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Author's profile photo Sven Denecken

SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Private Edition, and SAP S/4HANA | 2022 Product Launch

I am excited to share that the 2022 release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, and SAP S/4HANA is here – the most intelligent and comprehensive ERP to date. In this blog post, I have the pleasure to walk you through the key aspects that bring intelligence to our digital core along with some of the highlights of the release.

To get an overview of my personal highlights, watch my video below.

Foundation of the Digital Core

Before jumping right into the highlights of this year’s SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, and SAP S/4HANA release, let me name the four aspects that make up the foundation of the digital core:

  1. An architecture delivering a scalable foundation to transact at the highest possible automation,
  2. A system of intelligence supporting and steering the business using embedded analytics, simulation, prediction, and decision support to run live businesses,
  3. An end-to-end experience that can be implemented, consumed, and adapted faster,
  4. And an open architecture to allow connectivity and adoption of micro-services.

What Makes the Digital Core Intelligent?

A modernized ERP provides the base to connect your data, automate key functions, and constantly improve your products and services. For a successful modernization of your ERP, the following aspects need to be considered:

  1. A digital-age user experience: Conversational UIs and natural language processing allow the targeting of a hands-free ERP.
  2. Automation of business processes: Automation mainly addresses companies’ bottom lines and helps to reduce costs. We are working on ever-increasing automation of more ERP business processes within the next years.
  3. The next generation of business processes: We provide a streamlined architecture and technology never seen before. This aims to increase the top line by providing an infrastructure which allows you to completely rethink value creation and service tasks.

Figure 1: The new Horizon theme offers a modern look and an improved user experience. Important note: This is a preview – the Horizon theme will be made available for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, and SAP S/4HANA I 2022 with FPS1 in Q1/2023*.

*Current state of planning, can be changed by SAP without further notice.

 

Highlights of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Private Edition, and SAP S/4HANA | 2022 Product Launch

Every new release gives us the opportunity to keep expanding our capabilities and enabling our valued customers to fully benefit from the latest innovations. With the 2022 release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, and SAP S/4HANA, we offer a whole set of new key innovations. Let me walk you through what this release has in store for you.

 

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an essential asset for any business both now and in the future. We at SAP make sure we stay on top of the latest AI technologies and benefit from their ever-advancing capabilities for our intelligent enterprise.

 

Supply Chain Management

In Supply Chain Management, we leverage the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) algorithm, widely used in econometrics, statistics, and time series analysis to achieve a high-quality forecast. The ARIMA algorithm is used from the predictive analytics capabilities of SAP HANA in extended service parts planning (eSPP) forecasting. With this, you can forecast the need for spare parts in upcoming periods based on past values without having to include additional key figures, which optimizes customer services while minimizing your stockholding costs. Note: The ARIMA algorithm also applies to the ‘SAP Digital Supply Chain Management Edition for SAP S/4HANA’, also known as DSC Edition.

Figure 2: The autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) algorithm supports a more accurate forecast of spare parts in Supply Chain Management. The ARIMA forecast model detects trends and seasonality with low forecast error.

 

Public Sector

In the Public Sector, we have success-tracking concepts within Behavioral Insights. Success tracking involves analyzing Machine Learning-based risk and debt trends in relation to an organization’s collection actions. With this, you can use the ‘Explore At-Risk Customers’ app to analyze risk scores and trends across the scenarios delivered by Behavioral Insights as well as study customer pulse by viewing and analyzing the actions that they perform. The latest enhancement adds success tracking features to this app, including the possibility to filter, view, and group customers by the current collection strategy and collection step. Strategies and steps can be compared or analyzed by their impact on success. Additionally, dunning by collection strategy events can now be easily consumed by the ML models, as well as displayed on the customer pulse (visual timeline). This app will help you to understand the effectiveness of existing collection strategies and steps as well as determine the best next action for individual customers or groupings of customers.

Figure 3: Success-tracking concepts within Behavioral Insights help analysts to determine the best next action for individual customers or groupings of customers.

 

Data Insights

How to Bring Data into Value

 

Finance

In the finance area, we offer the direct integration of data from SAP Analytics Cloud into SAP S/4HANA Finance for group reporting, removing the need to transfer the data first into accounting and then release to group reporting. Here, we leverage value from data and analytics, and we enable more accurate and more efficient profitability planning in planning consolidation scenarios such as group-level planning with no integration in company-level planning and the planning of consolidation units that are not represented in accounting and need to be consolidated.

Figure 4: The direct integration of data from SAP Analytics Cloud into SAP S/4HANA Finance for group reporting offers more efficient profitability planning in planning consolidation scenarios. Note: This screenshot was taken from SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition 2208. The functionality is now also available in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, and SAP S/4HANA 2022.

