Sap s/4Hana Finance Assignment 2022

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SAP S/4HANA FINANCE
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Institution Affiliation
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SAP S/4HANA Finance
The society, the world economy, and the industrial sector are experiencing tremendous
transformation. These transformations alter both processes within an institution and its entire
commercial model at a rather rapid speed. It should be noted that such changes have an impact of
altering the need for an institution’s information technology (IT) architecture, necessitating the
need for innovative solutions that are flexible and can swiftly adapt to the changing conditions
within a business entity (May, Böhm & Lehner, 2017) . The growing wealth of financial data
offers a key challenge to the chief financial officers (CFOs). Recent studies indicate that
financial intelligence is essential for any successful organization. As such, the use of these
financial data is vital in assessing markets, enhancing business performance, and redesigning an
institution’s tactical business requirements (Kumar, 2017). The finance department faces a
number of challenges including the use of complicated processes and user interfaces for finance
and tax functionalities which consume time, and lacking a central database for all the financial
information which affect the planning process in business, among others (Morrison, 2018a).
These problems can be mitigated by applying SAP S/4HANA, which opens the path towards a
prosperous generation of value in the digital economy. Advanced database innovations and the
amalgamation of information into a single platform significantly simplify commercial processes
and portray them across systems. This approach offers institutions with an advanced look at their
data and processes. SAP S/4HANA Finance, as part of the SAP enterprise management, is one of
the latest solutions for the CFO’s office. The platform was designed with other objective of
reacting to the challenges facing the financial sector by offering enhanced reporting operations
and improved process efficacy. Essential to note is that the capabilities offered by S/4HANA
database in conjunction with the improved Fiori user experience offers organizations with an
enhanced approach of conducting businesses (Flanagan, 2017). This paper, therefore, discusses
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the basics of SAP S/4HANA finance, highlighting its differences with SAP ERP FICO, its
benefits in business, and challenges faced in implementing it in an organization.
The Overview
SAP history goes back to the early 1970s when it launched its pioneer product, R/, which had the
presentation, the application, and the database layers essential for ERP system were incorporated
into a single system. This version was improved in the late 1970s with the introduction of R/2,
and later in 1992, R/3, which was user-friendly because of its improved graphical user interface
(May, Böhm & Lehner, 2017; KPMG, 2017) .
The growth of the main memory capacity besides the existence of multicore hardware was the
basis for the development of SAP HANA database software. The platform which was anchored
upon the SAP business warehouse accelerator (BWA) product, integrated column-based storage
engine with a raw-based query engine. This architecture enabled it to deliver superior runtime
statistics for the investigative load. The HANA database in utilizes a single database
methodology for both the online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing
(OLAP), an approach that eradicates unnecessary complexities and dormancy, and facilitates the
acceleration of information dispensation throughout the data flow (May, Böhm & Lehner, 2017) .
SAP HANA system incorporates a number of design principles that enhance its performance
characteristics. The first one in the parallelization of all levels beginning from the hardware to
running query, an approach that was motivated by the existence of multicore systems. Secondly,
the database system depends entirely on the column-oriented data landscape, which permits only
the columns touched by the query. Moreover, besides SQL support, HANA encourages
analytical functionalities by offering a set of engines which support financial scheduling tasks
(May, Böhm, & Lehner, 2017) . Figure 1 describes the evolution of the HANA database.
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Figure 1: The evolution steps of SAP HANA database system (May, Böhm, & Lehner, 2017)
A considerable number of people are aware of the existence of HANA, but, differentiating
between HANA, S/4HANA, and S/4HANA Finance is still imperceptible. As defined by Kumar
(2017), HANA is the SAPs new advanced- executing platform, and S/4HANA is the novel suite
that has the capabilities of executing on the HANA database. S/4HANA finance is a software for
accounting management. Kumar (2017) reports that S/4HANA finance was launched in 2014 for
monetary functionalities in the SAP S/4HANA business suite. Note that the difference that exists
between ‘traditional’ database and the in-memory platform, is that the advanced HANA applies
the in-memory feature to enhance its operations, and SAP positions it as a focal repository for
data (May, Böhm, & Lehner, 2017) . This way, it can only use a single copy of data for
operations and analysis. This eliminates the inherent latency and the risk of inconsistencies in the
case of inadequate design.
SAP business suite is a group of commercial software which facilitates end-to-end processes to
execute in SAP databases. Integrating the HANA database in the business suit is an approach
adopted by a number of prominent institutions having sophisticated SAP platforms. SAP,
however, altered the dynamics of software logic to optimize the functionalities of SAP business
suit in conjunction with the database platform. The suite augmented for HANA is the S/4HANA
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