SAP S/4HANA ERP is a powerful suite for digital business solutions. The SAP S/4HANA ERP leverages the advanced in-memory platform and SAP HANA of SAP to deliver optimized business processes and premium end-user experience with SAP Fiori for clients. SAP S/4HANA is offered in two versions including, on-premise and S/4HANA cloud. The platform is highly regarded as an effective and efficient solution for companies of all sizes and across industries. Here in this blog, we will be briefly looking into the potential of SAP S/4HANA and its potential impact on businesses. We will also be looking at the difference between SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA.
S/4HANA – A Big Leap Forward!
S/4HANA is quite different compared to the previous versions of the SAP Business Suite. Here the name represents;
- The “S” stands for simple, which implies that the platform is meant to offer more straightforward and more optimized solutions for business processes.
- The “4” indicates that this is the fourth edition of the SAP Business Suite.
What is SAP S/4HANA?
SAP S/4HANA simply represents the Business Suite 4 SAP HANA. As can be taken by name, it implies that S/4HANA is the 4th version of the SAP Business Suite. However, this time around, the business suite differs from the previous version since it is exclusively developed to run on SAP HANA. S/4HANA platform was created to offer more interactive and easily manageable solutions for users to resolve complex issues. S/4HANA also provides better handling and processing of a large volume of data than the previous versions of SAP Business Suite.
Some of the worth-mentioning applications of S/4HANA includes;
- The advanced technology used in S/4HANA minimize the computational time required to perform business processes compared to the previous versions of SAP Business Suites
- Leverages the improved SAP Fiori interface to offer a more interactive and user-friendly interface
- Is capable of running massive volumes of data-parallel, offering up to 50x more data processing as compared to SAP R/3
What Is New with SAP S/4HANA?
SAP S/4HANA was a massive shift from its traditional business suite. It was nothing short of an enormous undertaking by the company that required a complete overhaul of the database concept and rewriting of hundreds of millions of lines of code. The ultimate vision behind SAP S/4HANA was to offer users better usability and simplicity while offering developers more flexibility. Some of the other worth-mentioning advantages of the platform include;
- Business Process Optimization
SAP S/4HANA enables businesses to maximize their business processes by leveraging powerful technologies, including the Internet of Things (IoT) and other robust analytics
- Business Process Modernization
Business process modernization is yet another central selling point for the S/4HANA software. Given that the SAP S/4HANA uses the powerful SAP HANA platform, it vastly optimizes the platform’s ability to simplify business processes and enable businesses to undertake real-time analytics.
What Are the Benefits of SAP S/4HANA?
For businesses looking to undertake SAP S/4HANA implementation or migration, here are some of the benefits you can achieve;
- Reduce the need for the hardware since the data will be compressed. SAP S/4HANA application suite enables data compression, thus requiring low data storage need.
- Reduced cost of software acquisition. SAP S/4HANA implementation eliminates the need for multiple software products like middleware software, management software, ETL, and data replication software
- Optimized development time with streamlined processes and automation
- Greater efficiency and productivity owing to an intuitive user interface and a simplistic environment leveraging SAP HANA platform
Summary of Expected SAP S/4HANA Migration
With a myriad of potential benefits of S/4HANA, businesses worldwide have already started implementing the platform to optimize processes and improve productivity. With the option to choose from SAP S/4HANA on-premise or S/4HANA cloud, companies have the flexibility to select the best model that meets their unique requirement and IT strategies. SAP CRM integration with S/4HANA further improves the proposition of S/4HANA implementation, enabling businesses to improve efficiency and effectiveness of businesses processes while simultaneously eliminating complexity and redundancy.
If you also wish to implement SAP S/4HANA for your business, the best-recommended approach is to employ a certified SAP consulting agency or SAP-certified hosting provider. An experienced agency will have the expertise to assess the business requirement objectively while also evaluating the business readiness for the implementation. This will also help you to choose the best possible deployment path while minimizing business disruptions.
Difference between HANA and s4hana
SAP HANA
HANA is the backend that operates the SAP landscape. In essence, HANA is an innovative column-based Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) that is responsible for performing all required actions (store, retrieve, process, and analyze) for core business activities. HANA itself doesn’t perform any tasks; instead, it runs applications installed by the businesses like SAP finances, HR, Logistics, and others to complete the tasks. The advantage of HANA is its ability to accommodate all types of data; thereby, it offers businesses the flexibility to choose any software they need to meet their unique requirements.
Another great benefit of HANA is its ability to minimize memory usage up to 10x compared to other RDBMS. As a column-based database, HANA combines the OLAP and OLTP into a single structure, which further improves its performance significantly. To make it even better, SAP HANA is able to substantially improve the speed of both OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) and OLTP (Online Transaction Processing). SAP HANA is unique RDBMSs with a neat structure and low memory footprint. The system is also unique in its ability to perform real-time analytics, which makes crunching data faster and almost instantaneous. This enables businesses to remain prepared for changing conditions and brings in various other strategic benefits.
SAP S/4HANA
SAP S/4HANA stands for Business Suite 4 SAP HANA. To put it simply, it’s the 4th edition of the Business Suite from SAP, which is exclusively developed to run on SAP HANA. SAP has been marketing S/4HANA as the new generation version of the business suite that comes with a simplified architecture and interactive interface. The SAP S/4HANA is meant to replace the SAP ECC/ERP.
SAP S/4HANA was released in 2015 and was marketed as the “most significant update by the company in over two decades.” The ultimate purpose of SAP S/4HANA was to offer users with interactive and straightforward learning curve while helping them solve much complicated issues and handle massive volumes of data seamlessly. The platform is being provided to businesses as on-premise, cloud, or hybrid deployment models.
According to the company, developers preferred the ERP system SAP S/4HANA for being more agile and easy to use. SAP markets the SAP S/4HANA as an opportunity for businesses to optimize their business models and improve revenues by leveraging advanced technologies, including; Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data.
SAP S/4HANA doesn’t require Batch Processing, which makes it easier and more convenient for businesses to simplify their processes. It also enables companies to access data insights remotely in real-time for assessment, forecasting, planning, execution, and simulation.
Simple Finance by SAP S/4HANA is one of the significant modules of S/4HANA, aimed to streamline financial processes for businesses. The module also enables real-time analytics for financial data, enabling companies to align their financial and non-financial data into a “Single source of truth.”
HANA Pricing
HANA is priced based on the per GB model. This means that a mid-sized ERP instance, which will be around 1000 GB to 2000 GB, would roughly cost around USD 1.6 million (one time). This is the average base price, which doesn’t include the support charge or the cost of hiring HANA skills which are still costly and challenging to find.
