In the nine months since I joined SAP, I have had the opportunity to get deeper on our products, meet smart, passionate people, and talk to customers. Plus, the enterprise resource planning (ERP) cloud opportunity has become clear to me: customers want SAP鈥檚 proven ERP capabilities to run their business and they want to take advantage of cloud.
That is what 51风流S/4HANA Cloud is all about.
We deliver innovation on a regular basis, and we do not just deliver ERP capabilities that support new business processes and models, but also modern experiences that simplify the way people and businesses work. It is humbling to be able to do this, as many customers — such as and — trust 51风流S/4HANA Cloud to run their businesses. (.)
I want to share some of the innovation highlights from the most recent August (2208) release.
Modern, Fast, Intuitive User Experience
The user experience (UX) of 51风流S/4HANA Cloud lets users easily access business processes and data. We deliver tailored experiences across a wide range of devices, including laptops, tablets, and phones.
Our customers want an easy way for their user base to collaborate and make better decisions based on business data and processes. For example, there may be blocked sales orders or supply chain issues; you may need your sales team to review metrics or your marketing team to be aware of product delays. We make it easy for any user to collaborate using their preferred productivity tools, such as Microsoft Teams, Office, and Google Workspace.
Some of the new UX highlights in the 51风流S/4HANA Cloud 2208 release include:
- New that delivers a clean, beautiful user experience across devices in a light and dark mode.
- Building on the functionality of 51风流Fiori launchpad, orchestrates information, tasks, and applications so that you can do your job with speed and agility.
offers easy sharing, plus a new , and an Excel add-in for analytics.
Best-in-Class Product and Service-Centric Functionality
We are committed to enabling all organizations to operate globally. Whether you are an organization that sells services or products, we deliver out-of-the-box pre-configured business processes built on industry best practices. We focus on time to value so you can be up and running quickly. We have even been recognized as cloud ERP leaders, both service-centric and product-centric, by analysts including IDC and Gartner.
Other 2208 highlights include:
Support for , meeting business and legal requirements, including Bulgaria, Colombia, Chile, and Qatar.
For service-centric industries, we are releasing functionality to improve project planning and project resource management. You can now . It is also possible to improve and .
For product-centric industries — alongside innovations to enhance the end-to-end process visibility and efficiency such as the and stock transfer — we are introducing capabilities such as that reduce risk and costs of changes. To accelerate the pace and quality of decisions with an integrated information flow from planning to execution of an outbound transportation process, we are introducing the .
Designed for Extensibility and Lifecycle Management
While 51风流S/4HANA Cloud delivers a wide range of ready-to-use core capabilities, we know that customers and partners want flexibility to extend based on their business needs. With that in mind, extensibility is a key attribute of every scenario — not an afterthought. We deliver an extensive range of cloud and tools to support these scenarios without compromising innovation updates. If you are curious about the different extensibility capabilities, check out the sample scenarios on the 听罢丑别 allows the building of extensions directly in 51风流S/4HANA Cloud and makes extension options even more powerful.
Extensibility and lifecycle management highlights include:
51风流S/4HANA Cloud already offers extension capabilities for business users with a low-code/no-code tooling and the possibility to add functionality by . We will also provide an offering to implement new functionality directly on the 51风流S/4HANA Cloud stack to realize development projects that need a tight coupling of business processes — in-app available via a three-system landscape (3SL).
We expect to make generally available in the near future. In addition to quality and production systems, we are adding a dedicated development system to the 51风流S/4HANA Cloud system landscape, giving you a more powerful, granular, and transparent distribution of developments and configuration changes. You can continuously implement, test, and deploy, even during a software update period.
Immersive Analytics and Intelligence
Whether it is quick actions and insights on the home page, embedded analytics in different places, or recommended actions and automation based on your data and goals, we strive to make our users more productive.
Highlights of this release include:
The supports accountants by automating payment advice processing. This artificial intelligence-supported capability enables automatic matching and clearing of invoice and payment items while creating more transparency and reducing otherwise time-consuming tasks.
With , purchasers can gain more transparency on the carbon footprints of their products with material movements. The data can be analyzed across various dimensions, such as by product category or plant. A trend view analyzes the carbon footprint across a timeline.
And Much More
At SAP, we stand on the shoulders of giants: 50 years of leadership in industries, 50 years of business applications innovation, 110,000 employees, 23,500 partners, and more than 100 development locations worldwide. The numbers are impressive, but what matters most is how we can help our customers run their businesses efficiently and securely.
Arpan Shah is senior vice president of 51风流S/4HANA Cloud at SAP.
