You're invited! A Real-Life Journey on the Upgrade to SAP S/4HANA 1809/1909 Webinar

Back by popular demand! Did you miss SAP TechEd in Las Vegas? Our CEO Christopher Carter delivered a popular session at the event, A Real-Life Journey on the Upgrade to SAP S/4HANA 1809/1909, to a standing room only crowd. The Approyo team has moved many different companies to S/4HANA and now is your chance to learn about real-life situations and scenarios for moving to SAP S/4HANA 1809/1909 in this SAP TechEd bonus webinar.

A Real-Life Journey on the Upgrade to SAP S/4HANA 1809/1909
Presenter: Approyo CEO Christopher Carter
Date: Wednesday, October 30
Time: 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm EST

Join us for a discussion of the methodology and the process used to migrate to SAP S/4HANA 1809/1909. We will discuss the pitfalls, the success, and the overall project. We will not dig into the details on failed activities but will give everyone a sense of the timing and skill set needed to be able to accomplish such a herculean task.

Don't miss out, Register today! 

SAP Releases SAP S/4HANA 1909

With the 1909 release of SAP S/4HANA, SAP continues to focus on delivering leading-edge value in three key areas: intelligent automation, insight and prediction, and next-generation best practices. Intelligent automation, insight and prediction, next-generation processes: SAP S/4HANA 1909 is the Intelligent Enterprise Foundation and brings many new and innovative capabilities to the market. View the complete announcement on www.SAP.com

Foundation of a Digital Core

• An architecture that delivers a scalable foundation to transact at the highest possible automation
• A system of intelligence that supports and steers the business using embedded analytics, simulation, prediction, and decision support to run LIVE business
• An end-to-end experience that can be faster implemented, consumed, and adapted
• An open architecture to allow connectivity and adoption of micro-services

What makes the Digital Core intelligent?

• A digital age UX: Conversational UI´s and natural language processing allows us to target a hands-free ERP by 2020.
• Automation of business processes: Automation mainly addresses companies´ bottom lines and helps to reduce costs. We strive for an automation of 50% of all ERP business processes within the next 3 years.
• The next generation of business processes: We provide a streamlined architecture and a technology that did not exist before. We aim to increase the top line by providing an infrastructure which allows us to completely rethink value creation and service tasks.

While the list of new capabilities in SAP S/4HANA 1909 is extensive, it is important and consider the big picture. In 2017, the number of SAP S/4HANA innovations was 966, in 2018 it was 2,389, and now, in 2019, it stands at 3,312: an increase of almost 3.5 times! User experience (UX) innovations have gone from 646 to 1,048, and to now 1,496 — up by more than double in three releases.

Major SAP S/4HANA 1909 Highlights from SAP

• In finance, improvements in the continuous closing process will drive increased process efficiency and faster insights into your business. Integration of SAP Analytics Cloud with financial planning provides quicker, clearer insight so you can run your business more effectively. 
• In manufacturing, intelligent robotic process automation (IRPA) helps deliver predictive material resource planning (pMRP) so you can better serve your customers while reducing inventory costs.
• Predictive analytics now helps improve sales forecasts and delivery performance. Added blockchain capabilities make supplier quotes more secure.
• Improved integration across all lines of business drives end-to-end processes that lead to improved customer-centricity.

View the complete announcement on www.SAP.com

Start your path to the Intelligent Enterprise and SAP S/4HANA with Approyo
Approyo provides full SAP service technology with extensive capabilities in consulting, solutions architecture, hosting and managed services, in order to develop the right solution for our customers. We are already helping our customers start the move the SAP S/4HANA 1909. Get started today...

SAP S/4HANA: The Speed and Power of Simplification

SAP S/4HANA eliminates the complexities of legacy ERP databases, giving organizations a vastly simplified digital core with access to business-critical data in real time. The “S” in SAP S/4HANA is a nod to SAP's legacy business suite. SAP S/4HANA is optimized for SAP HANA, which supports a data model that simplifies the business computing environment dramatically. To take full advantage of this design, SAP S/4HANA was created to reimagine and recode the business suite from the ground up.

REUNIFICATION
Traditionally, the typical enterprise computing environment has been split between online transactional processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP). This split is a compromise made long ago: each system gets a copy of the original transactional data, commonly in a different data model, with each optimized for the type of workload (OLTP versus OLAP) in that system. This compromise, though, comes at the cost and complexity of managing two separate environments and moving data between them. Because SAP HANA can support performing analytical calculations and transformations on the fly, organizations can now bring OLTP and OLAP together again. Gone are the complex “helper structures” (indexes and data aggregate tables) that are used to overcome system performance issues running at the speed of disk. Now, with a simplified data model and the speed of in-memory processing, organizations can perform analytics on all data (live and historical) in a single environment – in the moment, as needed.

