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SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition: Innovation Highlights In The Latest Releases

ngatran
Advisor
Advisor
‎2024 Aug 14 5:16 PM
810

In the current world, businesses cannot rely on a certain Unique Selling Point for their success. They must be proactive on all fronts to remain relevant, with technology being a pivotal pillar in driving organizational growth. The latest capabilities and technologies empower organizations to be a step ahead of the competition and utilize the opportunities presented by the global market.

Each release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition comes with a new set of capabilities bringing simplification, innovation, and automation to customers and their end users.

Stay updated with the latest SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition to maximize your investment!

Explore in this blog significant innovations, which have been delivered with the latest releases:

 

Table of Contents

Application Innovation Highlights In Line Of Businesses

User Experience Innovations

SAP Business Technology Platform Innovations

Innovations With Business AI and Joule

Innovations For Sustainability

Other Resources

 

Application Innovation Highlights

Throughout the latest releases, we introduced a wide range of application innovations in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, encompassing apps, APIs, functionality, and extensibility across all lines of business. These major innovations differentiate significantly from older SAP S/4HANA releases and SAP ERP.

Supply Chain

  • Advanced Shipping and Receiving simplifies communication between Transportation Management, Extended Warehouse Management, Stock Room Management, Inventory Management and Physical Inventory, and Logistics Execution application. Simplified SAP TM and SAP EWM Integration support mixed and multi-warehouse scenarios within one single freight order (FO) and helps users coordinate the process steps from the arrival of trucks at the gate to the final goods receipt in the warehouse.

  • With Supply Creation-Based Confirmation (SBC), the availability check in sales orders is significantly enhanced. SBC is typically used by manufacturing industries especially in “make-to-order / Assemble-to-order” scenarios when there is not enough stock in the warehouse for the requested product. With SBC, during the ATP check, you can create supply elements for a multilevel BOM – with resource scheduling and reservations on capacities - to immediately cover the sales order requirements when there is not enough supply available in the system.

  • The Greenhouse Gas Emission feature enables you to set CO2 emissions parameters for vehicle types to drive optimization and insights on sustainability.

A freight order with calculated emission dataA freight order with calculated emission data

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Service

  • Service with Advanced Execution helps businesses to plan, execute, and bill services for complex assets or long-running services with multiple billing cycles. It supports service processes with longer service cycles and complex technical objects that require extensive planning and execution. The core characteristic of this process is the integration of the commercial aspects of Service with the planning and execution capabilities of Maintenance Management. The use of Maintenance Management capabilities means that you can use the task list that you are familiar with from the plant maintenance (PM) module of SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) and SAP S/4HANA, to represent complex maintenance operations and activities for industrial equipment, pieces of machinery, and other classes of assets.

  • The scenario lets you have a cost-plus commercial arrangement, where the service is charged to the customer based on the actual cost of activities plus a surplus or margin on top of the costs. That’s what dynamic item processor (DIP) or resource-related billing does.

  • A new way to deal with revenues and costs for service processes called Item-Based Accounting, which lets you have an insight into a real-time margin analysis before month-end financial closing and revenue recognition, leveraging the new Event-Based Revenue Recognition.

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Asset Management

  • Many innovations have been delivered to close the loop between asset strategy and asset execution. SAP Asset Performance Management (SAP APM) provides asset health insights from operational data and analytics and helps you craft cost-effective asset performance strategies for various asset classes.

  • SAP APM and S/4HANA work as a single system so that you can now directly reflect the strategic insights into the actual maintenance execution, enabling your maintenance teams to carry out different maintenance strategies appropriate for the asset criticality and class for optimal reliability and maintenance costs, and to measure efficiency and effectiveness of maintenance programs for continuous improvement.

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Sales

  • Low-touch sales order processing increases the sales team’s efficiency and productivity. One example is the automatic creation of sales orders from unstructured data, like purchase orders in PDF or Image formats, with the combined usage of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, SAP Build Process Automation, and Document Information Extraction service, part of SAP AI Services.

  • The sales representative can import documents in XLSX format to create sales orders, sales quotations, sales contracts, or scheduling agreements.

