SAP S/4HANA Finance: Overview, Benefits, and Issues

Running head: COMPUTERISED ACCOUNTING
Computerised Accounting
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COMPUTERISED ACCOUNTING
Introduction:
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is utilised for accounting, inventory control and
human resource of an organisation. This is used to improve the business of an organisation by
sharing information, business planning and decision-making (Bahssas, AlBar & Hoque 2015).
This essay would provide a brief overview of SAP S/4HANA Finance and its importance in
financial management. The section part would elaborate the difference between SAP S/4HANA
Finance and current SAP ERP FICO. The next section would emphasise on the benefits of SAP
S/4HANA Finance for business organisations. Finally, the essay would shed light on the issues
encountered by the real life organisations at the time of shifting to SAP S/4 HANA Finance.
Historical overview of SAP S/4HANA Finance:
SAP S/4HANA Finance could be defined as a financial application in the SAP S/4HANA
ERP platform. It comprises of a group of interrelated functions of financial management
providing real-time data from the ERP applications. SAP S/4HANA Finance is a portion of
S/4HANA and it is developed on the SAP HANA in-memory database platform (Bressler 2014).
S/4HANA is involved in integrating cross-organisational functions into a system, which
combines transactional analytics and processes for real-time applications. In case of the front
end, SAP S/4HANA Finance utilises SAP Fiori for personalised and consumer-like experience.
SAP first launched SAP HANA in 2011 in the form of next generation in-memory
platform developed as the great simplifier for the customers for inventing and reinventing
business through real-time insight. SAP Business Suite has been introduced in January 2013 so
that the organisations could drive real-time business along with simplifying the running
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procedure of SAP Business Suite by combining analytics and transactions into in-memory
platform. It has drawn tremendous market reaction, as 2,000 customers registered to use the
software in just two years (Faerber et al. 2015). In June 2014, focus has been shifted to particular
business areas, which have helped the customers in driving real-time insight throughout finance
along with simplifying the techniques of running their finance systems. Following on such
success, SAP S4/HANA has been introduced in February 2015, which is the largest innovation
of SAP until date.
S/4HANA is built on advanced in-memory platform along with providing a personalised
Fiori-based user experience for accessing role-based solution. There are a number of customers
found to be shifting from SAP Business Suite to S/4HANA and for 75% of the total customers; it
takes six-month average for project migration (Chen 2015). SAP is engaged in providing a rapid
deployment project for performing quick migration to the HANA platform and SAP Simple
Finance solution. The different partners of SAP offer fixed price integration for some clients.
The customers could be able to use the customisation even after the system is migrated
effectively. The migration of SAP Business Suite to S/4HANA is conducted through the
implementation package as SAP Simple Finance, Simple Logistics and others (Drum,
Pernsteiner & Revak 2017). By using SAP S/4HANA, SAP is able to offer new products and
upcoming generation of business applications, which constitute of simple enterprise software in
relation to big data and it is built to assist in running simple in the digital economy.
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Figure 1: Overview of SAP S/4HANA Finance
(Source: Drum, Pernsteiner & Revak 2016)
Owing to the advanced characteristics of SAP HANA, SAP S/4HANA is built for real-
time business functions, business intelligence analyses and planning. The below figure depicts
the Fiori-based user interface of SAP related to S/4HANA solution providing role-based
experience to the users.
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