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Welcome back to this release information series for the professional services industry. After one release without blog, we have several great innovations coming with this 2008 release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
As usual, in the video below you can find a short summary of the three most important highlights of this release, but in this blog, you will also find more innovations than just the three highlights.
If you are also interested in the previous blogs of this series or just more information on professional services in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, please also visit my collection blog.
Let’s hit the ground running with our brand-new project billing functionality.
A first version of our new Project Billing solution was delivered with this latest cloud release for SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2008. Even though this functionality is one of the biggest changes in the professional services scenario since its existence, it doesn’t have an immediate impact on existing customers for now.
There is going to be a new scope item for this functionality, 4E9. With the 2008 release this scope item will be marked as non-standard relevant, which mean that the default solution in still going to be the existing and well-known billing functionality in SAP S/4HANA Cloud for the professional services scenario, which can be changed through customization.
In this scope item we deliver a new app and a new role, the billing specialist, who will be able to monitor billing elements, prepare project billing requests for the ones that are due, and generate corresponding billing document requests.
With this first delivery, we have several capabilities: monitoring and preparing billing for billing elements of the contract type Fixed Price and Time and Expenses, creating billing document requests for billing elements, Incorporating any received prepayment amounts, automatically, and Scheduling recalculation of billing amounts.
There are several additional benefits that will come with this innovation. Increased usability for one, along with a move from a push to a pull principle prior to the preparation of billing data, bring improvements in performance and even adding new features, such as no restrictions on adding further materials.
My colleague Andreas Hammerschmidt elaborates further on this topic in his Blog “Project Billing for Customer Projects in SAP S/4HANA Cloud”. Please have a look there for more input on our new project billing.
Secondly let us take a look at a smaller, but still very interesting enhancement in the management of Private Projects.
With this 2008 release we are adding an additional filter in these analytical queries:
Users can now leverage on the new “my projects” filter to filter on projects where they are assigned as a project role. In addition to that custom analytical reports can be built with my project filter enabled and this will ensure that users cannot see projects where they are not assigned with a project role.
This will provide flexibility in accessing projects based on user’s assignment to a project role. You can find more in this also here.
Another great innovation is the new Organizational Flexibility in Accounting for Professional Services.
This functionality comes first in as an initial delivery to the professional services scenario. In the next releases this will be extended not only for this industry but also others.
The profit center reorganization functionality as it is also called, includes the profit center reassignment for commercial projects and linked sales orders. In this initial delivery, internal projects are not covered.
It handles the transfer of open receivables triggered out of the project billing and the transfer of accrued or deferred revenue from revenue recognition.
There are three new apps being delivered in the role of the Divisional Accountant:
The app “Manage Organizational Change” orchestrates all necessary activities of an organizational change.
With this it is going to be possible to allow the adjustment of profit centers of commercial projects and sales orders with posted accounting data, as well as handling of profit center changes in a compliant and consistent way.
You can orchestrate all activities of an organizational change, simulate the effect of an organizational change on financial KPI’s, and report on master data re-assignments and transfer postings.
One innovation that several of our customers have been looking forward to is the excel upload and download functionality for condition maintenance
This excel upload and download provides the functionality to manage prices in the excel, and it supports to create and change condition records by importing data from spreadsheets.
The excel is generated dynamically regarding the filter criteria “Condition Type”, and only relevant key fields are available for maintenance, e.g.: you enter condition types PSP0 and PCP0 in the App, and the downloaded excel will include the key fields of PSP0 and PCP0, and relevant condition records as well. You can adapt the prices using MS EXCEL, e.g: formula, sum and chart etc. In case there is any errors in the data that can of course be solved directly in the downloaded excel, and re-upload it again.
Last, but as usual, not least are the enhancements in integration for transferring staffing information.
This will be especially interesting for customers working with a third-party resource management solution. The existing API for creating and updating commercial projects (Commercial Project - Create, Update) was enhanced to accommodate staffing information like resource demand and resource supply to be transferred to SAP S/4HANA Cloud using an OData service.
Staffing information like resource demand and resource supply that could be available in an external solution can be transferred to S/4HANA Cloud using the OData service
This will capture the staffed effort at a monthly granularity for accurate financial planning and the billability of resources to control automated write off’s during billing.
For customers working with our Advanced Resource Management functionality this can of course not be leveraged.
Thanks for taking the time and reading this summary.
For more information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, check out the following links:
Follow us via @Sisn and #S4HANA, or myself via @KStopf or LinkedIn.
As usual, in the video below you can find a short summary of the three most important highlights of this release, but in this blog, you will also find more innovations than just the three highlights.
If you are also interested in the previous blogs of this series or just more information on professional services in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, please also visit my collection blog.
Let’s hit the ground running with our brand-new project billing functionality.
A first version of our new Project Billing solution was delivered with this latest cloud release for SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2008. Even though this functionality is one of the biggest changes in the professional services scenario since its existence, it doesn’t have an immediate impact on existing customers for now.
