We are hearing a lot about S/4 HANA now-a–days and the interest it evoked lead me to collate and evaluate information available on S/$ HANA. During this course, I made following notes about the comparison between ECC and S/4 HANA which will give a snap shot about the simplification and the functionality in procurement process. I hope this will be useful for some enthusiasts of SAP S/4 HANA.
Functionality/Element |
ECC |
S/4 |
Material Master |
- Material Number length is 18 characters
- Service Master is used for Services.
|
- Material Number length 040 characters
- MRP fields – Quota arr. Usage, SLoc MRP indicator, spec. proc. type SLoc , reorder qty and replenishment qty are not required to be switched on.
- A new Material type ‘SERV” for service material. However, service material type “DIEN’ is also available.
|
Vendor Master |
- Master data is maintained separately for Vendor and Customer.
- Only one single address
- No integrated classification data
- No time - dependency
- Supplier evaluation is only on hard facts only and supplier evaluation for soft-facts using questionnaire is not available but only in SAP Supplier Life cycle management.
- No integration to Dun &Bradstreet Information Services
|
- Business partner concept is used as a replacement for Vendor and Customer Master.
- The roles available are “000000” – Business Partner (Gen), “FLVN00” – FI Vendor and “FLVN01” – Supplier.
- Multiple addresses are possible.
- Multiple roles
- Time dependency object attributes and relationships
- Purchasing Category: Suppliers can be managed according to specific categories of goods and services.
- Classification: Assign important characteristics to suppliers. A score card for each supplier to monitor supplier’s social responsibility compliance
- Own questionnaire can be defined directly and evaluation requests can be created and distributed directly to appraisers.
- Support of Dun &Bradstreet Information Services data
|
Purchase Requisition |
- If no source of supply is assigned automatically by the system, Buyer needs to do this manually.
|
- System proposes automatically a set of available sources of supply to facilitate and accelerate assignment of source of supply.
- Grouping, filtering and downloading capabilities of open purchase requisitions.
|
Purchase Order processing |
- Search for existing POs is time –consuming, no provisioning of existing documents.
- No prefilling of other fields based on supplier.
- No pre-filtering of value help search results.
- Only at the end get a list of errors that need to be corrected.
|
- Dynamic prefilling and provisioning of fields based on selected supplier or material type.
- Restricted list of available value help fields to avoid subsequent errors in purchase order.
- Draft purchase order is created automatically when session is lost or retrieved automatically upon returning.
|
Output Management |
- The output management configuration is based in NAST.
|
- The configuration is based on BRF+ (Business Rule Framework Plus) based on Adobe server and Adobe Forms. But NAST configuration is still supported for New documents.
|
Contract Management |
- Only one-time search for contract documents is possible.
- No action can be done directly in the contract list
- Approval information is missing
- Notes are missing
|
- All activities can be executed in one screen
- Contract target value or target quantity update
- Approval details, notes, business card for supplier are provided
|
Invoice processing |
- Inflexible search functionalities
- Confusing visualization of Supplier invoice to detect issues
- Administrator has to resolve business issues in case of faulty supplier invoice
|
- Flexible and dynamic search capabilities
- Defect issues in one glance
- Directly resolve issues finish the process
|
Hope this information is useful for a quick grasp of the simplification features in procurement area.