S/4HANA: Business Benefits and Technological Advantages

The demand of long-time customers with SAP has always been lower operational costs, a more intuitive user interface, faster MRP2 runs, easier maintenance and integration with other cloud applications, and most importantly simplification of processes.

SAP S/4HANA was launched as SAP R/2 and is now quickly proving to be SAP’s most successful ERP system with S/4HANA – the fourth version of this solution. The launch of S/4HANA has come about at the same time when new technologies such as cloud services and mobile computing were introduced.

With most of the business functionality of the SAP business suite carried over to SAP S/4HANA, new workflows, larger transaction volumes, real-time analytics on transactional data, flexible reporting structures and simulation of business scenarios can be carried out. All of this with an all-new UI and a new framework for modifications and extensions, SAP S/4HANA is meant to take the digital age by its horns!

SAP HANA is the only database that SAP S/4HANA runs on, and hence to realize the complete potential of an in-memory database for enterprise applications, its application code has been dramatically simplified.

Today, the SAP HANA database family offers radically new ways of solving any foreseeable challenges, thereby giving businesses a substantial advantage over the competition and many other application scenarios — be it from analytics of big data or scientific research to new IoT applications. This is made possible through data federation, with which SAP HANA can seamlessly integrate with other databases.

In short, SAP S/4HANA has been that trailblazing upgraded application that businesses across various domains needed.

The biggest business advantage of SAP S/4HANA is the simplicity of its database layout. The database offers higher data entry speed. The application also presents unbelievable improvements in reporting and complete flexibility in reporting using external hierarchies which can be restructured anytime without changes to the database. Now this works to the advantage of small and medium businesses that are constantly in the process of evolving.

SAP HANA’s UI is cleaner, is easy to understand and use, and accommodates the introduction of new processes without glitches. Live data can be used in management meetings to illustrate the current and clear situation of the company’s business along with predictive analytics and simulations that can offer a peek into the future in real-time.

While SAP S/4HANA offers many benefits, small and medium enterprises often find it difficult to extract maximum value from the system.

If your enterprise plans to deploy S/4HANA, Gemini Consulting & Services can help you. We have a team of consultants with over a decade of experience in implementing S/4HANA for clients across various verticals and providing maximum value from it. Contact us to know how we can customize and enhance your technological journey with S/4HANA.

S/4HANA is an enterprise solution that benefits all domains effectively irrespective of size, sector and geographic location. Further, here are some specific attributes that go on to prove this.

• The shift from SAP GUI to role-based SAP Fiori has distinctly reduced screen numbers in the application and hence has resulted in a much simpler and efficient interface model.
• A new single integrated system solution for a given business requirement allows for much faster and precise delivery and quality of products.
• The data model of SAP S/4HANA establishes formats for every posting. Hence, the whole operation of letting go of the data aggregation system in favor of selecting individual items based on random criteria promotes greater flexibility in analytics.
• The launch of 1610 overrides the need for a Core Interface or CIF; this incorporates production planning and detailed scheduling, resulting in a discernable drop in data redundancy, thereby, causing a decrease in infrastructural costs.

1. The SAP R/3 system introduced way back in 1992/3 was meant to be for smaller companies. But it was embraced by large and very large enterprises.
2. The simplification of the UI of S/4HANA is real and is guaranteed to save time with the first day of productive use.
3. With the modified data model, any field can be used as an index for selecting data.
4. The unprecedented short response time allows for faster development cycles of new applications.
5. The deployment of extensions in SAP HANA Cloud Platform helps enhance SAP S/4HANA systems as well as to build completely new applications.
6. SAP S/4HANA combines the proven set of core business functionalities across languages and almost all countries, with the ability to venture into completely new dimensions of applications. This capability is critical when business processes are developing at an ever-increasing speed and core enterprise systems must also accommodate changes. Smaller companies are embracing S/4HANA because it is easy and fast to operate.
7. SAP HANA can be exploited without consideration for compliance with other platforms. This is a formidable advantage and is now a strategy taken by all other providers of cloud services.
8. Since SAP still believes in running the new system in the cloud and on-premise, SAP S/4HANA becomes the one version that can reduce the TCO and speed up the much-needed step into a scalable future.
9. Through SAP HANA, enterprises can access other databases, such as SAP HANA Vora or Hadoop. As a result, IoT integration becomes easy.

It is easy for enterprises to add extensions and integrate other software applications and customized software into the SAP HANA Cloud Platform. As a result, it becomes easier to cater to the business-specific needs of the customers and offer them a clear competitive advantage for a relatively low cost.

SAP S/4HANA’s primary differentiator is its unique architecture; it runs in-memory, with data stored in a column, that helps with faster, near real-time analytics and compute capabilities. The focus of this application is to provide end-users active decision support in real-time, that is data-driven and considers both internal and external sources of data.

Most importantly, SAP S4/HANA allows organizations to work seamlessly in a digital economy which is a key driving factor for businesses to migrate into the SAP environment and more particularly switch to S/4HANA.