SIMPLICITY
By redesigning ERP for SAP HANA, the SAP S/4HANA reduces the number of tables dramatically across a wide range of functions. Take, for instance, finance and controlling. While in the past, data was structured in subledgers (accounts payable, accounts receivable, general ledger, asset accounting, cost center accounting, and so on), today they run on a single universal journal. This universal journal brings together postings related to finance (FI) and controlling (CO) in one single source table. The integrity of financial data is guaranteed by design, eliminating reconciliation effort between FI and CO and ensuring that every-one can always access the most current data. Teams are aligned and more effective because the complexity has been removed. Forecasting is faster and more accurate. Key performance indicators such as days sales outstanding (DSO) are avail-able in real time on a granular level. Profit center reporting, profitability analysis, and other real-time analytics performed on top of the universal journal become a reality.

As much as this simplification helps SAP, it also helps our customers. The SAP Tax Compliance application, for example, helps to streamline tax compliance through an automated tax control framework and now runs in SAP S/4HANA instead of a separate system that requires data replication. This application provides an enterprise-wide repository of compliance checks and enables corrections continuously during the current declaration period, freeing tax specialists from searching for anomalies. This simplification to a single source of truth supports new benefits – such as a comprehensive enterprise search. Now business users can search for master data and documents across different LoBs and across systems for a holistic view of the enterprise with zero latency in a modern user interface. At the same time, a built-in authorization framework helps to minimize administrative overhead and enable single sign-on so that users can work across LoBs in a secure fashion, without impediments.

INTELLIGENT TECHNOLOGY FOR THE INTELLIGENT ENTERPRISE
A simplified data model is imperative for intelligent technologies, such as machine learning. Traditional database models that maintain acceptable performance only with added complexity simply cannot scale to meet the needs of machine learning deployments. To run simulations, train algorithms, and improve visibility into what’s coming next, technologies need a data model up to the task. SAP S/4HANA is leveraging machine learning technology in the solution itself. One example is accelerated accounts receivable. With legacy databases and complex data models, accounts receivable can be an error-prone process that crosses multiple systems to match purchase orders to invoices. With SAP Cash Application software on SAP S/4HANA, machine learning technology does the matching automatically – and gets better over time with the addition of new data.

THE DIGITAL CORE
With SAP HANA as its foundation, SAP S/4HANA serves as a digital core for the business – one that helps drive business agility, improve customer experiences, and increase business performance.

Start your path to the Intelligent Enterprise with Approyo
Approyo provides full SAP service technology with extensive capabilities in consulting, solutions architecture, hosting and managed services, in order to develop the right solution for our customers. Get started today... 

Top Reasons to attend SAP TechEd Las Vegas

SAP TechEd is the single best technical training program of the year offered by SAP. The experiences and content offered at this event are in alignment with both my personal development needs AND the interests of our organization’s development, growth, and success.

Network
Your SAP Community, your peers, innovative customers,  and the technology experts you trust. All in one place for you to make purposeful connections. A unique opportunity in a great community.

Further your SAP Career
Attend for the information, training, and education you need today. Then future-proof your career with essential skills for your role in your organization’s intelligent enterprise.

SAP Knowledge
Seven tracks. 32 Learning Journeys. Over 600 sessions.  SAP experts and customers delivering best practices,  how-to tips, and advice. Get insight into the innovation and new technologies that will put you at the front of the pack.  Collaborate with SAP technology gurus to get the answers you need. One-on-one engagement, demos, sessions, and hands-on experiences foster brain-storming,  problem-solving, and actionable solutions.

SAP Strategy
Look to the future with product road maps to get answers to your questions about what comes next.  Discuss – and even influence – future product functionality through direct contact with strategists.

Attend our session
Approyo CEO Christopher Carter will be speaking at SAP TechEd in Las Vegas on Wednesday, September 25 from 9:30am - 10:15am PST. His session, A Real-Life Journey on the Upgrade to SAP S/4HANA 1809, will look at what it takes for a company to migrate or upgrade to SAP S/4HANA 1809.

