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Highlights of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005 Release (May 2020)
The second release of the year is here! I am proud to announce the general availability of our SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005 release today.
Disruptive times like these prove to us, how important it is for businesses to run processes as smoothly as possible. With the power of solutions like our fully-fledged SAP S/4HANA Cloud, it’s intelligence and integration capabilities we make sure that you have an easy-to-use Cloud ERP on your side, that helps you to better manage this unstable economic situation.
Read more about our solution during the COVID-19-Era here.
Therefore, it is our task to continuously improve our offerings and our SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005 Release brings new, innovations in all Lines of Business and industries, supporting the intelligent enterprise with even more features and improvements.
Find out which are my favorite highlights of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005 release in this blog. Watch the video below to get a first impression on the innovations it brings to all of us.
Finance
As Finance is the backbone of each and every successful company, let’s start with the most important innovation in this field: Advanced Payment Management. It is now possible to monitor, approve, and process payment batches for both SAP and non-SAP systems. Having one central hub for these actions leads to an increased level of automation for the entire end-to-end process and thus, to a better visibility of the whole cash flow. Additionally, the conversion of various payment formats is supported as well e.g. converting CSV or TXT files to XML.
Figure 1: Advanced Payment Management allows you to monitor, approve, and process payment batches for both SAP and non-SAP systems
Learn more about this and all the other updates in Finance in Ulrich Hauke’s blog.
Additionally, check out Komathi T’s blog to find out more about this topic.
Manufacturing & Supply Chain
The new Graphical Kanban Board makes it easy to constantly monitor your control cycles with their circulating Kanban containers. This innovation provides an easy-to-understand graphical monitor represented by different colors which indicate, for example, missing parts or bottlenecks for every supply area. For high flexibility, we enable this feature for different business users in Lean Manufacturing to supervise and improve processes through quick actions which are supported by filter, sorting and grouping functionalities.
Figure 2: The new Graphical Kanban Board makes it easy to constantly monitor your control cycles with their circulating Kanban containers
Cycle counting is a crucial method for assessing physical inventory to count materials at regular intervals within a fiscal year. With our new situation handling use case Physical Inventory Monitoring as part of the LoB Manufacturing & Supply Chain, we now have the advantage to leverage process steps in cycle counting. This increases overall inventory accuracy and enables real-time reporting for your company’s warehouse stock. A variety of provided filters facilitates the maintaining of conditions and texts to inform users about situations.
Figure 3: Physical Inventory Monitoring increases overall inventory accuracy and enables real-time reporting for your company’s warehouse stock
Gerhard Welker talks about the different innovations in this Line of Business in his blog.
Sourcing & Procurement
In the Line of Business Sourcing and Procurement we have improved the integration of SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP Ariba to speed up procurement processes. One of the enhancements we provide in order to scale contracts across the enterprise is the ability to integrate SAP Ariba Contracts with Central Procurement with a single backend. To reduce the number of manual process steps, we support automatic transfer of attachments between SAP Ariba Buying and SAP S/4HANA Cloud as well as SAP Ariba Network and SAP S/4HANA Cloud in various scenarios.
Figure 4: Improved integration of SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP Ariba speeds up procurement processes
In her blog, Katharina Doerr provides a detailed understanding of the innovations SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005 brings for Sourcing and Procurement.
Enterprise Portfolio & Project Management
One highly anticipated innovation in this area is the integration of enterprise projects with sales orders. This integration enables you to account assign sales order items to billing elements within enterprise projects for selected use cases. Being able to post actual revenues directly to the project provides real time analysis of revenue recognition data and profitability. To increase flexibility, we even support more complex hierarchical project revenue accounting scenarios through enablement of multiple billing elements in a project.
Figure 5: The integration of enterprise projects with sales orders enables you to account assign sales order items to billing elements within enterprise projects for selected use cases
Find out more about the updates in Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management in Corina Kinzel’s new blog.
Sales
We provide new insights into sales volume, profit margin and incoming sales and service orders across various dimensions with the Order-to-Cash Dashboard. With this one-stop shop you can check who manages sales and after-sales service for an organizational unit and display incoming sales and service orders. Additionally, this innovation makes it easy to follow the turnover of sales and service order processing on your team and plan capacity or balance the workload accordingly.
Figure 6: The Order-to-Cash Dashboard provides new insights into sales volume, profit margin and incoming sales and service orders across various dimensions
Check out Christian Vogler’s blog to find out more about this topic.
Service
To increase service excellence with in-house repair processes, we’re releasing repair quotations as part of our SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005 release for Service. Having this feature in place, can provide cost estimates to customers for requested repair objects. The resulting benefit is not only the ability for you to plan with cost estimates prior to repair order creation, and enhanced operational efficiency, but the more transparent service delivery will also lead to a higher customer satisfaction.
Figure 7: Repair quotations allows for cost estimates and increases service excellence with in-house repair processes
Young Hwae Koo gives an insight into the SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005 Release updates for Service in her latest blog.
