Highlights of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2002 Release (February 2020)
We are proud to announce the general availability of our SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2002 release today.
The first release of this year brings great innovations in all Lines of Business and industries and adds a lot more features and improvements that support the intelligent enterprise. Also via the embedded SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) we’re adding more capabilities for clients to analyze and steer their companies, and we’re also enriching SAP S/4HANA Cloud with more intelligent robotic process automation (iRPA) capabilities.
In this blog post you will find my favorites of some of the latest and greatest SAP #S4HANA #Cloud 2002 highlights. You can also check out the video below to gain insights into the innovations which are top of mind.
Finance
Optimized Automation with SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation
The future of ERP is automated! This time-saving feature of our latest 2002 release automizes tasks with minimal human intervention, ensuring processes run as smoothly as possible. The automation is delivered on three levels:
- Simplified Finance Application Architecture
- Business Process Automation
- Intelligent Technologies
This complete automation suite comes with software robots which are designed to mimic humans by replacing manual clicks. These robots help with interpreting text-heavy communications, and making process suggestions to end users for definable and repeatable business processes.
Figure 1: SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation is being executed without manual interaction (note: no audio voice available)
Read more about the Finance updates in Ulrich Hauke’s blog post, or more about SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation in Hardeep Tulsi’s blog post.
Manufacturing and Supply Chain
Lean Integration Between Production and Warehouse Managed on Bin Level
As part of the Manufacturing and Supply Chain update we have innovations lined up in the area of Warehouse Management. One of them is the lean integration between production and warehouse managed on a bin level. Until now production supply areas used in SAP S/4HANA Cloud could be assigned to inventory managed storage locations. With SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2002 production supply areas now additionally can be assigned to warehouse managed storage locations as well, which allows management on storage bin level. This leads to an improved stock transparency as stock in production is managed on a more-granular level.
Figure 2: ‘Lean integration between production and warehouse managed on bin level’ increases stock transparency (note: no audio voice available)
For additional information, read Gerhard Welker’s blog post.
Sourcing and Procurement
Contract Management with SAP Ariba Contracts
One of main highlights in the Line of Business Sourcing and Procurement is the integration of SAP S/4HANA Cloud with SAP Ariba Contracts. SAP Ariba Contracts is used to negotiate and determine prices and sign a legal contract with a supplier; these prices are then passed to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, which can be used by the operational purchaser to buy materials or lean services as required. The integration of the two platforms helps not only to perform strategic sourcing activities but users will benefit from reduced transaction costs as fewer manual steps are needed and contracts are exchanged in an automated way.
https://youtu.be/GZpE36-b68Q
Figure 3: ‘Contract Management with SAP Ariba Contracts’ supports users as fewer manual steps are needed and strategic sourcing activities can be performed (note: no audio voice available)
In her blog post, Katharina Doerr sheds some light on this topic.
Professional Service
Configurable Project Roles
For the Professional Services industry, we strive to facilitate the customer’s project controlling and monitoring efforts. In addition to the four existing project roles, you can now maintain customer-specific project roles by using a self-service configuration UI. This helps you to map custom roles to the relevant type of project. Both the standard roles and the custom roles can now also be broken down to the billing item level, which adds flexibility to your project management.
https://youtu.be/mY1to81uwdQ
Figure 4: Using a new SSCUI you can define custom project roles which improves maintenance of projects (note: no audio voice available)
Check out Katharina Stopf’s blog post to read more.
Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management
Improved Usability by Copying Projects in Project Control Application
Setting up projects from scratch can be pretty time consuming. That’s why we’ve established a way to make the Project Control Application even more user-friendly by adding a feature to copy a selected project. This copied project comes with information on work package hierarchy, project and work package master data, milestones and team assignments, and it can either be edited directly with the Project Control application, the Project Planning, or the Project Briefs application.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFdPOGJaIDo&feature=youtu.be
Figure 5: The ability to copy projects with Project Control Application improves usability and reduces manual efforts (note: no audio voice available)
Find more details in Corina Kinzel’s blog post.
