http://news.sap.com/what-is-sap-s4hana-13-questions-answered/
1. What is the business value of SAP S/4HANA for
customers? What’s the payback period? And who is likely to benefit most?
Written natively for the SAP HANA platform, SAP S/4HANA is an entirely new generation of SAP Business Suite
that is characterized by simplifications, massively increased efficiency, and
compelling features such as planning and simulation options in many
conventional transactions.
SAP S/4HANA signals a move away from the
transactional system that merely records data toward giving end users active decision
support in real time that is based on data from both internal and external
sources.
We are currently in the process of
developing a business value calculator for SAP S/4HANA that will drill down to quantify the benefits at the level of individual
solutions. In SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA, customers already have the option
of calculating business cases enabled by TCO savings and optimizations. These
calculations are equally valid for SAP S/4HANA. But the simplifications created
by SAP S/4HANA bring other benefits too – which the business value calculator
will take into account – such as the use of new user interfaces, reduced data volume,
greater flexibility, and higher throughput. Finance departments, for example,
will profit from more efficient shared services and accelerated financial
closing.
2. How long does an SAP S/4HANA implementation take?
It’s obviously very hard to generalize, but
we do have reliable empirical values to go on: 75% of customers that have
migrated their existing SAP Business Suite on HANA as the first major step in
moving to SAP S/4HANA have done so within six months. That’s a very good result
for a migration to a new platform.
Some large enterprises are opting for
greenfield projects – seeing the technological innovations as an opportunity to
completely rebuild their ERP landscapes from the ground up. Brownfield projects
are also an option: In this approach, the customer leaves its IT landscape
intact but adopts the new technology to enrich and enhance it. Greenfield and
brownfield projects naturally take longer – sometimes even several years. And
migrating to SAP S/4HANA is only one part of such a project.
3. Does SAP offer programs that simplify the move to SAP
S/4HANA?
Yes, and we attach great importance to
providing comprehensive support for our customers in this respect.
Specifically, we offer SAP Rapid Deployment
solutions that enable a fast migration to the
SAP HANA platform and thus also to SAP Simple Finance. These pre-defined
implementation packages are delivered by SAP or by our partners and even enable
fixed-price implementations in some cases.
4. How much experience do potential integration partners
have?
Our integration partners are of course
working with the rapid-deployment solutions to some extent. And our service
partners already have broad experience of implementing SAP Business Suite on
SAP HANA for our customers. In fact, over 60% of implementations are performed
by partners and integration partners, not by SAP. We operate roll out programs
to inform and educate our partners about all of our new solutions. And our
Global Partner Organization (GPO) holds regular “enablement sessions” at which
it brings partners up to speed on the new technologies and explains to them in
detail how SAP S/4HANA will impact their work.
5. Which skillsets are required?
In most cases, it’s the implementation
partner that handles the project, so customers don’t really need to get bogged
down in the details. However, more information is available at SCN, SAP’s Community Network. Both, partners and customers can refer to.
6. Is it possible to migrate company-specific
customizations?
In principle, yes. When we developed our
solutions, we took particular care to ensure that they would be
“backwards-compatible.” In other words, the customer can keep customizations
and continue to use them after the migration. However, this does not always
apply to modifications. Take the analogy of a house and imagine that the
customer has not only added a balcony but has also modified the building too.
In this case, the function of the house may be affected, whereas the
“balconies” will be fine.
7. What are the requirements for moving to SAP S/4HANA?
The initial path is to move to SAP Business
Suite on SAP HANA and then to implement packages that contain the
simplifications. Currently, these come in the form of SAP Simple Finance,
though SAP Simple Logistics is slated for release soon and further
simplifications will follow in 2015.
8. What is a “system-driven” implementation?
We want to radically simplify the
implementation of SAP S/4HANA so that customers enjoy rapid success and
payback. This is particularly relevant in the cloud, of course, where customers
expect to deploy a preconfigured system. SAP therefore provides ready-to-run
business processes based on best practices that can be activated. During the
activation, the system configures itself. The SAP S/4HANA Guided Configuration
facilitates customers to personalize the processes delivered by SAP. Within the
app “Manage your solution” easy SAP Fiori UI?s can be used to maintain e.g. the
organizational structure, approval thresholds or other individual settings.
