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.

Finance with SAP S/4HANA

Enterprises today are increasingly experiencing a new normal of volatility that is  fundamentally changing how they engage with their investors, customers, suppliers, regulators, and employees. This volatility is driven not only by traditional areas of currency exchange risk and commodity prices but also by macroeconomic volatility and rapidly changing consumer and employee preferences. Additionally, tax policy volatility and complex regulatory requirements are challenging finance to capture, analyze and provide deeper and more relevant real-time information.

The role of finance itself is evolving towards active engagement with business partners, simplifying and automating processes, enabling new questions to be asked that were never possible and delivering new insights during the decision-making process. Leading finance organizations are driving digital transformation and fundamentally changing the way they bill, collect, report, and pay taxes, and how they plan for and manage a constantly changing business. Finance’s role is expanding as it leans into innovation to creatively adapt to change, manage volatility, and to find new opportunities to create value.

SAP S/4HANA is the finance innovation platform that enables today’s digital business by bringing business processes and analytics together into a single, smooth, digital motion. It provides the foundation for continuous innovation by allowing customers to benefit from newest SAP Leonardo innovations as they emerge along with the ability to leverage extended finance for procurement, workforce management, travel & expense management, etc. The time to innovate and transform is now and SAP supports a live business for all roles of the office of the CFO.

SAP S/4HANA for central finance foundation
Provides a non-disruptive path to adopt SAP’s latest finance simplifications and innovations for customers with heterogeneous landscapes, out-of-maintenance, and/or highly customized SAP systems. It provides a unified financial and management platform to centralize process execution, planning, and reporting based on the same (single source of the truth) data. Benefits include advanced reporting at the segment, entity, or group level; business-model-agnostic rollups for reorganizations and M&A modeling; scalable local and central process execution (complementing process execution in source ERPs); and a starting point for finance shared services across business units.

Transformation platform for the digital enterprise
Create an advanced digital data architecture (universal journal), a platform to include future innovations, a single source of the truth for both transactions and analytics, and a digital core to include integration for workforce, network, customers, and new innovations enabled by SAP Leonardo, SAP Ariba, SAP Concur, SAP SuccessFactors, and SAP Field glass solutions.

Rapid value creation with minimal disruption
Massive simplification and optimization within SAP S/4HANA can be deployed with minimal business disruption to accelerate business value and capture and eliminate the need for overly complex processes.Additional value can be achieved by deploying solutions and templates within our SAP Activate methodology, standardizing master data using the SAP Master Data Governance application, and focusing effort on the reduction or elimination of legacy custom code.

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Build your competitive advantage across the entire subsidiary ecosystem with SAP S/4HANA

Managing the subsidiary network can be a big challenge

• High IT complexity and cost due to heterogeneous applications across subsidiaries
• High Corporate risk due to limited governance and compliance across subsidiaries
• Higher cost of finance and increased cash needs due to limited visibility to timely subsidiary analytics
• Reduced operational efficiencies due to minimal leverage by subsidiaries of Corporate capabilities and services
• High subsidiary operational costs due to inconsistent business processes
• High costs to incorporate new acquisitions into the Corporate infrastructure
• Low collaboration Corporate to Subsidiaries and Subsidiaries to Subsidiaries leads to reduced monetization of the Digital Economy 

A new subsidiary strategy is needed for success in the digital economy

Companies need to expand globally faster

• New (M&A) and existing subsidiaries are key components of a growth strategy and these need a solution that helps them scale quickly at low cost 
• Solution standardization is key and the most effective solutions with provide built-in governance, control, visibility, and best business practices 
• The Cloud value proposition is the perfect fit to enable efficient subsidiary adoption and flexible growth

Success in the Digital Economy will drive companies to implement new business models across all subsidiaries

• Better collaboration between Corporate and subsidiaries to quickly roll out company-wide products and services
• Digital economy  business models to allow speedy response to both local  and global business needs 
• Faster integration into corporate infrastructure for quicker/more effective M&A ROI

Building competitive advantage and out-performing the competition requires a tighter alignment between Corporate and its subsidiaries

• Real-time visibility across the entire subsidiary ecosystem to drive insight to action and serve customers better
• One face to the customer with tighter subsidiary ecosystem interrelationships
• Increased leverage of Corporate services and capabilities out to subsidiaries to build competitive advantages

Cloud solutions are a great choice for subsidiaries

Instant Value

• Accelerate go-live & user adoption
• Rapid global deployments
• Quickly adapt to new business needs

Continous Innovation

• Instant access to the latest technologies
• Get the latest best practices
• Keep up with regulatory changes

Predictable, Lower TCO

• Shift from CapEx to OpEx
• Better transparency into costs & usage
• No infrastructure investment needed

Simple, Reliable & Safe

• Easy to configure & extend 
• Fully managed by a trusted 3rd-party
• Complete data security and protection

Enter SAP S/4HANA
An intelligent ERP suite designed specifically for in-memory computing, SAP S/4HANA offers a personalized, consumer-grade user experience with SAP Fiori. No matter your industry or business size, SAP S/4HANA can help you drive instant value across all lines of business.

• Complete Visibility - Increased global operations, compatible applications, sharing
• Control & Governance - Manage more diverse operations, more disparity, withcontrol and financial consistency
• Business Processes - Consistent, best practices, corporate standards
• Managed Risk - New governments, new laws, new languages, new customers, new employees
• Optimized IT Cost and Speed - Effectively use limited resources, inexperienced people, time
• Reduced Complexity - Global suppliers, new channels, new markets, complex supply chains
• M&A - No longer slow and expensive to ramp up and integrate to Corporate

Read the full blog post....  

