SAP has released the second “Feature Pack Stack” (FPS), SAP S/4HANA 2020 FPS02 for the 2020 release, on May 26, 2021. This is the second in a sequence of FPS’s that will be delivered twice a year and introduce new optional capabilities. And once again, it comes up with a new set of capabilities bringing simplification, innovation, automation, analytics, and user experience to customers. In total, we delivered more than 40 innovations and enhancements in this FPS02!
The following blog summarizes SAP’s first shipment of this year for SAP S/4HANA 2020 and its highlights across near all lines of business and industries.
The picture below provides an overview of the key innovations that were shipped with SAP S/4HANA 2020 FPS02, and in the following, I will go into details for Lines of Business (LoB), Industries, and Cross-Topics.
Picture 1: The highlights at a glance.
With FPS02, SAP S/4HANA 2020 has reached the stable stack for the 2020 release. This means that no bigger functional or technological changes – especially of incompatible nature – are expected anymore in SAP S/4HANA 2020. Future SPs of SAP S/4HANA 2020 will mostly contain maintenance and legal changes. The release to customers for the next SAP S/4HANA release is the starting point of the maintenance-only phase. New innovations will be delivered in future releases of SAP S/4HANA. After the end of mainstream maintenance, the release usually enters customer-specific maintenance.
At the same time, in Q4 2021 we celebrate five years since SAP released the second version of our new generation ERP solution – SAP S/4HANA (version 1610).
It means that if an SAP S/4HANA 1610 customer wants to keep the system under mainstream maintenance, it must be upgraded to a higher release before 2022 accordingly. Note, that if the SAP S/4HANA starting release is already in customer-specific maintenance, a two-step or multistep upgrade may be required; for more information on this scenario, see the Product Availability Matrix (PAM).
Picture 2: Mainstream maintenance of about 5 years for each release
On February 4, 2020, SAP announced a maintenance commitment for SAP S/4HANA until the end of 2040. See related press release and SAP Note 2900388.
The first innovation it’s about Mass Changes in sales documents. Typically, updating sales orders in SAP S/4HANA requires the user to manually open and make changes to the correspondent Sales Orders Header Data or Sales Orders Items Data, one after the other. Maybe this is a possible process for a very small list of orders, but it becomes time-consuming for larger ones.
With the new SAP S/4HANA 2020 FPS02, we have a new SAP Fiori app to manage mass changes of sales documents. We support the Mass Changes for:
Demo 1: 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.
Cross-currency hedging in hedge management of net open exposure (FX risk)
Functional enhancement in Hedge Management and Accounting of Net Open Exposures (FX Risk) to cover exposures that are to be hedged in a currency other than the local currency to enable cross-currency hedging:
To learn more about Hedge Management of Net Open Exposures (FX Risk) see Product Assistance
Optimize cross-currency hedging by automatic creation of hedge requests
Enhancement in the Hedge Management of Net Open Exposures (FX Risk) process to enable automatic generation of a proposal list of FX hedge requests for hedging areas where the target currency is derived from the currency pair of the exposure item.
You have now the ability to manage and clear open items on GL accounts in central finance.
Support for the “compound” type in total data validation rules
When defining validation rules for totals validation, you can create compound rules, which are composed of basic rules connected with logical operators. After the execution of validation with the compound rules, validation results are displayed on both basic rule and compound rule levels.
Additional filter on the country in international trade classification apps
Enables users to reduce the list of products to be classified according to the countries of the plants through trade classification apps.
Relevant for App:
With SAP S/4HANA 2020 FPS02, we modernized the integration between SAP CPQ and the subscription order management component in SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management.
Delivery scope:
To reduce manual efforts for creating operational projects based on portfolio decisions, we made enhancements to:
To improved risk management support for portfolio items and projects, you are now able to archive project versions with associated risks.
Improved integration of SAP Extended Warehouse Management with SAP Global Trade Services (SAP GTS) for delivery changes and before loading
With this feature, compliance checks in SAP Global Trade Services (GTS) for the SAP Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) outbound delivery are performed more frequently:
As delivery dates can influence the result of a compliance check, EWM calls GTS for a new check each time when the out-of-yard date has been changed.
