What’s New with SAP S/4HANA Cloud: Enhanced Flexibility, Agility for Your Competitive Advantage

There is no better time than now to make your business ready to seize the many opportunities of today’s dynamic marketplace.

To stay ahead of the competition, business agility and operational flexibility are key. They give you the ability to change directions and take advantage of new opportunities as soon as they arise. But how do you apply these concepts to your business?

Operational flexibility with SAP S/4HANA Cloud enables you to take the right action faster – whether it’s capturing new opportunities, keeping up with customer demands, or minimizing the impact of unexpected events.

SAP continues to be the leader in delivering intelligent enterprise resource planning (ERP) with SAP S/4HANA Cloud. With the latest 1902 release, stronger business outcomes are possible because it enables companies to be even more agile and responsive, shown below in two prime examples:

Close Your Books Faster with Greater Insight and Control, so You Can Get Back to Business

Imagine
You’re the one responsible for period-end financial closing activities across a multitude of subsidiaries spanning different product lines and geographies. This has traditionally been a time-consuming, heavily manual effort that consumes resources across various organizational entities.

What’s Possible
Utilizing advanced financial closing capabilities in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, you can get support in planning, executing, monitoring, and analyzing financial closing tasks for the entities of your group. It is specifically designed to support periodic, recurring closing activities where multiple persons are involved and activities are performed in a fixed chronological or dependent sequence. This enables a flexible, streamlined, consistent closing process across all entities with coordinated roll-up, greater transparency, and increased compliance.

Impact
You can now close your books faster – with greater accuracy and lower resource utilization –  so you have a better view of your business. This way, you can more readily deploy finance professionals to forward-looking activities that improve other business outcomes such as the evaluation of new business opportunities.

Simplify Your Warehouse and Reduce Goods Movements with Flexible, Integrated Processes

Imagine
Your warehouse receives frequent shipments from production locations and vendors. Traditional goods movement processes require you to slot the incoming items before performing quality inspections. This increases the potential for substandard inventory and redundant stock movements.

What’s Possible
Now with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, your warehouse staff can perform quality management activities during goods receipt – helping ensure only goods that meet spec are slotted and distributed to customers. Furthermore, partial lots can be employed, making it easier for staff to accept some goods while rejecting others from the same shipment due to quality defects.

Impact
You can now enjoy quality management integration with goods receipt processes, which reduces unnecessary stock movements. The possibility that defective stock could enter the sales and distribution stream is also drastically reduced. This decreases warehouse throughput requirements and ultimately increases customer satisfaction.

Key Highlights for SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1902 Release

Last November’s SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1811 release enabled next-generation business processes by bringing better insight and greater connectivity. The new features and capabilities of the 1902 release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud take innovation a step further to offer enhanced flexibility.

• Advanced financial close (all industries): Supports periodic, recurring closing activities where multiple responsible persons are involved and activities are performed in a fixed chronological or dependent sequence – resulting in faster closing through improved closing efficiency, governance and compliance, and transparency and accuracy.
• Time-based revenue recognition per IFRS15 standard (professional services): Empowers you to perform time-based revenue recognition according to IFRS15 (International Financial Reporting Standard), covering multi-element arrangements of provider contracts in contract accounting and invoicing.
• Warehouse management (manufacturing): Extends functionality introduced in the 1811 release by enabling inspection of products delivered from production or external suppliers before storing in the warehouse and usage decisions for partial lots when, for example, only some of the stock items in the inspection lot are of good quality.
• Transportation management (manufacturing): Expands capabilities set in the 1811 release, such as view transportation charge details and manually calculate charges; see the transportation charges based on the relevant freight agreement between your company, the purchasing organization, and the carrier; and get the freight cost broken down at the level of each delivery item based on gross weight.
• Service management (manufacturing): Synchronizes external service orders and service confirmations through application programming interfaces (APIs), provides functionality for execution of field services in conjunction with an external system, and stores data in universal journal, among other capabilities.

Conquer Future Business Challenges with Intelligent ERP Today

The 1902 release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud empowers you to be more responsive and better prepared to operate in today’s complex world. At SAP, we continue to innovate and refine our intelligent ERP solution, so you can become even more agile and flexible to meet the challenges of a dynamic shifting marketplace now and beyond.