The SAP S/4HANA Finance Software: Overview, History, and Differences from SAP ERP FICO

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The SAP S/4HANA Finance Software
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The SAP S/4HANA Finance Software
Vosough et al. (2016) defined SAP S/4HANA Finance as one of the financial
software that is found in the platform called the SAP S/4HANA ERP. The software has a set
of interrelated monetary management tasks which come up with information that is real-time
from the applications known as Enterprise Resource Planning (EPR). May, Böhm & Lehner
(2017) also contributed to the research of SAP S/4HANA Finance and said that the software
is a fragment of the S/4HANA and it is found on in-memory of SAP HANA database
podium. The software incorporates most of the monetary organisational functions into one
system of finances transaction processes and come up with analysis which is used in the real
time period. Sun, Gregor, & Keating (2015) also reported that the software applies SAP Fiori
for a consumer-like and custom-made User Experience (UX). The software has brought a lot
of positive changes in the analysis of financial data and coming up with reports in a faster
rate (May, Böhm & Lehner 2017) . The paper here in has discussed SAP S/4HANA Finance
further by giving the overview and the brief history of the software and the difference
between SAP S/4HANA Finance and SAP ERP FICO. The paper has also discussed the
benefits of SAP S/4HANA Finance and the challenges and issues the businesses have
encountered while migrating to SAP S/4HANA Finance.
Historical Overview of SAP S/4HANA Finance
According to Vosough et al. (2016) in the introduction part above, SAP S/4HANA
Finance is one of the financial software that is found in the platform called the SAP
S/4HANA ERP. Nica et al. (2017) reported that the SAP HANA platform has been in the
market since the year 2010. SAP HANA is a column oriented with relational management
system of the database which is an in-memory and was invented and brought to the market by
SAP SE (Ghattamneni 2016). the fundamental function of the software as a database server,

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is storing and retrieving information as commanded by other financial software like SAP
S/4HANA Finance and SAP ERP FICO. The software also performs other function apart
from storing and retrieving information. The functions include processing information in a
spatial form, analysing data predictively, and processing information in a graph form.
Ghattamneni (2016) reported that applications like SAP Business and SAP Enterprise
Resource Planning (EPR) have been running in the databases including SAP HANA
database.
SAP S/4HANA Finance is new software which was launched in the New York Stock
Exchange on 2nd February 2015 (Nica et al. 2017). According to Artale et al. (2017), the
introduction and launching of on-premise and cloud edition took place in the event where the
SAP S/4HANA Finance was launched. Cloud edition was later made available on 6th May
2015 in Florida at the town called Orlando (Sun, Gregor & Keating 2016). Economist and
other business people have called SAP S/4HANA Finance has one of the biggest innovation
and update in the Enterprise Resource Planning (EPR) system created by SAP and has never
been seen for two decades. Economists have appreciated that SAP S/4HANA Finance is
representing financial transformational shift in the business world but they have raised
questions on the availability, functionality, migration and the pricing of the software.
Ghattamneni (2016) noted that the software has given many business people hard time in
pricing and migration to the SAP S/4HANA Finance. The SAP S/4HANA Finance is not
easily available for small business people in the market because it is a bit expensive.
According to the research done by Prifti et al. (2017), 370 customers had already
bought SAP S/4HANA Finance software by 21st April 2015 just two and a half months after
launching the application. It shows that SAP S/4HANA Finance has played a significant role
in the financial reporting, accounting and auditing. SAP Company had recorded a positive
growth in sales of the software by the first half of the year 2015. Ghattamneni (2017)

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reported that the SAP Company had received more than 1300 buyers by October 2015 which
was a growth in sales. The growth of buyers who migrated to SAP S/4HANA Finance has
been increasing rapidly and by 30th June 2018, the buyers had increased to 8900 from 5400
recorded in 2016 (Ghattamneni 2017). However, there are number of databases which are not
from SAP that are competing with SAP S/4HANA Finance tightly. They include Microsoft,
Oracle and Workday Inc. The SAP S/4HANA Finance was produced in two editions that are
SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA On-Premise (Allen et al. 2018).
SAP S/4HANA On-Premise is similar to the current SAP Business Suite in terms of
functionality, coverage, localisation and industry-specific (Pattanayak 2017). The software
was created in 64 country versions and has 39 languages including English, French,
Germany, Japanese, and Russian (Ghattamneni 2015). The SAP S/4HANA Cloud is offered
in 18 languages and the versions are in 33 countries. Both the SAP S/4HANA Cloud and
SAP S/4HANA On-Premise have the functionality for accounting, finance, procurement,
controlling, sales, plant maintenance, manufacturing, project system and auditing (Sorko &
Kohlbacher 2015). To clearly understand the difference between the SAP S/4HANA Finance
and current SAP ERP FICO, a person must first understand what SAP ERP FICO is.
Therefore, the paper has discussed SAP ERP FICO so that it can be easy to differentiate
between SAP ERP FICO and SAP S/4HANA Finance.
Overview of current SAP ERP FICO
Collignon (2017) suggested that current SAP ERP FICO is one of the essential
functional constituent in SAP ERP Central Component which mandates and make the
management of financial information easy for an institution. The main fundamental function
and objective of SAP ERP FICO is helping the organisations in managing financial
statements for easy analysis and reporting of monetary data hence, making it easy for the