SAP S/4HANA provides next generation process that connects and organizes the entire business taking the advantage of artificial intelligence (AI) so that every employee can make quick decision. Some of the capabilities of S/4HANA includes finance, supply chain, manufacturing, research and development, sales, procurement, ectara which are further discussed.
3.4.1 Finance
Finance is one of the modules included in SAP that deals in managing financial transactions within enterprises. This module helps employees to manage and report real-time data involved in financial transactions. Following are some of the activities and tasks offered by the Finance module:
• Faster report generation and reduction in bill processing time
• Improves the profitability and cost with comprehensive analytics
• Enables subscription-based revenue model
• Simplify accounting and financial close process by combining financial and management ac-counting and profitability data into a single universal journal.
• Optimizes straight-through process with real time analytics, audit trails and compliance reporting to predict cash flow accurately, manage liquidity efficiently that helps to improve treasury and financial risk processes. (SAP 2019.)
3.4.2 Supply Chain
Supply chain management is one of the key modules in SAP that controls production planning, business forecasting and demand planning. The process helps suppliers, customers, manufacturers, business part-ners and retailers connect with each other to manage supply chain process effectively and efficiently.
Following are some of the benefits offered by this module:
• Lower inventory costs
• Helps in providing more accurate commitment dates to customers by considering business rules, material availability
• Help ensure on-time delivery to the right locations by supporting the complete transport lifecycle for domestic and international freight
• Optimizes inventory levels and processes by coordinating goods movements across inbound, outbound and physical inventory processes to minimize waste, loss and damage. (SAP 2019.)
3.4.3 Manufacturing
Production planning (PP) is one of the modules offered by SAP which consists of master data, system configuration and transactions in order to accomplish the plan procedure for production. The module collaborates with master data, sales and operation planning, resource planning, material requirement planning, product cost planning and so on while working towards production management in enterprises.
Following are some of the activities of SAP PP module:
• Helps to improve operational efficiency reducing the delivery delays
• Improves production planning by coordinating manufacturing operations from material require-ments to inventory and adjusting plans based on real-time information from the business, suppli-ers’ network and plant floor.
• Supports complex assembly processes by creating an efficient plan covering the areas such as material requirements, production and capacity planning, bills of materials, routing, factory lay-out and machines models.
• Optimizes production and material flow and enables flexible and efficient manufacturing process by using the methods such as lean control, continuous improvement and just-in-time production.
• Boosts quality and lowers cost by fostering collaboration between R&D and manufacturing teams with relevant data and smooth handovers of engineering documents, bills of materials and design changes.
• Enhances quality management by running closed-loop quality management process to prevent the issues. (SAP 2019.)
3.4.4 Research and development (R&D) and engineering
SAP R&D and engineering is one of the capabilities offered by SAP that Manages, translates and inte-grates customer driven innovations to optimize project efficiency by delivering high quality projects on time and within scope and maintaining continuous design standards. Following are some of the activities offered by the module:
• Manages, translates and integrates customer driven innovations to optimize project efficiency by delivering high quality projects on time and within scope and maintaining continuous design standards.
• Manages enterprise projects effectively investing in the right projects by aligning the project portfolio with the enterprise strategy to identify opportunities and manage resource.
• Accelerates the market by increasing the efficiency of Bill of Material (BOM) management and enabling closed loop inspection planning in accordance with industries standards such as ISO/TS 16949 and ISO 9000.
• Boosts efficiency with requirement driven process by linking requirements to product data, ana-lyzing requirements and gaining insights from downstream process.
• Reduces warranty costs and improve service levels by embedding sensors into the product that helps in monitoring and enabling remote diagnosis and maintenance. (SAP 2019.)
3.4.5 Sales
SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) module deals in managing all transactions ranging from inquiries, pro-posals, quotation, and pricing that helps greatly in inventory control and management. Following are some of the capabilities offered by SD module:
• Improves revenue and cash flow by managing order-to-cash process flawlessly and providing access to accurate, real time information.
• Supports sales force and sales manager providing the customers data on interactions, activities and territories.
• Enhances cashflow and manages subscription billing more efficiently.
• Decreases the lead time for sales quotation with a single source of true and improved data access.
• Helps to expand sales by improving the product design based on customer feedback. (SAP 2019.)
3.4.6 Procurement
SAP Material Management (MM) is one of the modules offered by SAP that manages procurement processes within the organization. Following are some of the capabilities offered by MM module that helps to enhance the procurement practices:
• Provides extensive insights on purchasing cost by analyzing purchase orders, invoices and con-tracts and evaluates supplier performance with real-time data access.
• Streamlines operational purchasing having insight to the preferred suppliers and agreements.
• Automates sourcing and contract management by accessing every sourcing data point in one system and managing automated procurement documentation.
• Reduces procurement cost enabling the centralized procurement process instead of multiple ap-provals.
• Helps to reduce supply-chain risk by improving supply chain visibility to identify and form re-lationships with an optimal mix of suppliers and partners who can best serve the organizational strategic vision. (SAP 2019.)
4 IMPLEMENTATION OF SAP S/4HANA
A lot of process and organizational changes occurs during the implementation of S/4HANA. Depending upon the organizational needs and available resources, the whole operation might take up to several years. Virtually every person in the organization is involved weather they are the part of SAP technical support organization (TSO) or the actual end-users of the SAP software. Therefore, to meet the organi-zational goals in terms of budget, product quality and time, it is important that the implementation pro-cess is planned and executed using a solid method. At the same time, various methodologies have been provided by the SAP as a part of implementation such as Accelerated SAP (ASAP) for on-premise and SAP Launch for the cloud. However, the latest implementation method provided by the SAP is SAP Activate. Before we go ahead with the SAP activate methodology, lets quickly review the SAP ASAP methodology and find the differences. (Singh 2017.)