Get insights and updates about cloud ERP and RISE with SAP, SAP S/4HANA and SAP S/4HANA Cloud, and more enterprise management capabilities with SAP blog posts.
Welcome to 2022 and to another great release with SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Here you can find the latest innovations that have been delivered for the professional services industry with this 2202 release. If you have a general interest in the professional services scenario in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, 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 most important highlights of this release.
New Process Extensibility from Timesheet to Project Billing Request and Invoice (Key User)
Most of you will be familiar with the concept of process extensibility, but just to summarize shortly, this enables key users to create custom field within one app and this field can be carries through the process, though various other apps. This brings great flexibility to companies and the specific characteristic they have in their processes.
Now this has been also enabled between time recording and billing document output enables administrators to create a new custom field across multiple business contexts so that the information can flow end-to-end in the professional services scenario. The improvements that come with this innovation are a higher end-user productivity and an increased efficiency during project billing.
Take a look at this functionality in the system demo down below:
Project billing for customer projects in the “completed” stage
Customers projects have serval stages from “in planning” to “completed”. Up until this release it was not possible for Project Billing Specialist or Billing Team Members to prepare a bill if the project had already been moved to the “completed” stage. With the current release these roles are now able to do so, which allows more flexibility in business processes and operations.
Of course, these billing elements will then also be displayed in the list report of the “Manage Project Billing” app. It is important to note that resources can no longer record their efforts toward a project in the “completed” stage. What can now still be processed are invoices, post expenses, and transfer costs to accounting.
Take a look at this functionality in the system demo down below:
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.
Usability in Customer Projects
There are several smaller enhancements in the “Plan Customer Projects” app. These changes are meant to increase the usability of the app and an improve the workflow for the users. The first of the topics I want to mention here is regarding the employee search in the simple staffing functionality included in the scope item J11.
The innovation is a more efficient and performant employees search while assigning the resources to the role. Now a user can leverage the additional filter options to narrow their search for accurate and effective results. These new options are the delivery organization, the cost center, the company code, and the service cost level.
The next item in this context is the new arrangement when adding a new role or a work package during the project planning. Users will now be able to easily find the newly added role, additional resource, or a work package at the top of the list. No more scrolling down the list to navigate to the new role/ work package.
Take a look at the changes in the system demo down below:
Important Update on Project Manager Roles
There is one really important information for all our customers working with the professional services scenario, specifically the Customer Project Manager role.
In the recent releases the business role template “Project Manager - Professional Services” (SAP_BR_PROJECT_MANAGER_PROF), which provides flexibility to enhance authorization to access and maintain the projects, has continuously been enhanced with additional business catalogs over the last few releases. With this 2202 release, the role template SAP_BR_PROJECT_MANAGER_PROF is equivalent with its earlier version - SAP_BR_PROJ_MANAGE_COMM.
The business role template SAP_BR_PROJ_MANAGE_COMM, has been marked as to be deprecated, which means in a future release this might be deleted. At this point in time this is not yet clarified. But we ask all our customers to make themselves familiar with the business role template “Project Manager - Professional Services” (SAP_BR_PROJECT_MANAGER_PROF), if they have not done so already.
Resource Management
In the December release of the resource management functionality in the Cloud for Projects there was a new API for resource request creation, update and deletion. This API can be used to connect the process from third party solutions to the one in the Could for projects, but also in parallel with for example SAP S/4HANA Cloud. There is no strict decision that needs to be made, whether to work with the API or for example SAP S/4HANA Cloud. This was especially set up this way to give customers the possibility to create not only resource requests for a project, but also for instance trainings or opportunities.
Take a look at the functionality in the system demo below:
Thanks for taking the time and reading this summary.
For more information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, check out the following links:
