In this webinar, SAP promised to continue their commitment to both converting existing ECC R/3 functionalities into SAP S/4HANA, as well as, introducing newer functions and features targeting the innovation.
Even though the 1809 release is scheduled to be released this September 21st (2 days from the webinar), everything that they presented was shown as being “SAP LABS PREVIEW”, that is, the scope can change before the official release.
Some of the changes and innovation items presented today were already expected or previously announced in past roadmaps.
SAP insists that there is no more reason to wait. They want the customers to be confident that S/4HANA is ready to help companies to start their digital transformation. While I agree that the S/4HANA is the enabler of the Digital Transformation, and the system is ready to many companies, there are still some ground to cover.
Fast and Furious innovation
There were 4 on-premise releases so far (1511, 1610, 1709 and now 1809) and the number of innovations for SAP S/4HANA products has being growing fast and furious:September 2017
Image Source: SAP
September 2018
Just in one year, almost 1,500 new features and innovation items were added to the SAP S/4HANA space (on-premise, on-cloud). The new release, 1809, brings so many changes and features that the recommendation is to look on the Simplification List, Innovation Discovery and the Roadmaps Portal.
There are changes in LoBs, changes on foundation elements and changes to industry specific releases. Those industries were already available in previous releases, but 1809 brought new features to them that you might want look if you are using one of them.
Image source: SAP
Here are some of the key innovations delivered in the 1809. It is not a comprehensive list of new features, but the most popular.Embedded Transportation Management
- Mixed pallet building and load optimization
- Carrier invoicing through SAP Logistics Business Network
Supply Chain
- AATP (advanced Available To Promise): alternative-based confirmations
- Product allocation: calculate non-reserving availability
Industry to Core – Utilities
- Analytical insight and exception resolution in billing and invoicing
- Analysis of meter reading
Industry to Core – Retail and Fashion
- Merchandise Management: empties in warehouse management integration
- Enhanced season management
Customer Management
- Embedded Service Management (Service Core) with eliminated middleware, harmonized data models
Digital Manufacturing
- Demand-driven visibility and interactive planning
- Capacity evaluation and adjustment for MRP controllers
Finance
- Central Finance: Provide a finance data hub for real-time consolidation
- Intercompany reconciliation report
Sourcing and Procurement
- Centralized purchase requisitions through hub and central contract management hub
- Integration of SAP Ariba Buying with SAP S/4HANA
Asset Management
- Overview Page for Planner
- Technical Object Damage Analysis
- Task list and operations
Sales and Distribution
- Simplified Sales Order creation
- Perform split analyses in Sales billing and invoicing
- Approval workflow for credit memo requests
Inventory Management
- Predictive analytics/machine learning for decision support
- Posting goods receipt for production order
Quality Management
- Quality inspection: recording results
- Complaint management recording/monitoring
- Analyze KPI’s for quality management data
Extended Warehouse Management
- Item Unique Identification
- New report to classify products based on history warehouse tasks (ABC calculation)
R&D / Engineering
- Variant Configuration: multi-level, CPQ, classification
- Product marketability and chemical compliance
Migration Cockpit
- Transfer Data using staging tables
- Adjust the migration objects that are used with the Object Modeler
Next 12 months releases’ roadmap
What is the SAP strategy to the next 12 months’ releases?
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How to start?
One point that keep confusing customers deciding what platform strategy to adopt is that although the on-cloud version gets quarterly releases for faster innovation, the same features are also released in the on-premise version during the one-year release.Check the numbers of innovation items released to the on-cloud version, there are too many, and depending on the strategy of your business, to be on top of the innovation can make all the difference and waiting 1 year is not acceptable.
