Enterprise Resource Planning Blogs by Members
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The bane of running a profitable business is how to ensure profitability, this problem most of the times border on time management. Once you are able to overcome this problem, you can rest assured that the issues of timeliness and productivity have been taken care of.  

You cannot, however, achieve this feat without being able to maintain visibility into your business, whether you have one employee or one hundred employees. This is very crucial but attempting to do it manually is absolutely impossible. 

To effectively run your business and at the same time manage the schedules of all your employees, you need to optimize the process in one way or the other. To augment and better reposition the process of digital transformation with the intent of increasing productivity, SAP S/4HANA Cloud was kicked off in February 2017. 

SAP S/4HANA was initiated as a SaaS version of SAP S/4HANA ERP, an assemblage of integrated business applications. Some areas SAP S/4HANA ERP had advantages over ordinary time management tools include the ability to revolutionize business processes with intelligent automation since it’s supported by artificial intelligence and robotic process automation.

It is also able to make better decisions as well as faster with embedded analytics, a conversational interface, and digital assistants, and amazingly doing this with real-time predictive insights for every employee. SAP says that the intention of coming up with the new SaaS version was to provide a "next-generation intelligent ERP" system that enables companies to achieve digital transformation. 

SAP S/4HANA Cloud is built on SAP HANA and takes advantage of HANA's in-memory processing and real-time data accessibility, but the difference is that this was made available in a SaaS model. The beautiful thing about the whole stuff is that once you deploy SaaS, you can easily go about accessing all of S/4HANA's functionality without expending any more resources on hardware, databases or IT staff. 

S/4HANA Cloud was solidly packaged with the latest advancement in technology that can help bring "intelligence" into ERP applications, including machine learning, virtual and augmented reality, blockchain, and voice-enabled technology. S/4HANA Cloud was fashioned to handle tasks like finance, sourcing, and procurement, sales, professional services, and manufacturing very efficiently and effectively.

The three fundamental aspects of SAP S/4HANA Cloud's intelligent ERP 

SAP says that SAP S/4HANA Cloud includes three technologies that form the foundation of intelligent ERP, they are as follows:  

Digital assistant 

SAP S/4HANA Cloud uses SAP CoPilot, a conversational digital assistant (or virtual assistant) for the enterprise, which enables your interaction with ERP applications and functions. SAP CoPilot uses contextual data about you and the activities you are carrying on to provide information relevant that is relevant to the activity.  

Machine learning 

SAP S/4HANA Cloud includes machine learning technology that automates the actions or tasks you embark on repeatedly. Such actions are often error-prone due to the onset of boredom as a result of the repetition when you have to do them manually. 

With the inclusion of machine learning, SAP S/4HANA Cloud astonishingly performs them more efficiently.  

Predictive analytics 

SAP S/4HANA Cloud comes with embedded analytics that enables it to predict the outcomes of actions. The analytics tools are readily configurable to your needs. 

It’s also possible to develop these tools into apps that you can use for inventory management which can be used to predict when your stock will arrive, time management app to track the coming and going of your employees or even a customer conversion app that enables your marketing team to determine the chances of onboarding and converting a potential customer.

This is not to underscore the efforts of companies like Time Clock Wizard, Evernote, Focus Booster, and Dropbox among others who have been resolving problems associated with time management tools like employee scheduling with self-management and attendance tracking features, however, SAP S/4HANA Cloud is in a class of its own.

Benefits you derive from using SAP S/4HANA Cloud 

There are basically five different ways you can benefit from integrating SAP S/4HANA Cloud and these are as follows. 

1. Faster ROI

The absolute truth about setting out on a business venture is profitability and this you can achieve in this digital economy by making value creation your primary objective. SAP S/4HANA Cloud does not only help you to realize this value but goes further to accelerate time to value so as to thrive in this highly competitive business environment. 

Going by the fact that 50% of executives think that, within five years, IT’s value proposition will shift from support to business value creation, you don’t have any business sitting on the fence. 

With the integration of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, you are sure of enjoying a faster time to value whereby you can move your IT at the speed of your business with standard best-practice content for all key business functions. You have the opportunity of driving actions and decisions at the speed of thought with machine learning. 

SAP S/4HANA Cloud will afford you the opportunity of a huge reduction in training time and enable fast user actions and decisions with the solution’s intuitive interface and responsive design. Overwhelmingly, you can improve productivity and employee buy-in with ready-to-use applications among others. 

It’s very obvious that you cannot achieve all these with time management tools ordinarily

2. Increased business agility

SAP S/4HANA Cloud affords you the golden opportunity to call the shots in your particular niche. You have the instrument now to stay ahead of the competition through awesome business agility and operational flexibility. These two advantages create the room for you to launch into a new direction and leverage any new opportunity as soon as it arises without embarking on an overhaul. 

With SAP S/4HANA Cloud’s operational flexibility, you are rightly positioned to take the right action faster. This may be by capturing new opportunities, being in tune with customer demands, or absorbing the shock created by unexpected events.

SAP’s aspiration to be the leader in delivering intelligent enterprise resource planning (ERP) is unwavering, with SAP S/4HANA Cloud. With their latest 1902 release, you are bound to enjoy stronger business outcomes since your organization will become definitely more agile and responsive.

3. Lowers total cost of ownership

When you embark on SAP S/4HANA Cloud deployment it enables your organization to move from a capital expenditure approach to provide software to an operating expenditure model that requires less capital up-front. This approach will ensure that there is a significant reduction in your total cost of ownership (TCO). 

Usually, changes and support incidents account for approximately 50 percent of traditional, on-premises ERP operations costs. SAP S/4HANA Cloud reduces those costs and how it impacts internal IT teams. 

The total cost of ownership (TCO) reduction experienced by this deployment is in the range of 25 to 30 percent lower. You also get about 75% reduction on on-premise incidents with SAP S/4HANA Cloud’s high-level process standardization as well as a simplified user front end that minimizes your internal team’s involvement in incident support. 

Your employees are saved from the usual “how do I do these questions?” since all queries are directed to SAP directly. You also get to cut to reduce the size of your IT staff by 50%, this is a great avenue to cut costs and also reassign existing staff to high-value projects.

You are assured of up to a 40% reduction in waste, thanks to features like built-in processes based on best practices, streamlined product life cycle management, and efficient planning for complex manufacturing. SAP S/4HANA Cloud comes with features like predictive analytics and integrated inventory, and logistics processes, you should expect up to 30% reduction in inventory levels. 

You are in the position to more accurately estimate what you’ll need, how, and when while maintaining full visibility of your stock.

4. Improved governance and compliance

With a reported 74% of organizations keeping some or all of their sensitive data in public clouds, you are definitely in safe hands with SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Conversations on improved security measures to prevent data loss and governance of cloud solutions have come to the foreground as organizations seek cloud solutions they can trust.

You also enjoy the availability of intuitive dashboards for comprehensive identity and access governance capabilities, that will greatly improve your productivity.

5. More intelligent ERP that improves efficiency

The world is on a fast lane of digital transformation and as such, you should align your business with a central core such as SAP S/4HANA Cloud, which will allow you to run your business effectively and efficiently. You have the opportunity of a cloud solution that will provide you with end-to-end business process coverage along with continuous innovation and self-service intelligence.

A research conducted by IDC reveals that, by 2020, at least 50% of net-new IT spending will be cloud-based, shrinking non-cloud enterprise applications by 20%. 

You need an intelligent next-generation Cloud ERP business suite like S/4HANA Cloud to reposition your business for the digital future. It will afford you the opportunity to integrate business processes, turn real-time data into actions, and tremendously increase your employees’ productivity. 

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