 

R&D / Engineering

With this release, we bring an enhanced impact analysis in change records. The Impact Management in Change Record application allows you to perform impact analysis that can help you identify objects (Material, BOMs, Orders, etc.) that are affected by a proposed change. Before implementing the change in the process, you can check the dependencies by performing an impact analysis and view the list of impacted objects with their object details. Let me give you a business example: There is a requirement to replace a material in a car engine, but the same material may be used in different other items such as BOM, BOM components, production routing, change records, etc. Therefore, prior to making the change, it is important to understand how the change impacts the other objects. The steps shown in figure 5 explain how an impact analysis is performed in change records and how the impacted objects are identified.

Figure 5: Shorten time to market through more accurate transparency on the product change early in the product-change process.

 

Digital Transformation

The Next Generation of Business Processes Inherently Part of SAP S/4HANA

Sales

In the sales LoB, we ship advanced intercompany sales to support legal compliance and consistent flow of values throughout logistical transactions. With this innovation, we bring intelligence to our digital core by introducing the next generation of business processes inherently part of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, related to special business processes in order and contract management. Intercompany sales processes allow two affiliated companies and an external customer to participate in a single intercompany process. With the Advanced Intercompany Sales process, the system automatically creates the following additional business documents:

  • Purchase orders in the selling companies
  • Sales orders in the delivering companies

For the transfer of control of goods between the affiliated companies and to the customer, this advanced process uses valuated stock in transit (VSiT). To support valuated stock in transit in this process, a virtual plant is introduced in the selling company. To orchestrate and monitor each process step, this process makes use of the ‘Monitor Value Chains’ app. You use this app to track all steps of advanced intercompany sales, advanced intercompany stock transfer, and sell from stock with valuated stock in transit (VSiT) business processes. It provides you with a detailed overview of all relevant steps and documents in these processes. In addition, it directly integrates these processes with other business applications. The business benefits are increased transparency, efficiency, and cross-team collaboration.

Figure 6: Value chain monitoring as part of advanced intercompany sales is a free offering that provides a framework allowing customers to design, run, and monitor business processes across the value chain.

 

Product Compliance and Transportation Management

The business-to-business interface of dangerous goods with transport management is an important component of product compliance to ensure the safe transportation of dangerous goods. To support your compliance with dangerous goods regulations, dangerous goods checks are now integrated into the processing of the following transportation documents for ocean transport:

  • Freight unit
  • Ocean freight bookings

Figure 7: Make dangerous goods data available to carriers in electronic form (business-to-business interface).

 

Industry 4.0

Industry 4.0 is one of the game-changing technologies and plays a critical role in digital transformation and business transformation.

 

SAP Extended Warehouse Management

With this release, we offer integration services for SAP Warehouse Robotics which enable you to connect SAP Warehouse Robotics to SAP Extended Warehouse Management (SAP EWM) as a standalone product, decentralized EWM based on SAP S/4HANA or EWM as a part of SAP S/4HANA. This allows you to read warehouse orders and task, to assign and unassign a resource that is mapped to a robot to or from a warehouse order, to set a warehouse order status to ‘In Process’ when a robot starts processing the warehouse order, to confirm warehouse tasks and orders when a robot finishes processing the warehouse orders, and to assign a queue to a warehouse order with exceptions. Note: To enable the integration with SAP Warehouse Robotics, you need to activate the OData service /SCWM/WAREHOUSE_ROBOTICS.

Figure 8: The integration with SAP Warehouse Robotics facilitates processes in SAP Extended Warehouse Management.

 

Another example in the same area is the Work-in-Process (WIP) Management. Work-in-Process Management is based on the WIP information that is communicated between an integrated manufacturing execution system (MES) and SAP Extended Warehouse Management (EWM). In a manufacturing plant, due to planned or unplanned delays between manufacturing operations, output of the previous operation can’t be provided for the next operation immediately. Therefore, it’s necessary to store WIP stock in a warehouse for a period of time, for example, to save space in a production line. With this new release, you can store unfinished items in your warehouse that are in the middle of the manufacturing process until they’re requested for a follow-on manufacturing operation. Now here is how this works in a business context: After a shop floor control (SFC) number is created in the MES and a goods receipt is requested, the MES sends detailed manufacturing information to EWM via the interface ‘WIP Inbound Delivery In’. When the goods receipt is complete and the warehouse tasks are confirmed, EWM informs the MES of the processing status of the inbound delivery via the interface ‘WIP Inbound Delivery Status Out’. The MES creates a staging request for WIP via the interface ‘Warehouse Staging Request In’. The MES needs to be informed of stock changes or stock moves that are relevant to the production supply area. After the warehouse tasks are confirmed, EWM sends the relevant stock change information to the MES via the interface ‘Warehouse Stock Change Notification Out’. The MES then creates a request for goods issue to consume the WIP stock from EWM via the interface ‘WIP Goods Issue In’.

