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Author's profile photo Katharina Stopf

Intelligent ERP Update: Professional Services in SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1911

Welcome back to the last update on professional services innovations in 2019 for SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Unbelievable but true, another year has passed, and we have filled it with great new functionality to serve our professional services customers in the public cloud.

As you probably already know, in the video below you can find a short summary of the three most important highlights of this release, but in this blog, you will also find more innovations than just the three highlights.

If you are also interested in the previous blogs of this series or just more information on professional services in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, please also visit my collection blog.

 

Let us get started right away with the new functionality in planning of additional resources with flexible units.

With previous releases a project manager was able to plan human resources and expenses on his or her project.

With this new functionality it is possible to also plan additional resources in all types of work packages which improves the planning efficiency of project managers.

Cost and Revenue for the additional resources will be calculated based on the planned quantity and the maintained prices.

In order for customers to use this functionality, customers have to categorize at least one activity as additional resources using the SCCUI for Mapping Resources to Resource Types and activate the feature toggle /CPD/CA_CPD_SS_OTHRESOURCE.

 

Next up, is the new workflow for Preliminary Billing Documents.

 

This functionality gives customers the option to enable or disable the internal approval processing of preliminary billing documents.

This is of course especially interesting as it can be used with the professional services scenario. After the billing proposal is released, the DMR can be found in the preliminary billing apps and from there the approval workflow can be triggered.

Customers can define rules for a one or multi-step approval and assign approval authorization to different business roles.

Of course, the users will have the option to approve, reject, or ask for a rework of the preliminary billing document in question.

 

Also, I want to highlight the progress we are making in the reporting area for professional services.

The first enhancement when it comes to reporting with 1911 is to be able to see the full text of the time recording in the approval. In addition, we are whitelisting a CDS view in order for customers to bring this information in their custom reports.

Also, we are adding more reporting functionality to our customer projects. With 1911 there will be a multi-dimensional project analytics report, which helps to improve visibility of project commercials and focuses on financial performance of the project. Key capabilities include, comprehensive data sources and a curated set of KPIs that enable reporting along the project lifecycle on key dimensions such as costs, margin, billing, work in progress and staffing.

 

Also in the area of advanced resource management we are enabling an additional newly released CDS View I_RSHProjectAssignmentHrs, which allows customers to access and analyze detailed assignment information from SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

 

One item I want to point out is an additional check that the system will provide in the background when project managers want to complete a project. In case there are time recordings that have not been approved so far, the system will let send an error message letting the project manager know that this task has to be completed first.

 

Last but not least, we have also enhanced the settlement functionality of internal projects in the scope items 1A8.

The settlement rules already allowed for settlement against other cost centers or G/L accounts. Beginning of the year we already included the settlement to WBS elements with the limitation that this will only be possible on fixed priced projects.

With 1911 this will also be possible for time and expense projects. So project managers can now easily settle costs from an internal cost collector to other customer projects, for instance costs collected in a sales cycle.

 

Thanks for taking the time and reading this summary.

 

For more information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, check out the following links:

Follow us via @SAP and #S4HANA, or myself via @KStopf or  LinkedIn.

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