1. What is SAP S/4 HANA? SAP S/4HANA, short for SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA, is SAP’s next-generation business suite. It is a new product fully built on the most advanced in-memory platform today–SAP HANA–and modern design principles with the SAP Fiori user experience (UX). SAP S/4HANA delivers massive simplifications (customer adoption, data model, user experience, decision making, business processes, and models) and innovations (Internet of Things, Big Data, business networks, and mobile-first) to help businesses run simple in a digital and networked economy.
2. What does the name of SAP S/4HANA stand for? SAP S/4HANA is the short form for SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA. It brings the next big wave of SAP innovation to our customers, similar to the transition from SAP R/2 to SAP R/3. SAP S/4HANA is a new product with a new code line.
3. What are the deployment options offered? SAP currently plans to offer on-premise, cloud (public and managed), and hybrid deployments to give real choice to customers. SAP S/4HANA also gives customers the option to fully leverage the new HANA multi-tenancy functionality as provided by the SAP HANA platform (currently support package 9) for the cloud.
4. How does SAP S/4HANA relate to SAP Simple Finance powered by SAP HANA? The SAP Simple Finance solution marked the first step in our SAP S/4 HANA road map for customers. The solution has demonstrated the value of simplification (for example, no indexes, no aggregates, and no redundancies) and instant insight in Finance. SAP S/4HANA, on-premise edition leverages the full scope of SAP Accounting powered by SAP HANA included in SAP Simple Finance. SAP S/4HANA, managed cloud edition is intended to leverage the same scope. SAP S/4HANA, public cloud edition is planned to focus on a selected scope of SAP Simple Finance in alignment with the key requirements in finance.
5. What is the benefit to the data model for using an in-memory platform? SAP S/4HANA delivers high-volume transaction processing (OLTP) and high volume real-time analytical processes (OLAP) based on a unified data model without the redundant data layers typically required by traditional RDBMS based systems. This reduces TCO while providing new opportunities to increase business value from existing investments. Examples for redundant data layers are custom-built layers based on database tuning efforts such as secondary indexes, or application built-in performance accelerators such as aggregate tables or multiple general ledger versions for different managerial reporting needs.
INTERVIEW QUESTIONS FOR “S4HANA”
The massive simplifications of the data model and the data processing layers enable business and technological innovations on a broad scale across all lines-of-business and industry solutions. The new application architecture simplifies system landscape architectures and accelerates cloud deployments on an economical scale.
6. Do SAP S/4HANA and SAP Business Suite share the same data semantic? With SAP S/4HANA, SAP has developed a new product that leverages basic data structures and elements of the SAP Business Suite for maximum compatibility, nondisruptive migration and hybrid scenarios. However, SAP S/4HANA provides new business functionality on top of these data structures natively built on the SAP HANA platform and designed with the SAP Fiori UX principles. SAP Business Suite on-premise customers on the latest enhancement package can easily move to this new product simply by migrating to the SAP HANA database and applying the exchange innovation (new code)to their current SAP Business Suite environment.
7. In simple finance, can I have a new field based on business need which can link with logistics? For example, a team field which will drive from sales Oder which will flow to GL posting? You can add a field to the universal journal easily but you will have to create derivation logic of some kind to fill it and as with any derivation the more complex you make the logic to fill it, the more you’ll impact performance during posting.
8. What is a “system-driven” implementation? We want to radically simplify the implementation of SAP S/4HANA so that customers enjoy rapid success and payback. This is particularly relevant in the cloud, of course, where customers expect to deploy a pre-configured system. SAP therefore provides ready-to-run business processes based on best practices that can be activated. During the activation, the system configures itself. The SAP S/4HANA Guided Configuration facilitates customers to personalize the processes delivered by SAP. Within the app “Manage your solution” easy SAP Fiori UI´s can be used to maintain e.g. the organizational structure, approval thresholds or other individual settings.
9. What are the requirements for moving to SAP S/4HANA?
The initial path is to move to SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA and then to implement packages that contain the simplifications. Currently, these come in the
form of SAP Simple Finance, though SAP Simple Logistics is slated for release soon and further simplifications will follow in 2015.
10. Is SAP S/4HANA, cloud edition a public cloud offering? Yes. The SAP S/4HANA, cloud edition has all the qualities of a public cloud offering. Please note that the SAP S/4HANA, cloud enterprise edition provides additional services for customers that require broader extensions and configuration capabilities.
