The Release is here - my SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2402 Release Highlights

Welcome to another SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition release packed with innovations and enhancements that help your businesses run better. It’s the year 2024, and we are delivering our 31st major SaaS ERP release. Public cloud ERP customers have gained an impressive amount of upgrade experience in just a few years – equivalent to approx. 120 years on-premises if you consider a conservative average upgrade frequency of 4 years in that deployment. With SaaS, all aspects of a Clean Core approach and full life-cycle compliance are built into the solution’s foundation to give customers a head start in adopting the latest and greatest at availability – and we are delivering many innovations.??

Check out how the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2402 release supports your journey to either becoming a digital enterprise or increasing your competitiveness when you are already there.?

One thing has certainly been noticed widely– artificial intelligence and business automation are on everyone’s mind. Our fully-fledged cloud ERP is at the center of the intelligent, sustainable enterprise and brings innovation and opportunities for automation to your processes to lift your business up from higher efficiency to even higher effectiveness.?

As announced last year by SAP, Joule, our natural-language, generative AI copilot built directly into SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition will come to life with the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2402 release in an Early Adopter Care program.?

Joule will transform the way you interact with the system and is going to boost business process efficiency and user experience. A few highlights are:??

1. quick, seamless, and contextual access to user enablement content,?

1. and you can formulate business requirements in natural language and let Joule provide direct insights on the desired business objects or an application link for you to execute the business process.?

If you want to be part of the Early Adopter Care Program, check out the respective chapter to join.??

Before we dive into the release details, I’d like to look at my 2nd top priority, user experience. Therefore, we introduced spaces and pages in an earlier release already and are deactivating the classic groups. The launchpad is the first impression most users have of SAP Fiori, and the place where they organize their day. ?With spaces and pages, you will move to more of a “day-in-the-life” and process-oriented role-based approach to the launchpad. It helps the business user identify where they need to start their tasks and increases efficiency. I’d like to remind you to switch to spaces and pages to make the best out of your launchpad

Now, without any further ado, let’s see what we have in store for you in this release. Watch my video below in the first comment to get a glimpse of my personal highlights in a different format.

Modern and Intelligent Experience?

Artificial Intelligence – SAP User Experience?

As mentioned already, one of our top priorities is offering you the best possible user experience. Our natural-language, generative AI copilot Joule will come to life through an Early Adopter Care program in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition in this release after already having been launched Joule in SAP Successfactors. Joule is directly built into SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and will boost business process efficiency and user experience. You can express your business need in natural language and Joule will grant you quick and seamless access to user enablement content by providing insights on business objects or guiding you to applications. This massively transforms how you interact with the system.

Embedded Analytics – Finance?

With the Review Booklet Designer, analytical specialists have full flexibility to create customized review booklets based on the Group Financials Statements – Review Booklet. Here, you can customize review booklet pages and page groups and adjust proposed filters for business users on business page level. Additionally, we offer an individual set of dimensions and measures for rows and columns. It is integrated in the existing embedded analytical workflow and comes with a step-by-step approach for simple usage.?

Here, we increase efficiency and accuracy of your sales order creation process by enabling you to complete missing sales order data with the aid of system recommendations in the “Manage Sales Orders – Version 2” app. This new feature equips the app with recommendations for input fields that are absolutely necessary for further processing: This way, you can safely and accurately complete orders that were generated through electronic input channels and require post-processing using the “Monitor Recommendations for Sales Document Completion” app.?

Extensibility – SAP User Experience?

As of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2402, developers can use on-stack developer extensibility to work with SAPUI5 Adaptation Projects in SAP Business Application Studio (SAP BAS) to create variants of standard SAP Fiori applications using an easy-to-use project wizard. In a UI adaptation project, you can extend the original code to define changes that fulfill the specific business requirements of different business roles, user groups, organizational units, and countries. For example, you might want to simplify and streamline a specific process by hiding fields not required by casual users, visualizing data as a chart, or changing a responsive table to a grid table to make information easier to process. After deployment, both the original application and your adapted application exist in parallel and can be made available to the relevant users through uniquely named application tiles in SAP Fiori launchpad/My Home. However, note that standard applications need to be enabled for the adaptation. As a partner, you can enable your custom apps for adaptation projects and allow your customers to take advantage of adaptation projects in this context.?

