SAP S/4HANA Enhancements Accelerate Digital Transformation Adoption

SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) announced the SAP S/4HANA 1610 release, the latest enhancement to SAP’s next-generation ERP business suite.

By utilizing a simplified data model and the award-winning SAP Fiori 2.0 user experience, the new release helps reduce complexity and unleash the next wave of business productivity. Through prediction and pattern recognition capabilities, along with machine learning, SAP S/4HANA lays the foundation to reduce exception management for more routine transactions, empowering the workforce to focus on higher-value tasks with embedded analytics and real-time insights.

“With this third major on-premise release of SAP S/4HANA, companies of all sizes can take advantage of innovations offered across lines of business and industries,” said Wieland Schreiner, executive vice president, SAP S/4HANA, SAP. “Innovations in line of business and industry functionality allow companies to realize productivity gains and dramatically simplify their IT landscapes. SAP S/4HANA is the digital core that helps companies run live in today’s digital world.”

Digitizing the Extended Supply Chain

Today customers have even greater expectations, from their discovery and purchasing experience to the personalization and delivery of products and services. As a result, companies need to manage an increasingly complex multichannel supply chain in order to deliver the customer promise made to the “audience of one” delivered through a “lot size of one.” New functional, usability and integration enhancements in the SAP S/4HANA 1610 release allow supply chains to perform better with increased agility, promoting lower lead times, better customer service and higher profitability.

For example, supply chain planners can expect advanced warning of impending material shortages based on inputs from internal and external data sources. With real-time insights, companies can confidently target segments of one with high-value service-based offers, knowing more precisely their ability to profitably fill demand. To help companies manage in the digital world, the following core supply chain enhancements are included in the new release:

• Advanced available to promise (aATP) offers newly enhanced capabilities to manage supply allocations at multiple levels, with high-performance, real-time ATP order confirmation. Additionally, new back-order processing and interactive rescheduling methodology helps ensure that constrained supply is matched to demands based on customer priority.
• Inventory management provides simplified and highly scalable transaction management, with enhanced user productivity in a range of SAP Fiori apps to help provide inventory visibility and to track slow-moving items, monitor shelf life and provide real-time status updates of items in transit.
• Material requirement planning (MRP) includes embedded production planning and detailed scheduling (PPDS) natively deployed without the need for complex integration and data maintenance to help drive accelerated MRP processing times from hours to potentially minutes and enable intelligent constraint-based planning and scheduling.
• Extended warehouse management (EWM) is embedded to dramatically simplify adoption of advanced warehousing capabilities such as automation with mechanical handling equipment, task and labor optimization and the use of mobile devices, without the need to integrate a separate system. The SAP EWM application can be utilized in both embedded and stand-alone deployments.
• Environment, health and safety (EHS) management offers comprehensive and integrated new functionality reimagined to take advantage of the digital transformation occurring across the enterprise. It uses real-time data to support EHS practitioners in managing operational risk, worker safety and compliance, with integrated solutions for incident management, chemical management, operational risk assessments, industrial hygiene/exposure monitoring, regulatory compliance and emissions management.

“We participated in the guided beta for the SAP S/4HANA 1610 release, completing the upgrade from SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA ECC EHP 8 to 1610 in 10 working days,” said Arnab Mukherjee, manager of enterprise applications, Varian Medical Systems. “We are looking forward to fully deploying SAP S/4HANA 1610 in 2017 as the solution now includes key components such as extended warehouse management and product portfolio management. The simplified data model and corresponding IT landscape are an exciting continuation of innovations such as universal journal, which helps eliminate reconciliation between financial accounting and controlling that first attracted us to SAP S/4HANA.”

Unique Industry Functionality Designed Specifically for In-Memory Computing

SAP is a recognized leader in providing industry-specific functionality to help our customers achieve their business goals. The new SAP S/4HANA release allows organizations to meet specific industry digital transformation needs while delivering greater functionality and simpler integration to a broad set of functions. For example, retail industry functionality such as merchandise management is completely re-architected for the modern retailer providing retailers, as well as customers from other industries that require retail functionality, complete visibility to make holistic business decisions based on harmonized master data.

Oil and gas industry customers can take advantage of upstream and downstream functions, including hydrocarbon product management, that are optimized for high performance on the SAP HANA platform, as well as a real-time inventory planning workbench with enhanced simulation capabilities for supply chain scheduling, providing insight and flexibility to better meet the needs of end customers.

Additionally, the new release incorporates all features of the SAP S/4HANA Finance solution. Companies can transform finance processes by simplifying landscapes while still taking advantage of every innovation released for SAP S/4HANA Finance, from easily accessing the most-granular level of detail to performing simulations on live data.

About SAP

As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device — SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 335,000 business and public sector customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably.