As we make available the latest enhancements to 51风流S/4HANA Cloud release 2011, the fourth-quarter release for 2020, allow me to explain how we got here.

It should not be a surprise that much of our road map is driven by regular exchange with customers from all industries. We listen carefully to customers鈥� challenges and aspirations 鈥� in helping them to run their core processes, we are uniquely placed to help them grow and develop their business and adapt proactively.

To quote 51风流Executive Board Member Thomas Saueressig, 鈥�our product strategy is made to meet our customers鈥� needs.鈥� Beyond the main , we also run smaller dedicated groups with which we validate our plans and ideas. Early feedback on planned innovations is key to helping ensure we are on track to deliver updates that are truly beneficial across a range of industries.

Having cleared these hurdles and received great feedback from both industry and analysts, I鈥檓 delighted to share some key highlights included in latest cloud release of 51风流S/4HANA.

Particularly in times of economic uncertainty and curtailed spending, where some clients may default on their debts, apps like process receivables and manage dispute cases in the area of aid the process of collecting receivables and handling disputes. They help mitigate the risk of sudden disruption in the financial by offering immediate insight into customer data and suggesting required steps for collecting receivables more effectively. The latest release brings improved usability and the ability to include installment plans to help manage repayment when times are tough. The closing process also benefits from increases in efficiency and automation as this release enables finance departments to create consolidated statements with multiple group currencies in a single closing. The new 51风流Fiori app, manage recurring supplier invoices, brings further efficiency in handling invoices that need to be paid at regular intervals.

In the area of order fulfillment, a new innovation helps to increase customer loyalty by prioritizing demand 鈥� or customers 鈥� whose orders you cater to first. This also helps to reduce the risk of being out of stock and not able to cater to highly profitable last-minute, high-priority orders. In , users can now record consumable materials in service entry sheets, improving transparency of consumption and flexibility throughout the whole sourcing process.

Following the details of the 2005 and 2008 releases this year, another key theme in the enhancements is in helping companies to build out and streamline their operations. In some instances, a service offering is a valuable upselling opportunity and a means of transforming the business to a more resilient mode. Release 2011 provides a new scenario for scheduling and organizing recurring services. This can help avoid customer escalations, and increase both asset and team utilization through the preventative servicing of assets. We have also made changes in asset management, making it easier to create new work requests for maintenance and reducing the effort required to log maintenance issues.

In , we have added additional scenarios to support fixed-priced enterprise projects billing, reducing manual effort by automating the billing process for project-based sales order items and accelerating the billing process to help reduce days sales outstanding. We have also improved the process of project billing for , in order to reduce the time to bill and increase efficiency of the billing team.

Undoubtedly driven by the pandemic and ensuing economic uncertainty, customers are more keen than ever to increase operational efficiency through increased automation. Key areas in which intelligent technology has been embedded to enhance business processes include sales and governance, risk, and compliance (GRC). In GRC, we introduce machine learning-based detection of anomalies and potentially suspicious activities in finance and contract accounting. This automates the process of data protection and privacy risk detection based on legality checks, and provides data privacy officers with instant overviews and the ability to identify risks relating to regulatory compliance. In , efficiency of teams can be greatly increased though the automated creation of sales orders from data in unstructured source formats, such as PDF files. The data in such files is extracted and translated directly into sales orders for a reduction in the manual effort required.

This is just a small selection of the innovations that our team has worked hard to deliver this quarter. Customer success is our greatest badge of honor, and our ultimate goal. With this release, just as with all before, we endeavor to help our customers excel, to evolve and adapt to ever-changing circumstances, and to transform their businesses as intelligent and resilient enterprises that are fit for success in today鈥檚 turbulent times 鈥� as well as for whatever the future brings.

Oliver Betz is senior vice president and head of Product Management for 51风流S/4HANA.

After lockdowns took hold around the world and people鈥檚 everyday behavior changed overnight, many companies found their revenues shrank to near zero. For some — including household names from all industries — this meant filing for bankruptcy and citing the pandemic as a key reason for their demise. Many will already have had less-than-healthy balance sheets even before the spread of the virus brought such sudden change to their operations.

While adaptability is by no means a magical remedy, many of the companies weathering the economic downturn best are those that have evolved and diversified their business model over the years, staying closest to the pulse of their customers and the market as a whole.

