Gaining Flexibility with S/4HANA Cloud 1902

Change is absolutely pervasive and constant in today’s world. To keep the customer at the center of everything you do, it’s important to increase your business agility – being able to shift resources, respond to threats, jump on a new product opportunity, or identify the right partnerships. With SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1902, we’re helping increase flexibility within a key IT system that underpins your business: ERP. Let’s take a quick look at five innovations in today’s 1902 release:

Advanced Financial Closing

Imagine: Your company has grown by leaps and bounds over the last decade. Geographic expansion, new product lines, and acquisitions have resulted in a variety of different business entities from a financial perspective. Rolling the results up to report on the performance of your group can be a difficult, time consuming endeavor.

What’s Possible: With SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1902, you can utilize Advanced Financial Closing to define, automate, approve, and monitor the closing process.

Impact: Close your books faster, gain control and transparency, and increase the time your finance organization spend on forward-looking activities.

Time-based revenue recognition

Imagine: You’ve created a new business unit built upon IOT-based services. Instead of shipping products, this unit is selling access: time-based subscriptions allow companies to purchase outcomes instead of widgets. But, how do you easily account for and report on these contracts?

What’s Possible: Systematically identify contracts and associated performance obligations with new functionality in SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1902, then manage fulfillment of those obligations as well as easily post revenue, assets, and liabilities resulting from those contracts.

Impact: Don’t let IT systems get in the way of business innovation. Highly-automated revenue recognition for large numbers of contract items, fully integrated with the general ledger, makes it easier than ever to scale digital service-based business units.

Quality Management in Warehousing

Imagine: Between receiving, slotting, and shipping, your warehouse is executing thousands of goods movements per day. Now, factor in additional movements to facilitate quality management processes. And then, the quality management processes themselves.

What’s Possible: Quality inspection during goods receipt, available in SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1902 allows your warehouse staff to combine stock receipt and inspection processes to streamline warehouse operations.

Impact: Fewer required goods movements, no inventory space allocated to out-of-spec merchandise, and reduced possibility of inferior products entering your supply chain or being shipped customers. This translates directly into lower costs and higher customer satisfaction.

Interactive Production Scheduling

Imagine: Not every order, even if it’s for the same product, is created equal. What if one of your best customers places a last-minute order but agrees to a very lucrative price? Can you fulfill it in time?

What’s Possible: With new production scheduling functionality in SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1902, you can easily control scheduling to prioritize certain orders. With an easy-to-use SAP Fiori app you can filter based on area of responsibility, identify or switch work centers, reschedule already-scheduled operations, and execute mass order operations.

Impact: Prioritize your production schedule to meet customer and business demands, delivering profitable revenue and customer satisfaction.

Integration of SAP Enable Now

Imagine: You need to onboard new employees to accommodate rapid growth or cross train employees to ensure business continuity. Maybe you want to make it easier for employees that only use certain functions intermittently.

What’s Possible: With new integration of SAP Enable Now, SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1902 enables you to create company-specific context sensitive help. This allows you to tailor the assistance provided to make it easier for employees to accomplish their tasks.

Impact: Make it easier for people to accomplish their jobs, with faster onboarding and reduced incidence of errors, especially for employees that infrequently access certain functionality.

Interested in diving a little deeper? My colleagues from product management have a great series of 1902 videos. Check them out here.

For decades now, ERP has been focused on process optimization. (Yes, that applies to SAP too!) That’s still important of course, but so too is flexibility to remain customer-centric, no matter how a market turns or develops. Standardization with rapid innovation allows companies to move faster, pivot more accurately, and better meet customer needs. Every company will have cloud ERP. It’s only a question when and to what degree. Check out SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Maybe today is the start of that pivot for your company.