- SAP Managed Tags:
Content is equally important as code and SAP has always delivered standardized business software that helps drive mission critical operations, enabling customers to address complex business requirements to run critical business capabilities. It is our obligation to keep investing and listen to our clients and partners to constantly define and develop good business content.
In this blog we will lay out what we are focusing on in regards to above and how especially in dynamic times it is of benefit for every business that wants to leverage a modern ERP.
Customers have used the flexibility inherent in the software to create different business variants to accommodate complex business requirements. Throughout the years, customers have benefited from this flexibility by creating tailored solutions for their business demands.
As the speed of innovation and technology has increased, flexibility has proven to be good to tailor business requirements, however, implementation has proven to be a longer and more costly process. On the other hand, SAP has always offered best practices coming from the collective best-in-class processes of SAP customers. SAP Best Practices have provided customers with detailed documentation, process diagrams, testing scripts and pre-configuration, so customers have always a template to jump start their implementations. SAP Best Practices allow customers to make use of best-in-class processes to accelerate implementation by making small adaptations and increasing the time to value.
Lets take an example:
Traditional best practices processes, like Material Requirement Planning have helped customers gain competitive advantage by providing clear benefit to support their material planning and create efficiencies in the supply chain and inventories. Customers realize measurable value e.g. reduce days in inventory, reduce inventory carrying cost, etc. But with the advances in technology (iRPA, ML, Predictive Analytics, etc.) and the power of in-memory computing,
SAP has launched New Business Practices like Predictive Material and Resource Planning, Demand Driven Buffer Level Management, etc. With these exciting new practices, customers can quickly create demand scenario simulations and interactively evaluate and simulate capacity constraints and demand fulfillment. They can manage supply chains based on customer demand by decoupling material flows and lowering inventory using dynamically managed stock buffers for relevant products. As you can see, SAP is providing New Best Practices as customers are evolving and adapting to their dynamic environments and allowing them to do things that were not possible before.
See New Best Practice - Predictive MRP example via this video:
For our entire SAP S/4HANA portfolio SAP is delivering Best Practices to help customers benefit from the power of evolving changing business content, so customers don’t need to start from scratch and to help them benchmark existing traditional processes with new Business Practices.
It is our recommendation that customers always look to our delivered business content when implementing SAP S/4HANA and any other SAP Solution.
Now, SAP Solutions, and in particular SAP S/4HANA, are helping customers address complex business requirements, regardless if the need is in an industry vertical (Automotive, Chemicals, etc.), specialized line of business (connected assets, connected manufacturing, etc.) and/or a geographical footprint (companies, divisions, subsidiaries, etc.) with the complexities that localization and specific legal regulations mandate in some countries. Many customers face the challenge of how to implement, considering all these additional variables.
With SAP S/4HANA, SAP is helping customers by providing packaged business content to address challenges in these Industry verticals, specialized line of business and in the geographical scope.
For geographical scope, we deliver Best Practices for individual country versions, so national companies can benefit from our country versions, which are fully loaded with processes ranging from Finance, Order to cash, Manufacturing, Supply Chain, etc.
For International Companies, SAP delivers, in our SAP S/4HANA solutions (Cloud and AnyPremise), the SAP Model Company for Enterprise Management Layer / SAP Model Company for Multinational Corporation. These fully activated templates for multiple countries provide the necessary international financial structure (Defined Group Corporation with Group currency, Group Leading accounting principle, Fiscal Year Variant and local countries with 2 parallel ledgers using the local accounting principle, etc.) to quickly jump start an international implementation. These powerful templates are fully loaded with all processes ranging from Finance, Order to cash, Manufacturing, Supply Chain, etc. as well.
Imagine now the power of business content, you can jump start an implementation with all best practices available for multiple countries with a predefined international financial corporate structure out of the box.
For customers looking for additional industry specific content and/or specialized lines of business on top of the Best Practices of the SAP Model Company for Enterprise Management Layer / SAP Model Company for Multinational Corporation, then they can benefit from the best-in-class industry and line of business expertise included in the SAP Model Company. SAP delivers a strong and robust portfolio of Model Companies which will address specialized industry and advanced line of business requirements.
In addition to the SAP standard content delivered in SAP S/4HANA, customers benefit from the strong partner ecosystem building on SAP business content to help our customers to drive even additional value.
Finally, I would like to talk briefly on the power of the community as an often-underrated platform to not only support projects and newly live customers, but also to help longer term customers find the value in new innovations. With access to subject matter experts from SAP, excellent learning opportunities and perhaps more importantly, other customers a community is and should be you first stop when looking for advice, guidance and exchange on S/4HANA.
Next time you start an SAP S/4HANA implementation (Cloud and/or AnyPremise), ask your project team and your system integrator to look into the SAP Best Practices and/or SAP Model Companies from SAP and/or Partner Solutions before you start your transformation journey, you will be surprised how much you could save, learn and benefit from this best-in-class business content.
For more information on SAP S/4HANA, check out the following links:
- SAP S/4HANA During the COVID-19-Era here
- 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
