What does SAP S/4HANA version 1709 have to offer?

November 14, 2017

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Introduction

SAP released S/4HANA 1709 in September 2017, as its third release of S/4HANA core. The past releases of 1511 and 1610 S/4HANA Enterprise Management had laid the building blocks e.g. core data-model changes, FIORI Analytical Applications, VDM’s starting of Integrated / Embedded Solutions. In the current release SAP has added a few more pillars for digital transformation with IoT, Machine-Learning, Big Data Analytics to name a few.

SAP S/4HANA has already reached a milestone of 1000 live customers and with each release SAP is providing broader industry coverage and a go to platform for Digital transformation.

The core values in S/4HANA are still the same and untouched. S/4HANA is still outstanding in: Real-Time Analytics, Simulation, and being able to handle multiple dimension at the same time. A number of new features and notable enhancements have been applied. In this blog we will have an initial look at these.

*This is the current state of planning and may be changed by SAP at any time without notice and key innovations do not reflect licensing

SAP S/4HANA 1709 – Key Innovations

Below we see the key innovations in various areas, and we will go into some of the details of the innovations (new innovations in black, existing/enhanced innovations in yellow).

*This is the current state of planning and may be changed by SAP at any time without notice and key innovations do not reflect licensing

Key Changes in the area of Finance

The key innovations in Finance are shown below:-

*This is the current state of planning and may be changed by SAP at any time without notice and key innovations do not reflect licensing

SAP is introducing a new soft close and prediction functionality, that, together with the financial closing cockpit provides the ability to close the books using an abbreviated closing procedure.

Key innovations in the SAP Logistics area

SAP continue to provide innovation in the logistics area with focus on new areas like quality management, EWM and some specific functionalities like Available-to-Promise and Advanced Variant Configuration.

With SAP S/4HANA 1610, SAP enabled EWM as a side by side with core, in this release SAP has gone ahead and provided more features in this release in area of EWM.

The key innovations in EWM are shown below:-

*This is the current state of planning and may be changed by SAP at any time without notice and key innovations do not reflect licensing

In the new release, SAP has also improved features for the Transportation management solution, as shown below:

*This is the current state of planning and may be changed by SAP at any time without notice and key innovations do not reflect licensing

This release also focuses on the Quality Management solution and has made the changes below:

*This is the current state of planning and may be changed by SAP at any time without notice and key innovations do not reflect licensing

The additional features in Sourcing & Procurement build upon the strides which were made in the 1610 release:

*This is the current state of planning and may be changed by SAP at any time without notice and key innovations do not reflect licensing

ATP functionality has also been extended from 1610, with a number of additional functionalities:

*This is the current state of planning and may be changed by SAP at any time without notice and key innovations do not reflect licensing

S/4HANA 1709 industry specific enhancements

Below we note the key innovations offered in various industry sector verticals. These innovations are helping clients make a business case to make the move. Note however a lot of these innovations were initially a part of the cloud version of the solution and are consolidated and offered with the 1709 release:

*This is the current state of planning and may be changed by SAP at any time without notice and key innovations do not reflect licensing

Three different approaches to move to SAP S/4HANA:-

*This is the current state of planning and may be changed by SAP at any time without notice and key innovations do not reflect licensing

However clients who are already on any version of S/4HANA / suite on HANA will also need to go through a DB upgrade as S/4HANA 1709 is for HANA 2 DB. This path is shown below.

*This is the current state of planning and may be changed by SAP at any time without notice and key innovations do not reflect licensing

To improve the experience when adopting SAP S/4HANA, SAP recently launched a new set of tools. The SAP Transformation Navigator, which helps customers determine their go-to solutions.

To sum up

SAP S/4HANA 1709 appears to be a key release and will be a version many clients will be looking to upgrade to from their current SAP release.

SAP S/4HANA has reached a very important milestone of 1000 live customers and these are across various industries and geographical distribution.

Although this current release does not offer earth-shattering new features as such, it provides an extension / addition to the key offerings in each area. The product has really stabilised and offers far more clarity and a more predictable path for client IT teams to proceed with digital transformation. This will make 1709 the go to release version for most EHP series clients.

All in all the new release promises to be another exciting solution and further affirm the market leadership of SAP. It will also create a lot of new projects and work for SAP Consultants, especially those who have managed to already acquire S/4HANA experience. Stay tuned later this month for my next blog, on how to upskill to S/4HANA ( please bookmark Eursap’s Blog page and check back for more soon!). Please also Bookmark and check on Eursap’s latest SAP vacancies to keep up to date with the latest SAP S/4HANA work opportunities.

Author: Rishab Bucha – SAP S/4HANA & FICO Consultant

External Sources:

https://blogs.sap.com/2017/09/15/introducing-sap-s4hana-1709/

https://www.sap.com/products/s4hana-erp.html

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