What is SAP S/4 HANA and it’s basic benefits?

All over the world, SAP S/4HANA is quickly becoming SAP’s most successful ERP system. S/4HANA is the 4th ERP suite developed by SAP. For over four decades, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software has been the core of SAP.

SAP S/4HANA’s  unique architecture is quite a contrast from the classic relational database. It runs in-memory, with data stored in columns, allowing for faster, near to real-time analytics and compute capabilities.

Stepping away from merely recording data, SAP S/4HANA focuses on providing end users active decision support in real time, that is data-driven and takes into consideration both internal and external sources of data.

Most importantly, SAP S/4HANA allows organizations to work seamlessly in a digital economy. This has been a key driving factor for various businesses using SAP ERP over the years, to seriously start considering the business benefits of S4HANA and make the decision of whether they should go for  this modernized ERP solution.

Here’s detailing the major benefits or value adds SAP S/4 HANA provides for customers:

1. Simplification:  SAP S/4HANA brings about immense simplification to the management and administration of the IT landscape – in fact, simplicity is one of the key features SAP has brought in to its ECC application structure.  SAP S/4HANA enables the centralizing of hardware and network resources, and serves as the digital core for business process simplification, by harnessing the power of its HANA in-memory database.
2. Ease Of Use: Fiori 2.0, provides a modern design for a completely innovative user experience, enabling users to easily access Overview Pages, Work Lists and List Reports. SAP Fiori’s UI is designed specifically to be highly intuitive, personalized, responsive, and simple, which allows users to prompt questions and access required details, regardless of device or deployment.
3. Cost Effectiveness: Adopting S/4HANA is a smart move, as far as cost efficiency is considered. You have the ability to bring together all the analytical and transactional capabilities of a variety of systems onto one location. This enables immensely better decision making.
4. Innovation : SAP S/4HANA sets the stage for future innovation. Technology is evolving rapidly, which means merely ‘keeping up’ doesn’t cut it anymore. Enterprises have to stay ahead of the curve and make decisions that are future ready. S/4 HANA applications leverage speed, context and data accessibility like never before.
5. Improved performance and speed: S/4HANA enables improved performance by allowing you to plan, execute, generate reports and analytics based on live data, as well as triggering period closing and providing improved predictions. It also enables your organization to provide better service for customer-centric applications

Overall, the basic benefits of migrating or moving into SAP S/4 HANA system for a customer using ECC is extremely high. There is definitely doubt whether a customer must completely switch to HANA or have a combination of both ECC and HANA, but for better system performance and overall improvement in effectiveness, the earlier a customer switches to HANA the better it is for them.

Not to forget, SAP has announced that it will stop providing support for the legacy ECC systems from 2025 so although it does involve financial and technical risks, all customers- small, medium and big should actively think of moving or planning a smooth transition into SAP S/4 HANA.