Industry Capabilities with SAP S/4HANA

SAP S/4HANA is an intelligent, integrated ERP system that runs on the in-memory database, SAP HANA. It can help you:

• Address industry-specific requirements with proven best practices for 26 verticals and enable new business models as your marketplace evolves
• Revolutionize business processes with intelligent automation — supported by artificial intelligence and robotic process automation
• Make better decisions faster with embedded analytics, a conversational interface, and digital assistants
• Meet your IT landscape goals with hybrid, cloud, and on-premise scenarios that share a consistent data model, code line, and user experience

Here are just a few capabilities that SAP S/4HANA provides across multiple industries:

• Simplify asset operations and maintenance - Maximize asset value, control risks, and help ensure safety with a holistic view of asset status to plan maintenance activities with the right person, tools, resources, and integrated documentation. 
• Manage environmental, health, and safety risks - Execute tasks in critical environments with a complete view of compliance and safety measures, so you can identify risks and regulations, define priorities, implement controls, and track incidents.
• Maintain service agreements - Provide a single contract for all outcome-based services and reduce administrative burden by consolidating and maintaining task lists, catalogues, maintenance plans, and warranty information.
• Provide customer-oriented services - Engage with customers across a multitude of channels to offer packaged service offerings; manage complaints, claims, returns, and refunds; and schedule and dispatch field services to fulfill service orders.
• Streamline service parts management - Optimize parts logistics and inventory processes with real-time visibility across all supply locations to source service parts globally and ensure their availability.
• Streamline Core HR and payroll processes - Integrate employee master data, organizational data, and cost-center-related information from the SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central solution to speed reorganizations and other end-to-end processes.

Start your path to the Intelligent Enterprise with Approyo
Approyo provides full SAP service technology with extensive capabilities in consulting, solutions architecture, hosting and managed services, in order to develop the right solution for our customers. Get started today...

Intelligent Finance with SAP S/4HANA 1809

SAP S/4HANA is the digital core – the nerve center – of your entire business. It consolidates internal and external elements into a single, living structure that goes beyond traditional ERP. In other words, it connects all of your processes, provides you with live information and insights, and seamlessly integrates your enterprise with the digital world at large.

Finance on SAP S/4HANA is a set of comprehensive solutions designed to help the office of the CFO meet the demands of a digital economy. It is part of the market-leading, best-in-class finance solution portfolio from SAP, built on a modern digital core that harnesses the benefits of the SAP HANA platform.

Increasing efficiency in operational finance with next generation automation scenarios
With the SAP S/4HANA 1809 release SAP has added multiple new highly automated scenarios lifting the level of automation to the next level:

• The goods and invoice receipt reconciliation process, not only all relevant information is brought together in just one screen, but by integrating our digital assistant into the process, users experience a much more fluent collaboration. All aimed at quicker and more efficient reconciled items. On top of that, we planned for October complementing machine learning capabilities to add pro-active recommendations to resolve specific issues.

• As part of the evolution towards a continuous close, the introduction of a new highly automated process supports us in making the accrual management process not only more efficient but more accurate as well.

With SAP S/4HANA 1809 release, further enhancements are added to enable a more complete real-time margin analysis, including predictions through:

SAP further improved our real-time margin analysis with integrating profitability information in the universal journal

The introduction of predictive accounting, which unlike mathematics-based predictions make use of the already available document flow to predict financial results of the future

To cope with a changing organizational view, responding to the need for better insights not only for entity but also at the business unit or group level in a more automated way, new key components are being introduced:

• Group reporting – The need to deliver accurate, up-to-date financial information continuously in a company’s consolidation process is not limited to the level of an individual entity. Therefore, SAP has introduced the SAP S/4HANA Finance for Group Reporting solution which provides direct access to the underlying transactions and detail across the entire enterprise so that a company can confidently and efficiently consolidate their financial and managerial results required in their closing cycles. It enables organizations to extend this evolution towards a continuous financial close on group level. It provides unprecedented transparency by delivering a complete flow of collection, processing, analysis and publication of the information.
• Embedded analytics – Most finance professionals will agree that it is often cumbersome to get interesting information out of their ERP system. Additional capabilities have been added to support business users in getting insights more flexibly and efficiently, so they can concentrate on acting on the information, rather than investing time in number crunching.
• Tax service – Global tax regulations get more diverse, complicated and change more often than ever before. Keeping up with the pace of change, typically in multiple systems, is a challenge. SAP’s response is a central tax determination engine with rules and rates maintained by SAP or its partners. With the SAP S/4HANA 1809 release, emphasis has been placed on enabling self-service tax management, facilitating an organizations chosen approach to reduce the risks and costs of inaccurate calculations and liability from non-compliance.