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While the innovation discovery and roadmaps portal are the source for what is there? What is coming?, and navigating on those portal filtering to the items that you think it might be relevant to you is recommended, SAP also recommends companies to running some tools such as:- S/4HANA Business Scenario Recommendations – This is a customized report about how SAP S/4HANA can enhance your company’s current performance and competitiveness based on your system’s current production usage data. You should use this tool to identify the business process that can be improved and discover new capabilities. Using this tool, SAP will issue a report with recommendations based on what you have in your ECC today, so instead going to look on a much more comprehensive list of innovation, you can look on the report that is more direct to your company.
- SAP Transformation Navigator – With this tool, it is possible to see the S/4HANA roadmap to each component you have in your current landscape. This tool assesses your current IT landscape, business strategy, and industry trends, and delivers one comprehensive report containing custom recommendations of the SAP products and solutions required to realize your digital strategy.
- SAP Readiness Check – Use this tool to learn the technical requirements and actions for a system conversion to S/4HANA. This tool you help to answer questions like:
- How big should my SAP HANA database be?
- Are my add-ons compatible with SAP S/4HANA?
- What SAP Fiori applications are relevant to my users?
- Which business functions I run are affected by SAP S/4HANA?
- Which transactions I run are affected by SAP S/4HANA?
- Will my custom code objects work with SAP S/4HANA?
- New Implementation: That’s the Greenfield project (either on-cloud or on-premise) and using the Migration Cockpit to load the data from ECC to S/4HANA. This is the best strategy to companies that want to take this chance to review their processes and re-organize the system, get rid of customizations and push for simplification.
- System Conversion: If the goal is to move to the S/4HANA faster, and the company is not worried about reviewing the existing processes and to get rid of developments, system conversion might be more suitable to your company.
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In the past, early adopter’s customers had to take a long path to be running on the S/4HANA full Suite:
Image Source: SAP
But now, it is possible, in a system conversion, to go from ECC 6.x directly to 1809 on HANA 2 DB without having to go to Suite on HANA first. Now, the process is one-step to move to the Full Suite S/4HANA on HANA 2 DB without having to go through the middle steps, regardless if it is on-cloud or on-premise:
Image Source: SAP
Whether your company must go to the On-premise, public cloud or private cloud, it depends on so many factors, such as: IT strategy, innovation cycles, adoption and upgrade efforts, TCO, Commercial Models, Business functionality, Regulator requirements, etc., here are some of the differences between the platforms:
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SAP S/4HANA simplified the data model and introduced a modern user-experience. They are consistent for both on-cloud and on-premise versions and either on-cloud or on-premise were designed for in-memory database and IT landscape simplification.SAP claims to have more than 2,100 live customers on S/4HANA, more than 8,900 licensed customers where few thousands are already working on their projects. The solution is now available to 25 different industries, in 160 countries and translated to 38 languages.
Every live customer has a success story to tell that involves cost reduction and performance improvement. Here is one example:
Image Source: SAP
SAP CoPilot
SAP CoPilot is the (not new) digital assistant that allows users to organize their day, organize tasks in one central spot, and now, in the 1809 release, incorporate Natural Language. Think on Amazon Alexa or Apple Siri assistants, now you can have the same experience on SAP, asking questions for example, searching for results of sales report in a given region for example, scheduling meetings to talk about a specific item on your SAP dashboard. The CoPilot uses Machine Learning capabilities to improve the results and perform better as it is trained by the user.- Humanized Next-Gen UX with a Conversational UI using Natural Language Processing functionality
- Business Context Awareness understanding the business situation and pro-actively suggesting solutions
- Self-learning system using machine learning functionality to gain knowledge based on historic data and experience
- Cross Applications with One Personality and One Memory across all SAP
- Open and Extensible for Integration to SAP and Non-SAP Solutions Enabling our customers and partners to extend CoPilot Skills through bots, agents and APIs
Machine Learning