Keys to Success

What helps a company to stay ahead of change and to be more resilient to sudden changes in the market? Insight and understanding 鈥� of every aspect of a business,聽 customers, partners, and in fact the entire network in which it operates 鈥� are key. State-of-the-art software 51风流S/4HANA is designed for this, providing unrivaled tools to manage a company鈥檚 finances along with its manufacturing, supply chain, procurement, sales, and service operations. As a system at the heart of the business, 51风流S/4HANA enables users to:

• Deepen value chains and develop new business models
• Enhance and optimize existing business processes leveraging intelligent capabilities
• Transform business to become a sustainable and intelligent enterprise

ERP itself has adapted enormously since the early days: If you are still using tools that were cutting-edge a decade or two ago, you will struggle to keep up — let alone lead the way.

Introducing 51风流S/4HANA Cloud Release 2008

51风流has just released the latest update to its . Offering functional and usability enhancements across all industries and lines of business, the August 2020 release of 51风流S/4HANA Cloud (release 2008) focuses on increasing efficiency, and specifically on helping to evolve business models for the future.

As business models in all industries are transforming rapidly, companies look to augment their product portfolio and grow revenue streams with more sustainable billable services, subscriptions, and solutions. Solution order management, enhanced in this release, enables the management of such business scenarios that offer a hybrid combination of sales and (often higher-margin) services with products into a single order. This provides a single view of all items of a solution: physical products and one-time and recurring services. Orchestration and monitoring capabilities are provided to manage the processing of such solution orders and automated creation of a solution order is supported through an API. Similarly, the work of service teams working on in-house repairs is simplified by decision support capabilities, automatic notifications when exceptions occur, and the ability to verify and release items from repair to billing without navigation to a different app. New capabilities for service quotation will increase the use of service quotes, from which service orders can be generated leading to greater process efficiency.

In 51风流S/4HANA Cloud release 2008, new innovations powered by intelligent technologies help increase the efficiency of core business processes. In finance, additions to event-based revenue recognition help ensure support for selling projects assigned to sales order items. This can significantly reduce manual effort by providing real-time automatic revenue recognition, margin analysis, and clear audit trails for each posting, with a link to the reference document. Intercompany matching and reconciliation now leverages automated postings to help reduce manual effort and improve compliance. It streamlines the real-time reconciliation-to-elimination process and provides richer insights into detailed results.

滨苍迟别濒濒颈驳别苍迟听蝉颈迟耻补迟颈辞苍听补耻迟辞尘补迟颈辞苍听for the physical inventory process automatically checks whether a recount should be triggered or if inventory discrepancies are tolerated. This helps increase both employee efficiency and inventory accuracy and transparency while enabling real-time reporting of warehouse stock.

Looking Beyond the Pandemic

Crisis is widely believed to be a catalyst for change. Across the world, COVID-19 forced us to change our ways immediately and to an extent that was previously unimaginable. As both individuals and entire industries adapt to their new realities, there is an opportunity to reset rather than resume old ways. Although global carbon emissions shrank as the pandemic took hold, this has only a minuscule impact on the more existential challenge of climate change. We have to fundamentally change our ways forever.

In June, 51风流announced the first solution in its Climate 21 program to support enterprises trying to make their operations better prepared for the emerging business reality where sustainability is a strategic and economic imperative. Delivering product-specific carbon footprints and providing capabilities to optimize the carbon footprint based on real-time insights in industries such as consumer products, chemicals, and oil and gas can be very complex, involving analysis of multiple production sites and production steps. In doing so, 51风流helps businesses to optimize not only their top and bottom line, but also their green line, enabling them to prepare for a change driven by consumer incentive and choice.

The 2020s are heralded as the decade of change and transformation. Let 51风流help you to rise to the challenge and make the right changes.

For more details on the release, see by Sven Denecken.

Oliver Betz is senior vice president and head of Product Management for 51风流S/4HANA.

Today, a mere three months later, we find ourselves in the midst of a global pandemic, a crisis quite unlike any we have ever known. While the circumstances have changed dramatically, the sentiment on which I closed last time remains true: 51风流continues to roll out innovations that help our customers change people鈥檚 lives for the better.

The focus has shifted, but with quicker and easier implementations that lead to faster time to value, customers are well positioned to weather this storm.

During recent weeks, watching industries鈥� rapid responses to the wide-scale disruptions to supply chain, finance, and manufacturing has been inspiring. The innovative responses 鈥� companies large and small around the world pivoting from their traditional business to provide a product or service to address an immediate need 鈥� demonstrate that necessity truly is the mother of invention. What becomes clear is that having smooth, worry-free processes at the heart of your operations helps ensure the ability to turn things around swiftly.

