S/4HANA 1709 – All you need to Know

Officially SAP released S/4HANA 1709 on September 15th 2017. More than 1000 companies across the globe are live with S/4HANA and this is a clear sign that S/4HANA product has reached maturity. This article illustrates the evolution of the new release, available latest tools for SAP S/4HANA adoption, including functional innovations and enhancements.

Each quarter sees SAP releasing Future Package. On-Premise installations will allow customers to decide for themselves when such installations of upgrades occur to deliver user friendly solutions. SAP manages Cloud deployments in terms of upgrades and maintenance, whereas upgrades are handled based on automatic basis.

S/4HANA has retained its great performance in Real-time Analytics, Simulation and being able to manage multiple dimensions simultaneously. Despite predictions about its growth and future, the core values in S/4HANA remain the same and unchanged.

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The Important Highlights of the 1709 release

Source: blogs.sap.com

User Experience

Along with S/4HANA 1610 release, Fiori 2.0 was launched for a highly consistent user experience across the every line of business. With the latest 1709 release, Fiori has evolved further into something the users will find highly efficient.

The On-Premise version of this release comes with a digital assistant named “CoPilot” which uses HANA enterprise search to enable single click access for every object that exists. CoPilot comes with these capabilities:

Now, the digital assistant “CoPilot” is made available for On-premise. CoPilot makes use of HANA enterprise search to make every object which comes up accessible with one click. The main capabilities of SAP CoPilot include:

1. User can make notes in Apps: CoPilot links the notes to the Apps in which they are created.
2. Screen Shots: Users can create and share Screenshots from Fiori Apps.
3. Recognize Business Objects: CoPilot identifies business objects from current applications in which users work and permits them to add the objects to notes.
4. In-context chat: This will enable users to chat with colleagues and share notes, screenshots and business objects as well.
5. Quick actions: This enables users to rapidly create Business Objects within CoPilot such as contact persons and more.

Along with CoPilot, Object Pages, the Overview Pages, and List Reports capabilities are improved with this release.

Finance innovations in S/4HANA 1709

Document splitting has been made available in this release which is really useful when it comes to migration. Implementation of document splitting is possible now in phases instead of jumping to it directly alongside migration.

SAP Leonardo means that Machine Learning capabilities are added in the application. Various apps have been made available in 1709 release which makes use of Machine Learning. A great example for this is the Cash Application. Here the system makes use of all existing historical data to learn matching criteria so that payments can be cleared better when bank statements are being imported.

Transportation Management in S/4HANA 1709

Initially, the application related to Transportation Management was a standalone application. With S/4HANA 1709 it is integrated into the S/4 Core. This means it is part of one system, one data model and has a consolidated landscape.

Advanced Variant Configuration in S/4HANA 1709

There was a pronounced lack of a flexible and great looking product configurator for manufacturing enterprises in both previous releases of S/4HANA. It was seen that third party solutions were widely used instead of standard SAP solution for product configuration

The new variant configurator will be able to support the Lot Size of One in a marketplace which is dominated by trends of customization and individualization of products. Along with the new simulation engine which is developed for the advanced variant configurator, there are also brand new Apps which are available in Fiori to improve user experience.

Catch Weight Management (CWM)

CWM is an Industry term associated with consumer products and food processing Businesses. While this functionality is not new, it was always a standalone application. With the current release of S/4HANA, this application has been integrated into the core, just like Transportation Management and EWM (1610 release). The purpose for CWM is landscape consolidation and integration of the data sources.

HANA 2 and relation to S/4HANA 1709

The release of 1709 makes HANA 2 mandatory as the database platform for S/4HANA 1709 is actually built on HANA 2. This includes a set of enhancements such as a new management cockpit which will include security and disaster recovery. The key advantages here include added clustering capabilities such as the Active/Active clustering capability.

Active/Active clustering means that users can actually do something productive with their secondary instance of HANA instead of using it for disaster recovery and backup. Therefore some of the analytical workloads can be redirected to the secondary instance. This functionality was already available in 1610 FSP1, and now it is a standard capability in S/4HANA 1709.

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New Migration Cockpit in S/4HANA 1709

S/4HANA 1610 includes data migration tools. Now users now have the Migration Cockpit, Migration Object Modeler (MOM) and even the Rapid Data Migration (SAP Data Services) tools to speed things up all-round. Whereas S/4HANA 1709, is built with more content and number of supported Business Objects.

It is worth noting that the Rapid Data Migration tool requires a separate installation. But unlike Rapid Data Migration, the Migration Cockpit and the Migration Object Modeler are embedded tools which can be used with S/4HANA on a plug and play basis. LSMW is still available but in future, the users will prefer data migration tool.

Conclusion

All the features mentioned above make it clear that S/4HANA has finally come out of age and is ready to be used by global enterprises right out of the box.

Source: goo.gl/g7haNa

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