SAP S/4HANA ERP Solution Overview

Independent ERP Analysis

SAP S/4HANA

Find out everything you need to know about SAP S/4HANA ERP, including functionality, industry fit, customer references, customer reviews, license pricing and implementation with our independent overview.

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SAP S/4HANA:

1. Functionality Overview

2. User Interface (UI) & User Experience (UX)

3. Industry Fit

4. Pricing

5. History

6. Deployment

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SAP S/4HANA Functionality Overview

SAP S/4HANA

Financial Management

SAP S/4HANA provides finance and accounting covering general ledger, accounts payable and receivables, financial consolidation, revenue and cost accounting, cash management, settlement management, profitability analysis and grants management.

SAP S/4HANA

Project Management & Accounting

SAP S/4HANA offers a lot of functionality for professional services automation, including project management and accounting capabilities that support your operational & finance teams. This is delivered via the R&D / Engineering modules within SAP S/4HANA.

SAP S/4HANA

Supply Chain Management (SCM)

SAP S/4HANA ERP provides rich functionality for goods movements, inventory management, analytics and control, returnable packaging logistics, warehouse management, delivery management, transportation management and order promising.

SAP S/4HANA

Sourcing & Procurement

SAP S/4HANA ERP provides capabilities covering purchase order processing, purchase order approval matrixes, self service requisitioning and procurement catalogues, spend visibility and analytics plus invoice scanning and processing using optical character recognition technology (OCR). 

SAP S/4HANA

Human Resources (HRIS)

SAP S/4HANA provides functionality for time recording, expenses management, holiday, absences and leave request management, plus an employee database with basic payroll functionality. SAP provides it's best of breed human capital management (HCM) solution for further capabilities. 

SAP S/4HANA

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

SAP S/4HANA does not intend to provide a rich CRM solution, however it will cater for basic sales order processing, billing, contract management, master data management, sales rebates management, claims, returns and refund management.

SAP S/4HANA

Service

SAP S/4HANA enables rich back end capabilities for service management, although not a true end to end solution. S/4 covers warranty management, service request management, service order management, service billing and more.

Third Party Extensions & Add-Ons

As a Tier 1 enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, SAP S/4HANA provides a great deal of out of the box functionalities. Despite this, SAP has partnered with third parties or solution extension (solex) partners in some areas, in order to expand the core ERP capabilities. SAP also has a digital store named the 'SAP Store' where further addons are available from SAP ecosystem partners. These partners include the likes of OpenText.

Third party solutions are integrated to different degrees, so it's always worth checking the level of integration and who ultimately you are contracting with before signing up. 

SAP Solution Extensions and add-ons include:

- Opentext Invoice Management for automatic invoice and document scanning and reconcilliation.

SAP S/4HANA User Interface (UI)

SAP S/4HANA takes advantage of SAP's award winning user interface technology, Fiori. Unlike SAP S/4HANA's predaccessors such as ECC6 or R/3, S/4HANA has a modern, fresh user interface which adapts based on the users role and authorisations.  

Much like SAP Business ByDesign, S/4HANA also uses HTML5 technology in order to optimise itself for viewing based on the device you are using.

ERP Vendor Overview

SAP S/4HANA Industry Fit

Which industries are best suited to SAP S/4HANA ERP and why?

Professional Services

SAP S/4HANA offers a lot of functionality that can help professional services firms including integrated financial management & accounting, deep project management, billing, customer relationship management and more. This can be extended with SAP SuccessFactors for complete HR & Finance integration.

SAP S/4HANA Pro's & Con's

SAP S/4HANA Pro's & Strengths:

• Tier 1 ERP solution which can handle almost any business scenario and eventuality. 
• Large ecosystem of wider SAP products which can expand functionality. 
• High availability of consultancy resources within the market.
• Huge localisation coverage.
• Modern user interface.

SAP S/4HANA Con's & Weaknesses:

• Support costs and agility can be hampered by the scale of the system.
• Implementations can be complex and expensive if not controlled correctly.

 ## SAP S/4HANA History

SAP Business ByDesign was first launched in 2007 at a time when Cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) was a very new concept. It is the first true Cloud or software as a service solution from Germany software giant, SAP. The product has experienced many ups and downs over that time, but today is a strong performer in the SAP product ecosystem.

SAP S/4HANA Deployment

SAP S/4HANA can be deployed as a traditional On-Premise model or in the Cloud through one of SAP's Cloud offerings. 

S/4HANA On-Premise

As the name suggests, S/4HANA On-Premise is the perpetual licensing option for SAP's market leading Tier 1 ERP solution. This version of the software can be deployed in your own datacentre or in a Hyperscaler or third party of your choice. S/4HANA On-Premise (OP) gives organisations the greatest level of control over their data and their customization options.

S/4HANA Extended

S/4HANA Cloud Extended Edition

Extended Edition provides licensing, maintenance, product support, hosting and managed services as one annual subscription cost to SAP S/4HANA customers. 

S/4HANA Private Cloud

S/4HANA Essentials

SAP S/4HANA Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Is SAP S/4HANA only suitable for large organisations?

SAP S/4HANA is the successor to SAP's flagship enterprise resource planning software, ECC6. Like ECC6, S/4HANA has been built to cater for the needs of complex and generally larger businesses. That said, there are many midsize and even some SMB customers running the solution, often because they have particular complexities or large growth ambitions.

How much does SAP S/4HANA cost?

As with any ERP solution, ByDesign has it's own set licensing, implementation and support costs. The minimum cost of an SAP ByDesign subscription is around $25,000 annually, with implementations being 1-4x that cost.

Can I deploy SAP S/4HANA On-Premise?

Yes, S/4HANA provides deployment flexibility, it can be deployed on your own premises, in a datacentre or hyperscaler of your choice such as Microsoft, Google Cloud Platform or on Amazon Webservices, or SAP can host it via their Private Cloud, Extended or Essentials service offerings.

What's the difference between SAP S/4HANA and Business ByDesign?

SAP Business ByDesign is branded as a 'suite-in-a-box'. It offers a wide set of functionality in one product and it comes ready to go with business processes pre-defined within the system. On the other hand, S/4HANA is built with a best of breed approach in mind. S/4HANA comes with a great deal of functionality out of the box, but relies more on the wider SAP product set to extend those capabilities into other areas such as CRM, human resources and more.

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