Start your path to the Intelligent Enterprise with Approyo
Approyo provides full SAP service technology with extensive capabilities in consulting, solutions architecture, hosting and managed services, in order to develop the right solution for our customers. Get started today... 

How can the Intelligent Enterprise impact the Manufacturing Industry

The market is experiencing a disruptive shift in customer demand for new, extensive, smart, and personalized products. Sellers are constantly reducing buffer inventory with obsolescence risk in mind. Manufacturers are competing to meet this challenge and provide individualized products in similar lead times and cost as off-the shelf products. This creates tremendous complexity for the manufacturing operations team, yet at the same time, companies are looking for growth and profitability while maintaining high quality and sustainability.

To meet these demands, manufacturing is being used as a strategic pillar, becoming more collaborative, localized, automated, integrated, and highly adaptive. Companies are adopting digital manufacturing strategies and solutions to seamlessly connect relevant business stakeholders, information and operational processes in real time. Digital manufacturing simultaneously improves responsiveness and efficiency which drives growth, while decreasing cycle time and cost. Leveraging technologies like 3D printing, cloud, machine learning, and the Internet of Things (IoT) is increasing agility and extending the manufacturing network. Digital manufacturing has become a strategic differentiator.

SAP solutions powered by Approyo enable companies to integrate and embed intelligence in manufacturing processes facilitating Industry 4.0 principles with one source of live information. They provide an optimal coordination of planning and execution processes, covering all aspects of the manufacturing cycle from planning to shop floor and beyond.

Reduce manufacturing cost by increasing output and gaining real-time visibility into quality and costs
Increase plant output with improved planning and visibility into equipment utilization while also reducing the inventory held for manufacturing. Have a real-time and drillable view of the performance metrics of all the production facilities globally. This enables identifying and implementing global manufacturing best practices.

Reduce revenue loss due to plant fulfillment issues by agile planning and production orchestration
Gain the ability to respond to demand and confirmed order changes. Live inventory data and drastically reduced material requirements planning (MRP) processing time improve transparency and responsiveness. The planning system simplifies constraint based capacity planning by bringing together material and capacity constraints. Improve production tracking, labor shortage, first pass yield, and equipment availability to ensure on-time delivery.

Increase revenue growth by mass manufacturing of individualized products and 3D printing
Produce personalized products ordered by customers with minimal human intervention. Product genealogy for every unit is maintained in the system for service and compliance needs. Collaboration with Origin Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) and contract service providers enables fulfilment of custom orders faster, while reducing inventory levels, time to market, and
waste.

Reduce scrap and rework cost by empowering the workforce to take informed decisions
Gain immediate insights on planning, execution, quality, with analysis at the finest level of granularity available on mobile devices. Supervisors can analyze and take immediate actions on their mobile devices.

Protect people and the environment and reduce manufacturing downtime by proactively managing operational risk
Provide critical safety information to all employees – top floor to shop floor – to create an effective safety culture. Establish a holistic approach to embed safety and operational risk management into all of your operations.

Reduce manufacturing-related IT cost by using an integrated set of solutions
With SAP S/4HANA as the digital core, integrate seamlessly with the manufacturing execution suite and manufacturing network solutions (digital manufacturing insights, distributed manufacturing). This reduces the cost to develop and maintain digital manufacturing capabilities.

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com 

Digital Supply Chain - New innovations with SAP S/4HANA

Supply chains are now a competitive differentiator based on their speed, agility, and insight. Customers’ unique needs must be met with personalized products, new business models, greater intimacy through Internet of Things insights and deeper real-time prediction and intelligence across the enterprise.

Intelligent enterprises across all industries are focused on business outcomes and innovation by leveraging an intelligent suite of applications, intelligent technologies, and digital platforms. Discover how SAP S/4HANA and other supply chain solutions from SAP can help your business turn digital innovation into a competitive advantage.

Prediction of stock-in-transit arrival
The ability for warehouse managers to predict the arrival date of a shipment and manage delivery delays. Prebuilt set of KPIs supports robust analytics for the business scenarios. Early and efficient visibility for stock transport orders that leads to reliable processes for planning and scheduling of goods in transit.

Real-time Inventory
Live inventory management that enables unlimited simultaneous material movements and true transparency on inventory and material flows. Decreased stock buffers due to better transparency and insights.