Figure 9: WIP Management lets you store unfinished items in your warehouse that are in the middle of the manufacturing process until they’re requested for a follow-on manufacturing operation.

 

Digital-Age User Experience

 

SAP Fiori Apps

In this release, we offer various SAP Fiori apps in different areas. Let me just mention some of them:

  • New SAP Fiori app allowing customer returns orders to be created without reference to a sales document in sales, increasing process flexibility.
  • New SAP Fiori app for analyzing stock in a date range in Inventory Management, providing the ability to analyze inventory difference postings for one or more materials in a defined time period and to track goods movement postings based on material documents.
  • New SAP Fiori apps to maintain data for safety data sheets and labels in product compliance, e. g. to manage information on waste codes, enable the use of worldwide and EU GHS classification for unpackaged products and raw materials, or provide a release concept to control when information is ready to be used in follow-on processes
  • New SAP Fiori app ‘Analyze Incoming Payments’ in finance, allowing you to monitor and analyze incoming payments to optimize clarification processes and team workload. You can use this app to regularly analyze how many payments have been clarified manually within a given period and determine the effectiveness of the automated clarification process provided by the standard. The app analyzes payment lots, credit lots, and check lots, and displays an overview of which amount and number of payments in a payment lot has been cleared automatically or manually.

Figure 10: Make better decisions with key details and feedback on the automatic matching of payments through machine learning with the ‘Analyze Incoming Payments’ SAP Fiori app.

 

Transportation Management

The load plan provides you with an overview of how the loading space available for transporting a business document is currently used. A load plan is also created for detailed mixed package building. It provides you with an overview of the loading of a package or a pallet, for example.

In both the transportation cockpit and in the business document, you can display the complete load plan as a 3D load plan or as a hierarchical table (load plan hierarchy). With this release, a new batch report for creating PDF files for load plans of road freight orders and container units is available. Further, you can create a load plan manually.

Figure 11: Improved usability with enhanced load planning options.

 

Sustainability

Sourcing and Procurement

With this release, we now have sustainability integration scenarios in sourcing and procurement. This helps customers to increase visibility of footprint data to support actions to achieve the sustainability targets and deliver on the “green line” objectives of the organization.

Figure 12: Integration scenarios with sourcing and procurement help customers to increase visibility of footprint data. This screenshot was taken with the new Horizon theme ‘Morning Horizon’ available with FPS1*.

*Current state of planning, can be changed by SAP without further notice.

 

Environment, Health, and Safety

Here, you can create environmental reports and get a summary of the available environmental data in the system with the new Manage Environmental Reports’ SAP Fiori app. The app provides a framework for creating summary reports that can serve as a guidance on how to create environmental summary reports. You can use the reports to fulfill legal and internal reporting requirements. In addition to reports containing current environmental data, you can also make up a snapshot of projected environmental data based on the setup of compliance activities for a future period. The app provides an example template for managing greenhouse gas reports (carbon dioxide, methane, dinitrogen oxide, and carbon dioxide equivalents).

Figure 13: Example report for greenhouse gas, including specific report page and report file generation.

 

This blog post covers only selected innovations for selected LoBs and industries. You can find the entire overview of innovations in the What’s New Document published on the SAP Help Portal.

To get further insights into our SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, and SAP S/4HANA | 2022 release, stay tuned for Yannick Peterschmitt’s deep dive of the release highlights and read his blog post.

 

For more information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, and SAP S/4HANA | 2022, check out the following links:

 

Follow us via @SAP and #S4HANA, or myself via @SDenecken

 

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      13 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Kai Sicker
      Kai Sicker

      What's the best way to find out about interesting changes from the point of a developer?

      For example I would be really interested if there are any changes/improvements to the RAP model.

      Author's profile photo Shavneet Singh
      Shavneet Singh

      Exactly What I am also interested in.

      Whether RAP Model fully supports all types of Media, Eg : Downloads of PDF , Upload from Excel at both list and Object page , and upload of attachment.

      Regards ,

      Shavneet Singh

      Author's profile photo Christian Vogler
      Christian Vogler

      Thank you for reading our blog and thank you for your comments.

      The intention of this blog is to give an overview of the innovations concerning the new 2022 Release, unfortunately, the aspects concerning the development domain are not covered.

      We do have innovations for ABAP RESTful Application Programming Model (RAP) like New RESTful APIs for event and session-based charging.

