Professional Services in SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2111

We have already arrived at the final release of the year 2021. As usual, in this blog I will guide you though the major innovations for the professional services industry.

You can find a collection on overall professional services insights for SAP S/4HANA Cloud in this collection blog.

As usual, 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.

Let me start it off again with the same message I already relayed the last time, about the changes now realized with the scope item 4E9. With this 2111 release it is now marked as a standard scope item, which means that new customers will automatically start their systems by using this scope item.

For all our existing customers, is now the time to seriously get to know the new project billing functionality and start planning their move from the original project billing functionality over to the new project billing functionality. The original functionality is now marked as “to be depreciated”. Currently the final deletion of the original functionality is under discussion for the second half of 2022, but this is still subject to change.

Andreas Hammerschmidt has as with every release also updated his very detailed blog on the new project billing topics, there you are able to find much more information on all the details. You can find this blog post from Andreas Hammerschmidt.

Enablement of contract type usage-based billing in project billing

With this new functionality, billing specialists and billing team member can prepare project billing requests and billing document requests for billing elements of contract type “usage-based billing” in the “Manage Project Billing” app. In the “Schedule Project Billing Preparation” app, it is now possible to schedule the preparation of billing documents requests for billing elements of contract type “usage-based billing”.​

This gives the experts the possibility to monitor and prepare billing for billing elements of type “usage-based billing” which includes​

• fully or partially postpone one or more usage based items to the next bill​
• postpone items with service dates after a specified date to the next bill​
• write-off a partial or the entire amount to be billed for one or more items​
• include any items that were postponed or written off before submitting the project-billing request in the current billing cycle​
• create a billing-document request for a billing element upon submitting the prepared project-billing request​

This innovation applies to the scope item 4E9.

Additional Item functionality in project billing

This next functionality gives experts the option to add an additional item to an existing project billing request.​

Billing specialists can add an manual item in the “prepare billing” screen, which results in additional credit or revenue​, they can use the additional item to leverage one-time credits and cloud revenue​ and defer the additional item when the billing document is created and posted to financials so that it has no impact on revenue recognition or the Project WIP Details app.

This innovation applies to the scope item 4E9.

Copy Work Package

This will easily increase the usability when creating new projects or maintaining existing ones. Project managers will be able to create new work packages by copying an existing work package in a customer project or internal project.​ They can choose the information they wish to copy – information such as work items, work package plans, blocked functions, and attachments.

This innovation applies to the scope item J11.

Copy Timesheet

Also this will be a real timesaver for the consultants maintaining their time on each project. By copying already recorded time, a lot of maintenance effort will become obsolete.

This innovation applies to the scope item J12.

Thanks for taking the time and reading this summary.

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

• SAP S/4HANA Cloud release info here
• Jan Gilg SAP News article here
• Latest SAP S/4HANA Cloud Release Blog Posts 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