Highlights of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2105 Release (May 2021)
Another quarter, another release. I am proud to announce the general availability of our second release of the year today – the SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2105 release. With solutions like our fully fledged SAP S/4HANA Cloud, we offer you an easy-to-use, intelligent Cloud ERP with numerous integration capabilities to help your business run smoothly.
Our continuous task is to keep improving our offerings for our valued cloud customers. With this release, we bring new innovations in all Lines of Business and industries, supporting the intelligent enterprise with various new features and improvements.
Also new, Built-In Support promises to improve the customer support experience by providing access to real-time support while using SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Providing efficient, simplified and guided support channels, Built-In Support allows users to search for information, get help from an intelligent chatbot, or communicate with SAP support experts.
Let me walk you through my favorite highlights of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2105 release in this blog. Watch my video below to get a first impression of some of the many, many innovations this release brings to all of us.
https://youtu.be/72pGRQwInHk
Finance
As always, we start with the most important highlight in Finance – the shipment of innovations in universal parallel accounting, which allow you to prepare and present financial statements for different sets of accounting standards across end-to-end processes using ledgers. With SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2105 we give you the possibility to perform parallel valuations and reporting for each ledger, resulting in individually calculated values for financial and management accounting. This ensures consistent parallel value flows and full audit trails that fulfill local and group-wide reporting requirements. With this innovation, we offer full flexibility while reducing manual efforts by providing a high degree of automation and accuracy for parallel legal valuations.
https://youtu.be/qez_YyzcxRY
Figure 1: Prepare and present financial statements for different sets of accounting standards using ledgers (note: no audio available). If you want to watch the end-to-end value flow in universal parallel accounting, click here.
Take advantage of the whole series on Finance in SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2105 in Ulrich Hauke’s blog post.
Governance, Risk & Compliance
The next area I would like to touch upon is Governance, Risk and Compliance, where we deliver another interesting innovation: the new business content for SAP Financial Compliance Management. With this innovation, you can establish proactive risk management within your company, as well as easily and quickly perform business-critical compliance checks with the help of ready-made content. You can take advantage of more than thirty of the most used out-of-the-box controls which can be tailored to fit the specific needs of your organization if needed. This ensures a time-saving and effortless usage while simultaneously increasing the level of financial compliance. Finding suspicious activities and staying compliant has never been this easy!
https://youtu.be/xxALpZNhDsA
Figure 2: Figure 2: SAP Financial Compliance Management allows you to easily perform business-critical compliance checks through ready-made content (note: no audio available). Check out this video if you want to deep dive into the functionality available with SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2105.
Read Katrin Deissner’s blog post to learn more about this.
Manufacturing & Supply Chain
Next in line we have Manufacturing & Supply Chain with the serial number handling with stock-based serial numbers in the area of Warehouse Management. With the help of the cloud warehouse management functionality, you can now manage serialized products at bin level. This gives you the possibility to receive and issue products as well as to pick, pack, and count products with stock-based serial numbers. Additionally, you can use the warehouse monitor with the enhanced functionality to post serialized stock items and to display serial numbers. You can also migrate stock with serial numbers on stock level.
https://youtu.be/HNUfyVM06WI
Figure 3: Serial number handling with stock-based serial numbers for Warehouse Management lets you manage serialized products at bin level (note: no audio available).
Find out more about the many innovations shipped in Manufacturing & Supply Chain in Gerhard Welker’s latest blog post and learn about Discrete Industries in Markus Oertelt’s blog post.
Sales
Updating a list of Sales Orders requires manual, time-consuming work steps. With SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2105, we are now facilitating this work by enabling you to trigger mass changes of sales documents. We have developed a brand-new SAP Fiori app which gives you the opportunity to manage and make changes to multiple documents at a time. It gives you support for sales orders, sales contracts, and customer returns and offers flexible filter capabilities to prepare the list of documents and items to be changed. Any updates are scheduled in the form of one or more jobs which run in the background. This leads to a greater efficiency through user-friendly capabilities to filter and prepare mass changes of sales documents, a transparent job monitoring, and efficient post-processing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWYEj2RMG-Q
Figure 4: The new SAP Fiori app enables you to trigger mass changes of sales documents and to manage and make changes to multiple documents at a time (including audio).
