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Author's profile photo Jose Marquez Mares
Jose Marquez Mares
June 24, 2023 13 minute read

SAP S/4HANA Functional Innovations documented by the S/4HANA RIG team

Hello, and thanks for reading this blog post. I’m a member of the SAP S/4HANA RIG (Regional Implementation Group).   One of our goals is to share our accumulated SAP S/4HANA knowledge with the extended SAP community using a variety of channels. We have found that blog posts and openSAP courses can be a very effective way to massively share content. For this reason, as of now we have published more than 500 blogs and have delivered several openSAP courses.

In this blog post, I have consolidated the assets that we have created specifically for functional innovations. For practical purposes, I cannot list all the innovations we have delivered in SAP S/4HANA. However, I will highlight the ones in which the S/4HANA RIG team has posted the content that I believe is significant and may be relevant to you. So, if you are planning to move to SAP S/4HANA and are wondering how to get the most value out of SAP S/4HANA, this blog is for you.

Aligning with SAP Activate, if you have started your SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition (or On-Premise) journey, or if you are planning to start it soon, I recommend reviewing these features as part of your EXPLORE phase. If you are already using SAP S/4HANA, then you can evaluate those features for future potential inclusion as part of your RUN phase.

If you are not familiar with the SAP Activate phases, my recommendation is to begin by first watching the videos contained within the following blog:  SAP Activate in under 9 minutes

To facilitate the consumption of this content, I have classified our assets into the following groups Cross-functional topics, Procure to Pay, Plan to Product, Order to Cash, and Finance:

Cross-functional topic: This section includes features that are relevant for several lines of business.

  • Mass Changes of documents: SAP ERP has limited options to massively update documents when you are already in production. For many customers, a common solution was to create their own custom transactions or use options like LSMW (SAP Legacy System Migration Workbench) or the Transaction MASS, which we know could be a little bit dangerous. But, in SAP S/4HANA, we offer several SAP Fiori apps that can make mass changes easier. For more information on this topic, please check the following links:
  • SAP S/4HANA output management: As it is stated in the SAP Note 2470711 – S4TWL – OUTPUT MANAGEMENT, SAP S/4HANA output management is a modern solution for output-related tasks. It takes the functionality from existing SAP output solutions and adds additional features like seamless integration into Fiori apps, flexible email configuration and email templates as well as the support of SAP Cloud Platform Forms by Adobe. For this feature, we have published the following assets:
  • Condition contract management in Settlement Management: As you are aware, “classic” rebate processing is no longer supported in SAP S/4HANA, the successor is “condition contract management” in Settlement Management which provides a central standardized solution for the administration of supplier and customer rebates.

 

Procure to Pay:

  • Service Procurement: SAP S/4HANA introduced a new service data model to simplify and align the service procurement process within our new Digital Core and, in the future, across our procurement solutions. The following blog provides an overview of the challenges customers faced with SAP ERP and how the new service data model supports the business needs for “simple lean” services. Starting with the SAP S/4HANA 2022 release, “complex” services are supported as well. The name for the new data model is Product Service.
  • Central Procurement: As it is explained in the SAP support portal, Central Procurement allows you to integrate your SAP S/4HANA system (which acts as a hub system) with other connected systems in your system landscape. SAP S/4HANA, SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP ERP, and third-party systems can act as connected systems. These integration scenarios serve as an enabler for shared services, that help to control the procurement processes of multiple connected systems from a single source system centrally. To learn more about Central procurement, you can watch these videos:

Plan to Product:

Additionally, you can watch the following videos:

  • Predictive MRP: The SAP Help Portal explains that the goal of predictive material and resource planning is to identify potential capacity issues and to evaluate possible solutions as early as possible based on a simplified requirements plan using a simplified material requirements algorithm. As a result of the simulation, production planners are prepared to take decisions on changed conditions, for example regarding demand planning, resource plans, preproduction, or make-or-buy decisions.
  • Demand-Driven Replenishment: The SAP Help Portal informs you that Demand-Driven Replenishment helps you plan and manage supply chains efficiently based on customer demand, rather than through traditional MRP procedures. You do this by strategically decoupling material flows, becoming less vulnerable to disruptions in the supply chain, and by protecting the flow through dynamically-managed buffer (stock) levels for relevant products.
  • MRP: According to the SAP Help Portal, the main function of material requirements planning is to guarantee material availability, that is, it is used to procure or produce the required quantities on time both for internal purposes and for sales and distribution. This process involves the monitoring of stocks and, in particular, the automatic creation of procurement proposals for purchasing and production.