We all should agree that SAP S/4HANA is the start to get your company to the next level of Enterprise Resourcing Planning. Modernizing your ERP provides the foundation to connect your data, automate key functions, and constantly improve your products & services. With Machine Learning capabilities embedded, the ERP becomes intelligent and job becomes more dynamic and predictive, routine tasks are automated. SAP started introducing ML capabilities in the S/4HANA in the 1709 release, here is what is coming to the 1809:Sourcing and Procurement
- Exception handling
- Increased invoice automation with machine learning and efficient invoice monitoring for exception handling
- Reduce free-text items using Machine Learning that automatically proposes to create a new catalog item
- Propose material group for free-text items in purchase requisitions
- Provide options for materials without source of supply using Machine Learning
Product safety and Stewardship
- Product compliance
- Services for dangerous goods determination and classification as well as substance group assignment based on machine learning models
- Models that will be trained with product data and chemical composition respectively substance data from SAP and our customers
- Integration of the services into SAP S/4HANA for Product Compliance
Inventory Management
- Goods Receipt Process
- Automatic detection of patterns for determining recurrent behaviors based on historical data and application of the patterns to new data –using predictive analytics in SAP S/4HANA
- Enhancements to the existing app with additions, such as the predicted delivery date
- Inclusion of the predicted delivery date into creation of stock transport orders
Sales and Distribution
- Analytics
- Determine the quotation-conversion probability using predictive analytics and machine learning
- Monitor your delivery performance using predictive analytics in SAP S/4HANA – in-time supply of procurement processes to the creation of outbound deliveries
Merchandise Management
- Global data synchronization integration
- Machine learning global data synchronization integration: Enable access from global data synchronization (GDS) inbound processes to SAP Leonardo Machine Learning
SAP continue pushing hard to implement more ML elements and make the ERP more intelligent every release. Some of the ongoing initiatives and success cases can be found here:
Introducing “Project: Machine Learning in a Box”
Explore AI and machine learning software and applications
SAP Next Generation Business Processes
Master Data Management
MDM is the 2nd biggest concern on every customer moving to SAP S/4HANA (Spoiler Alert: custom code is the 1st). Thinking on that, SAP delivered major changes and improvements to MDM in the 1809 release. Here are some of the highlights:Mass Maintenance
- Scope and process enhancements in mass maintenance of master data, increased data coverage. Support for:
- Multiple vendor and customer assignments in mass maintenance of business partner data
- Classification data in mass maintenance of material, customer, and vendor data
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The following business objects are supported:- Business Partner
- Business Partner Relationship
- Product
- Mass Maintenance enables you to update multiple master data records at a time
To update records, you select the fields and records you want to change. The system then displays a list of fields to change based on your selection. Once you enter your changes, the system provides statistics on the changed fields and validates the data. You check the validated data and then activate it. Activation copies the data from the staging area to active memory, enabling the system to use it in business transactions.
New feature:
- Support of multiple assignments for business partner
- Support of classification data for business partner (customer, supplier) and product
Central Governance
- Central governance for internal order master data –continued improvements to data quality
- Initial loading of internal orders
- Searching statistical internal orders
- Changing or creating statistical internal orders
- Replicating internal orders with IDOC and service-oriented architecture (SOA)
Enable central governance for internal order master data including:
- Make initial load of internal orders
- Search statistical internal orders
- Change or create statistical internal orders
- Replicate internal orders with IDOC and service-oriented architecture (SOA)
- Enhanced SAP Fiori user experience in process analytics –summary dashboard and analytical list pages
- One-stop information on prevailing process quality in central governance, consolidation, and mass processing
- Intuitive navigation and drill down for detailed analysis of process-quality issues
- Summary dashboard and analytical list pages displaying relevant process information at a glance and enabling users to drill down and start completing the processes
