SAP S/4 HANA - Simple, Scalable, Sustainable and Smart!
In the age of Digital Enterprises where disruption takes place every often, Information Technology impacts every facet of business making it core like any other business function (Finance, Supply Chain or Product development etc). CXO’s expect IT to take lead in transformational change, operational excellence towards customer value addition and providing continuous innovation. IT cannot continue to operate as a black box with unlimited budgets and long implementation timelines. The name of the game is Simplicity, Sustainable, Scalable and Smart.
Various organizations and business across the world have invested heavily in SAP implementations, leveraging its business rich features, functionality and processes. Over a period of time numerous modifications, enhancements and additional features including customizations; SAP implementations have become overly complex and rigid. The increased complexity has restricted (at-least slowed down) organizations ability to simplify, innovate along with increased TCO. SAP customer base has expressed an obvious concern and frustration often questioning SAP’s transformational abilities of providing business value by offering robust yet simplified, agile and elegant solutions. SAP has made various attempts in past to address concerns including various acquisitions like Business Objects, Sybase, SuccessFactors, Ariba to name a few along with heavily investing in HANA. However it failed to deliver the results expected by industry as these solutions were introduced as on-off solutions vs integrated. SAP is not the only one, its competitor Oracle has been trying to offer its Fusion platform since last ten years.
Recently, Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP along with Dr. Hasso Plattner, Chariman of SAP the Supervisory Board launched SAP S/4HANA; calling it as the next generation of business suite and it's greatest innovation since R3 and ERP. As per Bill McDermott “SAP is redefining the concept of enterprise resource planning for the 21st century. SAP S/4HANA is about uniting software and people to build businesses that run real-time, networked and simple”. The approach embraced by SAP aligns with what I call pressing the "Reset Button" i.e leveraging last known operationally effective state.
What is S/4 HANA?
S4/HANA stands for Simple 4th Generation SAP business suite solutions that will run on HANA. S4/HANA is not a new innovation like HANA, nor it is a set of new features and functionality in SAP ERP, it is a simplified version of SAP ERP that integrates and leverages various solutions and technologies in SAP arsenal. S/4HANA is SAP’s core software reimagined, rebuilt to capitalize on the significant simplification that the HANA platform provides. It is a packaged solution that has
SAP ERP at its core (simplified) optimized to run on HANA platform, designed with SAP Fiori for richer user experience that is easily configurable and deployed on Cloud and On Premise. It’s key objective is to deliver massive simplifications, enrichment and innovations to its diverse customer base.
The simplification comes by eliminating aggregates and indices, eliminating duplication of data, systematically separating Actual from Historical, and not requiring batch transaction or analytics queries. It provides an integrated Transaction Processing and Analytics data system that fundamentally changes how we build the enterprise software. S4/HANA will provide real-time access to all its users and use cases, and new features that capitalize on the fact that all queries come back fast enough for the user to explore the data.
Simple – Complexity is the most intractable business problem that all companies face today. Today’s reality is that many companies have system environments that are difficult to manage acting as enemy to agility and innovation. S4/HANA allows us to unify all the ERP data sets – unlocking deeper integration scenarios and
another depth of insights. Integrating SAP ECC with CRM, SRM, SCM, PLM and BW is a project in its own. S4/HANA consolidates various systems into one resulting in no overhead of integration and data flow across various systems. As various applications will operate as single integrated systems, the data and information across those systems will always be in sync. This will simplify the code that executes in SAP application layer and will improve performance. Guided Configuration, reduced data foot print higher through put and faster analytics will further help IT to keep the system future ready.
Scalable and Sustainable – Internet of Things is driving innovation and development cycles are getting shorter and more frequent often putting a demand and expectation on IT systems to keep up the pace. One of the key challenges faced by current SAP implementation is Total Cost of Ownership esp for upgrades
and new features. In last few years SAP has been strongly advocating migrating to and/or implementing HANA but the software maturity coupled with hardware, implementation and migration cost has been a major hurdle in building business case. Customers had limited options available where they leverage Cloud environment for enterprise class implementing. However at the same time, there have been numerous SAP customers who have been able reap benefits from their investments in HANA. S4/HANA addresses challenge by offering cloud and on premise solution making the solution more sustainable. Additionally companies don’t have to spend millions of dollars on HANA hardware - simplified data model, Dynamic Tiering and Smart Data Access will help in shrinking the footprint of HANA hardware. HANA does support Scale Up (Vertical) and Scale Out (Horizontal) options from the very beginning but you cannot mix and match the different hardware configurations. This does put a constraint on organization as they grow because they may end up in a situation where they have to upgrade their entire stack (Master, Index and Slave nodes/servers).
Smart (User Experience) – I was in Australia on a speaking engagement on SAP User Experience and Mobility. On my way to the hotel, the cab driver inquired about me purpose of my visit. Upon learning that I am on SAP speaking engagement,
he immediately told me that he works in plant and all his co-workers complain about SAP UI and various challenges associated with using and learning SAP. My interaction with him made me think deeper – Has SAP over complicated its UI by having hundreds and thousands of screens/views and dozens of UI related technologies? Of course SAP response is to implement Fiori and Personas to have better UI but it has to be a separate project. How many organizations will be willing to build a case of having simplified and enhanced User Experience and demonstrate ROI on it especially when business leaders are still waiting and complaining about the core functionality? In the age of Mobility, enriched User Experience is an assumed thing. S4/HANA addresses this issue head on but having its UI is based on Fiori (HTML 5). During the launch event, SAP demonstrated workflow that can be managed through Smart Watch. Let’s hope SAP continues in investing and integrating in richer UI technologies that can meet the expectations of today’s mobile workforce.
Why go for SAP S/4 HANA?
Consolidation of systems ERP, CRM, SRM, SCM, PLM – all in one
Ease and simpler system upgrades
Personalized, Responsive and intuitive User Experience – Fiori based UI supporting access from various end user computing technologies including wearable’s.
Guided Configuration for faster setup and shorter development/deployment cycles.
Cloud (Private/Public/Hybrid) and On premise solution supporting multi-tenancy.
Reduced Data Footprint from improved and faster in-memory processing; removed unnecessary indices, aggregates
Integration of OLAP and OLTP
My Point of View
It is quite refreshing to see SAP has recognized the need to simplify things and going back to its core competencies of world class enterprise software. There is a clear writing on wall the next generation of software has to be simple, scalable and sustainable. SAP must ensure that it doesn't try to pitch and oversell SAP HANA as a magic pill that solves everything. SAP memory based solution must co-exist with other open source technologies especially in the world of Big Data and Internet of Things. To keep up with speed of innovation and change, companies will prefer keeping their options open that including leveraging best of the breed solution vs SAP lock in for its enterprise needs. Integration will be a key in achieving it and SAP must focus on how it can enhance its integration capabilities (On Prim and In Cloud). Its current offering of NW PI and HCI needs to be architected and aligned with S4/HANA. SAP needs to ensure that this initiative is supported and sustained by continuous innovation that includes delivery and integration of various modules in S4/HANA. SAP needs to publish its roadmap of S4/HANA alignment and integration with various industry verticals like FMS, Utilities and others. There is no doubt that it is a bold and right step. As Hasso quoted on indicating “If this doesn't work, we’re dead. It’s that simple.”
Source of images - SAP
Author is Chair for ASUG SIG Integration Technologies and E-Business and Customer Chair for ASUG SAP Influence Council on Cloud Packaged Solution covering Ariba, Cloud for Customer (C4C), Success Factors and HANA Cloud Integration (HCI).
