SAP recently released SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition 2023 FPS03, packed with new AI, automation capabilities, and usability improvements to transform business operations.
These powerful capabilities help reduce manual effort and empower smarter decision-making while helping businesses stay ahead of the competition.
Exploring AI-assisted capabilities
In the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition 2023 FPS03 release, innovative AI capabilities continue to be shipped at a fast pace. They help businesses improve employee productivity, assist in decision-making, and provide predictive insights, in order to better adapt to changing demands and better compete in an unpredictable environment.
New AI capabilities include:
- AI-assisted journal upload: This capability simplifies the process of creating journal entries by using generative AI technologies. It is designed to assist accountants in managing large backlogs of period-end journal entries, which are often required for transactions executed outside the accounting system, temporary postings, settlements, accruals, and provisions. By leveraging AI technologies, this feature enhances efficiency and accuracy in managing journal entries, ultimately benefiting accountants and financial departments.
- Predictive labor demand planning: Labor demand planning now enables the prediction of planned durations for picking and packing processes, enhancing the efficiency of resource and workload planning. By utilizing historical workload data, the capability provides accurate predictions for task durations, eliminating the need for extensive preprocessing or reliance on engineered labor standards. This feature allows warehouses to optimize labour allocation and reduce inefficiencies by predicting the time required for tasks such as picking, packing, and outbound deliveries.
- AI-based explanation of detailed scheduling optimizer results: Production planners often struggle to quickly understand the detailed scheduling optimizer results, as they are intricate and can lack clear explanations. This complexity can leave planners uncertain about the decisions made by the optimizer, making it challenging to address exceptions efficiently. SAP’s AI assistant now includes a capability that offers explanations for detailed scheduling optimizer planning results. Production planners can ask questions in natural language through a chat interface, allowing them to intuitively grasp what occurred during the scheduling process. This helps them to focus on any exceptions.
- AI assisted in-house service initiation: Repair shops receive a significant amount of paperwork. Manually converting this paper-based information into the SAP system is labor-intensive and prone to errors, which can lead to data loss, especially under tight deadlines. The AI assisted in-house service initiation leverages the Document Information Extraction service to capture incoming paper documents. The SAP system automatically extracts the necessary data and creates a list of repair objects for the corresponding in-house service. Repair staff then reviews the generated order and continues processing it to completion.
Additions to SAP’s unified copilot Joule
After having released many transactional and navigational use cases with S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition FPS02, we continue our journey with releasing Joule support in these areas:
- Dispute management for contract accounting: Transactional capabilities for dispute resolution and payment resolution
- Revenue accounting and reporting: Transactional capabilities to manage revenue accounting items, manage revenue contracts, revenue contract schedule, combine revenue contracts, and reconcile revenue contracts
- Sales: Transactional capabilities to perform single or mass changes to sales order fields, provide issue resolution for sales order fulfilment issues, create sales documents with reference, and fetch billing document information
- Service: Transactional capabilities to fetch service confirmation details, reference objects, release service orders and service order items, cancel service confirmations, and complete service confirmations
- Asset management: Transactional capabilities to display maintenance orders, maintenance notifications, and maintenance jobs, and perform activities on jobs
- Enterprise portfolio and project management: Transactional capabilities to display or change a project work breakdown structure (WBS) element, or network in project builder
- Procurement: Transactional capabilities to create purchase requisitions with or without material or service items, show a list of materials or suppliers, update the delivery date for all schedule line items in one or more purchase orders, show the details of purchase order items and workflow approver emails, process invoice reminders
- Product lifecycle management: Transactional capabilities to fetch details of bills of material and navigate to the Maintain Bill of Material app, and fetch details of change records
- Convergent invoicing: Transactional capabilities to display clarification cases, billing plans, invoicing documents, and billing requests
Additional innovations across functional areas
The latest release features a wealth of new enhancements to improve business processes across procurement, finance, manufacturing, R&D, and service and asset management. The enhancements include:
Procurement
Mass change of price scales in central purchase contracts enables procurement professionals to efficiently perform mass changes on central purchase contracts by uploading or downloading scale values for item condition types using Microsoft Excel.
Finance
- Improved data integration and flexibility for planning in manage financial plan data app: To continuously optimize the integration between SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, a new framework in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition enables users to efficiently configure and schedule jobs for financial plan data to be integrated from SAP Analytics Cloud into SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition.
- Hedging of subsidiary exposures by treasury center (balance sheet FX risk) aggregates the balance sheet exposures of subsidiaries on treasury center level and performs hedging of the net exposure centrally without any additional internal transactions.
Manufacturing
- Manage production models materials app: The production model provides a joint view of the manufacturing bill of material (MBOM) and the shop floor routing to facilitate hand-in-hand definition of the MBOM components and shop floor production steps, supported by a 3D visual of the header material of the MBOM.
- Check optimization log app: Increased transparency for production planners is available through insights into status indicators, runtime metric, cost, and solution quality metrics.
R&D
- Project cost overview and project cost line items apps to include service transactions: Project cost and revenue transparency for the service business managed projects is possible by analyzing service contract items and service order items assigned to WBS elements.
- Standard contents for dangerous goods regulations allow users to continuously consume up-to-date compliance requirements for dangerous goods management by benefiting from a simplified process to receive fast and frequent updates of dangerous goods regulations.
Service Management
Service hierarchy with collective accounting: Enhance commercial flexibility in creating bundled service offerings by grouping of service order items into service hierarchy and by consolidating financial reporting and revenue recognition.
Asset Management
- Manage maintenance orders simplifies the management of maintenance orders. With this new SAP Fiori app, the planner can display a comprehensive list view of maintenance orders, create maintenance orders, and process individual orders.
- “As-found” data recording in performance maintenance job: Improve recording of asset reliability data by recording the as-found condition of the maintained asset in a proactive maintenance job without an assigned maintenance notification.
SAP is resolutely at the forefront of the AI revolution, embedding ever more capabilities in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition. We redefine how businesses run and how people work, and this is only the beginning. We are working on new agentic capabilities soon available via Joule, underpinned by our recent launch of SAP Business Data Cloud.
With the FPS03 release, our aim is to equip businesses with new capabilities to increase their level of automation, improve their users’ experience, boost their efficiency, and uncover new business opportunities.
To see these innovations in action, make sure to join our upcoming webinar, which will deep dive into the new AI functionalities and other innovations introduced here. You can also learn more about our recent innovations by reading: What’s New in SAP S/4HANA and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition 2023 FPS03.
Maura Hameroff is senior vice president of Cloud ERP Product Marketing at SAP.