9. How “new” is the data model really?
Today, just as in the past, a conventional
financial document is stored in one or two tables. However, in the past,
aggregates and indexes were required to map the various views of the document.
In the new architecture, these aggregates and indexes are obsolete.
Our aim has been to shrink and simplify the
underlying data structures, because an in-memory database works best with wide
tables. Tables that used to be nested are now compressed. Fundamental data
structures that determine what a financial, material transaction, or inventory
management document look like remain the same. So we have, in fact, left the
document pretty much as it is, which makes it easier for the customer to move
from a conventional ERP system to the new technology. A new data structure
would leave the customer no option but to perform a full migration. In terms of
effort, that’s comparable with implementing a new system.
From the customer perspective, the path we
have chosen is simpler because it merely involves an upgrade to a new system.
In a nutshell: The “old” data model was fundamentally okay. And we can achieve
so much with a slightly adapted data model that we don’t see any reason to
force customers into the disruptive process of switching to a completely new
data model.
10. SAP Fiori is mentioned a great deal, but we do not
hear much about SAP Screen Personas in the context of SAP S/4HANA. Why is that?
SAP Screen Personas is a critical part of the SAP S/4HANA user experience strategy. It is the
ideal solution for scenarios not yet covered by Fiori applications or for an
organization’s custom transactions. Customers can use SAP Screen Personas to
simplify their existing SAP GUI screens or WebDynpro ABAP applications to meet
their unique needs and increase productivity. SAP is providing design guides
and SAP Fiori-inspired sample content for SAP Screen Personas.
The SAP Fiori UX strategy aims to transform
the transactional operational model to a role-oriented one. Since our focus is
on delivering the SAP Fiori UX, we do not highlight the underlying technologies
that provide this capability to the users.
11. Which SAP S/4HANA applications are available right
now? Is it just SAP Simple Finance? What’s the difference between the cloud and
on-premise offerings?
If I implement SAP S/4HANA on premise, I’m
technically implementing SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA and deploying the
“exchange innovation” for SAP Simple Finance. But that’s just the first step.
SAP will continue to deliver additional
exchange innovations that replace the existing SAP Business Suite code with the
new SAP S/4HANA code. At the moment, the customer receives the code for the new
accounting solution. We plan to ship the code for SAP Simple Logistics at the
end of the year and further new code in subsequent years. By the time we reach
the end of this journey, we will have incrementally switched the customer’s
entire system without subjecting it to the upheaval of a big-bang migration.
The situation is different if the customer
opts to deploy SAP S/4HANA in the cloud. In this
case, the customer gets the entire solution at one go. We plan to release a
public cloud version at the end of the first quarter of 2015 and a version for
managed cloud in the second quarter.
12. What does SAP S/4HANA cost? Is there a charge for
customers who already deploy SAP Business Suite?
SAP S/4HANA is a new product so it is not
free of charge for SAP Business Suite users. However, we are running a license
promotion until the end of the third quarter of this year. Customers who have
licensed the SAP HANA platform for SAP Business Suite – that’s currently more
than 2,000 – are eligible to upgrade to SAP S/4HANA licenses at no charge.
We’ve already signed our first contracts with customers above and beyond our
pilot projects.
13. What’s the roadmap? Which releases will appear next?
SAP S/4HANA is available today for
on-premise customers. The current offering, SAP Simple Finance, gives customer
a simplified finance system. The next major group of simplifications we’re
addressing and planning to deliver is in logistics. These include simpler
inventory management and valuation, along with simplifications in supply chain
management, notably demand planning. Logistics involves some of the most
complicated ERP processes of all, but this is the area in which customer demand
is strongest. One of the benefits they’re looking for is higher throughput.
Once we’ve delivered both SAP Simple
Finance and SAP Simple Logistics, we’ll have covered most of the functions of
an ERP system. In other words, we’ll essentially have simplified processes at
the core. We’re planning to simplify further elements, such as the project
system, quality management, and sales and distribution functions in 2016.