Christian Vogler gives a detailed overview about this in his blog post.
Asset Management
We offer another amazing innovation in our next area, Asset Management. The SAP Maintenance Assistant mobile app for SAP S/4HANA Cloud is a native mobile application which can be used by maintenance technicians to execute various tasks such as managing work orders and operations, creating and managing maintenance requests, and assessing request priorities. With this app, you are no longer bound to the desk; by downloading the relevant business data onto your mobile phone, you can take advantage of all functionalities in offline mode. This offers full flexibility and iproves overall user experience while also reducing paperwork and costs – a win/win for you and the environment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMHhIdJzdwA
Figure 5:Manage your work orders flexibly with the SAP Maintenance Assistant mobile app for SAP S/4HANA Cloud (note: no audio available). Watch this video to find out more.
Read more in Gerhard Welker’s blog post.
Sourcing & Procurement
Let’s move to Sourcing & Procurement, where we offer the Integration of Product Compliance Checks into Purchasing Processes to help enforce compliance at each step of the product lifecycle. The integration of compliance information in purchasing processes such as stock transfers ensures the availability of safety information and provides safe and compliant transport of hazardous materials. The key factor here: The stock transports are automatically checked and blocked whenever safety data sheets or dangerous goods classifications are missing. With this innovation, you can easily and automatically protect the brand and benefit from a safe, on-time delivery.
https://youtu.be/synDjg4FoXU
Figure 6: The Integration of Product Compliance Checks into Purchasing processes helps you to enforce compliance at each step of the product lifecycle (including audio).
Read Harish Mangtani’s blog post to learn more about this.
Service
Next on, we deliver external workforce procurement for In-House Repair in the area of Service, enabling service managers to trigger the procurement process when repair works need to be performed by third-party service contractors and the associated costs need to be processed. With this innovation, purchase requisitions are generated automatically when repair orders are released with external service items. All procurement-relevant documents, including purchase orders and service entry sheets, are linked to the repair order. This increases the efficiency of In-House Repair processes by extending its scope.
https://youtu.be/TxU-vHOFbgY
Figure 7:External workforce procurement for In-House Repair automatically generates purchase requisitions when repair orders are released with external service items (note: no audio available).
Young Hwae Koo walks you through all the innovations in Service in her latest blog post.
Enterprise Portfolio & Project Management
In order to run successful projects, staying on top of costs is crucial for Project Financial Controllers. As projects and their respective plans are likely to change throughout the lifecycle, it is important to flexibly react upon any budget changes. Therefore, you can now leverage a new SAP Fiori app in Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management: Manage Project Budget Transfers. With this app, budget plans can easily be adjusted on WBS element level without uploading the budget plan for the whole project. By simply reducing or increasing the amount, you can easily transfer budget from one WBS element to the other. In case you have not distributed the budget of a project to the below WBS elements, you can still do so using this app and thereby flexibly manage the budget within the project even after the initial budget plan upload.
https://youtu.be/8c0PTo2Guoo
Figure 8:With the new ‘Manage Project Budget Transfers’ SAP Fiori app you can easily adjust budget plans on WBS element level without uploading the budget plan for the whole project (including audio).
Learn more about this in Corina Kinzel’s blog post.
Professional Services
In Professional Services, we automate the billing process in project billing through the application job. Here, we enable you as a project billing specialist or a billing team member to automate the billing process based on different attributes and criteria. The application job helps you to define the automated creation of billing document requests for different billing methods, leading to an increased speed in project billing and a reduced effort in the billing process.
https://youtu.be/My7ILOc_jKM
Figure 9: The automation of the billing process in project billing through the application job allows project billing specialists and billing team members to define the automated creation of billing document requests for different billing methods (note: no audio available).
Read Katharina Stopf’s blog post to find out more.