      Please have a look at the What’s New here to find more.

      For more information about ABAP Platform 2022, see:

      SAP Notes 3225464: https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/3225464

      Best Regards,

      Christian

      Author's profile photo Carine Tchoutouo Djomo
      Carine Tchoutouo Djomo

      Hi Shavneet,

      the maintenance of large objects (aka OData Streams) can now be enabled in RAP-based Fiori apps. This gives end users the option to incorporate and download binary files or text files when editing BO entity instances.

      You can read more here: Working with Large Objects

      Find more updates here: What’s new in RAP  (e.g. RAP Business events)

      Kind regards,
      Carine

      Author's profile photo Bjoern Panter
      Bjoern Panter

      Hi Kai,

      for developers the new developer extensibility aka Embedded Steampunk is part of this release too.

      Find some details here https://blogs.sap.com/2022/09/05/embedded-steampunk-some-more-details-for-abap-developers/

      Also the new Extensibility Guide will be released soon.

      Interested in Clean Core? A new blog will be released soon.  Just follow Mohan Kumar Jayarama or Bjoern Panter

      (29) SAP S/4HANA Cloud ABAP Environment - Embedded Steampunk - YouTube

       

      Regards,

      Mohan & Björn

       

      Author's profile photo Marc Bernard
      Marc Bernard

      Here's the What's New for ABAP 2022:

      https://help.sap.com/whats-new/6a9ccc848f4047178da63fe4eaa86d50?locale=en-US

      or details here:

      https://help.sap.com/docs/ABAP_PLATFORM/66906ae3920c4fc684cf588290fb9267/d3d5c132973b404db980ba6ae0889be7.html

      Best,

      Marc

      @marcfbe

      Author's profile photo Carine Tchoutouo Djomo
      Carine Tchoutouo Djomo

      In addition,

      What’s new in RAP: https://help.sap.com/docs/ABAP_PLATFORM_NEW/fc4c71aa50014fd1b43721701471913d/40bb1ba88c1e4139896fd7550c76654f.html

      Kind regards,
      Carine

      Author's profile photo Youri Regnaud
      Youri Regnaud

      About integration services for SAP Warehouse Robotics is this new integration comes with eWM Business Events to publish new Warehouse Orders and Warehouse Tasks with Oub/Sub patterns?

      Author's profile photo Christian Vogler
      Christian Vogler

      Hi Youri,

      thanks for reading our blog.

      SAP Warehouse Robotics is a product that is built on SAP BTP. You can use it to automate your warehouse operations using robots, for example, to move handling units (HUs) from source storage bins to destination storage bins.

      Connecting to SAP EWM

      You can connect SAP Warehouse Robotics to SAP Extended Warehouse Management (SAP EWM) as a standalone product, decentralized EWM based on SAP S/4HANA or EWM as a part of SAP S/4HANA. To be brief on the product names, SAP EWM is used for references to these deployments in this guide.

      See also: https://help.sap.com/docs/WAREHOUSE_ROBOTICS

      Best Regards,

      Christian

      Author's profile photo Youri Regnaud
      Youri Regnaud

      I think I have understand the value proposition of Warehouse Robotics. My point is more I assume you build a real time integration between eWM and Warehouse Robotics to send new WO/WT. And as SAP provide more and more business event in a pub/sub pattern with Event Mesh i ask the questions

      Author's profile photo Youri Regnaud
      Youri Regnaud

      About Work-in-Process (WIP) Management (what is a great release feature) is there a plan (or not) to make some integration between WIP Batches in ERP and Work-In-Progress Management in eWM? Another interesting use case is for external processing operation in a production order. Logistic have to pack, ship WIP to the supplier but without support of logistic objects in SAP ERP and SAP eWM. Offer a wait to create ODN to ship WIP to Supplier can help us to standardize all shipment activities.

      Author's profile photo Christian Vogler
      Christian Vogler

      Hi Youri,

      this innovation is related to DIGITAL MANUFACTURING CLOUD, and we will add more features in the next release coming in 2023, like "WIP placement and synchronization".

      The scope here is:

      • App enabling correction of WIP shop floor control (SFC) placement on a routing or recipe due to production issues requiring the synchronization of WIP with the manufacturing process
      • App that is similar to the “SFC step status” transaction in SAP Manufacturing Execution

      For more Innovations, see our Roadmap:

      https://roadmaps.sap.com/board?range=CURRENT-LAST&PRODUCT=73554900100800000266#Q4%202022

      Best Regards,

      Christian

      Author's profile photo Youri Regnaud
      Youri Regnaud

      Thanks, I assume if our MES manage well SFC concept we can use this EWM features as well, with for sure additional works for integration?