The compliance of delivery in GTS can change even if the outbound delivery has not been changed in EWM (e.g. a business partner is blocked). Therefore, GTS can send a push message to the EWM outbound delivery if something has changed in GTS regarding compliance.
Immediate batch replication for decentralized SAP Extended Warehouse Management (SAP EWM)
This feature enables you to have batches replicated to your Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) system immediately. If you are using decentralized EWM based on SAP S/4HANA, master data, including batches, that were created or changed in the enterprise management system (such as SAP S/4HANA or SAP ERP) must be replicated to EWM. Before SAP S/4HANA 2020 FPS02, this replication was done with a scheduled report and therefore with a time delay. With FPS02, the newly created or changed batches are replicated directly to EWM without a delay.
With the new release, we have now an OData API to create, read, update, and delete an inspection plan and its objects.
The Odata service can process data as follows:
To learn more about Inspection Plan see Product Assistance
In SAP S/4HANA, the following purchase order API is available on the SAP API Business Hub.
ODATA API API_PURCHASEORDER_PROCESS_SRV
The service enables you to create purchase orders through an API call from a source system outside SAP S/4HANA. Furthermore, you can use the service to update, and delete existing purchase orders from the SAP S/4HANA system. The service contains a header, item, account assignment, schedule line (including subcontracting), and pricing nodes. It is based on the OData protocol and the information is sent in the request as a payload.
To learn more, see OData API for Purchase Order Documentation
We have now with this release increased process flexibility through the ability to add an ad hoc workflow. This allows you faster change-process handling through transparency on task processors and quick actions to get in touch with them.
The second innovation in this area is bout change-record support for discrete industry objects. This reduces product development costs through the effective management of changes to process industry objects.
Product specification API: configuration enhancements
The Product Specification API provides, for example, capabilities to integrate with the SAP Enterprise Product Development - Collaboration capability for specification collaboration with suppliers on raw material composition and property data.
The innovations here are:
Intelligent scenario to train and predict the risk of late payments and of late tax return filing
In SAP S/4HANA 2020 FPS02 we introduce Intelligent ERP technologies like predictive capabilities or machine learning scenarios that support your journey to the intelligent.
Delivery scope:
Predefined, or baseline scenario that can be configured and run by the customer to predict specific outcomes, including the following:
With this feature, you can create any set of utility-specific master data objects, including technical master data in SAP S/4HANA Utilities, and use enhancements for meter reading results.
Delivery Scope:
OData API for the extension for Multichannel Foundation for Utilities
Master data: Operation: create
Empower customers to create any set of utility-specific master data objects including technical master data such as connection objects with addresses, premises, installations, and points of delivery in SAP S/4HANA Utilities.
Meter reading result: Operations: read and create
Empower customers to use unique identifications for registers involving meter reading results and consumption data with enhanced functionality to accept secondary identifiers of the register (point of delivery external ID, serial number, and register code such as OBIS code).
This API is available on the SAP API Business Hub.
To learn more about Extension for Multichannel Foundation for Utilities see Product Assistance
This feature enables you to specify a price origin with a utility price key. You can use the price origin for fixed pricing. The following operations, which were made available with earlier shipments, have been enhanced to support price origins:
The archiving process for EDM profile values has been enhanced at several points:
Measuring steps of manual weighing entries
With this feature, you can define measuring steps for manual weighing entries on weighbridges.
Some weighbridges have a strictly defined measuring interval. Based on the calibration of the scales they are only able to measure in certain steps. These measuring steps are based on the weight range of the measured gross weight and tara weight. This is required in order to avoid wrong manual entries according to the weighbridge calibration in the weighing transaction.
Use the enhanced configuration settings for hardware profile groups and maintain measuring steps for weighing intervals for gross weight and tara weight.
In the case of manual weighing in the weighing transaction with the specification of this hardware profile group, a check is carried out to determine whether the weights entered have been entered in the defined measuring steps.
If the manually entered weights do not match the defined measuring steps, the user is informed by a message. The weight must then be corrected manually by the user. Otherwise, the weighing process cannot be completed.
Ability to define minimum net weights according to the gross weight for multirange scales
With this feature, you are able to define minimum net weights according to the gross weight for multirange scales.
There are special requirements for multirange scales. A multirange scale has at least two weighing intervals. If the load increases beyond one of the defined weighing intervals, the minimum net weights change automatically.
