Highlights of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1911 Release
Today, we’re happy to announce the general availability of our SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1911 release today.
With our fourth and last release in this year, we ship innovations across all lines of business and industries, delivering on the promise of an intelligent ERP.
One of the ways that we bring intelligence is via the intelligent Robotic Process Automation (iRPA) solution which helps to automate many of the repetitive tasks across SAP and non-SAP systems. We’re further expanding the range of available bots to reduce manual efforts and increase efficiency – delivering them continuously via the SAP Best Practice Explorer.
Read more in Yannick Peterschmitt’s blog post and Hardeep Tulsi’s blog post.
In this blog post you will find the latest and greatest SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1911 highlights. For a quick overview, check out my video below.
Finance
Agile Decision Making with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Embedded Analytics Powered by SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Fiori
The first innovation in the area of Finance is Agile Decision Making with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Embedded Analytics Powered by SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Fiori. Providing deep insights into your business and consequently enabling you to stay on top of your finances is a must. With SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1911 you can make use of reporting and data visualization via dashboards and multidimensional reports based on SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC). The reporting is fully embedded into the SAP S/4HANA Cloud user experience which allows for a seamless navigation between your SAP Fiori Launchpad, SAP Analytics Cloud reports and SAP S/4HANA Cloud apps. Having an overview of your most important KPIs and being able to create custom stories which can be linked as tiles in the SAP Fiori Launchpad can ultimately help you to increase efficiency and effectiveness of management decisions.
Read more in Katharina Doerr‘s blog post, Ulrich Hauke’s blog post and Katrin Deissner’s blog post.
Figure 1: ‘Agile Decision Making with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Embedded Analytics Powered by SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Fiori’ increases your business efficiency (note: no audio voice available)
Manufacturing and Supply Chain
Prediction of Slow or Non-moving Materials Supported by Predictive Analytics
Already with our SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1905 release we have shipped the ‘Slow or Non-Moving Materials’ app. This app helps you to monitor and make time-dependent investigations of the slow or non-moving materials in your stock. With our new release we are bringing more intelligence into the already existing functionality and are introducing a detailed page which provides additional insights into the future development of a material in the product life cycle using predictive analytics. Using these capabilities you can lower warehousing costs and increase supply chain efficiency, avoid or reduce scrap materials, and finally classify materials suitable for cycle counting in physical inventory.
Read more in Gerhard Welker’s blog post.
Figure 2: Insights into future development of a material helps you to react immediately with follow-on activities (note: no audio voice available)
Sourcing and Procurement
Lean Service Integration with Ariba Network
As part of our Line of Business Sourcing and Procurement we’re supporting three integration scenarios with our SAP S/4HANA 1911 release. One example is the Lean Service Integration with Ariba Network which helps to streamline the process of service procurement. When creating a lean service request, e.g. a purchase order, in the SAP S/4HANA Cloud system, it is now sent to the supplier in the Ariba Network. From there the supplier can access the purchase order through the supplier portal in Ariba Network and may create a service entry. The seamless integration with SAP S/4HANA Cloud enables you to react immediately and approve the service entry sheet in time as the system will send you a respective notification. In order to speed up the procurement process the document is sent automatically to Ariba Network where the supplier can start creating the invoice for the delivered service.
Read more in Katharina Doerr’s blog post and Katrin Deissner’s blog post.
Figure 3: Streamline the process of service procurement with ‘Lean Service Integration with Ariba Network’
Service
Service Quotations for Service Cost Estimates
Our latest release has quite some innovations in store for you around Service Management. You can now use service quotations which can be sent to your customers holding the estimated costs and required service conditions before placing a service order. Service orders and service confirmations are now combined in a single working area which makes it much easier to have a consolidated view on the life cycle of the service order. This will not only improve transparency in the service ordering process, it will also result in higher customer satisfaction.
Read more in Young Hwae Koo’s blog post.
Figure 4: ‘Service Quotations for Service Cost Estimates’ provides early transparency into demand for service (note: no audio voice available)
Professional Services
Planning Additional Resources with Flexible Units
A functionality in the area of Professional Services that we have already provided with our SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1908 release is the planning of human resources and expenses on projects. We’re now expanding this functionality for you in order to plan additional resources within all types of work packages which improves the planning efficiency of project managers. Costs and revenue resulting from the planning of additional resources will be calculated based on the planned quantity and the maintained prices. If you’d like to use this functionality you can categorize at least one activity as additional resources using the SCCUI for Mapping Resources to Resource Types.
Read more in Katharina Stopf’s blog post.
Figure 5: Planning additional resources within all types of work packages improves planning efficiency
Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management
Intercompany Processes for Enterprise Projects
In Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management we’re releasing a new process which addresses intercompany processes for enterprise projects. More specifically, we target time and expense type of cross company postings. Within this process the ordering company executes an Enterprise Project which orders services from an employee who is assigned to another company code. The employee from the delivering company then performs a time or expense booking against the project.
Moreover, we also provide the possibility to schedule the generation of intercompany debit memo requests on a periodic basis. The system even supports you by informing you about the outstanding debit requests, helping you to balance your accounts independently post the intercompany process.
Read more in Corina Kinzel’s blog post.
Figure 6: Manage time and expense postings with the new intercompany process (note: no audio voice available)
Sales
SAP Fiori App “Manage Sales Orders”
There are many ways to create sales orders in SAP S/4HANA Cloud. For occasional usage you can use the “Create Sales Orders – Fast Entry” application, and for more complex ones the “Create Sales Orders” application is the recommended application. With SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1911 we deliver the first version of the new SAP Fiori application “Manage Sales Orders”. Using this application you can use various filter options when searching for sales orders, create or edit sales orders, and display single sales orders. You can continue to use the Transaction VA01 which can currently still be used for more complex scenarios. All these transactions are available in the SAP Fiori theme to support a seamless user experience across the SAP Fiori launchpad.
Read more in Christian Vogler’s blog post.
Figure 7: Create, edit and display sales orders using the new SAP Fiori app “Manage Sales Orders”
Hybrid Cloud ERP with SAP S/4HANA Cloud
Accelerators are the readymade predefined contents which can be used by customers to realize Hybrid cloud scenarios. Accelerators contain integration contents, how-to documents & step-by-step process documents for Hybrid Cloud 2-Tier scenarios.
With SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1911, we provide an accelerator for product master data integration using cloud platform integration (CPI) to replicate product master from SAP S/4HANA on premise to SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
Read more in Abhijit Bolakhe’s blog post and Katrin Deissner’s blog post.
Figure 8: Hybrid Cloud Accelerators as part of the SAP Best Practices Explorer (note: no audio voice available)
Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast
Last but not least I’d like to draw your attention to our new podcast “Inside SAP S/4HANA”. This podcast leverages the unique knowledge and expertise of SAP S/4HANA product experts, partners & customers to address your needs by sharing product insights and project best practice. There is no customer success without product success and project success: we help you get to the next level and make your SAP S/4HANA projects a success. Subscribe now and benefit from the shared knowledge.
For more information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, check out the following links:
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud release info: http://www.sap.com/s4-cloudrelease
- Oliver Betz' article on SAP News here
- Early Release Webinar Series here
- Best practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud here
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud User Community: register here
- Feature Scope Description here
- What’s New here
- Help Portal Product Page here
- Implementation Portal here
Follow us via @Sap and #S4HANA, or myself via @SDenecken
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