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- Central governance – scope enhancements and simplifications across master data domains
- Use of newly added customers and vendors as references for partner functions within the same change request
- Enhanced pre-delivered data model for SAP Master Data Governance, Customers, via general data of the SAP Credit Management application (FSCM-CM)
- Adoption of simplifications and enhancements for SAP S/4HANA for the SAP Master Data Governance application and user interface enhancements for material searches
- Adoption of the universal journal for SAP S/4HANA with general ledger accounts as the basis for cost-element data
DATA QUALITY
- Managing data quality rules for products
- Repository to catalog and define data-quality rules for product master data
- Comprehensive description of rules, including business aspects, ownership, and rule implementations
- Collaboration and status handling during the life-cycle of rules, from creation to sunset
- Measuring and analyzing data quality –continuous evaluation
- Evaluation of product master data using data-quality rules
- Analysis of incorrect product data
- Correction of identified issues in product data
- Definition of data-quality scores as key-performance indicators (KPIs) for master data management
- Reporting and analysis of data-quality scores
MIGRATION COCKPIT
SAP Migration Cockpit counts with universal applicability. SAP delivered with the 1809 release, some changes connecting to SAP system as a data source as well to legacy systems:- The next-generation data migration software embedded in SAP S/4HANA
Guided procedure takes users through the migration process: Easy and safe
No programming by the customer required
Flexible for integration of custom business data including data transformations
Included in S/4HANA license and shipment
Made for migrating data from SAP and non-SAP sources into SAP S/4HANA (on-premise) and SAP S/4HANA Cloud
- Predefined SAP S/4HANA specific Migration Content
Pre-configured content and mapping for available migration objects, e.g. customers
Predefined templates for each object
Automated mapping between template and target structure
Migration programs are generated automatically
- Customer-Specific Migration Content can be flexibly included
Customer-specific enhancements to SAP standard objects (e.g. add new fields)
Key Finance Innovations
Financial Planning
- Connectivity of SAP Analytics Cloud to a on-premise planning environment
- Send plan data that has been treated or modified in the SAP Analytics Cloud solution to an ACDOCP planning table without using XLS export or import functionality
- Plan data allocations reworked to update new universal planning persistency
- Allocation of planned costs for first scenarios
- Enhancement of data structures to better support reporting of allocation results
- Simplify rule definition for plan allocations
- Improve traceability of allocations
Central Finance
- Improvements and simplifications for onboarding and operations
- Tools for correcting errors more efficiently (reversal and repost function)
- Increased flexibility and speed for initial loading
- Provide a finance data hub for real-time consolidation
- Replication of trading partner and profit center information within replicated postings (including initial load)
Consolidation
- Plan data consolidation
- Ability to create versions for planning / restatement purpose
- Data copy functionality
- Multiperiod processing
- Read access to universal journal plan items
- CDS views for comparison reporting
- External system integration
- Inbound interfaces and APIs for reported data and manual journals
Better support for integration scenarios, such as:
- Connecting on-premise SAP accounting software systems
- Connecting on-premise 3rd-party systems
- Providing APIs for SAP, partner, or customer developments based on SAP Cloud platform
- Intercompany reconciliation report
- Provide report that helps identify intercompany differences
- Display the translated reported data of related parties, including a calculation of the difference –based on the definition of intercompany elimination
- Display certain accounting information, such as operational account number or reference document number for companies that use SAP S/4HANA for accounting purposes, and display data at the provided level of data granularity otherwise
- Increased level of detail in consolidation data
- Increased level of detail available in consolidated data
- Direct integration of operational accounting type dimensions in group reports
- Built-in ability to drill down from embedded analytics reports through to the operational accounting journal
- Blending of operational reporting dimensions into group reports, enabling users to answer ad hoc questions that require highly detailed data using corporate group reports as a starting point
- Statutory group reporting (group accounting) and management reporting (group controlling) from a single source.