Advanced ATP
Intelligent, real-time product availability check for sales, planned, and production orders. Includes scalable available-to-promise (ATP) for managing large transaction volumes and flexible allocation management capabilities. Provides back-order processing with intuitive priority classification and interactive exception handling.

Improve production planning
Coordinate manufacturing operations across your organization including material requirements, logistics, and receipts for proper material handling, work in process, and inventory. You can also make plan adjustments based on real-time information from the enterprise, suppliers, and the plant floor.

Accelerate manufacturing workflows
Plan and schedule maintenance tasks synchronizing labor, material, equipment and schedules. Execute planned and unplanned maintenance to ensure optimal operations including improved safety and environmental impact.

Single platform for warehouse management
Reduced TCO by landscape simplification through native warehouse management with SAP S/4HANA; a single warehousing platform for all warehousing operations, including optimization, automation, and labor management.

Single platform for transportation management
Reduced TCO by landscape simplification through native Transportation Management with SAP S/4HANA; a single platform for transportation management with basic and advanced shipping functionality and real-time embedded analytics.

Demand-Driven MRP (DDMRP)
Dynamic planning of replenishments with demand-driven MRP (DDMRP) that is fully integrated into existing MRP concept. Replenishment only for real demand and introduction of buffers at strategically important points.

9.5 reasons to upgrade to SAP S/4HANA today

SAP S/4HANA is the digital core – the nerve center – of your entire business. It consolidates internal and external elements into a single, living structure that goes beyond traditional ERP software. In other words, it connects all your processes, provides you with live information and insights, and seamlessly integrates your enterprise with the digital world at large.

SAP S/4HANA 1809
SAP S/4HANA 1809, released in late 2018, significantly increases the possibilities for digital transformation across all lines of business. Imagine giving voice commands to your SAP ERP system and obtaining instant analytics. Or automating a large portion of your business processes, freeing employees for value-added activities. The streamlined architecture of the 1809 release is also scalable, enabling you to drive growth and profitability.

Enter the Intelligent Enterprise
Intelligent enterprises effectively use their data assets to achieve their desired outcomes faster – and with less risk. SAP is committed to helping every customer become a smart, best-run  business and make the world run better. SAP S/4HANA 1809 is the core to the intelligent Enterprise.

Intelligent Technologies will help SAP Applications differentiate while at the same time natively comprehending the context of the business application. This includes higher-order intelligence with many scenarios oriented along business outcomes and relevant to lines of business, feedback mechanisms leveraging IoT and business networks as data sources for training feedback, as well as actionable insights in order to derive connecting insights to strategic decisions via a consistent User Experience (UX).

9.5 reasons to upgrade to SAP S/4HANA right now:

1. Improve order fulfillment
2. Increase customer satisfaction
3. Reduce manufacturing error rates
4. Reduce procurement costs
5. Respond to market fluctuations faster than ever
6. Streamline your supply chain
7. Improve your manufacturing cycle time
8. Streamline your supply chain
9. Reduce unplanned downtime
9.5 The Intelligent Enterprise

Download the Whitepaper: 9.5 reasons to upgrade to SAP S/4HANA right now

Innovations and Intelligence in the new SAP S/4HANA 1809

SAP S/4HANA is an intelligent ERP solution that enables companies to capture every opportunity in today’s digital world, SAP S/4HANA removes common obstacles associated with legacy ERP applications, such as batch latency, complex landscapes, and manually-driven processes. The latest release, SAP S/4HANA 1809 provides new innovations in a number of key industries.

In the area of Procurement, we’re delivering s number of Machine Learning capabilities with SAP S/4HANA 1809, for example:

• Increased invoice automation and efficient invoice monitoring for exception handling
• Reduction of free-text items by automatically proposing the creation of a new catalog item
• Proposal of material group for free-text items in purchase requisitions
• Provision of options for materials without source of supply

Quotation Conversion Rates is an innovation in Sales and Distribution which truly delivers on the promise of an intelligent ERP. As an internal sales representative or a sales manager, you can use Quotation Conversion Rates to track to what extent your quotations are being converted into sales orders before expiring. By leveraging machine learning capabilities, you can gain predictive insights into quotation conversion by comparing actual and predicted results. The Quotation Conversion Probability (also known as Order Probability) is the probability that a quotation item will be converted into a sales order item. The probability, expressed as a percentage, and net value of the quotation is used in order to calculate a total expected order value.

