The rollout of the new SAP S/4HANA suite generated quite a buzz in the IT industry and in IT departments across all industry sectors. But what’s the right strategy for SAP users should they migrate, or should they wait and see? To help businesses make an informed decision AEB’s fact sheet “SAP S/4HANA – what the new generation of ERP brings to businesses” introduces the main features of S/4HANA, analyses its market acceptance and explains the criticisms that have been voiced so far.
The fact sheet by AEB, a leading provider of global trade and logistics solutions, offers sound support in order to help businesses find the right implementation and upgrade strategy. It outlines the benefits of early and delayed migration, respectively and even provides information on licensing models and migration strategies.
SAP launched S/4HANA in February 2015 with a veritable marketing blitz, promoting it as the next- generation ERP system and hailing it as the crux and potential centrepiece of its customers’ digitisation strategy. Some 3,200 businesses have already signed up, according to Prof. Hasso Plattner, SAP’s co- founder and Supervisory Board Chairman. That’s quite an impressive launch.
Among the main benefits of S/4HANA are the simplification of the overall system architecture, the programme structure, and the data model. Compared with SAP ERP (ECC 6.0, Enhancement Package 8), S/4HANA has over 50% fewer lines of code, tables, and data elements. That means less maintenance, shorter innovation cycles, and quicker system response times – all of which translates into better performance. Performance gains also come from the SAP HANA® in-memory platform, which replaces the conventional relational databases. A third benefit is the new SAP Fiori user interface which is much more user-friendly.
Critics in the business community cite the scarcity of use cases, saying there are not enough applications to actually justify the expense of a migration. Many SAP users have begun to hammer out an S/4HANA strategy and are analysing the relevance of its strengths and weaknesses for their own companies.
SAP S/4HANA – What the new generation of ERP brings to businesses can be downloaded free of charge at https://www.aeb.com/intl/media/fact-sheet-sap-s4hana.php.
