What is New in SAP S/4HANA 2020 Release?

SAP S/4HANA 2020 offers a new set of capabilities to help enterprises drive innovation, automation, and customer experience. With the new release, SAP offers enterprises a next-generation software that caters to their evolving requirements in the digital economy.

SAP has released SAP S/4 HANA 2020 in October last year. The new release offers many key innovations and enhancements that can significantly help enterprises using SAP ERP. In this blog post, we’ll discuss the key highlights of SAP S/4 HANA 2020 and how it helps enterprises.

SAP S/4HANA is an enterprise software built on the in-memory platform SAP HANA. The software is designed for digital businesses and provides real-time insights using a real-time process, single source of truth, dynamic planning and analysis. SAP S/4HANA includes:

• SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management
• SAP S/4HANA LoB Products
• SAP S/4HANA LoB Products for Specific Industries
• SAP S/4HANA Compatibility Packs

The same offering is also available as SAP S/4HANA Cloud – an extended edition.

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While there are numerous enhancements in the SAP S/4 HANA 2020 release, we will only cover major innovations introduced in the Line of Businesses (LoB).

Finance

In treasury management, SAP S/4 HANA 2020 provides new treasury reporting data. The Treasury reporting dashboard provides new data from cash management, treasury and risk management. The treasury dashboard includes KPIs like cash balances, market trends, debt and investment positions, FX risks and credit risks. The dashboard makes it easier to highlight financial positions and risks.

Revenue accounting and reporting are introduced in SAP s/4 HANA 2020. Optimized contract management has also been enhanced in the new release. Other features include integration with SAP Sales and Distribution, Convergent Accounting, Invoicing and 3rd party applications and disclosure support for Revenue Accounting.

Another new feature in Finance is in Financial Accounting & Bank Accounting processing. You can now reduce the use of General Ledger accounts as accounts by simplifying the bank relationship management processes.

Sales

In Sales, SAP s/4 HANA 2020 brings 3 new innovations. Intelligent product proposal, Preliminary billing document and Sales monitoring and analytics. The intelligent product proposal provides product and quantity recommendations based on historical data, fine tunes the provided proposals based on customer and sales document type. In preliminary billing documents, you can create preliminary bills based on ‘bills due’ lists, get a print preview of the document and post the final billing document.

In Customer Analytics, we have a new dashboard ‘Customer Overview’, monitoring all key sales KPIs like frequency of sales orders, sales value and margin, open and rejected sales orders etc.

Service

SAP has made innovations in In-House Repair, Recurring Services, and Embedded Analytics. This has helped expand the business scope of SAP/S4HANA 2020 in the services line of business. The In-house repair facilitates in-house management of services for the returned products returned from customers. It includes repair planning & scheduling, received devices and reviewing completed repair before shipment.

The new Recurring Services features enables planning and scheduling of recurring services using maintenance plan and service templates. A new business role — Service planner, is introduced with access to 9 default apps and 7 additional apps related to the maintenance plan, are available.

Embedded analytics helps you to monitor operations and business outcomes in real-time via analytics through visualization/dashboards. It provides both operational and business management data and can be personalized for individual user roles.

Supply Chain

The SAP S/4HANA 2020 extends capabilities in Situation Handling and Extended Services in Supply Chain. The Situation Handling now supports physical inventory. The new extended service parts planning enables planning of inventory for service parts based on volumes, velocity and segments.

Manufacturing

In Manufacturing, SAP has extended the SAP Fiori app for enhanced Predictive Material and Resource Planning (pMRP). The pMRP has been enhanced with new KPIs for improved simulation, and also shows materials with invalid source and violated constraints. You can also create PIRs during the release of a simulation.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made several businesses rethink and reimagine their operations. SAP S/4HANA 2020 release provides extra firepower to enterprises to address the new challenges in the digital economy.