Use the enhanced configuration settings for hardware profile groups and maintain two or three weighing intervals for the gross weight. Depending on the gross weight value, the minimum load of the net weight differs.
The minimum net weight is checked based on the previously determined gross weight. If the minimum net weight is not reached, the assigned weighing information is displayed on the scale in the net weight field.
Picture 4: Enable customers to meet the legal requirements of calibration limits for multirange scales.
Extensibility to add or change customer JIT call data based on the message data provided through the inbound SOAP service
Joint Venture Accounting on Universal Journal - Central Finance Integration
Automatic processing of items in error correction and suspense accounting
Comply with regulatory requirements, improve financial reporting accuracy, and reduce the number of days to close the books through the following:
Optimized web service call for requesting renewal quote in the remote quotation management system
The call of the Web service for creating a renewal quote in SAP Product, Quotation, and Underwriting Management has been optimized. Firstly, the Web service is now called only once for each policy, even if the policy contains several contracts (previously, the Web service was called for each contract within the policy). In addition, the handling of errors that can occur when the Web service is called has been refined.
Optimized web service call for requesting renewal quote in the remote quotation management system
You can now call the external quotation system SAP Product, Quotation, and Underwriting Management from Policy Management to trigger the further processing of renewal quotes to which the customer has not responded after a specific acceptance period. This means that you can close those quotes that are no longer required in the external quotation system.
The new transaction /PM0/ABP_RNW_ACT_NOR (program /PM0/ABP_RNWLOFFER_ACT_NORSPNS) is available for this purpose. You should schedule this transaction as a regular background job. The background job calls the external quotation system, determines which quotes are overdue, and executes the default action for the respective quote. The external quotation system returns the current processing status of the quotes to Policy Management at time intervals defined by the user.
If a new policy is created as the result of the renewal, the previous policy is now displayed on the user interface (up until now, the previous policy was only saved in the database). In addition, there are now some search and navigation options for the previous policy.
Refreshed design of insurance claims open-letter correspondence sent to customers after filing of a new claim with the insurance company. The claim opened letter has been replaced with a new colored logo and the fonts have been adjusted to improve the layout of the letter.
Handling of time zones within a global payment factory.
When defining times the system allows defining a time with a specific time zone.
This includes the definition of a bank cut-off time using one of the following options:
Central handling of checks initiated by connected systems
File handling between a subsidiary and a central payment factory
With this enhancement, payment files placed by a subsidiary onto a defined file directory can be encrypted. This ensures that sensitive payment data cannot be accessed by unauthorized parties. During upload, files are decrypted and imported into the central Payment Factory. On the application level, sensitive data can be masked to prevent access to detailed payment data such as beneficiary details of salary payments accessed by payment specialists without authorization.
Intraday cash reconciliation within a payment factory
Cash Management records created out of a Payment Factory represent the expected bank processing options regarding dates, amounts, and granularity of postings. Depending on the Batch Booking indicator of payment, Cash Management entries will be created either on a single transaction level or on batch level. This can be based on the information coming from the subsidiary or can be defined based on the settings for the payment agreement determined for a payment. This feature enables you to perform intra-day cash reconciliation for these payments by matching the incoming intra-day account statements against the corresponding memo records.
Country specific payment formats for payments out of a central payment factory
The country/region-specific payment formats have been extended with standardized mappings and sorting of transactions according to definitions in the payment format trees. In addition, you can now configure custom mappings from Advanced Payment Management structures to outbound mapping structures to simplify outbound format created using the same format tree for all payment sources.
Automatic validation and adjustment of due dates for inbound and outbound processing considering cut-off times
This feature enables you to validate and adjust due dates automatically for both inbound and outbound payments by considering cut-off times.
Inbound: validation of due dates provided by the sending subsidiary during inbound processing of payments; consideration of internal cut-off times agreed upon between the sending subsidiary and the payment factory; handling of due dates in the past to:
Outbound: validation of whether a payment can be executed in time considering bank cut-off times and required lead time; options provided by the solution in case a due date can't be reached:
Updating of the respective cash management entries whenever a due date is adjusted
Optimized handling of manual payments
This feature enables you to maintain or display information about regulatory reporting and structured remittance. The following Fiori apps available to payment specialists have been extended with the additional information as follows:
Picture 5: With this additional information, you reduce the need for access to an online banking portal to a minimum for creating manual payments.