Product Compliance
Let’s move to Product Compliance and the management of regulatory objects. Regulatory graphics are Hazard Pictograms for the labelling of containers, workplace hazard warnings, and for use during the transport of dangerous goods. With this feature, you can leverage the new Classify Packaged Dangerous Goods SAP Fiori app to view provided graphics which are assembled in collections. Here, you can search for embedded regulatory graphics through the entire graphics catalog using a wide range of filters and even attach additional information to these graphics for future reference. This is useful for label management as well as for a variety of documents, such as safety data sheets and reports.
https://youtu.be/l2Hb4ECqDqM
Figure 10: Take advantage of the new ‘Classify Packaged Dangerous Goods’ SAP Fiori app to search for embedded regulatory graphics through an entire graphics catalog (including audio).
Learn more in Christian Vogler’s blog post.
Two-Tier ERP
We have another innovation which is very valuable and worth mentioning: The Business Partner Replication using Cloud Integration for Two-Tier ERP. Naturally, the Integration of SAP S/4HANA Cloud to SAP Master Data Governance supports a direct replication of master data without any middleware, but since a variety of customers need to involve a middleware for their interfaces as per their policy, we deliver this accelerator to replicate business partners from our SAP S/4HANA on-premise offering to SAP S/4HANA Cloud using cloud integration. This accelerator reduces the implementation timeline drastically and offers a master data harmonization across the entire enterprise. Another plus: it is easy to enhance based on your individual requirements and offers trouble shooting based on the Application Integration Framework Monitor.
Figure 11: The Business Partner Replication using Cloud Integration for Two-Tier ERP reduces the implementation timeline and offers a master data harmonization across the entire enterprise.
Find out what’s new in Two-Tier ERP in Swati Balani’s latest blog post.
SAP Activate for SAP S/4HANA Cloud
Adapting to our ever-changing environment is a crucial step to success. Therefore, we continue to improve SAP Activate Methodology for SAP S/4HANA Cloud. We have also enhanced the functionality in SAP Activate Roadmap Viewer to make it easier to find accelerators and access the methodology content. Stay up-to-date and follow the tag SAP Activate to engage directly with my team and other SAP Activate users.
https://youtu.be/9lk0siiZRVE
Figure 12: With the enhanced functionality in SAP Activate Roadmap Viewer, you can find accelerators and access the methodology content quickly and easily (note: no audio available).
Read Jan Musil’s blog post to learn more about this.
SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation
Additionally, we continuously invest in our products’ intelligence and automation with SAP intelligent Robotic Process Automation. With our new bot environment, SAP intelligent Robotic Process Automation 2.0, we can build bots directly in the SAAS application with the Cloud Studio. Check out our iRPA Bot store and SAP Best Practices Explorer to find out how hundreds of bots can help you meet your automation goal. You can also learn more about it in yannick.peterschmitt#content’s intelligent ERP Update video & blog.
Figure 13: The iRPA Bot store offers hundreds of bots to help you meet your automation goal.
Find out more in Hardeep Tulsi’s blog post.
Additional Topics
Read Katrin Deissner’s and Syed Talal Hussain’s blog posts to find out what the SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2105 release has in store for Technology Topics.
Find out about Test Automation Tool in Anurag Nayak’s blog post.
Greg Hutcheon shares his insights into Solution Order Management in SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2105 in his blog post.
Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast
As always, I would like to encourage you to subscribe to our 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.
Your Voice Matters!
If you want to learn more and actively engage with SAP subject matter experts on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, join our SAP S/4HANA Cloud Community – now fully integrated with SAP Community. The community brings together SAP S/4HANA Cloud customers, partners and SAP experts and has a clear mission: deliver an interactive community to engage with one another about best practices and product solutions. We invite you to explore the new SAP S/4HANA Cloud Community ‘one-stop shop’ as the central place for all resources, tools, content questions, answers and connect with experts to guide you through your SAP S/4HANA Cloud journey.
For more information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, check out the following links:
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud release info here
- jan.gilg SAP News Center article here
- Latest SAP S/4HANA Cloud Release Blogs here and previous release highlights here
- Product videos on our SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA YouTube playlist
- SAP S/4HANA PSCC Digital Enablement Wheel here
- Early Release Webinar Series here
- Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast here
- openSAP Microlearnings for SAP S/4HANA here
- Best practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud here
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud Community: 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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