It is this time of the year again! SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Private Edition 2023 release is here. It is my pleasure to guide you through a product tour on the 9^th wave of innovations available for our private cloud customers.

You have certainly read the blog post from Bert O. Schulze sharing important information on this major release.

SAP has very successfully launched our offer RISE with SAP, a bundle of tailor-made ERP software, transformation services, business analytics, and partner expertise to guide you along your transformation to the cloud.

At the heart of RISE with SAP, there is SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition. This Cloud ERP is the foundation to run your business processes, drive innovation, and unlock efficiencies through intelligent automation.

Watch the video below to have an overview of what we have new on this release:

Artificial Intelligence Into the Core

Businesses constantly seek innovative solutions to stay competitive and thrive. Artificial intelligence is a real game-changer which helps revolutionize industries across the globe.

SAP as a Cloud ERP leader, we’ve seen an increasing demand for solutions supported by artificial intelligence. AI into the core business processes, to help our customers make the right decision and perform at their best.

Of course, it is already a key topic in this release, and you will find below enough examples leveraging different “AI” technologies. In addition, we will deep-dive into new applications focusing on user experience, data insights, as well as collaboration and efficiency scenarios.

User Experience

We start with innovations centered on the most important: the people, the users of the system. The first four highlights focus indeed on user experience.

Finance

We deliver the new SAP Fiori app for incoming payments – success rate, a feature that helps you to monitor and analyze incoming payments. The purpose is to optimize the clarification process and team workload. You can make better decisions with key details and feedback on the automatic matching of payment through machine learning. This feature will allow you to:

1. Know what happened with payments
2. Identify what helped during the payment-clarification process
3. See how well machine learning supported the automatic process for matching incoming payments

Figure 1: Analyze Incoming Payments to optimize the clarification process and team workload

Manufacturing

Here, we have a highlight in Production Planning with a modernized version of the SAP Fiori app Manage Material Coverage. Now you will work with a modernized look and feel improved layout, additional header information, and new icons; improved and new quick views with new layout and additional navigation options; flexible selection of the materials list; additional columns for displaying the stock-requirements list and the ability to download to Microsoft Excel.

The main benefits are improved usability, and an easy way to access relevant data that is needed to get the job done faster.

Figure 2: Manage Material Coverage with a modernized look and feel improved layout

Sourcing and Procurement

In this area, the product sourcing overview helps you to view analytical insights for sourcing projects and supplier quotations. This feature helps your business to coordinate with various stakeholders in the different stages of a sourcing project and get a complete overview of the various sourcing projects and associated quotations that require action. With that, you have a transparent view of the whole sourcing process.

Now you can display the following card on the overview screen:

• Sourcing projects by status
• Sourcing projects by manufacturing plant and procurement projects
• Total target amount of sourcing projects by material group
• Supplier quotations by status
• Quotations by supplier and material group
• Quotations pending submission by the supplier
• Sourcing projects by submission deadline and target amount
• Planned spend by material group

Figure 3: Product Sourcing Overview for analytical insights on sourcing projects and supplier quotations

Industry – Public Sector

Here, the example of user experience is in the budget execution area: we ship a new SAP Fiori app to Manage Earmarked Funds.  From now on, you can maintain earmarked funds documents using this SAP Fiori app to reserve budgets for expenditures outside of procurement.  You can also create multilevel categories of earmarked funds documents that allow modeling of internal and external demands and commitments.

This feature brings several benefits:

• Avoid budget overruns through the early reservation of budgets
• Smoothly integrate the recording of commitments and actuals
• Optimize compliance management

Figure 4: Manage Earmarked Funds as a new SAP Fiori app

Artificial Intelligence

Supply Chain Management

My highlight here is located on extended service parts planning. With SAP Artificial Intelligence capabilities, we leverage ARIMA, the autoregressive integrated moving average algorithm. You can predict with ARIMA algorithm and additional external data and use automatic model selection to determine if ARIMA, ARIMAX or any other forecast model is the best fit.

The benefits include turning forecast based on demand history into future-looking forecast based on AI and considering potential disruptions to your business proactively.

