An Introduction to SAP S/4 HANA

What is SAP S/4 HANA?

Introducing a revolutionary ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solution of the future, where it is the product of choice for many global Fortune 500 enterprise organizations today. SAP S/4 HANA is like the terminator of ERPs where the state-of-art technology now leverages in-memory computing, rather than reading from old and inefficient disks.

An ERP which was born and bred in Walldorf Germany and owned by SAP SE (Societas Europae)to take on the world where it has achieved greatness as a system that can literally do anything for multinational enterprise organizations. What’s more, SAP is a multinational firm catering to enterprise firms that want the best ERP solution out there. Think BMW, Mercedes, and Audi of the ERP world. You name it, SAP can do it! If it can’t, there is either a 3rd party add-on or you can customize your system to fit your specific business needs. This includes supporting any business process, interface to other disparate systems, or integrate with other SAP ERP modules and even native SAP products that don’t reside within the ERP. To elevate it another notch as a solution provider, they’ve even packaged S/4 for specific industries such as retail (formerly AFS apparel and footwear solution), fashion, oil and gas (IS-Oil), etc…) as an end-to-end ERP solution.

SAP S/4 HANA

Versions and Naming Convention

SAP kicked off its first ERP S/4 HANA (High-Performance Analytics Application) in March of 2015 as a finance solution where it was on-premise and the version was oddly named 1503.

So you’re asking what is 1503? No, it’s a newly manufactured Cyborg. Well, when SAP came up with the version names in their native Deutschland (Germany), they decided that it was best that the naming convention was based upon whether the solution was on-premise or in the cloud. Sort of…

With on-premise, the naming convention typically follows this path for newer on premise versions, but they did deviate in versions before 2020. Technically speaking, on-premise utilized both naming conventions by SAP of YYYY (year, year, year, year) & YYMM (year, year, month, month). The new nomenclature began in the 2020 version, whereas the older versions used YYMM similar to the SAP cloud version naming convention. Are you following me? Good! Finally, for on-premise, releases initially came out twice a year, but since version SAP S/4 HANA — 1709, which came out in September 2017, releases became an annual thing.

SAP S/4HANA 1709: September 2017 (YYYY)

YYYY — 2020 was released in 2020 as the first annual product release using this updated naming convention.

YYMM - 1503 for Finance means March 2015

In contrast, the cloud-based version of SAP always follows this naming convention in all releases . For example, 2022, means February 2202 where it is their latest release. Moreover, the SAP cloud-based version of HANA gets released every three months.

YYMM (year, year, month, month) — 2202 (February 2022).

YYMM (year, year, month, month) — 2111 (November 2021).

SAP S/4 HANA

on-premise or in the cloud?

The common misconception today even by SAP technical and business user community is that ALL SAP S/4 HANA implementations are on the cloud. The truth is that it all began as an on-premise solution for SAP. To provide a better illustration, they now offer both on-premise (formerly called Essential Edition, Single-Tenant Edition, and Multi-Tenant Edition) and a cloud-based solution aptly named SAP S/4 HANA Cloud. To make things more confusing on this topic, in 2021, SAP S/4 HANA Cloud came in a private edition while the on-premise edition deployment could be supported by SAP or by a Cloud-Hyperscaler.

Additionally, SAP developed this application for enterprises but it can also be leveraged by mid-market organizations as well today as an upgrade to SAP business one (small to medium businesses).

What is a Greenfield or Brownfield SAP implementation?

So you hear Greenfield or Brownfield on an SAP project. Perhaps some of the more technical SAP people say this and you’re completely dumbfounded by what that person just said. Both of these terms are approaches to the new SAP implementation and have their challenges and obstacles where it leans more heavily on the brownfield approach for obvious reasons which I will discuss in this writing.

A Greenfield project is a new SAP implementation meaning that the business previously ran another enterprise ERP such as Oracle, Peoplesoft, Netsuite, AS400, IBM Maximo, and so on (think mid-market organizations). These firms and their users don’t typically understand SAP besides the basics so this type of approach is simply difficult in that the business users will have minimal exposure, if any, to SAP and how it really works. Processes may be similar in many ways, but very challenging in other aspects, as with any new ERP system.

For example, terminology and semantics can be quite confusing when people are referring to something that means the same thing in their previous system. The adaptation to the new system field names is a daunting task in itself. For example in SAP what is called a material can be referred to as a SKU (Stock Keep Unit), Item, UPC, EAN, GTIN, buyer part number, customer material number, and I’ve even heard it more recently referred to as a “bar code” which means the material, not an actual scannable barcode like you would be led believe.

On the other hand, the Brownfield approach is much easier than compared to a Greenfield in that these firms are upgrading from an older version of SAP, such as ECC 5.0 or ECC 6.0. The approach is to implement the new SAP S/4 HANA system in parallel with the old SAP system. The SAP systems integrator (SI) then helps their customers to migrate to the new environment by migrating their business processes and workflows from their old system.

All things considered, the decision to go either on-premise or in the cloud when migrating to SAP S/4 HANA will be highly dependent on what your organizational needs are. On one hand, Cloud offers you a higher degree of standardization while on-premise or any premise (SAP or Cloud Hyperscalers) provides a higher degree of flexibility. Lastly, the decision makers or executives within your organization will decide (or have already decided) on either option based on costs, licensing requirements, upgrades, implementation, security, infrastructure, resources, and configuration.

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