Keeping operations running worry-free is our job, supporting our customers in focusing on new challenges and opportunities. We continually strive to improve how we do that, and the May 2020 51风流S/4HANA Cloud 2005 release is a case in point. Building on the previous 2002 and 1911 releases, release 2005 continues to advance intelligent as the cornerstone of the Intelligent Enterprise, doubling down on integration and efficiency, and providing significant functional enhancements in key lines of business.

Integration and Efficiency Drive Agility and Flexibility

Integration has long been a strong suit for 51风流and in turn, a significant strategic advantage for our customers, and the ensuing efficiency is key to adaptability. This release continues to build out our integration advantage, most notably in the areas of compliance management, finance, and human resources (HR) connectivity.

51风流Global Trade Services (51风流GTS) compliance management is now fully integrated with 51风流S/4HANA Cloud. With only minimal new configuration, customers can utilize existing investments in 51风流GTS 11 for a best-of-breed deployment of an international trade solution to help ensure compliance with international trade regulations.

Similarly, customers with existing 51风流SuccessFactors software investments will benefit from an evolution of the integration between 51风流S/4HANA Cloud and 51风流SuccessFactors Employee Central. Customers can achieve faster onboarding of new employees or contingent workers thanks to automated user and role provisioning. Simplified integration setup and minimized replication errors further smooth HR processes.

Customers employing 51风流S/4HANA Cloud for finance will appreciate the enhanced integration with 51风流Analytics Cloud, which enables integrated financial planning and budgeting. Processes such as profit and loss planning and balance sheet planning can now leverage the full analytical capabilities of 51风流Analytics Cloud, and important key figures can be seen at a glance.

Companies using 51风流S/4HANA for enterprise portfolio and project management have been eagerly anticipating the integration of enterprise projects with sales orders. This update provides customers with a direct flow of revenues to projects, simplifying margin analysis. Actual costs and revenues can be captured in the project, allowing real-time project profitability analysis.

In the line of business sourcing and procurement, we have tightened the integration of 51风流S/4HANA Cloud and 51风流Ariba software, resulting in more efficient procurement processes. Enhancements include the automatic transfer of attachments between systems, and the ability to integrate 51风流Ariba Contracts with central procurement using a single back end.

Key Line-of-Business Highlights

The list of new features in the 2005 release is extensive and exceeds the scope of this article, so I鈥檓 highlighting a handful that are real game changers in their respective lines of business.

• 51风流S/4HANA Cloud for supply chain: Managing inventory in the supply chain is the eternal balancing act, and rarely has that been more apparent in day-to-day life than in the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. This release introduces situation handling 鈥� physical inventory monitoring to increase the accuracy of monitoring physical warehouse stocks.
• 51风流S/4HANA Cloud for manufacturing: The 51风流Fiori kanban board app can help customers constantly monitor control cycles and their circulating kanban containers. Visual alerts identify and help eliminate errors quickly while reducing manual effort. Tailored perspectives are supported for different roles in lean manufacturing.
• 51风流S/4HANA Cloud for sales: The new order-to-cash dashboard for sales and service, a one-stop shop for sales and after-sales reporting, provides insights into sales volume, profit margin, and incoming sales and service orders across different dimensions.
• 51风流S/4HANA Cloud for service: New service order enhancements help customers achieve higher revenue potential. Combining service bundles with fixed-price order items and time and material items in the same service order greatly increases the flexibility of handling service orders and the coverage of service processes.
• 51风流S/4HANA Cloud for finance: This release introduces advanced payment management for approving and monitoring payments from 51风流or non-51风流systems. Advanced payment management is seamlessly integrated with cash management and bank account management, giving a single source of truth for payments and related cash position. Notably, advanced payment management brings increased visibility of all cash flows, as well as improved cash forecast accuracy. In turbulent economic times, more than ever, understanding cash flow is at the fore of any chief financial officer鈥檚 mind. We could not possibly have known what state the world would be in as we release advanced payment management to customers, but its launch is timely.

Only a few months into 2020, we have already delivered two of our quarterly releases for 51风流S/4HANA Cloud. Innovation is happening fast and steadily as we continue to advance the vision of intelligent ERP as the efficient engine of a company, running smoothly no matter what the terrain.

