A Quick View of SAP’s New S4 HANA

By Karthik Palanisamy, Vice President, Analytics and SAP Services

Karthik's specialties include ERP strategy, business intelligence, HANA, and leveraging technology.

 

An announcement was made by SAP in early February when Suite 4 SAP HANA was introduced, which is designed to “break through all limitations of the past and... fully leverages the latest in-memory and real-time capabilities.”

The following information is taken directly from a FAQ document on SAP’s site to offer our clients a quick view of what this new software is capable of doing:

FAQ: Do you have examples of business use cases?

Finance

Today: A single source of truth with superior granularity for all transactions and analytics to streamline and eliminate cycle times and reconciliations of the data. Reconciliation becomes inherent.

Before: Separate systems and documents driving complexity across finance and a lot of manual reconciliation efforts

Example of unique innovation: central journal to get a consolidated, real-time view of the state of the business across all entities; this was simply not possible before

Proof points with the SAP Simple Finance experience at SAP, where SAP runs SAP:

  • 70% less intercompany reconciliation time
  • Lengthy iterations eliminated in intercompany reconciliation

Today: Intercompany reconciliation on the fly for accelerating financial close. Unlimited simulations – apply historic data to continuously changing business context

Before: Only extensive transactions and batch processing, no real-time simulation Proof points with the SAP Simple Finance experience at SAP, where SAP runs SAP:

  • 71% faster batch input processing in financial close
  • 40% less posting corrections in financial close
  • 400 hours less processing time at quarter-end close

Marketing

Listening to your customers

  • Capture and analyze customer interactions from different channels
  • Get customer and consumer trends in a single view

Targeting the right customers

  • Perform customer segmentation with high speed on any data
  • Build dynamic target groups
  • Interpret behavior with scoring and attribution

Engaging with your customers

  • Execute personalized omnichannel campaigns
  • Analyze success of campaigns on open, clicks, and so on
  • Monitor impact on funnel and sales orders

Other examples and FAQs are available on SAP’s site.

What does this mean for your company?

Contact us to understand what it really means to you, who should consider this new option and what opportunities can be solved.

In future issues of this eNewsletter, we will be examining HANA and the various solutions in more depth as well as answering HANA questions from Pragmatek clients. Click here to email us.