Pull technical error information from middleware into SAP Application Interface Framework within
SAP S/4HANA – inbound IDoc and Web services.
Scope:
Intelligent scenario lifecycle management (ISLM): support of APL reason code and PAi scenario migration.
The Intelligent Scenario Management app allows you to operate on published intelligent scenarios. Intelligent Scenarios can be of type embedded (APL, PAL) or side-by-side (SAP Data Intelligence). You can train the model of an intelligent scenario, see training results, decide when to activate it for the consumption of your specific business domain.
Dependent on the type of intelligent scenario, trained models need a deployment before they can be activated.
Picture 6: Customer-controlled machine learning lifecycle management.
Note: with this release, no SAP Intelligent Scenarios are shipped.
For more information, see SAP Help Portal.
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The following blog summarizes SAP’s first shipment of this year for SAP S/4HANA 2020 and its highlights across near all lines of business and industries.
The picture below provides an overview of the key innovations that were shipped with SAP S/4HANA 2020 FPS02, and in the following, I will go into details for Lines of Business (LoB), Industries, and Cross-Topics.
Picture 1: The highlights at a glance.
Remark 1
With FPS02, SAP S/4HANA 2020 has reached the stable stack for the 2020 release. This means that no bigger functional or technological changes – especially of incompatible nature – are expected anymore in SAP S/4HANA 2020. Future SPs of SAP S/4HANA 2020 will mostly contain maintenance and legal changes. The release to customers for the next SAP S/4HANA release is the starting point of the maintenance-only phase. New innovations will be delivered in future releases of SAP S/4HANA. After the end of mainstream maintenance, the release usually enters customer-specific maintenance.
Remark 2
At the same time, in Q4 2021 we celebrate five years since SAP released the second version of our new generation ERP solution – SAP S/4HANA (version 1610).
It means that if an SAP S/4HANA 1610 customer wants to keep the system under mainstream maintenance, it must be upgraded to a higher release before 2022 accordingly. Note, that if the SAP S/4HANA starting release is already in customer-specific maintenance, a two-step or multistep upgrade may be required; for more information on this scenario, see the Product Availability Matrix (PAM).
Picture 2: Mainstream maintenance of about 5 years for each release
Important reminder
On February 4, 2020, SAP announced a maintenance commitment for SAP S/4HANA until the end of 2040. See related press release and SAP Note 2900388.
LoB: Sales
Mass Changes of Sales Documents
The first innovation it’s about Mass Changes in sales documents. Typically, updating sales orders in SAP S/4HANA requires the user to manually open and make changes to the correspondent Sales Orders Header Data or Sales Orders Items Data, one after the other. Maybe this is a possible process for a very small list of orders, but it becomes time-consuming for larger ones.
With the new SAP S/4HANA 2020 FPS02, we have a new SAP Fiori app to manage mass changes of sales documents. We support the Mass Changes for:
- sales orders,
- sales orders without charge,
- sales scheduling agreements,
- sales contracts,
- debit- and credit memo requests,
- and customer returns.
Demo 1: 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.
LoB: Finance
Financial Risk Management
Cross-currency hedging in hedge management of net open exposure (FX risk)
Functional enhancement in Hedge Management and Accounting of Net Open Exposures (FX Risk) to cover exposures that are to be hedged in a currency other than the local currency to enable cross-currency hedging:
- Definition of a new hedging area to enable the extraction of cross-currency exposures.
- The hedging areas that allow cross-currency hedging also allow to set the company code currency as risk currency.
- Usage of Hedge Accounting in a hedging area with cross-currency hedging.
- Creation of exposure items for cross-currency exposures and reporting in the Hedge Management Cockpit.
- Creation of FX hedge requests for the exposure items to request the hedging instrument. The supported financial instruments in the cross-currency hedging scenario are FX spot/forward transactions and NDFs.
- Hedge Management Cockpit also offers termination and redesignation requests for hedging areas allowing cross-currency hedges
To learn more about Hedge Management of Net Open Exposures (FX Risk) see Product Assistance
Optimize cross-currency hedging by automatic creation of hedge requests
Enhancement in the Hedge Management of Net Open Exposures (FX Risk) process to enable automatic generation of a proposal list of FX hedge requests for hedging areas where the target currency is derived from the currency pair of the exposure item.