  • The new Advanced Inter-company Sales process allows two affiliated companies to participate in a single inter-company process, e.g. a local sales office sells to a customer and the producing company delivers the goods directly to the customer or a local sales organization sells to a customer and a central warehouse delivers the goods.

Process Flow of Advanced Intercompany SalesProcess Flow of Advanced Intercompany Sales

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Finance

  • The new Universal Parallel Accounting (UPA), which provides a harmonized architecture for ledgers and currencies, has been introduced. UPA provides a foundation for calculating and posting values per ledger and currency along end-to-end processes.

  • UPA is also the baseline for future innovations in Finance such as Value Chain Analysis and Transactional Carbon Accounting.

  • The integration scenarios with SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Group Reporting, SAP Advanced Financial Closing, and SAP Analytics Cloud have been continuously enhanced to accelerate the digital transformation in Finance.

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Manufacturing

  • Material Requirements Planning (MRP) Live provides significant performance improvements, shorter planning cycles (multiple times a day), up-to-date supply and demand information on which to base decisions, matching demand and supply more efficiently, cross-plant planning, and being the foundation for predictive MRP.

  • Predictive MRP provides midterm planning solutions to influence capacity planning through MRP prediction, predicts and simulates capacity constraints based on current MRP results, simulating and resolving capacity and material gaps in a plant before they occur.

  • Demand-driven MRP helps to buffer inventory based on target levels in strategic locations, the replenishment is triggered based on the average consumption over the lead time, and specific MRP type controls the consumption-based planning through parameters for Qualified demand, Qualified supply, Safety stock, Lot size, Reorder point.

  • Collaborative MRP enables you to run material requirements planning in real-time and visualize results, visualize material bottlenecks, and resolve them with a simulative approach collaborate with suppliers on short-notice changes, and receive instant feedback through SAP Business Network for Procurement.

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Sourcing and Procurement

  • Introduced Lean Services - a new master data object “Product type” differentiates material and services (new material type SERV). Both can be mixed in a hierarchical structure, using Model Service Specifications. After the service has been confirmed, the flexible workflow can be used to approve the service entry sheets.
  • The new item category enhanced limit can be used for unplanned services. By leveraging data from SAP Sustainability Footprint Management, purchasers can track the carbon footprint of the products being requested in purchase requisitions.
  • Many investments have also been made in Central Procurement and Product Sourcing. 

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User Experience Innovations

Each SAP S/4HANA release brings around 300 SAP Fiori apps, supporting improved processes and intelligent use cases.

Screenshot of the New My Home Page available from SAP S/4HANA 2023 FPS01Screenshot of the New My Home Page available from SAP S/4HANA 2023 FPS01

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SAP Business Technology Platform Innovations

Each release enhances integration through the SAP Business Technology Platform with seamless connectivity across SAP cloud solutions, AI use cases, augmented analytics, and extended custom options.

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Innovations With Business AI and Joule

AI-powered processes and with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition will pave the way to a new world of accelerated business, faster decision-making, and multiplied productivity. 

Joule, the AI copilot that provides intelligent answers drawn from the wealth of underlying business data:

  • Revolutionize the interaction, making every touchpoint count and every task simpler.
  • Have more productive business interactions using natural language for informational, navigational, and transactional assistance.
  • Gain smarter insights grounded in underlying business data and enriched by business context. 

Drive growth and foster innovation with AI:

  • Achieve improved finance excellence with AI that helps optimize working capital and closing functions.
  • Support operational excellence through optimized manufacturing and asset performance and elevated product quality.
  • Deliver advanced intelligent order fulfillment by streamlining and automating the order fulfillment process.

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Innovations For Sustainability

With an upcoming wave of mandatory ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) reporting regulations, SAP plans to deliver one solution to enable an auditable foundation for carbon reporting and analysis in state-of-the-art finance quality and related to the same existing financial dimensions which are used to steer the company and on which financial reporting is done today.

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Other Resources

For details on the latest SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition innovations, please refer to the What´s New Viewer, to this blog about S/4HANA Cloud Release Highlights in 2023 and 2022, or to the SAP Community. Our roadmap for future releases evolves around the key themes of intelligent Cloud ERP, leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Sustainability.

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