Here is what you don’t know about the SAP S/4HANA 1909 Sales Release

[XiaohuaWang]

With the SAP S/4HANA 1909 on-premise release, a lot of exciting highlights are coming along your way. The purpose of this blog is to give you more details about the S/4HANA Sales (or known as Sales and Distribution in SAP ERP) delta capabilities included in this 5^th release.

In general, SAP S/4HANA innovations can be summarized into four categories:

1. Digital age user experience


2. Process automation and optimization


3. New business models


4. End-to-end analytics and real-time steering

As for providing new capabilities, Sales follows the same path. Now, let’s dive into some examples.

1. Digital age user experience. In addition to releasing new Fiori Apps, such as Manage Scheduling Agreement, there are also important enhancements to previously released Fiori Apps.
   Sales Order Fulfillment Dashboard summarizes any sales order fulfillment issues centrally, giving the sales back office the immediate transparency on the status along the complete order fulfillment cycle. This allows the sales force to focus on the business problems and to quickly resolve them. The dashboard has now been extended to include additional sales order fulfillment issue categories. The sales back office can easily identify sales order items affected by product compliance issues or dangerous goods transportation requirements.


2. Process automation and optimization. In an organization with detailed role and responsibility separation, it can be cumbersome to find the right person for the right task at the right point in time. With the 1909 release, SAP S/4HANA provides predefined responsibility management and flexible workflows for sales document processing. Moreover, you can adjust and extend them based on your business requirements. On top of that, the business department, in this case, the sales office or a dedicated business process expert, can now define the responsibilities and the workflow for the defined workflow scenarios on their own, without requiring support from IT.


3. New business models. As known from previous SAP S/4HANA releases, you are familiar with the new External Billing Document Request (EBDR) billing capability: the sales billing engine can now consume billing data from external systems, combining it with the billing requests from sales orders, deliveries, etc. into one single invoice. This can be very helpful for "pay-as-you-go" business models. In the 1909 release, an additional capability has been released, supporting the use of custom fields as a convergence criterion.
   Let me give you a business example: Your customer requests a single invoice for each container shipment that he receives. Each container contains multiple deliveries. The customer wants to be invoiced per container; not per delivery. The invoices for each delivery within one container must, therefore, be combined into one single invoice. First, create one custom field to capture the shipping container numbers/identifier. Then filter the billing due list, to show all outbound deliveries that were shipped in a specific container. Finally, create one single customer invoice per container.


4. End-to-end analytics and real-time steering. More sales KPIs are now built within the S/4HANA embedded analytics framework for flexible reporting purposes. The Flexible Analysis of Customer Returns allows you to easily monitor return situations by drag and drop measures and dimensions into the report. Furthermore, predefined sales KPIs are available in the SAP Analytics Cloud.
   There are many dashboards analyzing the sales delivery performance in SAP S/4HANA already. In 1909, you can use the Predictive Delivery Delay to predict any potential goods issue delay.
   
   Last but not the least, there are plenty of standard APIs released to connect the SAP S/4HANA system with external systems. Just to name two of them here: (1) You can use a standard API to do a sales order simulation in an external system while deriving the information from SAP S/4HANA for pricing, inventory availability, credit check, or similar. (2) There is also a “bulk replication of sales order data” capability. You can use it to replicate sales order data into your marketing system for customer segmentation and personalized campaigns.
   
   That’s just a short summary. For more details, please visit www.help.sap.com/s4hana