With the launch of GROW with SAP, we deliver cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) that you can adopt with speed and predictability while benefiting from continuous innovation. With the latest major update of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, we are delivering new modern experiences, foundational capabilities, built-in intelligence, and core ERP innovations to help improve organizational and employee productivity.
Modern and Intelligent Experience
We deliver a built-in, intelligent, modern experience across all our business processes and are delivering several enhancements to help make the SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition user experience more modern, productive, and collaborative for end users and IT. Some highlights include:
- The existing Create Sales Orders – Automated Extraction app has been enhanced with artificial intelligence (AI) and now enables auto-completion of sales order data. Follow-up processes, such as delivery of the sales order, may be blocked if certain information is missing when a sales order is created. The incompletion log now warns the user whenever a configurable set of fields is incomplete, helping to ensure missing data is manually filled in. The user is assisted by receiving recommendations of the most probable values for these fields, based on historic data. This solution is planned for delivery later this year.
- You can access your work through spaces and pages in My Home on any device. With the 2308 release, you can now personalize the menu bar to your needs by adding, removing, or adapting the sort order of spaces displayed.
Personalize the space menu for My Home. Click to enlarge.
- The Share as Tab feature is now generally available. You can accelerate decision-making and improve collaboration by sharing business data from SAP Fiori apps through tabs in Microsoft Teams channels, groups, and chats.
- SAP Start is SAP’s new central entry point for all SAP cloud business solutions. It provides intuitive and easy access to the most relevant business information from all integrated SAP cloud solutions in one central place. This is now available for all SAP customers with a RISE with SAP or GROW with SAP contract, or an SAP Build Work Zone standard subscription and will be available to all customers soon.
- Your IT users can now use the System News in My Home to get an overview of relevant system news. No additional tools or information sources are required. This helps reduce efforts to identify what information is relevant for your system and reduce the risk to miss critical system information.
- Your IT users can also define color-coding for different system types, such as development or test. A color-coded system info bar in the header of SAP Fiori launchpad indicates the system role and system name.
Core ERP Innovations
With seamless and modern project management, billing, and planning experiences, organizations can run their service business and financial processes effectively. Here are some highlights for finance and service-centric industries:
- The buying 360 capability empowers your casual users to shop via catalogs and marketplaces with full transparency on their requests. They can get tailored recommendations and be guided through the procurement process while the system helps ensure compliance, including approval processes. The processes are highly automated and require the attention of the operational purchasers only in exceptional cases. This allows buyers to focus on higher-value activities and can increase user satisfaction.
- The credit checks for solution orders enable you to use credit management in sales items, service order items, and service contract items so that the solution can be provided without financial risk. This helps avoid revenue loss by checking the creditability of your customers before starting the delivery and service fulfillment.
- We facilitate the financial close process for accountants by providing automated supervision of closing tasks with account balance validation. We have added the new SAP Fiori apps Manage Balance Validation Rules and Groups and View Balance Validation Results to enable maintenance and execution of validation rules. These apps are seamlessly integrated with SAP S/4HANA Cloud for advanced financial closing to help further increase automation and acceleration of entity closing.
- The new version of Manage Journal Entries offers significantly enhanced usability based on user research, including direct access to more related apps and functions, greater detail in the list of journal entries, and clearer navigation between journal entries and line items.
We are committed to continuously expanding our set of ready-to-use capabilities needed to run your business processes. Here are some of the 2308 highlights for product- and manufacturing-centric industries:
- By using wave management to control warehouse activities, you can increase efficiency by grouping warehouse request items into waves and releasing them together as packages.
- Transportation demand and capacities are frequently measured by floor space in trucks and containers. You can now use loading meter or pallet space consistently in the entire process from demand generation, planning, and subcontracting to charge calculation and settlement.
- With the Logistics Tracking app for milestone-based supply chain monitoring of materials and proactive handling of risks, we enable reporting with analytical capabilities across the field logistics supply chain for all logistics items throughout forward and return processes.
SaaS Foundation
Our software-as-a-service (SaaS) foundation helps ensure that businesses can streamline their operations, reduce manual efforts, and focus on their core activities while staying compliant with local regulations. In addition to localization, we invested heavily in other foundational topics, such as an improved E2E onboarding experience to make it easier for you to get up and running.
- We now offer four new local versions for Israel, Peru, Serbia (subsidiary only), and Ukraine (subsidiary only).
- Multiple scope items for the existing standard 40 local versions were released to increase business scope across the countries.
- Three new countries (India, Mexico, and South Korea) have been developed for SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management.
- We accelerated the business configuration by 50% with mass upload from Excel templates for over 1,200 configuration objects in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition by using SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). This allows you to save time and effort when setting up your business configurations.
- The extension of the baseline implementation for professional services results in a 70% reduction in time to value for your initial implementations thanks to predefined accelerators. We can accelerate your implementation to under 37 days by offering templates and automation for configuration, data migration, and testing.
For more information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, check out these links:
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition release info
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition community
- Latest SAP S/4HANA Cloud release blog posts and previous release highlights
- Product videos on our SAP S/4HANA Cloud YouTube playlist
- Early release webinar series
- Best practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud
- Feature scope description
- What’s new
- SAP Help Portal product page
- Explore SAP S/4HANA Cloud extensibility options by leveraging the sample scenarios from SAP in the SAP Extensibility Explorer tool
- For more details around what is being delivered for 2308, see Bert Schulze’s release blog on SAP Community
Arpan Shah is senior vice president of Public Cloud ERP Product Management at SAP.