In Manufacturing we’re introducing Demand-driven replenishment. With the demand-driven buffer level management, you can plan and manage supply chains much more efficiently. Providing decoupling points with strategic stock positions, manufacturers can avoid the so-called “Bull-Whip-Effect”, where the variations in demand increases as you move further up the supply chain from customer to supplier.

Moreover, in inventory management, we included intelligence by leveraging predictive analytics and machine learning for decision support.

Finance as well has quite a few intelligent innovations in store for you, for example predictive accounting. When a sales order is confirmed in the system, this is not recorded in accounting until goods have been delivered and the invoice has been sent. With the predictive accounting functionality, based on the sales order, a predictive goods issue and a predictive invoice is registered.

• Group reporting – The need to deliver accurate, up-to-date financial information continuously in a company’s consolidation process is not limited to the level of an individual entity. Therefore, SAP has introduced the SAP S/4HANA Finance for Group Reporting solution which provides direct access to the underlying transactions and detail across the entire enterprise so that a company can confidently and efficiently consolidate their financial and managerial results required in their closing cycles. It enables organizations to extend this evolution towards a continuous financial close on group level. It provides unprecedented transparency by delivering a complete flow of collection, processing, analysis and publication of the information.
• Embedded analytics – Most finance professionals will agree that it is often cumbersome to get interesting information out of their ERP system. Additional capabilities have been added to support business users in getting insights more flexibly and efficiently, so they can concentrate on acting on the information, rather than investing time in number crunching.
• Tax service – Global tax regulations get more diverse, complicated and change more often than ever before. Keeping up with the pace of change, typically in multiple systems, is a challenge. SAP’s response is a central tax determination engine with rules and rates maintained by SAP or its partners. With the SAP S/4HANA 1809 release, emphasis has been placed on enabling self-service tax management, facilitating an organizations chosen approach to reduce the risks and costs of inaccurate calculations and liability from non-compliance.

Start your path to the Intelligent Enterprise with Approyo
Approyo provides full SAP service technology with extensive capabilities in consulting, solutions architecture, hosting and managed services, in order to develop the right solution for our customers. Check out our new Whitepaper, What's new in SAP S/4HANA 1809 and get started today...

What's new in SAP S/4HANA 1809

SAP S/4HANA® is a real-time enterprise resource management suite for digital business. It is built on advanced in-memory platform, SAP HANA, and offers personalized, consumer-grade user experience with SAP Fiori. Deployable in the cloud or on premise, SAP S/4HANA can drive instant value across all lines of business – no matter your industry or business size.

SAP S/4HANA is the digital core – the nerve center – of your entire business. It consolidates internal and external elements into a single, living structure that goes beyond traditional ERP software. In other words, it connects all of your processes, provides you with live information and insights, and seamlessly integrates your enterprise with the digital world at large.

The Intelligent Enterprise
Intelligent enterprises effectively use their data assets to achieve their desired outcomes faster – and with less risk. SAP is committed to helping every customer become a smart, best-run business and make the world run better.

Intelligent Technologies will help SAP Applications differentiate while at the same time natively comprehending the context of the business application. This includes higher-order intelligence with many scenarios oriented along business outcomes and relevant to lines of business, feedback mechanisms leveraging IoT and business networks as data sources for training feedback, as well as actionable insights in order to derive connecting insights to strategic decisions via a consistent User Experience (UX).

SAP HANA 1809 - The Intelligent ERP
SAP S/4HANA 1809, released in late 2018, significantly increases the possibilities for digital transformation across all lines of business. Imagine giving voice commands to your SAP ERP system and obtaining instant analytics. Or automating a large portion of your business processes, freeing employees for value-added activities. The streamlined architecture of the 1809 release is also scalable, enabling you to drive growth and profitability.

Industry innovations:

• Finance with Goods and Invoice Receipt Reconciliation leveraging machine learning, and the new SAP S/4HANA for Accruals Management, which is designed to support customers along the entire process of accruals
• Central Procurement, a big step in ERP landscape simplification and a functionality that will help you increase transparency across the procurement systems
• R&D innovation with the new Recipe Finder App and portfolio and project management analytics
• Manufacturing and Demand-Driven Replenishment, the game changer that helps you plan and manage supply chains based on customer demand, and not only via the traditional MRP procedures
• Retail and Fashion with new business scenarios including new planning strategies enhanced with segmentation functionality
• Banking, coming this release with and Loans Management / Deposits Management enhancements
• Public Sector, including major architecture simplifications
• Utilities with a new Analysis of meter reading, supported by an extended virtual data model
• Insurance, providing in that 1809 version a new Product configuration for insurance and digital products

Download our new Whitepaper: What's new in SAP S/4HANA today to learn more about the benefits and features of SAP S/HANA 1809.

