Digitization Assignment 2022

SAP S/4HANA digital age
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Introduction
Digitization came with the aim of automating business processes and improve on the efficiency
to do away with human errors. Software developing companies have in response to that work
tirelessly bringing to the market enterprise resource planning software that assist business
enterprises carry out their activities such as order to cash, procure to pay among others with ease
(Seethamraju, 2015). Among other software that are in existence serving the aforementioned
purposes are SAP SRM, SAP CRM etc. (Stanciu and Tinca, 2013). SAP business suite 4 is the
latest version that runs in SAP HANA database only and having integrated features and
packaged as a unit product. Companies incorporate SAP S/4HANA in their memory database so
they can address specific requirements of the industries demonstrating the best practices resulting
to fresh and innovative business models that suites the market place with time (Kollár and
Martiško, 2015). SAP S/ 4HANA took over the market substituting the earlier existing ERP that
were used in the industries. Business enterprises prefer it due to its ability to give planning and
forecasting faster thus saving their precious time which would be used in other profit generating
activities for the betterment and development of the companies.
Furthermore, SAP S/ 4HANA is an intelligent software package with variety of benefits to the
companies that incorporates it in their daily activities (May, Böhm and Lehner, 2017) . Such
benefits include the management and administration simplification of IT landscape. Also, as an
intelligent ERP, it enhances performances of the organizations such as planning, reports
generation, execution and analytics from live data thus making it cost effective (Kulkarni, 2019).
Business leaders in the world are changing from ERP to SAP S/ 4HANA to enable them easily
transit from one business premise to the cloud which further helps in reducing the costs in
business. Even though it sounds fascinating and easy, the migration and adoption of SAP S/

4HANA is not easy since it needs the business management to think deep and evaluate the
benefits an organization can acquire if the technology is adopted (Plattner and Leukert, 2016).
Discussion
Historical overview of SAP S/4HANA
For over four decades now SAP has been in existence serving customers from all over the world.
Customers who use SAP had been enabled to best run their business in various industries aiding
in solving complex business problems and IT challenges (Pattanayak, 2017). With the continued
economic evolution, SAP has been transformed into hyper connectivity and supercomputing
which help companies to change how they operate offering simplicity in the digital system in
order to develop digital economy (Seidel et al. 2014). The journey started in 2011 when SAP
brought into existence and launched SAP HANA as the then next generation designed in-
memory in order to bring real time insight to the customers. Reinvention and upgrading of SAP
continued where in 2013, the SAP business suite which was powered by SAP HANA was
brought in the market to offer assistance to the business organizations so they can run real time
business and making SAP business suite operated simple through the integration of transactions
and analytics in an in-memory platform (Singh, 2017). Due to the simplification of business
activities, the response from the market was so positive that it got over 2000 companies within a
span of just 2 years making it the fastest growing SAP product. Now in 2015, SAP introduced a
new product known as SAP business suite 4 HANA which was believed to being the most
intelligent since the emergence of SAP R/3. The developers of SAP S/ 4HANA ensured that it
was made complete and built it on the most progressive in-memory platform known as SAP
HANA. The SAP business suite 4HANA is more powerful and advanced than the traditional
relational database management systems. Since its emergence, it has brought about simplicity in

matters of handling complicated business problems such as improved innovation, ease in making
business decisions by drawing insights from big data from business systems.
SAP enhanced codes that provide its users with the ability to have augmented important
performance in the daily activities and critical business processes such as reporting the activities
leading to ultimate improved business performance as compared to other databases. SAP HANA
provides database design that integrates numerous processing transactions (OLTP) and high
volume real time analytic process (OLAP) which is a big advantage for the companies in
business field since the establishment of the software is in mono model of data with no additional
layers of data which are depended on by traditional RDBMS systems (May, Böhm and Lehner,
2017). This makes SAP S/ 4HANA the coming business suit generation. A number of transition
scenarios for SAP S/ 4HANA include the enactment, system conversion and scenery change.
The system conversion process is regarded as a risky process for instance, conversion of a
system from SAP ERP ECC to a totally different form i.e. SAP S/ 4HANA. On the same note,
application process of the software is enacted with the presence of KTern feature in it (Ashlock,
2018). The software helps in addressing the challenges businesses are going through in their
normal operation making the businesses to gain successful value creation in the digital economy.
The introduction of the database management system software that integrated data and processes
data on one platform thus simplified business processes and represented them in entire system.
This made the companies to experience a new and modernized way of handling and process data.
Most of the business organizations that use SAP S/ 4HANA portray high levels of confidence
and having more positive views and expectations. Even though SAP S/ 4HANA has heap of
benefits, companies are still uncertain about the best way of incorporating the software in their
operations so they can gain the maximum value from the provided possible solutions.