What is the action plan for SAP S/4HANA? How much? What modules will be offered?
1. What is the business value of SAP S / 4HANA for customers? What is the amortization period? Who benefits more?
Natively written for the SAP HANA platform, SAP S / 4HANA is a new generation of SAP Business Suite that is characterized by simplification, massive increase in efficiency and attractive features such as planning and simulation options in several conventional transactions.
SAP S / 4HANA signals a step beyond the transaction system that only records data, to provide end users with active support in real-time decisions based on data from internal and external sources.
2. How long does an implementation of SAP S / 4HANA take?
It is very difficult to generalize, but we have reliable empirical values on which to base ourselves: 75% of the clients that migrated from their existing SAP Business Suite in HANA as the first big step to change to S / 4HANA did so in six months. That is a good result for a migration to a new platform.
Some large companies are choosing totally new projects; They see technological innovations as an opportunity to completely rebuild their ERP environments from scratch. There is also the option of expansion projects: in this approach, the client leaves their IT environment intact, but adopts the new technology to enrich and improve it. Completely new projects and expansion projects take more time, sometimes even several years. And migrating to SAP S / 4HANA is only part of this type of project.
3. Does SAP offer programs that simplify the change to SAP S / 4HANA?
Yes, and we attach great importance to providing comprehensive support for our clients in this regard. Specifically, we offer rapid deployment solutions (SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions) that allow rapid migration to the SAP HANA platform and also to SAP Simple Finance. SAP or our partners deliver these predefined implementation packages and, in some cases, allow fixed price implementations.
4. Is it possible to migrate company-specific customizations?
In theory, yes. When we develop our solutions, we take care to make sure they are “compatible with previous versions”. In other words, the client can maintain their customizations and continue using them after the migration. However, this does not always apply to modifications. Think of the analogy of a house and imagine that the client added a balcony and also modified the building. In this case, the function of the house may be affected, while the “balcony” would have no problems.
5. What are the requirements to change to SAP S / 4HANA?
The initial way is to change to SAP Business Suite in SAP HANA and then implement the packages containing the simplifications. Currently, these are SAP Simple Finance, but the release of SAP Simple Logistics is expected soon, and further simplifications will be made in 2015.
6. What SAP S / 4HANA applications are available now? Only SAP Simple Finance? What is the difference between cloud and local offers?
If I implement SAP S / 4HANA locally, technically I am implementing SAP Business Suite in SAP HANA and implementing the “exchange innovation” for SAP Simple Finance. But that is only the first step. SAP will continue to deliver additional exchange innovations that will replace the existing SAP Business Suite code with the new SAP S / 4HANA code. Currently, the customer receives the code for the new accounting solution. We plan to send the code for SAP Simple Logistics at the end of the year and other new codes in the following years. By the time we finish this path, we will have changed the complete system of the client gradually without subjecting it to the revolt of a brutal migration. The situation is different if the client chooses to implement SAP S / 4HANA in the cloud. In this case, the customer gets the whole solution in one go. We plan to launch a public cloud version by the end of the first quarter of 2015 and a cloud version managed in the second quarter.
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