11. How does SAP S/4HANA relate to SAP BW?
SAP BW will continue to represent the preferred solution for strategic enterprise data warehousing to help customers consolidate data from different sources (including SAP and nonSAP data sources) and get a consistent view across the enterprise. SAP BW has also been optimized to run on the SAP HANA platform: SAP BW powered by SAP HANA. SAP S/4HANA delivers built-in real-time operational reporting capabilities covering all typical analytics use-cases in the context of the suite. Therefore, SAP BW will continue to act as our central enterprise data warehouse solution.
12. How much experience do potential integration partners have?
Our integration partners are of course working with the rapid-deployment solutions to some extent. And our service partners already have broad experience of implementing SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA for our customers. In fact, over 60% of implementations are performed by partners and integration partners, not by SAP. We operate roll out programs to inform and educate our partners about all of our new solutions. And our Global Partner Organization (GPO) holds regular “enablement sessions” at which it brings partners up to speed on the new technologies and explains to them in detail how SAP S/4HANA will impact their work.
13. Which skill sets are required?
In most cases, it’s the implementation partner that handles the project, so customers don’t really need to get bogged down in the details. However, more information is available at SCN, SAP’s Community Network. Both, partners and customers can refer to.
14. Is it possible to migrate company-specific customizations?
In principle, yes. When we developed our solutions, we took particular care to ensure that they would be “backwards-compatible.” In other words, the customer can keep customizations and continue to use them after the migration. However, this does not always apply to modifications. Take the analogy of a house and
imagine that the customer has not only added a balcony but has also modified the building too. In this case, the function of the house may be affected, whereas the “balconies” will be fine.
15. How does SAP S/4HANA relate to SAP Business By Design and SAP Business One?
SAP Business ByDesign remains a dedicated end-to-end cloud ERP application for midsize companies that want to run their entire business on single cloud application. SAP Business One remains a dedicated ERP option for small businesses in all industries.
16. How does SAP HANA Cloud Platform relate to SAP S/4HANA?
In the context of SAP S/4HANA, SAP HANA Cloud Platform serves as an extension platform and agility layer. It is possible to build specific capabilities extending the scope of SAP S/4HANA by either integrating non-SAP functions or building your own capabilities. The cloud platform not only serves as the development platform but also as the runtime foundation for the developed solutions. The extensions built on the cloud platform can run against both cloud and on-premise deployments of SAP S/4HANA.
17. How does the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud service relate to SAP S/4HANA?
For SAP S/4HANA, managed cloud edition, we are leveraging the same infrastructure as a service (IaaS), data centers, and security qualities, though the lifecycle management is different. Innovation updates for the cloud editions are planned on a quarterly basis, to be consumed by the customer, and managed by SAP
18. SAP Fiori is mentioned a great deal, but we do not hear much about SAP Screen Personas in the context of SAP S/4HANA. Why is that?
SAP Screen Personas is a critical part of the SAP S/4HANA user experience strategy. It is the ideal solution for scenarios not yet covered by Fiori applications or for an organization’s custom transactions. Customers can use SAP Screen Personas to simplify their existing SAP GUI screens or WebDynpro ABAP applications to meet their unique needs and increase productivity. SAP is providing design guides and SAP Fiori-inspired sample content for SAP Screen Personas.
The SAP Fiori UX strategy aims to transform the transactional operational model to a role-oriented one. Since our focus is on delivering the SAP Fiori UX, we do not highlight the underlying technologies that provide this capability to the users.
19. Which SAP S/4HANA applications are available right now? Is it just SAP Simple Finance? What’s the difference between the cloud and on-premise offerings?
If I implement SAP S/4HANA on premise, I’m technically implementing SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA and deploying the “exchange innovation” for SAP Simple Finance. But that’s just the first step.
SAP will continue to deliver additional exchange innovations that replace the existing SAP Business Suite code with the new SAP S/4HANA code. At the moment, the customer receives the code for the new accounting solution. We plan to ship the code for SAP Simple Logistics at the end of the year and further new code in subsequent years. By the time we reach the end of this journey, we will have incrementally switched the customer’s entire system without subjecting it to the upheaval of a big-bang migration.
The situation is different if the customer opts to deploy SAP S/4HANA in the cloud. In this case, the customer gets the entire solution at one go. We plan to release a public cloud version at the end of the first quarter of 2015 and a version for managed cloud in the second quarter.