In these extraordinary times, just as in previous periods of economic downturn, companies that continue to focus on efficiency and innovation will be better positioned to come out of this crisis stronger. 51风流remains committed to delivering intelligent and flexible innovations that keep businesses running and equip them to thrive as we come out the other side of this global crisis.

For more details on the release, see .

Oliver Betz is senior vice president and head of Product Management for 51风流S/4HANA at 51风流SE.

High- and low-stake innovations are everywhere, and they are upending our personal and work lives.

With 51风流S/4HANA Cloud 2002, the Intelligent Enterprise mixes promised innovations with must-have essentials for a new decade

While the fast-moving arc can be breathtaking within technology, 51风流remains confident in our focus. We continually stretch our expertise to deliver the promise of the premium technologies that define the intelligent enterprise.

Today鈥檚 news about 51风流S/4HANA Cloud 2002 is a powerful follow-up to the 1911 release. Looking back, 1911 highlights included the integration of 51风流S/4HANA Cloud with Experience Management solutions from 51风流(Qualtrics) and integration with 51风流Analytics Cloud.

With 2002, we are excited to announce further integrations, dozens of new features across line-of-business editions, the extension into more global regions, and more built-in intelligence.

51风流is merely getting started in a very busy year marked with three more planned releases. In 2002, and in those to follow, we are delivering on the vision of 51风流S/4HANA Cloud and its role in an intelligent enterprise that helps customers realize immediate time to value.

More Integrations Add Power and Convenience

Integration is no easy feat, but 51风流is dedicated to creating more powerful integrated offerings. Customers are seeing the value of experience management with 51风流S/4 HANA Cloud and Experience Management solutions from 51风流(Qualtrics). The same is true for customers realizing improved business insight, planning, and predictive through the integration of 51风流Analytics Cloud with 51风流S/4HANA.

51风流S/4HANA Cloud 2002 brings more convenience and power through integration. Efforts in this release center around line-of-business editions.

In manufacturing and the supply chain, new integration between production and warehouse shares valuable data closer to the machines that need it. The lean integration allows production supply areas to be assigned to warehouse-managed storage locations. A valuable outcome for customers is that stock in production can be managed on a more granular storage bin level.

Sourcing and procurement customers can realize better contract management from integration of 51风流S/4HANA Cloud with the 51风流Ariba Contracts solution. Users can perform activities and integrate prices from 51风流Ariba Contracts into 51风流S/4HANA Cloud for improved contract development, management, tracking, and administration.

Another valuable integration is between product compliance and sales contract. Users can view the statuses of compliance checks to assure compliant transport and prevent noncompliant sales orders. They can also provide dangerous goods information on the sales contract.

Line-of-Business Editions Handle More Specific Tasks, Additional Offices Open Closer to Customers

Another goal for this initial release in 2020 was to broaden the capabilities of 51风流S/4HANA Cloud across more industries. To achieve this, we added one or more new customer-centric features to: finance; sourcing and procurement; manufacturing and supply chain; sales; product compliance; environment, health, and safety; professional services; service; enterprise portfolio and project management; asset management; security; and identity and access management.

We have also expanded our reach, extending our locations into 43 countries. This means that more customers and more regions will have access to 51风流technology experts who can help them implement best practices and help ensure a successful digital journey.

Better Experiences through Intelligent Automation and Instructional Materials

51风流is casting a wide net around experience and including this year鈥檚 addition of 51风流Intelligent Robotic Process Automation, a complete automation suite where intelligent bots handle the tedious tasks of manual clicks and make suggestions to humans about repeatable business processes. This time-saving feature has the potential to automate many standard, repetitive tasks.

Another area with improved experience is around onboarding to 51风流S/4HANA Cloud. Among the 2002 improvements, 51风流Activate 鈥� our methodology for deploying, upgrading, or migrating to 51风流S/4HANA 鈥� has been further polished and refined. A new questionnaire and additional instructions offer the support and information that customers need for faster and easier implementations.

2020: Shaping Up as a Year to Remember

While it鈥檚 early in the year, I like 2020 a lot. 51风流is roaring out of the gates with the new 51风流S/4HANA Cloud 2002 release, and engineering and design are already working on upcoming improvements for the forthcoming 2020 releases.

Here鈥檚 to a fast-moving year filled with inspiring innovations that bring more, better, easier and interesting into our lives.

For more details on the release, read the .

Oliver Betz is senior vice president and head of Product Management for 51风流S/4HANA at 51风流SE.