- SAP S/4HANA consolidation –legal consolidation
- Consolidation of the actuals data of legal entities
- Integrated “read data” access from universal journal actuals for SAP S/4HANA Cloud
- Flat file upload for reported data
- Flat file upload for manual journals
- Data validation
- Manual adjustment postings
- Currency translation into common group currency
- Automated intercompany eliminations
- Rule-based generation of draft cash flow reports and consolidation of investments
- Embedded analytics through the SAP Fiori user experience and the integration option for the SAP Analytics Cloud solution
Reporting
- Business reporting content –enhancements for flexible hierarchies
- Generation of profit center hierarchies, cost center hierarchies, and company code hierarchies using attributes in the master data
- Structuring of hierarchy nodes based on sequences of attributes (such as region, country, or product)
- Creation of parallel hierarchies for the same master data
- Mass change functions to update attributes
Cash Management
- Enhance the liquidity forecast through integration of real estate data
- Tap into business operations to provide an indication of future cash flow to the customer who uses contract and leasing management, even before it is booked in accounting
- Integrate the cash report with future flows
- Correspondence for bank account management
- Generation of correspondence to banks based on opening, changing, and closing activities in bank account management
- Bank fee importing and reporting
- Provide cash managers with transparency into the share of the wallet
Enable the cash manager to answer the questions:
- How is my business distributed into different partners?
- How is the cost distributed?
- Snapshot of historic cash position
- Cash manager to retain a historic snapshot of the cash position report for comparison with the current view
- Ability to compare yesterday’s historic cash position with today’s view to reveal the differences in actual and to optimize the future cash disposition for investment or financing
Integration / Connectivity
- Financial Planning: Connectivity of SAP Analytics Cloud to an on-premise planning environment
- Send plan data that has been treated or modified in the SAP Analytics Cloud solution to an ACDOCP planning table without using XLS export or import functionality
- Integration with business networks –cost center integration with SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central and SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll
- Cost center integration to SAP SuccessFactors solutions with the SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central and SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll solutions
- Integration with business networks –purchase order accruals
- Third-party accruals for purchase orders
- Provisions, deferrals, and other accruals, such as bonus accruals and vacation accruals
- Smooth integration with SAP Fieldglass and SAP Ariba solutions
Parallel Valuation and Revenue Accounting
- Parallel valuation –multiple currencies in follow-on processes
- Ability to handle multiple currencies from journal entries in follow-on processes:
- Allocations (distribution and assessment)
- Asset capitalization and depreciation
- Adoption of legal changes in revenue accounting –improved support for disclosures
- Utilize posting data that results from events related to revenue recognition, such as fulfilments and invoices, for analytical reporting and for meeting disclosure requirements
- Use the Revenue Accounting data sources with the Operational Data Provisioning Framework (ODP)
Treasury and Risk Management
- Basic coverage of legislations in foreign currency hedge management and accounting with US GAAP
Foreign currency risk management and accounting:
- Comprehensive process support for managing foreign currency risks
- Management of foreign currency risks arising from different exposures, such as forecasted transactions or firm commitments
- Accounting support for U.S. GAAP
Foreign exchange (FX) hedge accounting solution with U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) –which includes functionality for:
- Process automation –designation of hedging relationships
- U.S. GAAP accounting support for FX forwards and the FX option types “plain vanilla,” “zero-cost collar,” and “swaps”
- Assessment
- Recycling of other comprehensive income (OCI) values
- Removal of designation and reclassification at contract close
Leveraging Soft Close and Prediction
- Leveraging soft close and prediction –first commitment scenarios
Commitments:
- Are stored in the same basic structure as in the universal journal
- Include cost assignments to work breakdown structure (WBS) element, order, cost center, and so on but also link to the supplier
- Can be shown for derived characteristics, such as profit center and functional area
- Leveraging soft close and prediction –accounting for incoming sales orders
- New concept for handling of predictive data
- Financial line item details for incoming orders reporting
- Review incoming sales order report
- Provides a comprehensive overview of all orders and their values for the time period regardless of billing status