Financial Accounting
You have now the ability to manage and clear open items on GL accounts in central finance.
- Manage and clear open items on GL accounts centrally
- Technically clear open items on GL accounts in the source system to prevent clearing activities in the source system
Corporate Close
Support for the “compound” type in total data validation rules
When defining validation rules for totals validation, you can create compound rules, which are composed of basic rules connected with logical operators. After the execution of validation with the compound rules, validation results are displayed on both basic rule and compound rule levels.
International Trade Management
Additional filter on the country in international trade classification apps
Enables users to reduce the list of products to be classified according to the countries of the plants through trade classification apps.
Relevant for App:
- Classify Products - Commodity Codes
- Classify Products - Intrastat Service Codes
- Classify Products - Legal Control
- Classify Products - Customs Tariff Numbers
- Classify Products for End-Uses - Customs Tariff Numbers
LoB: Finance – Subscription Billing and Revenue Management
With SAP S/4HANA 2020 FPS02, we modernized the integration between SAP CPQ and the subscription order management component in SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management.
Delivery scope:
- Quote and order a configurable subscription with recurring fees
- Replicate the recurring pricing master data between SAP CPQ and SAP S/4HANA
- Replicate the recurring subscription product between SAP CPQ and SAP S/4HANA
LoB: Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management (EPPM)
Commercial Project Management
To reduce manual efforts for creating operational projects based on portfolio decisions, we made enhancements to:
- Synchronize additional attributes between commercial projects and portfolio items
- Align deletion of object links for commercial projects and projects from portfolio items
Project Management
To improved risk management support for portfolio items and projects, you are now able to archive project versions with associated risks.
LoB: Supply-Schain – Extended Warehouse Management
Improved integration of SAP Extended Warehouse Management with SAP Global Trade Services (SAP GTS) for delivery changes and before loading
With this feature, compliance checks in SAP Global Trade Services (GTS) for the SAP Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) outbound delivery are performed more frequently:
As delivery dates can influence the result of a compliance check, EWM calls GTS for a new check each time when the out-of-yard date has been changed.
The compliance of delivery in GTS can change even if the outbound delivery has not been changed in EWM (e.g. a business partner is blocked). Therefore, GTS can send a push message to the EWM outbound delivery if something has changed in GTS regarding compliance.
Immediate batch replication for decentralized SAP Extended Warehouse Management (SAP EWM)
This feature enables you to have batches replicated to your Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) system immediately. If you are using decentralized EWM based on SAP S/4HANA, master data, including batches, that were created or changed in the enterprise management system (such as SAP S/4HANA or SAP ERP) must be replicated to EWM. Before SAP S/4HANA 2020 FPS02, this replication was done with a scheduled report and therefore with a time delay. With FPS02, the newly created or changed batches are replicated directly to EWM without a delay.
LoB: Manufacturing – Quality Management
Inspection Planning
With the new release, we have now an OData API to create, read, update, and delete an inspection plan and its objects.
The Odata service can process data as follows:
- Read, create, update, and delete inspection plan header data
- Read, create, update, and delete inspection plan operations
- Read, create, update, and delete inspection plan characteristics
- Read, create, update, and delete a material assignment
- Read, create, update, and delete PRT assignment
- Read, create, update, and delete dependent characteristic specification assignment
To learn more about Inspection Plan see Product Assistance
LoB: Sourcing and Procurement
Purchase Order Processing
In SAP S/4HANA, the following purchase order API is available on the SAP API Business Hub.
ODATA API API_PURCHASEORDER_PROCESS_SRV
The service enables you to create purchase orders through an API call from a source system outside SAP S/4HANA. Furthermore, you can use the service to update, and delete existing purchase orders from the SAP S/4HANA system. The service contains a header, item, account assignment, schedule line (including subcontracting), and pricing nodes. It is based on the OData protocol and the information is sent in the request as a payload.
To learn more, see OData API for Purchase Order Documentation
LoB: Product Lifecycle Management
Integrated Product Development
We have now with this release increased process flexibility through the ability to add an ad hoc workflow. This allows you faster change-process handling through transparency on task processors and quick actions to get in touch with them.
