SAP HANA, SAP S/4HANA, Suite on HANA, SoH, Simple Finance, SAP S/4HANA Finance, let’s have the right wording!

Being part of the SAP S/4HANAEnterprise Support Value Map team, and SAP Communities reader as well, wording accuracy regarding exact product usage is key in my day to day work.

Regularly, I can see people searching for some help, but I am facing difficulties understanding which product they are referring to. With this blog, I am trying to make a summary of the often-used naming around SAP S/4HANA, Suite on Hana, Simple Finance, and to provide a very high level overview (only to “feel” the difference, not diving into technical details) of each Solution or Product so everyone can use the relevant wording.

Historically, first came SAP HANA, followed by Suite on HANA, followed by the SAP Simple Finance add-on and finally to SAP S/4HANA.

Let’s start with Suite on HANA, aka SoH, aka SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA:

SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA (often named “Suite On HANA” or SoH):

Take a product of the SAP Business Suite running on “Any DB” from Business Suite i2013 (For example ECC Ehp7)  or above, and migrate the “Any DB” to an SAP HANA Database, you will get an “powered by SAP HANA system”. Upgrade all the systems of the Suite in the same way, and you will get a Business Suite Powered by SAP HANA.

• The wording “Powered by SAP HANA” and not “For HANA or 4 HANA” is very important. This means that these Suite products are not redesigned for SAP HANA because DB wise, most of their coding needs to remain agnostic, although specific HANA optimizations were already introduced
• This wished DB agnosticism of the SAP Business Suite prevents from redesigning to use the full potential of HANA and as such limits innovation possibilities
• Therefore, a split of the codeline was decided and the S/4HANA concept came, first through the “Simple Finance” driven by the “simplification” principle.

SAP S/4HANA Finance formerly named SAP Simple Finance or sFIN

SAP S/4HANA Finance is the new name for what was formerly named SAP Simple Finance.

• It is at the same time:
  • An “add-on” which can be installed on a SAP ERP EhP7 or 8 System AND

• The Finance LoB Solution of the SAP S/4HANA product AND

• The official naming for the Finance portfolio of Solutions based on SAP S/4HANA Suite

And what about SAP Central Finance. It is a deployment option of SAP S/4HANA Finance, which consists in installing a new “Central” SAP S/4HANA system with the aim to receive financial accounting of SAP and Non-SAP systems, in the least disruptive way.

Then the simplification/redesign was applied to other Line of Businesses and Industries , which led to SAP S/4HANA.

SAP S/4HANA (Also known by its full name “SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA”)

The SAP S/4HANA product can be seen (very very high level and simplistic view) as a redesigned SAP ERP/ECC in order to provide new capabilities which go far beyond only accelerating standard transactions. Major Part of the redesign is also the ongoing re-integration of some industry solutions, and some other products (or “parts” of them  to the core SAP S/4HANA product (this is ongoing/planned and may be changed by SAP at any time without notice, see SAP Roadmaps for more )

SAP S/4HANA name can be used to describe either:

         1. the SAP S/4HANA “product” itself            2. OR the full Solution Suite, which corresponds to

• SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management (The digital Core) plus
• SAP S/4HANA products (add-ons shipped with the S/4HANA shipment or on top of it) plus
• “non SAP S/4HANA” products like digital networks with “out-of-the- box” integration

Stay tuned for my next blog in which I will do the same with HANA, HEC, HCP, HCI , SAP Cloud platform 

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