20. Can customers run different sap s/4hana editions in parallel in their enterprise architecture?
Yes.sap s/4 hana editions are integrated and run mostly on the same data semantic.
2. What does the name of SAP S/4HANA stand for? SAP S/4HANA is the short form for SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA. It brings the next big wave of SAP innovation to our customers, similar to the transition from SAP R/2 to SAP R/3. SAP S/4HANA is a new product with a new code line.
3. What are the deployment options offered? SAP currently plans to offer on-premise, cloud (public and managed), and hybrid deployments to give real choice to customers. SAP S/4HANA also gives customers the option to fully leverage the new HANA multi-tenancy functionality as provided by the SAP HANA platform (currently support package 9) for the cloud.
4. How does SAP S/4HANA relate to SAP Simple Finance powered by SAP HANA? The SAP Simple Finance solution marked the first step in our SAP S/4 HANA road map for customers. The solution has demonstrated the value of simplification (for example, no indexes, no aggregates, and no redundancies) and instant insight in Finance. SAP S/4HANA, on-premise edition leverages the full scope of SAP Accounting powered by SAP HANA included in SAP Simple Finance. SAP S/4HANA, managed cloud edition is intended to leverage the same scope. SAP S/4HANA, public cloud edition is planned to focus on a selected scope of SAP Simple Finance in alignment with the key requirements in finance.
5. What is the benefit to the data model for using an in-memory platform? SAP S/4HANA delivers high-volume transaction processing (OLTP) and high volume real-time analytical processes (OLAP) based on a unified data model without the redundant data layers typically required by traditional RDBMS based systems. This reduces TCO while providing new opportunities to increase business value from existing investments. Examples for redundant data layers are custom-built layers based on database tuning efforts such as secondary indexes, or application built-in performance accelerators such as aggregate tables or multiple general ledger versions for different managerial reporting needs.
INTERVIEW QUESTIONS FOR “S4HANA”
The massive simplifications of the data model and the data processing layers enable business and technological innovations on a broad scale across all lines-of-business and industry solutions. The new application architecture simplifies system landscape architectures and accelerates cloud deployments on an economical scale.
6. Do SAP S/4HANA and SAP Business Suite share the same data semantic? With SAP S/4HANA, SAP has developed a new product that leverages basic data structures and elements of the SAP Business Suite for maximum compatibility, nondisruptive migration and hybrid scenarios. However, SAP S/4HANA provides new business functionality on top of these data structures natively built on the SAP HANA platform and designed with the SAP Fiori UX principles. SAP Business Suite on-premise customers on the latest enhancement package can easily move to this new product simply by migrating to the SAP HANA database and applying the exchange innovation (new code)to their current SAP Business Suite environment.
7. In simple finance, can I have a new field based on business need which can link with logistics? For example, a team field which will drive from sales Oder which will flow to GL posting? You can add a field to the universal journal easily but you will have to create derivation logic of some kind to fill it and as with any derivation the more complex you make the logic to fill it, the more you’ll impact performance during posting.
8. What is a “system-driven” implementation? We want to radically simplify the implementation of SAP S/4HANA so that customers enjoy rapid success and payback. This is particularly relevant in the cloud, of course, where customers expect to deploy a pre-configured system. SAP therefore provides ready-to-run business processes based on best practices that can be activated. During the activation, the system configures itself. The SAP S/4HANA Guided Configuration facilitates customers to personalize the processes delivered by SAP. Within the app “Manage your solution” easy SAP Fiori UI´s can be used to maintain e.g. the organizational structure, approval thresholds or other individual settings.
9. What are the requirements for moving to SAP S/4HANA?
The initial path is to move to SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA and then to implement packages that contain the simplifications. Currently, these come in the
form of SAP Simple Finance, though SAP Simple Logistics is slated for release soon and further simplifications will follow in 2015.
10. Is SAP S/4HANA, cloud edition a public cloud offering? Yes. The SAP S/4HANA, cloud edition has all the qualities of a public cloud offering. Please note that the SAP S/4HANA, cloud enterprise edition provides additional services for customers that require broader extensions and configuration capabilities.