The second innovation in this area is bout change-record support for discrete industry objects. This reduces product development costs through the effective management of changes to process industry objects.
Product Development Foundation
Product specification API: configuration enhancements
The Product Specification API provides, for example, capabilities to integrate with the SAP Enterprise Product Development - Collaboration capability for specification collaboration with suppliers on raw material composition and property data.
The innovations here are:
- Enhanced Customizing for the Product Specification API customizing (Define Settings for Specification API) by guiding the user during configuration, for example, via a value help for available properties (value assignment types).
- Enhanced Custom Composition Configuration Service to read the description of the defined composition types. Composition type description - that is the description of the defined value assignment type (VAT). The API can now read the description of the composition type VATs, specified in the Define Settings for Specification API.
Industry: Public Sector
Discover Taxpayer Behaviours
Intelligent scenario to train and predict the risk of late payments and of late tax return filing
In SAP S/4HANA 2020 FPS02 we introduce Intelligent ERP technologies like predictive capabilities or machine learning scenarios that support your journey to the intelligent.
Delivery scope:
- Intelligent scenario to train and predict the risk of late payments
- Use of intelligent insights related to potential receivership or bankruptcy
- Intelligent scenario to train and predict the risk of late tax return filing
- Analytical model (CDS View) to understand behavior and risk trends
- OData API for External Events
Predefined, or baseline scenario that can be configured and run by the customer to predict specific outcomes, including the following:
- The model focused on predicting the risk of whether a taxpaying organization will go into receivership or bankruptcy status:
- The model output that includes a risk score and top influencing factors
- Predefined scope of events covering a typical public sector tax collection process
- Predefined catalog of machine learning features that can lead to higher risk
- Predefined connectors to ingest required data from SAP software and Microsoft Excel sources
- The ability for system administrator to set up, train, and run the model
- The ability for analysts to view, filter, and group customers and events using the latest risk predictions in various UIs.
Industry: Utilities
Billing of Energy and Water Contracts
With this feature, you can create any set of utility-specific master data objects, including technical master data in SAP S/4HANA Utilities, and use enhancements for meter reading results.
Delivery Scope:
OData API for the extension for Multichannel Foundation for Utilities
Master data: Operation: create
Empower customers to create any set of utility-specific master data objects including technical master data such as connection objects with addresses, premises, installations, and points of delivery in SAP S/4HANA Utilities.
Meter reading result: Operations: read and create
Empower customers to use unique identifications for registers involving meter reading results and consumption data with enhanced functionality to accept secondary identifiers of the register (point of delivery external ID, serial number, and register code such as OBIS code).
This API is available on the SAP API Business Hub.
To learn more about Extension for Multichannel Foundation for Utilities see Product Assistance
Commerce for Utilities
This feature enables you to specify a price origin with a utility price key. You can use the price origin for fixed pricing. The following operations, which were made available with earlier shipments, have been enhanced to support price origins:
- Create
- Read
- Update (This operation is not supported if the price origin is specified.)
Further processing of time series data
The archiving process for EDM profile values has been enhanced at several points:
- It is now possible to specify a time range for archiving (TO and FROM). Only the profile values from this period are archived.
- It is now possible to specify a meter reading unit in the selection.
- A new report to reload archived profile values is available.
- You may now archive profile values before the respective billing document is archived.
- The billing process may read profile values from the archive.
Weighing for Waste and Recycling
Measuring steps of manual weighing entries
With this feature, you can define measuring steps for manual weighing entries on weighbridges.
Some weighbridges have a strictly defined measuring interval. Based on the calibration of the scales they are only able to measure in certain steps. These measuring steps are based on the weight range of the measured gross weight and tara weight. This is required in order to avoid wrong manual entries according to the weighbridge calibration in the weighing transaction.
Use the enhanced configuration settings for hardware profile groups and maintain measuring steps for weighing intervals for gross weight and tara weight.
In the case of manual weighing in the weighing transaction with the specification of this hardware profile group, a check is carried out to determine whether the weights entered have been entered in the defined measuring steps.
If the manually entered weights do not match the defined measuring steps, the user is informed by a message. The weight must then be corrected manually by the user. Otherwise, the weighing process cannot be completed.