2018 year in review: Top SAP News

It's hard to believe by 2019 is almost here. As we head into the final few weeks of 2018, the Approyo team wanted a chance to look back at some of the important moments of the past year. Over the next few weeks, we will publish a series of 2018 year in review blog posts, looking back at the top stories of the year.

Top SAP news of 2018
What's new in SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 03 - March 28, 2018
SAP HANA 2 is the business data platform for the intelligent enterprise. Leveraging state-of-the-art database and data management technology, advanced analytical capabilities and intuitive application development tools in the only all-in-one, in-memory-first data platform – SAP HANA 2 frees up valuable resources and human capital for new and innovative application development to meet your business’s strategic objectives.

SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 03 includes a mix of new and continuous innovations across the themes of database management, data management, analytical intelligence and application development. Read the full blog post...

SAP Acquires Callidus Software Inc. - April 11, 2018
SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) announced that it has completed its acquisition of Callidus Software Inc. (Nasdaq: CALD), a market leader known for its lead to money applications, including sales performance management and configure-price-quote (CPQ).

Here is the official announcement from SAP. These applications, marketed under the brand CallidusCloud, will provide SAP and its customers a differentiated, cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) solution, putting SAP in a leading position to compete in the US$46 billion CRM market. SAP plans to consolidate CallidusCloud product assets within the SAP Hybris cloud portfolio, which is part of SAP’s Cloud Business Group. Read the full blog post...

SAP Announces SAP C/4HANA - June 5, 2018
Major news from the first morning at the 2018 SAP SAPPHIRE NOW Conference. SAP CEO Bill McDermott announced a new suite of applications, SAP C/4HANA, to help businesses serve and retain customers. SAP also announced the SAP HANA Data Management Suite, the industry’s first comprehensive data management solution that enables companies to turn data sprawl into business value. Read the full blog post...

SAP Announces new SAP HANA Data Management Suite - June 6, 2018
The SAP HANA Data Management Suite is based on the latest versions of the SAP HANA business data platform. It allows for secure, governed enterprise-class applications and analytics by providing an open, hybrid and multicloud-enabled solution suite that orchestrates all the data needed into a trusted, unified landscape. SAP HANA Data Management Suite is the foundation for building agile, data-driven applications that are always tapping into live data. With one query, SAP HANA Data Management Suite can deliver results from a single logical data set that covers the whole enterprise — turning the concept of universal data into a reality. Read the full blog post...

SAP Releases SAP S/4HANA 1809 - October 2, 2018
SAP announced the latest version of SAP S/4HANA; SAP S/4HANA 1809. The latest release promises to continue on with SAP's commitment to both converting existing ECC functionality into S/4, as well as, introducing newer functions and features. Read the full blog post...

Key Takeaways from SAP TechEd 2018 - October 10, 2018
Another SAP TechEd 2018 Las Vegas is in the books and it delivered five days of education, training, networking, and fun. Topics included SAP HANA Data Management Suite, SAP Cloud Platform, SAP Leonardo, SAP Analytics Cloud, and how real customers are building intelligent enterprises. Following up the SAP SAPPHIRE NOW Conference earlier this year, the main focus was the "Intelligent Enterprise". Expect to continue to hear this term from SAP and it's partners for the next several months and years.  Read the full blog post...

SAP Acquires Contextor to Augment Robotic Process Automation Capabilities
- November 20, 2018
SAP announced on November 19 that it has acquired a company called Contexter to boost robotic process automation in SAP S/4HANA and SAP Leonardo. SAP is expected to start integrated this into its products in 2019. Read the full blog post...

Check out the Approyo blog for more information.

SAP Releases SAP S/4HANA 1809

SAP announced the latest version of SAP S/4HANA; SAP S/4HANA 1809. The latest release promises to continue on with SAP's commitment to both converting existing ECC functionality into S/4, as well as, introducing newer functions and features.

