SAP S/4HANA Finance: Revolutionizing the Business Industry

BAO6714 Trimester 3 , 2018
Research Report
Topic:
“... enterprises are faced with the immediate need to embrace the digital
age to match the new and evolving business models and offer decision
makers with instant insight.”

Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................3
A n Overview of SAP S/4HANA Finance.................................................................................3
SAP S/4HANA Finance Vs. current SAP ERP FICO...............................................................4
Business benefits of SAP S/4HANA Finance............................................................................5
Case Study - 1............................................................................................................................6
Fujitsu.....................................................................................................................................6
Case study 2...............................................................................................................................8
ENGIE....................................................................................................................................8
Migrating to S/4HANA on AWS...........................................................................................9
Case study 3.............................................................................................................................10
EUROPEAN BAKERY.......................................................................................................10
Execution..............................................................................................................................10
Case study 4.............................................................................................................................11
Deloitte.................................................................................................................................11
Conclusion................................................................................................................................11

Introduction
The following report addresses the complex business issues in an IT architecture environment
and shows how SAP S/4HANA is beneficial for mitigating those issues by interconnecting to
the processes in a single in-memory platform. The benefit of warehousing and dealing with
packaging stock becomes simplified with the addition of SAP SCM solution in this integrated
system. SAP S/4HANA has revolutionized the banking industry by introducing the advanced
accounting solution with the real-time insight. The unification of Process elevates this
solution to lead all of the business segments across the world.
A n Overview of SAP S/4HANA Finance
SAP is one of the leading businesses ERP software solutions, serving the customers by
resolving the IT challenge over four decades. As the economy continues to be complex, SAP
also incorporate top trends like hyper connectivity, supercomputing, cyber security, cloud
computing, robotics, sensors, 3D printing and artificial intelligence (Blogs.sap.com, 2019).
The synthesis of these trends enables the businesses to innovate their operation by converting
their underlying system into a smart technology or making it a competent to digital economy.
In 2011, SAP has evolved SAP HANA, a next-generation in-memory platform which offers a
real time report of operational data to the users. SAP remodelled their ERP solution again in
January 2013 while introducing SAP Business Suite developed by SAP HANA (Alexander et
al., 2018). This innovation simplifies the businesses by bringing the transactional data and
operational data into a single in-memory platform. This product of SAP encouraged
popularity while over 2000 customers adopts it within 2 years (Zarantech.com, 2019). On
2014 onwards, SAP has shifted their focus on specialized business and financial functions.
After June 2014, the customers experience a real-time insight in their financial data with the
help of SAP Simple Finance developed by SAP HANA by eliminating unnecessary and
several fragmented data. SAP continues its innovation in specific business needs addressing
the issues and challenges of different businesses. The latest innovation of SAP comes in
February 2015, named as SAP Business Suite 4 HANA which is abbreviated as SAP
S/4HANA (Fahn et al., 2017). It is the largest innovation after SAP R/3. It is awarded by Red
Dot Design Award, a foundation of Germany, for its most advanced design concept (Künzel,
Brecht and Hagen, 2018). This innovation gives most superior user experience to the
customers by delivering simplification of business challenges like customer adoption,

decision making, business processes and models as well as innovations like IOT,
communication network, big data, and digitalization (M. et al., 2018).
SAP Simple Finance is an accounting product of SAP Business Suite for HANA, focusing on
SAP analytic clouds. This product runs on SAP HANA’s in-memory platform while offering
financial and the operational data with real-time report at a single in-memory platform. The
facility of this in-memory platform is, the user can optimize accurate updated data regardless
of their last log-in time (Pattanayak, 2017). SAP S/4HANA Finance pulls both the financial
and operational data from a single centralized location. The centralization feature helps
customer to check the problem from overall organization instead of searching in specific
departments. Cloud can also host Simple Finance, though SAP recommends of S/4HANA
Cloud.
SAP S/4HANA Finance Vs. current SAP ERP FICO
SAP FICO is the basic version of SAP’s finance module whereas SAP S/4HANA is the
updated version. SAP FICO is the product of SAP ERP Central Component which helps in
creating and managing financial statements for analysis and reporting. This software solution
helps the customers in business planning and decision making (Pedell et al., 2017). The term
FICO is derived from the fragmented version of SAP Finance (FI) and SAP controlling (CO);
these modules are used for specific financial dealing. SAP FI undertakes the comprehensive
financial reporting and accounting of a business, whereas SAP CO deals with the part of the
SAP FI’s task, focusing only on planning and monitoring costs. SAP FICO has physical data
architecture, worked in both internal and external data reporting (Blogs.sap.com, 2019). SAP
S/4HANA has the in-memory platform which unifies the earlier separate accounting into a
single platform. SAP FICO’s core functionality was only limited into business whereas SAP
S/4HANA extended its functionality by adding supply chain management system, introduced
into SAP SCM (Sikka et al., 2013). SAP FICO can only handle the finance related structure
whereas SAP S/4HANA Finance manages and consolidates the data associated with
Finance .SCM, human resource, procurement and many more. Also the extra capabilities of
SAP S/4HANA Finance are: it can secure the data, share centralized visibility of finance data
and rendering data in a Universal journal.