Sales
Down Payment Processing for Sales Quantity Contracts
In this release we introduce a new business process to manage sales quantity contracts with billing plans for down payment facilitated by the milestone billing plan. The following steps enable the down payment processing: First of all, you can create down payment requests as well as contract release orders. After that, the system blocks the delivery until your customers complete all down payments. Once your customers have completed all down payments, the system removes the delivery blocks on schedule lines. Finally, you can continue the delivery processing and invoicing.
https://youtu.be/F6sPDU-FE0k
Figure 6: Down payment processing for sales quantity contracts increases sales force efficiency by providing easy-to-use tools (note: no audio voice available)
Read more about this in Christian Vogler’s blog post.
Service
Increase Business Coverage on Service Order Processing
In the area of Service, we include service delivery by external work force and enable you to edit profit center on service order item level. These features, along with the ability to add service teams, enhances the service order processing. The increased business coverage eliminates friction in process integration and avoids data loss resulting from broken process flows.
https://youtu.be/sK1YNVIfWKM
Figure 7: Service order processing eliminates friction in process integration and reduces data loss (note: no audio voice available)
Read more in Young Hwae Ko’s blog post.
Product Compliance
Integration of Product Compliance into Sales Contract
With this release we have established a way to view the status of compliance checks of product marketability, dangerous goods, and safety data sheets in sales contracts. In addition, dangerous goods data can now be printed on form templates. This prevents executions of non-compliant sales orders for all relevant products and therefore assures compliant transport regarding dangerous goods regulations.
https://youtu.be/7pOcw7Pl3m8
Figure 8: ‘Integration of Product Compliance into Sales Contract’ enables users to gain insights into dangerous goods information on sales contract documents and prevents execution of non-compliant sales orders (note: no audio voice available)
More information on this can be found in Christian Vogler’s blog post.
Asset Management
Resource Scheduling for Maintenance Planners
SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2002 has also quite some innovations in store for you when it comes to Asset Management. One of the innovations that we ship is resource scheduling for maintenance planners, which provides you with insights into your maintenance workload and available capacities for current and upcoming maintenance activities. The ‘Resource Scheduling for Maintenance Planners’ application allows you to monitor important KPIs for your work centers, helping you to stay up-to date with upcoming, current and recent schedules.
https://youtu.be/hpqpr4-81kA
Figure 9: The ‘Resource Scheduling for Maintenance Planners’ application allows you to monitor important KPIs for your work centers (note: no audio voice available)
Gerhard Welker’s blog post gives you a more detailed description on this topic.
Localization
Among the many countries and languages our release updates offer, we are now happy to add some more to the list by delivering Service Management Localization for Italy, Mexico and Spain, and Best Practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Slovakia, together with the corresponding language Slovak.
Read about localization, along with many other interesting topics in Katrin Deissner’s blog post.
SAP Activate for SAP S/4HANA Cloud
SAP Activate provides you with an easy-to-follow guided journey toward SAP S/4HANA Cloud adoption. Therefore, we’re continuously improving the functionalities to enable the best possible adoption for our customers. With the latest release, we are adding a new Business Driven Configuration Questionnaire to support the Service functionality. Moreover, we’re adding instructions on how to run a Fit-to-standard workshop after the starter system has been decommissioned. These insights will benefit rollout projects and solution expansion after the initial implementation.
Check out details in this blog post: SAP Activate Content Updates for SAP S/4HANA Cloud-2002
Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast
Last but not least, I’d like to encourage you to subscribe to our new podcast “Inside SAP S/4HANA”. This podcast leverages the unique knowledge and expertise of SAP S/4HANA product experts, partners and customers to address your needs by sharing product insights and project best practice. There is no customer success without product success and project success; we help you get to the next level and make your SAP S/4HANA projects a success. Subscribe now and benefit from the shared knowledge.
Are you interested to read more about Analytics, Enterprise Search, Extensibility, and Identity and Access Management? Then read Katrin Deissner’s first blog post.
In her second blog post, Katrin sheds some light on Integration, Release Assessment and Scope Dependency Tool, Security and User Experience.
If you’ve missed what’s new in the test automation tool for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, check out Nidhi Choudhary’s blog post.
On top, Abhijit Bolakhe reveals enhanced features as part of Hybrid Cloud Deployment.
For more information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, check out the following links:
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud release info: http://www.sap.com/s4-cloudrelease
- Article on SAP News here
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud Release Blogs here
- Early Release Webinar Series here
- Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast here
- Best practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud here
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud User Community: register here
- Feature Scope Description here
- What’s New here
- Help Portal Product Page here
- Implementation Portal here
Follow us via @Sap and #S4HANA, or myself via @SDenecken
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