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SAP S/4HANA is an amazing technological invention which has changed how we do computing forever. Giving us unbelievable speeds while freeing us from conventional hard drive based systems. S/4HANA has made all of the features which were considered fiction, a reality. As fast as S/4HANA is, it is still only the beginning of a new era.
Irrespective of the industry, the business manager’s primary goal is to figure out a better way to manage the business more effectively. Across the floor, for Enterprises, big and small, the challenge has been the massive data complexity across the business processes and S/4HANA has addressed all of these needs.
Consider this PreS/4HANA example. Day to day Business transactions accumulate lots of data. To maintain data integrity and security the original data remains locked. Copies of the original data are shared for reporting purposes. So the data is extracted, transformed and loaded to another database. Inadvertently a lot of detail is captured and stored in this new database which needs to be summarized. With this data, we can construct desired reports. But the problem is if there were any changes in the Business Suite we will have to go through all of the above steps again to generate up to date reports.
There has always been a requirement for clean and efficient use of data. But for 40 years businesses have been layering complexity upon complexity to build a data infrastructure. Due to the inadequacies of the hard-disk-based computing systems, this has proven to be inefficient and disorganized. Both hardware and software engineers had realized this very early in the game that the solution to this dilemma is faster computing. Despite all efforts from hardware manufacturers and software developers, we had peaked the performance and the only available solution was brute force computing. Where we join several computers in a cluster to achieve higher speeds. Although this was a solution and was not a cheap one.
SAP did not invent in-memory computing. But once the concept was out, it sure did invest heavily in it to build one of the fastest computing appliances and named it HANA. HANA uses vast arrays of RAM memories to store the applications and the database which makes SAP work. HANA, although still in its infancy has emerged as the most desirable ERP system worldwide. And thousands of SAP customers who were on the previous (hard drive based ECC6) system are now aspiring to move over to HANA. SAP HANA completely removes all of the data complexity, that's allowed us to built a new set of a next-generation application called S/4HANA.
S/4HANA is the next generation of ERP system. In 2015 SAP announced its next big thing S/4HANA. You can see the evolution of the ERP suite by SAP: R/2(1979), R/3(1992), ERP(2004), S/4HANA(2015)
SAP was launched in 1972 followed by R/2 in 1979. In 1992 they launched client-server architecture with SAP R/3. 2004 saw leap toward web-enabled functionalities with SAP Business Suite solution S/4HANA in 2015.
With S/4HANA you can start to realize the ability to have true customer multi-channel experience:
When you take all these solutions together which enables you to drive a true digital transformation within your organization. That's why today SAP has over 10000 SAP HANA customer.
Since the launch of S/4HANA in 2015 SAP has over 8900 customers. And that's because it's enabling the next generation of digital transformation. Which is required for an organization to remove complexity and deliver business values.
Aspiring SAP S/4HANA Customers are now reaching the point in their road-map where they actually start implementing S/4HANA. Some of those customers want to keep their existing processes and transfer them to S/4HANA which is called conversion and SAP has tools for these conversions.
But some of the customers who have been using SAP for many years have quite complex systems in terms of DATA and in terms of modifications and enhancements. So they are thinking that SAP S/4HANA could be a good new start. So they are thinking about a "GREENFIELD" implementation, re-implement the processes and migrate the DATA into the new system.
So now the question is how to implement SAP S/4HANA. Your journey starts with the following three scenarios:
The first scenario is starting fresh new implementation. Implement SAP HANA and S/4HANA on Premise or on Cloud. Strategically simply subscribe to SAP S/4HANA cloud solution. Your choice than move data from a legacy application using proven migration content and tool.
System conversion of your existing SAP solution. If you are starting from ERP6 running on non-HANA database and installing a new code with SAP software update manager. Use the SAP HANA enterprise cloud to jump-start the process.
For customer already running ERP6 on SAP HANA. All you need to do is apply SAP S/4HANA functionality to enjoy the value of instance inside across your business.
Landscape transformation system consolidation for example - Install SAP S/4HANA to use consolidate Financial transaction from all across your enterprise. You get the full benefits such as Universal General. Take advantage of Centralized information across your business.
SAP has simplified the transition to S/4HANA with faster fewer services intense initial implementation to On Cloud or On-Premise. Rather adoption of innovation throughout the entire product life cycle and extensible framework for Partners. SAP ACTIVATE is the innovation adoption for the framework for SAP S/4HANA. SAP Activate is a Substitute for the ASAP methodology.
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