Here is an overview of SAP S/4HANA 1809 from sap.com

Innovations and Intelligence in SAP S/4HANA 1809

In the area of Procurement, SAP is delivering number of Machine Learning capabilities with SAP S/4HANA:

• Increased invoice automation and efficient invoice monitoring for exception handling
• Reduction of free-text items by automatically proposing the creation of a new catalog item
• Proposal of material group for free-text items in purchase requisitions
• Provision of options for materials without source of supply

Quotation Conversion Rates is an innovation in Sales and Distribution which truly delivers on the promise of an intelligent ERP. As an internal sales representative or a sales manager, you can use Quotation Conversion Rates to track to what extent your quotations are being converted into sales orders before expiring. By leveraging machine learning capabilities, you can gain predictive insights into quotation conversion by comparing actual and predicted results. The Quotation Conversion Probability (also known as Order Probability) is the probability that a quotation item will be converted into a sales order item. The probability, expressed as a percentage, and net value of the quotation is used in order to calculate a total expected order value.

In Manufacturing SAP is introducing Demand-driven replenishment. With the demand-driven buffer level management, you can plan and manage supply chains much more efficiently. Providing decoupling points with strategic stock positions, manufacturers can avoid the so-called “Bull-Whip-Effect”, where the variations in demand increases as you move further up the supply chain from customer to supplier.

Moreover, in inventory management, SAP included intelligence by leveraging predictive analytics and machine learning for decision support. Finance as well has quite a few intelligent innovations in store for you, for example predictive accounting. When a sales order is confirmed in the system, this is not recorded in accounting until goods have been delivered and the invoice has been sent. With the predictive accounting functionality, based on the sales order, a predictive goods issue and a predictive invoice is registered.

The Intelligent Suite build on the ingredients of the digital core
The Intelligent Suite will retain the modularity and flexibility of independent solutions while delivering a suite experience. Scenarios are business-driven and integrated, intelligent, and extensible. We embedded intelligence to deliver unmatched business value in each of the scenarios.

Intelligent Technologies
Intelligent Technologies will help SAP Applications differentiate while at the same time natively comprehending the context of the business application. This includes higher-order intelligence with many scenarios oriented along business outcomes and relevant to lines of business, feedback mechanisms leveraging IoT and business networks as data sources for training feedback, as well as actionable insights in order to derive connecting insights to strategic decisions via a consistent User Experience (UX).

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com 

Start your Journey to SAP S/4HANA with Approyo

If you use SAP’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, and you’re not using SAP S/4HANA, you’re on a deadline. By 2025, SAP will no longer support SAP ECC 6, the core component of SAP ERP. SAP S/4 HANA, a cloud based solution, is one way forward for all SAP ERP customers. Approyo can help your business prepare, migrate and support your move to SAP S/4HANA.

Based on the HANA in-memory database, S/4HANA is SAP's digital core. SAP S/4HANA gives companies a digitization-friendly IT environment to enable new ways of doing business -- that is its primary role. Its applications are interconnected in a way that traditional databases did not allow, enabling flexibility and real-time or closer-to-real-time insights.

Why move to SAP S/4HANA - Benefits explained

Innovation
SAP S/4HANA sets the stage for future innovation. Technology is evolving rapidly, which means merely ‘keeping up’ doesn’t cut it anymore. Enterprises have to stay ahead of the curve and make decisions that are future ready. SAP S/4 HANA applications leverage speed, context and data accessibility like never before. It is also driving cloud adoption by businesses, a platform which enables organizations to deliver innovative solutions and widens the capabilities offered by SAP S/4HANA itself.

Simplification
SAP S/4HANA brings about immense simplification to the management and administration of the IT landscape – in fact, simplicity is one of the key features SAP has brought in to its ECC application structure.  SAP S/4HANA enables the centralizing of hardware and network resources, and serves as the digital core for business process simplification, by harnessing the power of its HANA in-memory database. In older systems, enterprises often ran into issues of multiple batch-run dependencies. Elimination of aggregate tables, reduced processing time and the ease with which your systems can respond to transactions and queries, ensure that you are able to spend your efforts on strategic growth efforts.

Increased productivity
SAP S/4HANA streamlines business processes to deliver an expanded range of tangible benefits. Advanced analytics enable business users to access the data they need, instantly enabling transparency and faster reaction to changes in the business environment, while at the same time reducing the manual workload.

IT cost savings
SAP S/4HANA simplifies your IT landscape and optimizes data volumes, removing parallel and overlapping data. See more benefits of SAP S/4HANA

Understand your options
If you run ECC 6.0 or earlier version, you will need to upgrade by the 2025. Don't wait, start planning for your best upgrade path now and schedule a complimentary assessment with our team. We will help you understand all of your options and help you choose the best path forward.