There is going to be a new scope item for this functionality, 4E9. With the 2008 release this scope item will be marked as non-standard relevant, which mean that the default solution in still going to be the existing and well-known billing functionality in SAP S/4HANA Cloud for the professional services scenario, which can be changed through customization.
In this scope item we deliver a new app and a new role, the billing specialist, who will be able to monitor billing elements, prepare project billing requests for the ones that are due, and generate corresponding billing document requests.
With this first delivery, we have several capabilities: monitoring and preparing billing for billing elements of the contract type Fixed Price and Time and Expenses, creating billing document requests for billing elements, Incorporating any received prepayment amounts, automatically, and Scheduling recalculation of billing amounts.
There are several additional benefits that will come with this innovation. Increased usability for one, along with a move from a push to a pull principle prior to the preparation of billing data, bring improvements in performance and even adding new features, such as no restrictions on adding further materials.
My colleague Andreas Hammerschmidt elaborates further on this topic in his Blog “Project Billing for Customer Projects in SAP S/4HANA Cloud”. Please have a look there for more input on our new project billing.
Secondly let us take a look at a smaller, but still very interesting enhancement in the management of Private Projects.
With this 2008 release we are adding an additional filter in these analytical queries:
- Engagement Project Billing And Receivables Query (C_EngmntProjBillgAndRblsQry)
- Engagement Project Cost and Revenue Query (C_EngmntProjCostQuery)
- Engagement Project Forecast Query (C_EngmntProjFcstQuery_2)
- Engagement Project Staffing Analysis Query (C_EngmntProjStaffingAnlysQuery)
- Engagement Project Time and Expense Billing (C_EngmntProjTmeExpnBillgQ)
- Engagement Project Unbilled Revenue Query (C_EngmntProjUnbilledRevenueQry)
Users can now leverage on the new “my projects” filter to filter on projects where they are assigned as a project role. In addition to that custom analytical reports can be built with my project filter enabled and this will ensure that users cannot see projects where they are not assigned with a project role.
This will provide flexibility in accessing projects based on user’s assignment to a project role. You can find more in this also here.
Another great innovation is the new Organizational Flexibility in Accounting for Professional Services.
This functionality comes first in as an initial delivery to the professional services scenario. In the next releases this will be extended not only for this industry but also others.
The profit center reorganization functionality as it is also called, includes the profit center reassignment for commercial projects and linked sales orders. In this initial delivery, internal projects are not covered.
It handles the transfer of open receivables triggered out of the project billing and the transfer of accrued or deferred revenue from revenue recognition.
There are three new apps being delivered in the role of the Divisional Accountant:
- Manage Organizational Change
- Organizational Changes (Application Log)
- Organizational Changes Report (Master Data)
The app “Manage Organizational Change” orchestrates all necessary activities of an organizational change.
With this it is going to be possible to allow the adjustment of profit centers of commercial projects and sales orders with posted accounting data, as well as handling of profit center changes in a compliant and consistent way.
You can orchestrate all activities of an organizational change, simulate the effect of an organizational change on financial KPI’s, and report on master data re-assignments and transfer postings.
One innovation that several of our customers have been looking forward to is the excel upload and download functionality for condition maintenance
This excel upload and download provides the functionality to manage prices in the excel, and it supports to create and change condition records by importing data from spreadsheets.
The excel is generated dynamically regarding the filter criteria “Condition Type”, and only relevant key fields are available for maintenance, e.g.: you enter condition types PSP0 and PCP0 in the App, and the downloaded excel will include the key fields of PSP0 and PCP0, and relevant condition records as well. You can adapt the prices using MS EXCEL, e.g: formula, sum and chart etc. In case there is any errors in the data that can of course be solved directly in the downloaded excel, and re-upload it again.
Last, but as usual, not least are the enhancements in integration for transferring staffing information.
This will be especially interesting for customers working with a third-party resource management solution. The existing API for creating and updating commercial projects (Commercial Project - Create, Update) was enhanced to accommodate staffing information like resource demand and resource supply to be transferred to SAP S/4HANA Cloud using an OData service.
Staffing information like resource demand and resource supply that could be available in an external solution can be transferred to S/4HANA Cloud using the OData service
This will capture the staffed effort at a monthly granularity for accurate financial planning and the billability of resources to control automated write off’s during billing.
For customers working with our Advanced Resource Management functionality this can of course not be leveraged.
Thanks for taking the time and reading this summary.
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
- Sven Denecken’s SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2008 Release Blog
- The Link Collection for Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management here
- Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management Community
- Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast here
- Best practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud here
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud Customer Community: register here
- Feature Scope Description here
- What’s New here
- Help Portal Product Page here
- Implementation Portal here
Follow us via @Sisn and #S4HANA, or myself via @KStopf or LinkedIn.