SAP Cloud Platform
- Leverage SAP Cloud Platform for use in finance –application for goods receipt and invoice receipt monitor
- Machine learning service extension to include status proposals for the invoice and goods receipt monitor
- Reduced effort in manual checks as the monitor will make status proposals according to the particular circumstances of a purchase-order item
- Leverage SAP Cloud Platform for use in finance –SAP Real Spend for developing additional expense management scenarios
- Definition of further use cases to deepen the functionality of the SAP Real Spend solution in expense management scenarios
- Leverage SAP Cloud Platform for finance –Credit Management Cockpit
- Provide a cockpit that shows all relevant credit events for the credit controller
- Leverage SAP Cloud Platform for use in finance -smart alerting in SAP Financial Statement Insights
- Get automatic, system-generated alerts of any irregularities
- Autonomously detect unusual business situations in revenue and cost accounts
- Analyze revenue and cost data, proactively inform the group controller of potential issues, and provide explanations for unusual business situations
- Leverage insights for finance in SAP Cloud Platform with SAP S/4HANA Cloud for finance –integration of additional credit agencies
- Support for interfaces to additional credit agencies
- Leverage SAP Cloud Platform for consolidation –enhanced data collection for nonfinancial measures and non-integrated subsidiaries
- Dedicated application in SAP Cloud Platform for collecting data from subsidiaries not running their local accounting on
- Leverage SAP Cloud Platform for treasury -integration of trading platform 360T for inbound and outbound services
- Complete service offering for the integration of 360T as one treasury trading platform with minimal configuration effort and without the need to update the current system
- Availability of additional value-added services to complement our on-premise and cloud offerings in SAP Treasury and Risk Management
- Out of the box service after an initial onboarding
- Reduced TCI and TCO as IT support for the integration of an FX marketplace is outsourced to SAP Cloud Platform
Need for uploading the externally placed trades back to the SAP software system (inbound service)
Planned scope:
- Uploading onto the app and storage of deals done on 360T
- In-app storage of the competitive bids
- Upon completion of all necessary fields, writing of the deal to the SAP Treasury and Risk Management application and return of the deal number back to the app
- In case the deal is not complete (necessary data is not provided), notification made and e-mail sent
- Product types in scope: FX spot, FX forward, FX swap, FX plain vanilla options, and non deliverable forward (NDF)
Planned scope:
- Outbound service for FX deal requests arising from the hedge management cockpit
- Possibility to split deal requests from the hedge management cockpit into several deal requests inside the app
- Deal request to be sent to the trading platform (360T)
- Deal request to be mapped to incoming deals for completeness
Revenue Recognition
- Adoption of legal changes in revenue accounting –functional round offs for IFRS 15 and ASC 606
- Provide further features based on customer feedback to support the 5-step model outlined by IFRS 15 and ASC 606:
- Define rules for deriving values of fields for revenue contracts and performance obligations (POBs)
- Define customized logic to calculate contract liabilities and contract assets
- Calculate the remaining fulfilment percentage for a time-based performance obligation
- Clean up and reverse productive data coming from external sender components
- Perform an extended check before saving contracts to database
- Enable change of transactional currency in the sales order
- Deliver enhancements to POB cancellations for linked POBs
- General performance improvements
- Reprocess contracts in batch
- Reprocess account determination in batch
- Performance improvements for archiving of contracts and revenue accounting items
- Calculate and post rounding differences in batch for fixed foreign currency method
- Enhanced validation checks and inflight checks
- Improved reconciliation between sender components and inbound processing
- Navigate from the Financials documents to the original documents in Revenue Accounting
- Change the revenue spreading using an API
- Improved price allocation default BAdI implementation
- Calculate the remaining stand-alone selling price (SSP) for value-relevant performance obligations (POB)fulfilled by event type customer invoice
- Apply the remaining fulfillment percentage to the stand-alone selling price tolerance
- Re-run the cumulative catch-up program during transition to a new accounting standard
- End the usage of an accounting principle in Revenue Accounting
- Use batch split processes in SD with Revenue Accounting
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I hope you find this information useful.Leandro da Pia Nascimento
Source: https://blogs.sap.com/2018/09/20/sap-s4hana-1809-release-preview/
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