Ability to define minimum net weights according to the gross weight for multirange scales
With this feature, you are able to define minimum net weights according to the gross weight for multirange scales.
There are special requirements for multirange scales. A multirange scale has at least two weighing intervals. If the load increases beyond one of the defined weighing intervals, the minimum net weights change automatically.
Use the enhanced configuration settings for hardware profile groups and maintain two or three weighing intervals for the gross weight. Depending on the gross weight value, the minimum load of the net weight differs.
The minimum net weight is checked based on the previously determined gross weight. If the minimum net weight is not reached, the assigned weighing information is displayed on the scale in the net weight field.
Picture 4: Enable customers to meet the legal requirements of calibration limits for multirange scales.
Industry: Automotive
Just-In-Time Processing
Extensibility to add or change customer JIT call data based on the message data provided through the inbound SOAP service
Industry: Oil & Gas
Joint Venture Accounting
Joint Venture Accounting on Universal Journal - Central Finance Integration
- Integration of joint venture accounting (JVA) and central finance solution to support the replication of JVA documents and master data
- Support of JVA classic sender systems
- Support of JVA and new general ledger integration sender systems
- Support of JVA universal journal sender systems
Industry: Banking
Financial Accounting
Automatic processing of items in error correction and suspense accounting
Comply with regulatory requirements, improve financial reporting accuracy, and reduce the number of days to close the books through the following:
- Document attributes that are driven by business rules and can be configured based on soft error categories, which include data source, company code, account, and segment
- Automatic assignment of error correction and suspense (ECS) items to one or more owners by a rules framework
- Parking of single- and mass-corrected suspense items, which then automatically trigger a workflow to the approver
- Automatic identification of the appropriate approver to review and approve a corrected ECS item for posting (single release or mass release for posting)
- Aging of suspense items (new and corrected) in case it is necessary to trigger an escalation process through a predefined path
- Ability to view ECS suspense by different categories: view by ownership, view by data source, and view by aging buckets.
Industry: Insurance
Policy Processing
Optimized web service call for requesting renewal quote in the remote quotation management system
The call of the Web service for creating a renewal quote in SAP Product, Quotation, and Underwriting Management has been optimized. Firstly, the Web service is now called only once for each policy, even if the policy contains several contracts (previously, the Web service was called for each contract within the policy). In addition, the handling of errors that can occur when the Web service is called has been refined.
Optimized web service call for requesting renewal quote in the remote quotation management system
You can now call the external quotation system SAP Product, Quotation, and Underwriting Management from Policy Management to trigger the further processing of renewal quotes to which the customer has not responded after a specific acceptance period. This means that you can close those quotes that are no longer required in the external quotation system.
The new transaction /PM0/ABP_RNW_ACT_NOR (program /PM0/ABP_RNWLOFFER_ACT_NORSPNS) is available for this purpose. You should schedule this transaction as a regular background job. The background job calls the external quotation system, determines which quotes are overdue, and executes the default action for the respective quote. The external quotation system returns the current processing status of the quotes to Policy Management at time intervals defined by the user.
- Search and navigation options for links between old and renewed policy
If a new policy is created as the result of the renewal, the previous policy is now displayed on the user interface (up until now, the previous policy was only saved in the database). In addition, there are now some search and navigation options for the previous policy.
Claims Processing
Refreshed design of insurance claims open-letter correspondence sent to customers after filing of a new claim with the insurance company. The claim opened letter has been replaced with a new colored logo and the fonts have been adjusted to improve the layout of the letter.
Cross Topics: Payments and Bank Communications
Handling of time zones within a global payment factory.
When defining times the system allows defining a time with a specific time zone.
This includes the definition of a bank cut-off time using one of the following options:
- User-defined time zone
- Time zone of the payment receiver
- System default time zone
Central handling of checks initiated by connected systems
- Registering checks initiated by subsidiaries in a central payment factory
- Initiating check payments centrally
- Stopping or voiding bank checks centrally based on incoming bank messages
File handling between a subsidiary and a central payment factory
With this enhancement, payment files placed by a subsidiary onto a defined file directory can be encrypted. This ensures that sensitive payment data cannot be accessed by unauthorized parties. During upload, files are decrypted and imported into the central Payment Factory. On the application level, sensitive data can be masked to prevent access to detailed payment data such as beneficiary details of salary payments accessed by payment specialists without authorization.
