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Dear SAP S/4HANA Cloud enthusiasts, welcome to PART 1 of my blog illustrating the latest and greatest technology highlights in SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005 for Technology Topics. In this part, I will illustrate new features with the 'Manage KPI and Reports' app and present several cool dashboards from Finance, Sales, and Procurement. Then, I will explain the latest innovations with Enterprise Search, and explain what you can look forward to when it comes to Extensibility and Hybrid Cloud ERP.
In PART 2, you will learn what you should know about Identity and Access Management, Integration, Localization, and User Experience in SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005.
Watch my video to get a quick overview of our 2005 technology highlights:
Part 1 (this blog)
- Analytics
- Enhanced Navigation with 'Manage KPI and Reports' App
- Finance – Enhancement of Treasury Executive Dashboard
- Finance – Collections Management Reporting
- Finance – Credit Management Reporting
- Sales - Order-to-Cash Dashboard
- Sales - Customer Returns Overview
- Procurement – Enhancement of Purchasing Spend Dashboard
- Enterprise Search
- Extensibility
- Hybrid Cloud ERP
Analytics
Enhanced Navigation with 'Manage KPI and Reports’ App
The first innovation regarding the ‘Manage KPI and Reports’ app is the intent-based navigation which allows users to navigate from an analytical to a transactional application in order to take action on the gained insights (also known as ‘Jump-to’). This behavior is now improved for embedded SAP Analytics Cloud story and data analyzer reports. Key users, namely the Analytics Specialist, can define multiple combinations of semantic objects and actions for an application. As a result, the defined actions will be considered in the intent-based navigation while the end user is interacting with the dashboard/report. In addition, navigation intents can be marked as global target to correspond to all the visualizations configured for that particular story or data analyzer report. By the way – The semantic object and action for an application can be found via SAP Fiori apps library: search for the application go to implementation information/configuration section/target mappings.
Watch the video below to get a deeper understanding:
Fig. 2: With SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005, intent-based navigation in the 'Manage KPI and Reports' app allows you to navigate from an analytical to a transactional application in order to take action on the gained insights
The second enhancement allows you to configure a KPI tile, a smart business report or an analytical list page such that the same application tile can be used for different value settings using an end-user defined default values in the Fiori Launchpad settings. For example, a purchaser in the US wants to analyze data always reflecting US Dollar, his colleague from Spain rather would like to view the same data in Euro. This can be achieved once the KPI tile application settings have been adjusted to reflect the end-user’s default value settings on currency. Then both colleagues can open the same application and instantly view the data according to their needs.
The video below shows how this could look like:
Fig. 3: With SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005, KPI tiles, smart business reports, and analytical list pages can be configured in such a way that the same application tile can be used for different value settings based on user-specific default values in the SAP Fiori Launchpad settings
Finance – Enhancement of Treasury Executive Dashboard
For Treasury Executives, the Treasury Executive Dashboard visualizes real-time insights into treasury management by highlighting key performance indicators. Treasury Risk Managers can analyze the distribution of the global liquidity of a company on a country level using an interactive geomap. Furthermore, a new page for market risk provides insights into the total net present values of company’s assets and liabilities and the overall value at risk including different attributes. In addition, the financial status is part of the 'Bank Relationship Overview' page and can now be clustered by company code and bank group. To access the dashboard the activation of scope item SAP Fiori Analytical Apps for Treasury and Risk Management (1MN) is required.
Fig. 4: With SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005, the Treasury Executive Dashboard provides real-time insights into treasury management for Treasury Executives and highlights key performance indicators
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Finance – Collections Management Reporting
The dashboard supports Accounts Receivables Managers in proactive receivables management and provides an overview on the collection progress focusing on collection groups, segments and specialists per priority level. Users can monitor all attributes of the promise to pay at a glance, such as open promised amount and broken amount per customer reflecting due periods. Find more information here. To access the dashboard the activation of scope item 'Collections and Dispute Management' (BFC) is required.
Fig. 5: With SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005, the 'Collections Management Reporting' app, provides an overview on the collection progress focusing on collection groups, segments and specialists per priority level
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Finance – Credit Management Reporting
The ‘Credit Management Reporting’ dashboard provides an overview on the credit worthiness and payment behavior of business partners. Business users in the role of a credit controller, can now analyze customer credit exposure with regards to credit limit utilization, risk classes, countries and more to reduce risks of financial loss and to optimize business relationships.