11. How does SAP S/4HANA relate to SAP BW?
SAP BW will continue to represent the preferred solution for strategic enterprise data warehousing to help customers consolidate data from different sources (including SAP and nonSAP data sources) and get a consistent view across the enterprise. SAP BW has also been optimized to run on the SAP HANA platform: SAP BW powered by SAP HANA. SAP S/4HANA delivers built-in real-time operational reporting capabilities covering all typical analytics use-cases in the context of the suite. Therefore, SAP BW will continue to act as our central enterprise data warehouse solution.
12. How much experience do potential integration partners have?
Our integration partners are of course working with the rapid-deployment solutions to some extent. And our service partners already have broad experience of implementing SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA for our customers. In fact, over 60% of implementations are performed by partners and integration partners, not by SAP. We operate roll out programs to inform and educate our partners about all of our new solutions. And our Global Partner Organization (GPO) holds regular “enablement sessions” at which it brings partners up to speed on the new technologies and explains to them in detail how SAP S/4HANA will impact their work.
13. Which skill sets are required?
In most cases, it’s the implementation partner that handles the project, so customers don’t really need to get bogged down in the details. However, more information is available at SCN, SAP’s Community Network. Both, partners and customers can refer to.
14. Is it possible to migrate company-specific customizations?
In principle, yes. When we developed our solutions, we took particular care to ensure that they would be “backwards-compatible.” In other words, the customer can keep customizations and continue to use them after the migration. However, this does not always apply to modifications. Take the analogy of a house and
imagine that the customer has not only added a balcony but has also modified the building too. In this case, the function of the house may be affected, whereas the “balconies” will be fine.
15. How does SAP S/4HANA relate to SAP Business By Design and SAP Business One?
SAP Business ByDesign remains a dedicated end-to-end cloud ERP application for midsize companies that want to run their entire business on single cloud application. SAP Business One remains a dedicated ERP option for small businesses in all industries.
16. How does SAP HANA Cloud Platform relate to SAP S/4HANA?
In the context of SAP S/4HANA, SAP HANA Cloud Platform serves as an extension platform and agility layer. It is possible to build specific capabilities extending the scope of SAP S/4HANA by either integrating non-SAP functions or building your own capabilities. The cloud platform not only serves as the development platform but also as the runtime foundation for the developed solutions. The extensions built on the cloud platform can run against both cloud and on-premise deployments of SAP S/4HANA.
17. How does the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud service relate to SAP S/4HANA?
For SAP S/4HANA, managed cloud edition, we are leveraging the same infrastructure as a service (IaaS), data centers, and security qualities, though the lifecycle management is different. Innovation updates for the cloud editions are planned on a quarterly basis, to be consumed by the customer, and managed by SAP
18. SAP Fiori is mentioned a great deal, but we do not hear much about SAP Screen Personas in the context of SAP S/4HANA. Why is that?
SAP Screen Personas is a critical part of the SAP S/4HANA user experience strategy. It is the ideal solution for scenarios not yet covered by Fiori applications or for an organization’s custom transactions. Customers can use SAP Screen Personas to simplify their existing SAP GUI screens or WebDynpro ABAP applications to meet their unique needs and increase productivity. SAP is providing design guides and SAP Fiori-inspired sample content for SAP Screen Personas.
The SAP Fiori UX strategy aims to transform the transactional operational model to a role-oriented one. Since our focus is on delivering the SAP Fiori UX, we do not highlight the underlying technologies that provide this capability to the users.
19. Which SAP S/4HANA applications are available right now? Is it just SAP Simple Finance? What’s the difference between the cloud and on-premise offerings?
If I implement SAP S/4HANA on premise, I’m technically implementing SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA and deploying the “exchange innovation” for SAP Simple Finance. But that’s just the first step.
SAP will continue to deliver additional exchange innovations that replace the existing SAP Business Suite code with the new SAP S/4HANA code. At the moment, the customer receives the code for the new accounting solution. We plan to ship the code for SAP Simple Logistics at the end of the year and further new code in subsequent years. By the time we reach the end of this journey, we will have incrementally switched the customer’s entire system without subjecting it to the upheaval of a big-bang migration.
The situation is different if the customer opts to deploy SAP S/4HANA in the cloud. In this case, the customer gets the entire solution at one go. We plan to release a public cloud version at the end of the first quarter of 2015 and a version for managed cloud in the second quarter.
20. Can customers run different sap s/4hana editions in parallel in their enterprise architecture?
Yes.sap s/4 hana editions are integrated and run mostly on the same data semantic.
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