Looking for more information? Please check these blogs:

  • Basic Capacity Planning (PP-CRP): Capacity planning can be flexibly adjusted for planning demands and to the area of responsibility within the company. It is integrated into several application components, like Sales and Distribution (SD), Production Planning and Control (PP), Plant Maintenance (PM), Customer Service (CS), and Project System (PS). As described in the SAP Help Portal, capacity planning comprises Capacity Evaluation and Capacity Leveling.
  • Quality Management: The SAP Help Portal says that Quality Management enables you to ensure the quality of your products, processes, and services right from the start. It helps you to prepare, execute, and monitor different types of quality inspections, for example, in procurement, production, or sales scenarios. If defects occur, efficient nonconformance management features help you to report and process these defects to eliminate them and prevent them from recurring.
  • Embedded Extended Warehouse Management (EWM): The Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) offers you flexible, automated support for processing various goods movements and for managing stocks in your warehouse complex. The system supports the planned and efficient processing of all logistics processes in your warehouse. The SAP Help Portal also mentions that EWM gives you the option of mapping your entire warehouse complex in detail in the system, down to the storage bin level. Not only does this give you an overview of the total quantity of a product in the warehouse, but you can also always see exactly where a specific product is, at any time, in your warehouse complex.

You can also check the following blogs for more information:

  • Embedded Transportation Management (TM): Transportation Management (TM) supports you in all activities connected with the physical transportation of goods from one location to another. Additionally, the SAP Help Portal describes that you can use TM to create and monitor an efficient transportation plan that fulfills the relevant constraints (for example, service level, costs, and resource availability). You can determine options to save costs and optimize the use of available resources. You can react to transportation events and find solutions to possible deviations from the original transportation plan.

There are also these very interesting blogs:

  • Maintenance Management: Maintenance covers the following activities: Inspection, Preventive Maintenance, Repair, and other measures that are carried out by the maintenance organization. The SAP Help Portal mentions that, due to the integration with other modules (for example, Materials Management, Production, Sales and Distribution, Human Resources Management, and Controlling), data is kept completely up-to-date, and processes that are necessary for Plant Maintenance and Customer Service are triggered automatically in other areas (for example, a purchase requisition for non-stock materials in Materials Management/Purchasing).

Order to Cash

  • Advance ATP: As it is stated in the SAP Support portal, Advanced Available-to-Promise (aATP) is a business function in SAP S/4HANA that provides a response to order fulfillment requests from Sales and Production Planning. An order fulfillment request consists of the required material, plant, requested quantity, and material availability date. The response to the request is based on the current stock situation and any future, anticipated or planned stock receipts and considers concurrent orders. Furthermore, additional restrictions based on any other order attributes (like region or customers) can be applied. The aATP function generates confirmation proposals for the requested material and plant, including confirmed quantities and dates.

Finance

  • Cash and Liquidity Management: Cash and Liquidity Management is the successor of Classic Cash Management. As it is stated in the SAP Portal, SAP Portal, this solution enables an organization’s cash or treasury department to manage bank accounts centrally and overview the cash operations and long-term liquidity trends accurately and precisely. Cash managers can easily and intuitively get a high-level overview and detailed insights into bank accounts, cash position, and cash flows, which enables them to make decisions and take action directly. For Cash and Liquidity Management, we have released the blog post:
  • Payments and Bank Communications: Payments and Bank Communications solutions will streamline, provide improved controls, and give better transparency into business communications with your banks.  Solutions include:
    • In-House Cash functions: Used for processing internal and external payment transactions within a group or company.
    • SAP Bank Communication Management: Used for managing multiple bank communication interfaces.
    • Advanced Payment Management: Currently supporting four payment scenarios: Internal payments, payments ‘in name of’ with forwarding only, payments ‘in name of’ with routing optimization, and payments ‘on behalf of‘.
    • SAP Multi-Bank Connectivity: A connectivity solution based on a hosted, software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, which enables banks and their corporate customers to exchange messages.

Please review the guidance provided within the SAP Support portal and the following blog posted by our team:

  • SAP S/4HANA Credit Management: SAP S/4HANA provides Basic Credit Management that is based upon FSCM Credit Management as part of S/4HANA core functionality. There are additional options that include Advanced Credit Management (which can automate many manual credit management-related tasks) and SAP Cloud for Credit Integration (providing a direct link to major credit agencies for up-to-date creditworthiness evaluations).  For this topic, you can listen to this podcast:

In addition to the blogs created by the S/4HANA RIG team, if you want to know more about the innovations released in the latest SAP S/4HANA versions, I recommend you to review the blogs published by our colleague Christian Vogler

I hope this blog post was helpful to you. If so, click on “like” or “share”. I’m looking forward to your feedback and comments. If you have any questions, I encourage you to post into the Q&A using the tags: SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, and SAP S/4HANA. We will try to answer all your inquiries as soon as possible.

 

Special thanks to Sheldon Edelstein and Kusiel Camargo for your contribution!.

 

Thanks,

Brought to you by the SAP S/4HANA RIG team.

 

 

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      2 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Sriram Rekapalli
      Sriram Rekapalli

      Hi Jose,

       

      Great blog  with  well organized structure and content !

       

       

      Author's profile photo Jose Marquez Mares
      Jose Marquez Mares
      Blog Post Author

      thanks!