Intraday cash reconciliation within a payment factory
Cash Management records created out of a Payment Factory represent the expected bank processing options regarding dates, amounts, and granularity of postings. Depending on the Batch Booking indicator of payment, Cash Management entries will be created either on a single transaction level or on batch level. This can be based on the information coming from the subsidiary or can be defined based on the settings for the payment agreement determined for a payment. This feature enables you to perform intra-day cash reconciliation for these payments by matching the incoming intra-day account statements against the corresponding memo records.
Country specific payment formats for payments out of a central payment factory
The country/region-specific payment formats have been extended with standardized mappings and sorting of transactions according to definitions in the payment format trees. In addition, you can now configure custom mappings from Advanced Payment Management structures to outbound mapping structures to simplify outbound format created using the same format tree for all payment sources.
Automatic validation and adjustment of due dates for inbound and outbound processing considering cut-off times
This feature enables you to validate and adjust due dates automatically for both inbound and outbound payments by considering cut-off times.
Inbound: validation of due dates provided by the sending subsidiary during inbound processing of payments; consideration of internal cut-off times agreed upon between the sending subsidiary and the payment factory; handling of due dates in the past to:
- Update the due date to the next possible date (considering defined calendars)
- Trigger exception handling leading to rejection or manual repair
Outbound: validation of whether a payment can be executed in time considering bank cut-off times and required lead time; options provided by the solution in case a due date can't be reached:
- Search for another payment agreement that enables adherence to a given due date (for instance, a more expensive payment instrument)
- Adjust the due date to the next reachable due date
- Trigger exception handling leading to rejection or manual repair
Updating of the respective cash management entries whenever a due date is adjusted
Optimized handling of manual payments
This feature enables you to maintain or display information about regulatory reporting and structured remittance. The following Fiori apps available to payment specialists have been extended with the additional information as follows:
- Create Payments app allows you to enter these details during the manual creation of a payment
- Manage Payments app displays the information coming either from other (SAP or non-SAP) systems or from a manual creation.
Picture 5: With this additional information, you reduce the need for access to an online banking portal to a minimum for creating manual payments.
Cross Topics: Interface Monitoring and Error Handling
Pull technical error information from middleware into SAP Application Interface Framework within
SAP S/4HANA – inbound IDoc and Web services.
Scope:
- Ability to pull technical error information from SAP Cloud Platform Integration Suite into SAP Application Interface Framework
- Support for inbound IDocs and Web services
Cross Topics: Machine Learning Scenario Management
Intelligent scenario lifecycle management (ISLM): support of APL reason code and PAi scenario migration.
The Intelligent Scenario Management app allows you to operate on published intelligent scenarios. Intelligent Scenarios can be of type embedded (APL, PAL) or side-by-side (SAP Data Intelligence). You can train the model of an intelligent scenario, see training results, decide when to activate it for the consumption of your specific business domain.
Dependent on the type of intelligent scenario, trained models need a deployment before they can be activated.
Picture 6: Customer-controlled machine learning lifecycle management.
Note: with this release, no SAP Intelligent Scenarios are shipped.
- APL: SAP HANA Automated Predictive Library
PAL: SAP HANA Predictive Analysis Library
For more information, see SAP Help Portal.
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For more information on SAP S/4HANA, and SAP S/4HANA Cloud, check out the following links:
- Blog from Yannick about the key innovations of the main release SAP S/4HANA 2020
- My blog: SAP S/4HANA 2020 – Feature Pack Stack 1 (FPS01) – Part 1
- My blog: SAP S/4HANA 2020 – Feature Pack Stack 1 (FPS01) – Part 2
- Product videos on our SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA YouTube playlist
- SAP S/4HANA PSCC Digital Enablement Wheel here
- Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast here
- SAP S/4HANA Microlearning (OP/CL) – The ultimate collection blog
- Best practices for SAP S/4HANA here
- Feature Scope Description here
- What’s New here
- Help Portal Product Page here
- RISE with SAP here
- SAP Fiori Application Library: http://spr.ly/6006Ds0Uw
- SAP S/4HANA Trials: http://spr.ly/6005Ds0Uc
Follow us via @Sap and #S4HANA, or myself via @VoglerChrist and LinkedIn
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