Experience Digital Transformation with Approyo
The opportunity exists to transform business processes and achieve the digital transformation of your business with more automation and real-time visibility. Our SAP S/4HANA, SAP HANA and Cloud solutions address these important needs and more. Let us show you today! Set up a free consultation. 

Ask Approyo: SAP ECC vs. SAP S/4HANA

One common theme we hear from customers is the confusion in the market place around SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA. In this post, we will try to clear up the confusion and explain how the two solutions relate to one another.

What is SAP ECC?
SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) is the previous generation of SAP’s enterprise resource planning software. ECC provides modules covering a full range of industry applications, including finance, logistics, HR, product planning and customer service, linked together into a single, customizable system run on a database of the user’s choice.

What is SAP S/4HANA?
SAP S/4HANA is the successor of ECC. It is a natural evolution and not just a simple upgrade. Currently, SAP S/4HANA 1709 empowers every corner of your organization to deliver business results. SAP S/4HANA is the foundation for businesses to deploy machine learning and Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios based on SAP Leonardo capabilities, unifying transactional and analytical workloads in real time and helping you stay ahead of the competition.

SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA
The route to S/4HANA is achieved either by a system conversion from an ECC solution (including Suite on HANA) or a new install. A system conversion needs to take place with the reason being to enable the new simplified data model. You need to be conscious of what functionality you have lost from your existing system as part of the move to S4/HANA in order to then replace it.

Read the full Blog Post... 

Supply Chain and Manufacturing innovations in SAP S/4HANA 1709

The 1610 release of SAP S/4HANA brought advanced supply chain and manufacturing functionality such as production planning and detailed scheduling, advanced available to promise, and extended warehouse management directly into core ERP. This eliminated functional boundaries and allowed businesses to orchestrate end-to-end supply chain and manufacturing processes to better respond to customers’ demand for personalized products.

SAP S/4HANA 1709 continues the supply chain conversion path of the prior release by integrating the SAP Transportation Management application into the core, delivering the industry’s first truly converged supply chain and manufacturing ERP solution from planning and forecasting all the way to downstream production, execution, and transportation. In addition, logistics professionals can now take advantage of a new transportation cockpit as well as load consolidation, planning and optimization, automated carrier selection, and more. This reduces IT landscape complexity while simultaneously providing best-of-breed transportation tools to make your operations more efficient and effective. Plus SAP S/4HANA 1709 extends embedded analytics capabilities to cover transportation management.

SAP S/4HANA 1709 also allows you to leverage demand-driven material requirements planning in your supply chain and manufacturing environment. Now you can provide real-time prioritization of supply orders, dampen variability with strategic buffering, and shorten lead times.  This allows you to reduce cost with lower overall stock while ensuring high customer service levels. This new material requirements planning concept provides full demand transparency, decision support, instant insight, and immediate resolution based on lead time and consumption analytics.

Here are other notable supply chain and manufacturing innovations in SAP S/4HANA 1709:

• In warehouse management: integration of quality management processes and management for unplanned returns.
• In supplier relationship management: a new centralized purchase hub for consolidated purchase requisitions
• In manufacturing engineering: conversion of an engineering bill of materials (BOM) into a manufacturing BOM, 3D visual support for BOM items, and animated work instructions 
• In manufacturing for complex assembly: enhanced comprehensive planning environment, change impact analysis, and system-based shop-floor monitoring with automatic issue detection
• In extended production operations: enhanced monitor production orders and operations, root cause analysis and decision support for shop-floor operation issues, management of work queues and adjustments to existing production orders, and tracking and tracing of individual parts

SAP Releases SAP S/4HANA 1709

SAP released the latest upgrade to SAP S/4HANA, SAP S/4HANA 1709, on September 15. The latest release of SAP S/4HANA delivers new intelligence and innovations to help companies run live in an ever-more-dynamic and fast-paced digital world. SAP S/4HANA 1709 integrates new intelligent applications that bring SAP Leonardo capabilities for machine learning and predictive computing directly into the digital core.

Architectural evolution
The SAP S/4HANA 1709 release is now generally available. This release runs on SAP HANA 2, the second generation of SAP’s in-memory database platform, which supports scale-out and usage of active-active for added performance. This enables customers to benefit from the latest innovations in the database system.

Intelligent ERP for a Flexible Enterprise
SAP S/4HANA 1709 empowers every corner of your organization to deliver business results. SAP S/4HANA is the foundation for businesses to deploy machine learning and Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios based on SAP Leonardo capabilities, unifying transactional and analytical workloads in real time and helping you stay ahead of the competition.

New Applications powered by SAP Leonardo
SAP S/4HANA 1709 integrates new intelligent applications that bring SAP Leonardo capabilities for machine learning and predictive computing directly into the digital core, providing real-time insights and business context while simultaneously freeing resources from repetitive tasks. Examples include the following:

• SAP Cash Application software learns matching criteria from your historical financial clearing data to automatically match invoices with incoming payments, allowing for greater scaling of shared service centers or redeployment of finance professionals to more strategic activities.
• SAP Fiori apps for use in contract consumption predict contract expiration or goods consumption ahead of time, supporting more effective supplier negotiations and relationships.