Figure 5: ARIMA, autoregressive integrated moving average algorithm

 Situation Handling

SAP Artificial Intelligence plays now a key role in monitoring custom situations for situation handling. This technology brings certain business events called “situations” to the attention of a relevant group of business users. AI helps you monitor the life cycle of situations created by the extended framework of Situation Handling with the Monitor Situations – Extended app.

You can see the occurrence, the status, and related business objects for object-based and message-based situations.  This feature is essential to analyze the life cycles of situations efficiently during the whole cycle, from creation to closure. And analyze how situations are handled in detail.

Figure 6: Monitor Situations – Extended app to monitor the life cycle of situations

Flexibility and Collaboration

I decided to spotlight three innovations which bring you more flexibility in daily tasks, improve collaboration between teams, and reduce manual efforts and unnecessary work. These are key points to improve your workflow. The following highlights are in manufacturing, sales and asset management.

Manufacturing

This feature is part of extended production engineering. We improved the ability to identify maturity level of bill of material (BOM) using BOM status, to allow product and production engineers to work in parallel.  This is very useful if the production process of your company involves multiple teams and departments and if you make numerous changes to the BOMs throughout the process. From now on, you will have more flexibility and the possibility to give an early start in processes.

Now you will find the following options:

• ready only for engineering purposes but not for planning or production based on which production engineer may start preparing production process early
• ready for planning but not for production based on which production planners may plan for long lead procurement required for the part but not start production yet
• ready for production based on which production orders may also be created

Figure 7: Maintain Bill of Material allows product and production engineers to work in parallel

Sales

In sales, we ship a highlight in claims, returns, and refund management. With a new feature, you can suspend product valuation initiated by a refund in the customer returns process.  In the returns order item, you can now indicate if the product valuation for any refund decisions made is delayed, until the final logistical follow-up activity is confirmed.

Only the final logistical follow-up activity determines whether the product valuation should occur. This enables customer returns with an early refund during item creation without the valuation of corresponding returned goods at the first goods receipt.

The main benefits are:

• more flexibility in the returns and refund process
• avoiding unnecessary product valuation
• insuring a better and cleaner financial posting from customer returns

Figure 8: Returns Order Item: suspend product valuation initiated by a refund in the customer returns process

Asset Management

SAP now offers a great automation example, with the option to generate recurring schedules automatically, with the SAP Fiori app Generate Recurring Schedules.

If you have schedules that are repeated at regular intervals, now you will have them created automatically.  It is also possible to create some rules, based on:

• start and end dates
• recurrence pattern and schedule description pattern
• planners and reviewers

There is also the option to add operations to the schedule during automatic creation, based on the following criteria:

• performing work center(s)
• order type(s) and operation subphase
• indicator to make sure the operation is not part of another schedule yet

The SAP Fiori app helps your business to reduce manual effort in creating schedules, increases planning efficiency with automatic schedules, and reduces the risk of leaving out relevant operation.

Figure 9: Generate Recurring Schedules to create schedules automatically

Data Insights

Data insights is a key area to remember how your ERP helps you analyze valuable information and guides you in making informed, data-driven decisions.  Here, I highlight an innovation at utilities industry.

Utilities

SAP provides an innovation for the analysis and management of utilities clarification cases in business process exception management.  In this case, focused on bill to cash for energy prosumers.

First, it is now possible to analyze clarification cases thanks to the new core data services, CDS cube and CDS query. And second, we have provided the SAP Fiori launchpad content for the SAP Fiore role “operations specialist”. You will also find SAP Fiori apps for analysis and management of clarification cases in the meter-to-cash processes of SAP for utilities solutions.

Our main goal is to improve business processes by creating key performance indicators (KPIs) for managing exceptions. We also aim at enhancing user productivity with an easy-to-use app for analyzing clarification cases.

Figure 10: Clarification Case Overview to analysis and management of utilities clarification cases

Sustainability and Environment, Health, and Safety

We have an innovation that integrates sustainability and environment, health, and safety. This is a crucial area for companies that want to comply with legal and regulatory requirements related to environmental protection and worker safety.

Here, we present the provision of greenhouse gas emissions data to support integration with SAP Sustainability Control Tower. That’s it: we are enabling the integration of SAP EHS Management, environment management with SAP Sustainability Control Tower. Now, we also provide back-end adaptations of the existing CDS views in SAP Environment, Health, and Safety Management (SAP EHS Management).

