SAP S/4 HANA Training

Learn how SAP S/4 HANA in Propel provides automotive firms with a proven framework to adopt industry best practices while attaining operational excellence. Discover how SAP supports the automotive value chain with intelligent solutions and integrated, automated processes that are transparent and connected to the real world, delivering a superior customer experience.

What is SAP S/4 HANA?

SAP S/4 HANA is a future-ready enterprise resource planning (ERP) system with built-in intelligent technologies, including AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics. It transforms business processes with intelligent automation and runs on SAP HANA – a market-leading in-memory database that offers real-time processing speeds and a dramatically simplified data model.

Features and business benefits of SAP S/4 HANA

50% reduction in data footprint

100 times faster reporting

Enables improved insight and performance

Competitive edge and better workflows

Consumer-grade UX across devices

Offer reduced FTEs and faster implementations

Difference between HANA and S/4 HANA

SAP S/4 HANA is short for SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA, meaning that it is the fourth version of SAP Business Suite, but is designed to run only on SAP HANA.

S/4 HANA originated in SAP HANA, the in-memory database released in 2011. SAP HANA made it possible to process large volumes of operational and transactional business data in real time. In 2013, SAP launched SAP Business Suite on HANA, a HANA-based ERP system that included modules for CRM, SRM, PLM and SCM. Suite on HANA was essentially the SAP ERP business applications' front end running on the HANA in-memory database back end. S/4 HANA was written in HANA rather than running on top of it.

SAP S/4 HANA required rethinking the database concept and rewriting 400 million lines of code. According to SAP, the changes make the ERP system simpler to understand and use and more agile for developers. SAP sees S/4HANA as an opportunity for businesses to reinvent business models and generate new revenues by taking advantage of the internet of things and big data by connecting people, devices and business networks.

Also, because S/4 HANA does not require batch processing, businesses can simplify their processes and drive them in real time. This means that business users can get insight on data from anywhere in real time for planning, execution, prediction and simulation, according to SAP.

S/4 HANA Modules

One key component of S/4 HANA is SAP Finance -- formerly Simple Finance -- which aims to streamline financial processes and enable real-time analysis of financial data. SAP Finance helps companies align their financial and non-financial data into what SAP refers to as a single source of truth. Some Business Suite users are deploying SAP Finance as the first step on the road to S/4 HANA.

SAP has added more modules and functionality to subsequent releases, such as:

S/4 HANA 1511: --Released November 2015 -- which introduced a logistics module called Materials Management and Operations (MMO).

S/4HANA 1610: --Released in October 2016 -- which included modules for supply chain management, including Advanced Available-to-Promise (aATP); Inventory Management (IM); Material Requirements Planning (MRP); Extended Warehouse Management (EWM); and Environment, Health and Safety (EHS).