*to access the dashboard the activation of scope item 'Advanced Credit Management' (1QM) is required.
Fig. 6: With SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005, the ‘Credit Management Reporting’ dashboard provides an overview on the credit worthiness and payment behavior of business partners
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Sales - Order to Cash Dashboard
As promised, we expand the delivery of the out-of-the-box dashboards and provide two new dashboards for Sales. The 'Order To Cash' dashboard therefore, serves as a starting point for Sales Managers to analyze sales volume profit margin and incoming orders. Same as for the other dashboards, the order to cash dashboard brings flexibility by easy adjustable filters across different dimensions. To access the dashboard, the activation of scope item SAP Fiori Analytical Apps for Sales (1BS) is required.
Fig. 7: With SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005, the 'Order To Cash' dashboard enables Sales Managers to analyze sales volume profit margin and incoming orders
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Sales - Customer Returns Overview
The second dashboard in Sales focuses on Customer Returns across various dimensions. Sales Managers can access real-time data on return rates, number of returned items and incoming orders to gain a better understanding of return reasons over time. See the documentation for more information. To access the dashboard, the activation of scope item SAP Fiori Analytical Apps for Sales (1BS) is required.
Fig. 8: The 'Customer Returns Overview with SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005 provides real-time data on return rates, number of returned items and incoming orders
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Procurement – Enhancement of Purchasing Spend Dashboard
The ‘Purchasing Spend Dashboard‘ has been extended and offers now the possibility to analyze non-contract purchases in addition. These are items, where there is no negotiated pricing or blanket purchase agreements are in place when they are purchased. Users in the role of a buyer can analyze the total spend amount in relation to purchase orders that do not have a contract assignment. Ideally the rate of off-contract spend in a company is low. Thus, we added this information within two new pages ‘Off Contract Overview’ and ‘Off Contract Spend’. Find more information here.
Fig. 9: With SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005, the ‘Purchasing Spend Dashboard‘ allows has been extended and offers now the possibility to analyze non-contract purchases in addition.
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Enterprise Search
'Manage Search Models' App
With SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2002, we introduced the possibility for administrators to change SAP-delivered search models with the ‘Manage Search Models’ app. With the 2005 release, we expand the scope and offer four new features in addition:
- The possibility to enable or disable search fields within a search model. Administrators can take out specific fields not to be shown in the result list to the end users when they are searching.
- Key users can mark a field as a filter. That means an administrator can adjust the search model such that end-users can use additional fields to filter their search results. That increases user experience heavily to find the right answer for their search request.
Fig. 10: With SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005, the 'Manage Search Models' app allows you to disable or enable search fields and to select fields as filters
- When opening a search model, the administrator can enable or disable the whole search connector. By that one can limit or expand the search options for the end user.
- And lastly, we enriched the Technical Details page of each search model to provide the information on the required business catalogs. That means, the administrator can use the catalog information and add the catalog to a business role that a certain user is assigned to, such that the user is able to perform a search within the specific search model. This increases transparency and makes access more comprehensible.
Fig. 11: With SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005, the 'Manage Search Models' app displays the required business catalogs for a search model
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Extensibility
New 'Custom CDS Views' App
With SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005, there is a new app for custom CDS views. For this reason, the existing app 'Custom CDS Views' has been renamed to 'Custom CDS Views (To Be Deprecated)'. Functionality-wise there is almost no difference between the two apps. However, the new app allows you to migrate those CDS views that you have created with the old app and edit them if necessary. However, migration is not a must as the old app will continue to be available for quite some time.
Fig. 12: In SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005, the new 'Custom CDS Views' app allows you to migrate custom CDS views which have been created with the old app
More Information
XCO Library
XCO stands for Extension Components. The XCO library is an ABAP development library which provides a highly efficient experience for key users when developing in ABAP. The Key User (KU) edition is specifically designed to support typical in-app extensibility logic scenarios, such as working with JSON data or performing basic string operations.