This integration is fundamental and supports your business in:

• Monitoring features against the targets you set
• Taking your corporate environmental footprint data, such as air emissions, greenhouse gas emissions, wastewater, and waste data that have been calculated and recorded in SAP EHS Management, environment management to SAP Sustainability Control Tower for steering and target setting
• Facilitating environmental metrics for your corporate reporting initiatives
• Improving transparency of sustainability indicators based on actual environmental data

Figure 11: Integration of SAP EHS Management, environment management with SAP Sustainability Control Tower

Digital Transformation

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)

This innovation focuses on PLM, more specifically on Product Change Management. SAP provides now support for multiple occurrences of a change item in change records. Users can add the same component multiple times into a change record as a change item if the relevancy is different.

This feature enables you to document the relevance type of each change item. With that, you can indicate if the item is the root cause (problem item), impacted or solving the product issue or requirement (solution item).  Then, you increase transparency over the different phases of a product change.

Figure 12: Multiple occurrence of a change item

Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management (EPPM)

In project financials control for EPPM, we present the new SAP Fiori app to schedule project forecasting jobs: Project Cost Forecast. This function allows users to determine the remaining costs and the costs to complete for projects based on plan, forecast, commitment, and actual values in the network during the execution phase.

The feature brings more transparency, possibilities on planning and a relevant use in calculating project costs.

These are my selected highlights from the SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition 2023 release.  You can find the entire overview of innovations in the What’s New Document  published on the SAP Help Portal .

This blog post covers only selected innovations for selected LoBs and industries. You can find the entire overview of innovations in the What’s New Document published on the SAP Help Portal. 

Figure 13: Project scheduling in EPPM

To get further insights into our SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition 2023 release, stay tuned for Yannick Peterschmitt’s deep dive of the release highlights and read his upcoming blog post. 

Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast

As always, I would like to encourage you to subscribe to our podcast “Inside SAP S/4HANA”. This podcast leverages the unique knowledge and expertise of SAP S/4HANA product experts, partners and customers to address objects of interest by sharing product insights and project best practice. There is no customer success without product success and project success; we share all ingredients with you to get to the next level and make your SAP S/4HANA Cloud project a success. Subscribe now and benefit from the shared knowledge.

openSAP Microlearnings for SAP S/4HANA Cloud

Our openSAP microlearnings for SAP S/4HANA Cloud offer an exciting new learning opportunity. What began with a small batch of 20 videos, has now become a channel with more than 50 microlearnings that have generated over 20,000 views since then. Today we cover multiple lines of business such as finance, manufacturing, and supply chain, and key technology topics like Master Data Management, extensibility, SAP User Experience, and upgrade management. We are continuously adding new microlearnings to the SAP S/4HANA Cloud channel, so make sure you check them out.

Your Voice Matters!

If you want to learn more and actively engage with SAP subject matter experts on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, join our SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition community–now fully integrated with SAP Community. The community brings together customers, partners, and SAP experts and has a clear mission: deliver an interactive community to engage with one another about best practices and product solutions. We invite you to explore the SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition community ‘one-stop shop’ as the central place for all resources, tools, content questions, answers and connect with experts to guide you through your journey to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition.

Other SAP S/4HANA Cloud Enablement Assets

SAP S/4HANA Cloud is the foundation of the intelligent enterprise and is an innovative, robust, and scalable ERP. We at Cloud ERP Product Success and Cloud Co-Innovation offer a service as versatile as our product itself. Check out the numerous offerings our Enablement team has created for you below:

Further Information:

• SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition release info: sap.com/s4hana 
• SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition Community here 
• SAP S/4HANA PSCC Digital Enablement Wheel here 
• Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast here 
• Best practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition here 
• Help Portal Product Page here 
• Feature Scope Description here 
• What’s New here 

Feel free to ask your questions on SAP Community here. Follow the SAP S/4HANA Cloud tag and the PSCC_Enablement tag to stay up to date with the latest blog posts. 

Follow us on @SAP and #S4HANA, and myself Yannick Peterschmitt and LinkedIn.