This blog kicks off a series exploring the various aspects, including challenges, benefits and more, of SAP S/4HANA. This will keep SAP users informed of new insights and useful information. You can delve into SAP S/4HANA benefits and migration challenges as we share insights.
Seamlessly embrace changing business requirements with SAP S/4HANA. Unlock Agile Business Adaptation for today’s dynamic landscape with SAP S/4HANA’s scalability, flexibility, speed, faster analytics, simplicity, lower costs, and the strength of HANA’s in-memory database.
SAP customers are facing some tough decisions, like staying on ECC, hoping that SAP pushes back its support sunset date beyond 2027, migrating to S/4HANA, or moving to an entirely different ERP system.
As of the second quarter of 2022, German software company SAP SE reported 20,000 subscribers for its S/4HANA enterprise resource planning (ERP) package.
The total subscriber figure grew significantly in recent years, from around 370 in 2015 to 10,000+ in just four years later.
Top business benefits of SAP S/4HANA
Due to the HANA in-memory database, there are many SAP S/4HANA benefits for businesses, including process automation, simplification, speed and flexibility, lower costs, and faster analytics.
The system may get more straightforward to use than ECC, while it also provides an easier transition to the cloud. Below are some of SAP S/4HANA’s top business benefits.
1) Easy adoption of changing business models
SAP ECC has been designed for the business that hasn’t observed change or needs for change in business models, whereas, in today’s expanded opportunities, companies need faster change to scale, simplification, faster adoption, particularly for mergers and acquisitions, faster adoption and uniformity of business process across plants and warehouses, faster and real-time analytics for management decisions.
According to Thomson data, almost 77% of the world’s 500 largest companies rely on SAP software tools for their transactions.
2) Simpler to launch new products into the ERP environment
In the world of consumer-packaged goods, organizations expand into new markets while adding complementary products to their offerings by acquiring smaller brands.
Before SAP S/4HANA, they needed to integrate these acquisitions into their core ECC systems, which took time and resources. SAP S/4HANA simplifies this process, allowing organizations to quickly integrate acquisitions into their core systems. This saves time and resources and allows organizations to expand into new markets and add new products faster than ever before. This agility and flexibility can give organizations a clear competitive advantage. Additionally, SAP S/4HANA provides a more comprehensive view of the organization, allowing for greater transparency and better decision-making.
3) Lower ownership costs
S/4HANA brings in features like FIORI for web-enabled solutions to access critical business processes anywhere, offers the ability to design and develop chatbots for customer, vendor, and employee self-service, helps to reduce massive operation costs and improve productivity, and offers functions like Global Available-to-Promise (Global ATP) and master data governance into the core.
Even with S/4HANA’s reduced data footprint and scalability, high performance enables organizations to share infrastructure between multiple applications that reduces the need for fewer boxes to manage means lower administrative, ownership, and maintenance costs from an infrastructure perspective.
According to ACNSOL, S/4HANA reduces data footprints by compressing tables and objects, which means your data can be reduced by as much as 2.5 times, reducing the overall cost of data management.
4) Faster analytical reporting
SAP S/4HANA Embedded Analytics is one of the critical innovations of S/4HANA. It is a collection of SAP Fiori tiles in SAP S/4HANA that enables real-time operational reporting. Embedded Analytics uses SAP Fiori as the front-end user interface, and SAP has delivered authoritative content known as Fiori analytical apps for various functional areas.
SAP S/4HANA embedded analytics comes with many predefined business contents: KPIs, reports, queries, predictive scenarios, and planning scenarios. For example, the Fiori analytical apps for production planning include the Production Planning Overview app, which provides an overview of production orders, production order confirmations, and planned orders for a selected period.
Conclusion
Business transactions and analytics capabilities in the same system also speed up insights, allowing businesses to make decisions quickly. It lets companies complete processes in one application using a single source of facts. You may not require switching between systems and applications.
Stay tuned for further benefits of S/4HANA in upcoming posts, or reach out to us for a detailed discussion of our service offerings. Our team of SAP experts can help you maximize your S/4HANA implementations for maximum efficiency and cost savings. We can also provide advice and guidance to ensure you are getting the most out of your S/4HANA investments. Contact us today to learn more.
If you’re looking to explore additional benefits, we’ve got you covered! Read our blog “Discovering Untapped Benefits of SAP S/4HANA (Beyond Part 1!)“, which offers an extensive list of advantages that will pique your interest. Don’t wait any longer, dive in now and discover the multitude of benefits waiting for you.
Author
Abhinav Patel
Enterprise Applications & SAP Specialist
Abhinav Patel is a seasoned IT Leader with over 22 years of experience in SAP technology. As a Business Head of SAP Service Line at Cygnet, Abhinav has been instrumental in driving digital transformation and innovation across the organization. With a deep understanding of SAP’s capabilities, he has successfully led several projects and initiatives that have resulted in improved efficiency, increased profitability, and enhanced customer experience.