SaaS Foundation?

Finance – Sustainability?

Recognizing the significant role of greenhouse gas emissions in our global environment and their dual impact on both the climate and financial aspects, we have upgraded our approach to greenhouse gas emission planning. This improvement is achieved through integrated financial planning with SAP Analytics Cloud in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. Our solution empowers corporations to strategically manage their environmental footprint in alignment with their economic sustainability goals. By consolidating CO2 equivalent emissions data with conventional financial metrics, it provides a comprehensive overview of a company's operations and its overall impact. This not only fosters the development of environmentally responsible strategies but also identifies associated financial risks and costs linked to GHG emissions.?

Governance, Risk, and Compliance?

SAP Financial Compliance Management is integrated with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and provides you with the tools to become compliant with internal controls, laws, and regulations that apply to your organization. The solution enables you to document your internal controls framework and manage potential risks to your organization, as well as develop and monitor checks put in place to ensure compliance. We enhance the core compliance functionalities with a comprehensive risk management framework to outline purpose and benefit of each control, and?to provide transparency to the overall process health and compliance.?

Manufacturing?

We ship an integration with SAP Integrated Business Planning for demand planning to support the demand forecasting scenario using SAP Integration Suite. This bi-directional integration enables you to use both master and transactional data related to the demand planning process, technically based on an enhanced OData API for planned independent requirements (PIRs).??

Asset Management?

This release offers a new analytical CDS view for maintenance order confirmations, which allows you to build custom, personalized analytical reports with aggregation of drill-down capabilities for maintenance order confirmations. It provides data in the provided cube views in relation to how much actual work has been posted within a specific timeframe, by a specific work center or a specific maintenance technician, and against a specific work order.??

Localization?

We support the SaaS foundation by offering four new SAP-delivered local versions for Slovenia, Oman, Kuwait, and Kazakhstan, that help you steer business operations globally and address increasing legal changes and compliance requirements on time. We help you meet local requirements by considering diverse legal frameworks and different languages and by complying with a wide range of local financial reporting standards, tax calculations, and laws. ?

SAP Activate?

As mentioned in my release video, we are proud to announce the initial availability of Parallel Project Lines through an Early Adopter Care program. This allows you to create larger business configuration projects in a project tenant to test:??

• Configuration changes,???
• new features,???
• localizations,???
• own coding??
• any many more??

and to keep it separate from the productive line and merge only when ready. We have already launched a specific chapter of SAP Activate content that guides you in the use of this new capability. You can find it in the SAP Activate Roadmap Viewer as dedicated methodology roadmap.

Data Migration?

In addition to the migration approach “Migrate Data Using Staging Tables”, the SAP S/4HANA Cloud migration cockpit now facilitates the direct transfer of business data from an SAP ECC source system to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. Using a communication arrangement to connect to the source system, it selects data automatically, i.e., it uses the selection criteria company code and the migration objects to identify and transfer relevant data. A migration object describes how to migrate data for a specific business object to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. To adjust the selection of data, the SAP S/4HANA Cloud migration object modeler can be used.? Get started now and visit the SAP Help Portal for all related information

ERP Innovations?

Supply Chain Management?

We ship a new SAP Fiori app for the display of the journey of serial numbers. You can view all the business documents that contain a specific serial number and access those business documents to see the details. As an inventory manager, you can use this app to locate a missing item or to track down where possible inconsistencies occur. This increases transparency of inventory stock and improves data consistency across systems, processes, and organizations.???

Solution Order Management?

To streamline the selling of complex goods within a solution order, we’ve introduced sales kits with the 2402 release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. Sales kits support bill of materials sales, enabling solution order specialists to sell items which consist of multiple components as part of their solution order. Processing of sales kit items is possible on a main component level or on a sub-component level, with two new item category types to support each process added in the manage solution orders app. Solution order specialists can adjust pricing at both main and sub-item levels, selectively include or exclude components, add new sub-items, and incorporate free-of-charge items. Releasing the solution order item generates the sales kit in the subsequent sales order.?