The public API of each module is exposed via a special class, called the API “class” of the module. It is distinguished from all other XCO classes and interfaces in that it starts with “XCO_KU_”. The API class acts as the single point of entry for the functionality offered by a given module. Starting with the API class, code completion can be used to easily discover the scope of a given module.
The XCO library consists of several modules focusing on different functional areas. With SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005, we offer the following modules:
- JSON module
Simplifies working with JSON data as much as possible. This includes the creation of JSON strings (both from ABAP data structures and from scratch) as well as the conversion of JSON strings to ABAP. - Regular expression
Provides a straightforward integration with regular expressions - String
XCO string abstraction offers further simplifications when working with strings. - UUID:
To effectively work with UUIDs, XCO provides a simple way to translate between different UUID formats
Further Information
Extensibility Templates - Custom Analytical Queries
My next topic is extensibility templates. You might remember that with SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1908, we delivered this innovation which is especially important for implementation partners who support multiple customers. It allows large organizations with an extensive system landscape to distribute in-app extensibility content across system landscapes.
In the quality system of the template provider (e.g. the implementation partner), the extended items, such as custom fields, custom objects, or business logic which are created in a separate name space are added to the extensibility template and then exported from the quality system by means of a human readable .json file. When the template is created, the system checks for dependencies to other extension items which should also be included in the same file to guarantee consistency. The exported extensibility template can then be imported into the quality system of the template consumer (e.g. the customer of the implementation partner) and be adapted there according to the requirements of the respective customer. This has several huge advantages: First of all, it helps partners to keep their customer solutions consistent as they do not have to manually create the in-app extensions in each and every customers system. Instead, they can easily import the extensions from the same source file. This of course, leads to large efficiency gains, saving time and cost.
So far, it was possible to transport custom business objects, custom code lists, custom fields, custom logic, and custom libraries. With the 2005 release, this has been enhanced further to allow for custom analytical queries as extended items.
Further Information
Microlearnings for Extensibility on OpenSAP
Just in time for Sapphire, we delivered the first microlearnings for SAP S/4HANA on OpenSAP in the area of extensibility. Currently, there are two microlearnings available for in-app extensibility:
- Creating Custom Fields
- Creating Custom Business Objects
Fig. 13: In parallel with the SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005, 20 microlearnings for SAP S/4HANA have been published on OpenSAP.
You find them in the microlearnings section on the OpenSAP website. Select 'Microlearnings for SAP S/4HANA', then click on Technology Topics to display a list of available topics. For extensibility, this is currently:
- Creating Custom Fields
- Creating Custom Business Objects
In the future, the number of microlearnings on extensibility is planned to grow continuously over time. So, stay tuned for more!
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Hybrid Cloud ERP
Also for Hybrid Cloud ERP, there is news to spread for SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005: There are three hybrid cloud scenarios to be mentioned:
- Advanced Payment Management (APM)
Works like a centralized payment factory that supports the monitoring and approval of payments for an entire corporate group consisting of SAP and non-SAP systems. A centralized payment is especially important for heterogeneous landscapes, where the subsidiaries can submit their payments to a centralized payment factory. APM provides a single source of truth for payments and the related cash position by a seamless integration with cash management and bank account management. - Supplier Financing
In a two-tier scenario, where in the Headquarters acts as a supplier for the subsidiaries running SAP S/4HANA Cloud, supplier financing helps buyers i.e., the subsidiaries have an uninterrupted supply by providing liquidity to the Headquarters.In supplier financing, the subsidiary shares the invoices from the Headquarters to the Bank. The Bank takes over the subsidiaries’ payables and finances these in advance. The Bank offers the Headquarters with various payment options, such as early payment. This helps to improve the cash flow throughout the corporate group. - Centralized pricing:
Required for companies who would like to have faster decision-making, have strict policy and compliance requirements in managing their prices centrally at their Headquarters for all their subsidiaries. This accelerator helps organization in reducing their implementation timeline.
Further Information
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 2005 Release Blog
- Link Collection – Technology Topics with SAP S/4HANA Cloud here
- Embedded Analytics: SAP Analytics Cloud in SAP S/4HANA Cloud – Link Collection here
- Microlearnings for SAP S/4HANA Cloud 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
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