Asset Management
The Share Schedules feature allows you to share your schedules with other maintenance planners and reviewers such as production planners, and therefore simplify collaboration. Besides being able to share your schedule, you can add people as maintenance planners, reviewers or revoke access to the schedule. All maintenance planners have full permissions and can modify, share or delete the schedule. Reviewers have read-only access to the schedule and cannot see the utilization forecast shown when the schedule is in “scoping” or “refinement”.
Figure 8: The ‘Share Schedules’ feature enables you to share your schedules with other maintenance planners and reviewers such as production planners, and therefore simplify collaboration
In his blog, Gerhard Welker showcases the improvements brought to Asset Management by this release.
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC)
Enterprise Risk and Compliance provides integration points to global risk and compliance tools. The use of personal information is strictly regulated by various formalities and privacy risks that exist when this type of data is collected and processed. With the integration of SAP S/4HANA Cloud with SAP Privacy Governance, we provide an automatic privacy risk detection based on the legality check for data stored within SAP S/4HANA in relation to privacy regulations. This gives you insights into regulatory reporting and enables pro-active auditing. It has never been easier to create automated procedures, controls and work packages.
Figure 9: The integration of SAP S/4HANA Cloud with SAP Privacy Governance allows for an automatic privacy risk detection based on the legality check for data stored within SAP S/4HANA in relation to privacy regulations
Learn more about this innovation and more in Katrin Deissner’s blog.
Product Compliance
With the Dangerous Good Classification feature, we deliver new content-based compliance requirements which contain information provided by the dangerous goods regulations to simplify your classification process for unpackaged products. Compliance costs can be reduced through increased data quality and efficiency. By using regulatory dangerous goods content for data maintenance, you can simplify the classification of products. On top, you can also dynamically show or hide additional information.
Figure 10: With the Dangerous Goods Classification feature, we deliver new content-based compliance requirements which contain information provided by the dangerous goods regulations to simplify your classification process for unpackaged products
Christian Vogler provides you with the latest innovations for Product Compliance in his new blog.
Integration
We have rebuilt the integration between SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central as a frontrunner to deliver on the intelligent enterprise architecture. This contains one aligned workforce data model that will be used by all SAP applications, and so minimizing replication errors. Additionally, the SAP Cloud Platform Master Data Integration is introduced into the landscape in order to harmonize and simplify the integration setup. Automated user and role provisioning leads to a faster onboarding of new employees or contingent workers, whose workforce data persists in the system. You also have the option to automatically update Business Partner and Supplier in SAP S/4HANA Cloud to enable follow-up processes.
Figure 11: The rebuilt integration between SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central includes several enhancements and delivers on the intelligent enterprise architecture
User Experience
With SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005, we have implemented the SAP Fiori Launchpad with spaces to give easy access to dedicated layouts per business role template, supporting an even better focus on work context for the end-user within the business role. Spaces and pages are delivered as templates which are directly assigned to the business roles templates and depict an alternative content delivery to the already existing groups. As the administrator, you can create and adjust layouts for your business roles, as well as switch on new layout options which enable end-users to toggle between existing groups or new spaces.
Figure 12: The SAP Fiori Launchpad with spaces gives easy access to dedicated layouts per business role template, supporting an even better focus on work context for the end-user
Learn more about new spaces in the SAP Fiori Launchpad in Sylvia Strack’s blog.
SAP Activate
SAP Activate Methodology introduces updates to help our customers to stay agile and resilient in their implementations. This release brings new assets focusing on remote work and project agility. We have added Playbook for Remote Execution of Fit-to-standard workshops that helps your teams keep momentum when working remotely. We reduced the processing time associated with requesting new scope activation to reflect the efficiency improvements made in the product and service center processing. Moreover, we have added new tasks to the Discover phase to improve the customer guidance related to determining scope through value-driven analysis. We also enhanced the references to Situation Handling functionality in the Explore and Run phases with links to descriptions and videos, and added guidance related to implementing Robotics Process Automation in the Starter System, including it in fit-to-standard process to increase project visibility. Lastly, the Roadmap Viewer has been enhanced to support display of additional language variants. This allows customers to access SAP Activate in Japanese as shown below.
Figure 13: The Roadmap Viewer displays additional language variants which allows access to SAP Activate in Japanese
Check out Daniel Ciecko’s blog to find out more about this innovation.
On top, Hardeep Tulsi sheds some light on SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation in SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005 here, and Nidhi Choudhary covers the updates of the What’s New in Test Automation Tool for SAP S/4HANA Cloud here.
Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast
As always, I would like to encourage you to subscribe to our new podcast “Inside SAP S/4HANA”. This podcast leverages the unique knowledge and expertise of SAP S/4HANA product experts, partners and 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.
Your voice matters!
If you want to learn more and actively engage with SAP subject matter experts on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, join our SAP S/4HANA Cloud Customer Community. This platform which is available to SAP S/4HANA Cloud customers and partners has a clear mission: deliver an interactive community to engage with one another about best practices and product solutions.
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
- SAP S/4HANA During the COVID-19-Era here
- SAP News Blog Post by Oliver Betz
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud Release Blogs here
- 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 @SDenecken
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