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Author's profile photo Raghav Ravichandran

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.

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      Author's profile photo Renaud VAN DEN DAELE
      Renaud VAN DEN DAELE

      Dear Raghav,

      Thanks for your enthousiasm for SAP S/4HANA. There are some points which really needs to be corrected in your blog. The SAP ECC and other products of the SAP Business Suite (SAP CRM...) are supported until 2025 and not until 2022. This is mentioend in reference note 1648480 . As well, the fact the SAP ECC runs on SAP HANA as a database is not changing the date of end of mainstream maintenance. So moving to SAP HANA will not solve the end of maintenance issue. ECC running on SAP HANA will not have longer maintenance than ECC running on SAP ASE

      Best regards

      Renaud

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      May be a matter of months that the 2 new CEOs you have will start initiative to certify S4 on anyDb. HANA is a flop as standalone Db and SAP is not an idiot to force S4 and kill ECC support. We know how many licenses are being sold and how many implemented. I am sure SAP will be realistic !

      BR,

      PSB

      Author's profile photo Raghav Ravichandran
      Raghav Ravichandran
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Renaud,

      Thanks for pointing some rather glaring mistakes in the article. Will modify them and re-post them.

      Appreciate your response and hope to contribute and learn more from the SAP Community.

       

      Regards

      Raghav

      Author's profile photo Jeff Lu
      Jeff Lu

      excellent blog , great sharing --- > make our SAP community more attractive and vigorous !