Service?

With the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2402 release, you can now define the periodical price increase on service contracts. When creating billing request lines based on a renewal, the predefined price increase will be applied and the future prices will be automatically considered during service contract auto-renewal process, leading to reduced manual maintenance efforts through automation and mass processing for pricing updates of service contracts.?

Product Compliance?

We ship the continuous provisioning of regulatory graphics through the regulatory content service to simplify the process of receiving fast and frequent updates and ensure you stay up to date with the latest regulations and required regulatory graphics. The regulatory content service now delivers regulatory graphics in addition to regulatory phrases, listed substances, and compliance requirements. These graphics will be consumable within SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition for product compliance for dangerous goods and for e.g., printing on labels. We enable the consumption of regulatory graphics in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition for product compliance through a service interface and offer automated updates of regulatory graphics in case of regulatory changes.

Sourcing and Procurement?

In this release, we enable professional purchasers to reuse previously created model product specifications and easily copy them into their purchase requisitions by including the model product specifications search help into the SAP Fiori “Manage Purchase Requisitions – Professional” app. You can copy either single items, whole item sets or parts of the complete item hierarchy. Simply search for your target model product specification and then filter within that item hierarchy for the items or item sets that need to be copied. This way, we boost your efficiency in requisitioning by bundling service and material line items together into logical hierarchies within a professional purchase requisition while saving time and avoiding errors by enabling the reuse of existing model product specification.??

Professional Services?

In the Professional Services area, we are looking at the enhanced WIP reporting for customer projects in time and expense billing. The WIP on customer projects with the T&E billing method needs to be reported and justified to internal and external stakeholders such as auditors. This must be possible for previous periods as well; thus, we enhanced the journal entries of event-based revenue recognition with additional information. The event-based revenue recognition journal entries have been enhanced by the hours and the billed product, write-off and CAP postings can now be determined by journal entry item fields, and to enhance transparency, we reduce the journal entry items for the CAP postings.?

Environment, Health, and Safety?

With the operational risk assessment for chemical hazards, you can create risk assessments for risks related to chemical agents. You can identify, analyze, and evaluate chemical risks to the health or safety of employees working at your company, and apply the necessary controls to treat these risks. Within the operational risk assessment, you can address the hazard caused by handling chemicals in the employee workplace and manage chemical hazards by creating, assessing, and mitigating chemical risks inside a risk assessment.?

HR Connectivity?

In this release, we facilitate the local maintenance of worker address and payment information by enabling you to create, correct, and delete payment information through the Payment Information tab from the Work Agreement of the worker. Maintaining private addresses and payment information is now simplified and streamlined by omitting the need to switch to different roles and apps to maintain this data – we give you one app for all data. In case you are not using the best-of-suite approach by integrating SAP SuccessFactors, this is your best alternative

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I didn’t promise too much! This release is filled with innovations and enhancements that help your business run better. While you enjoy the innovations this release brings, check out what else we offer for you below.?

Meanwhile, don’t hesitate to leave a comment and check out our new community to ask your questions and engage with the experts.?

Follow us on @SAP and #S4HANA, and myself here on LinkedIn.

#SAPCloudERP #ERP #Cloud #SaaS

Jan Gilg Jonathan Rhodes Sven Denecken Yannick Peterschmitt Ulrich Hauke Gerhard Welker Markus Oertelt Sabrina Kunze Axel Herrmann, PMP Maria Silipo Christian Vogler Fernanda Rodrigues Syed Talal Hussain, MBA Katrin Deissner Brandon Kima Paul Saunders Laura Marwood Ph.D. Lawrence M. Marco Valencia Elena Cebanu Sally Redmond James McCormack Himanshu Sewalkar Sean D Silva Heino Schrader Rainer Zinow Owen Pettiford Mark Chalfen Alexander Greb Wouter van Heddeghem Parvathy Sankar Esther Vrieze Manish Saraswat ?