Looking back on 2020, SAP has increased its investment to continue to provide strong support for the transformation of SAP S/4HANA Cloud customers to digital smart enterprises. Focusing on the two strategic directions of integration and innovation, SAP has continued to cultivate in various business lines and different functional modules, launching a large number of new functions and product enhancements. The SAP S/4HANA Product Success team of the China Research Institute combined the product roadmap and customer feedback to select the top 9 new features of the year. Committed to making SAP S/4HANA Cloud products better serve customers in Greater China.
1. The new function of SAP Fiori interface-Space
In the version of SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005, the concept of Space was introduced in SAP Fiori for the first time. Through this new concept, we introduced the possibility of defining the page layout of the entire user group. It can be easier and more structured than before to define the content of the homepage. It solves the two pain points of users: too much content on the homepage and too slow loading; and the layout of the homepage is classified by technology, and it is difficult for users to quickly find the application they want.
If you want to actually experience the benefits of Space, you can click the following micro-learning link to watch the video:
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Open the link: https://open.sap.com/microlearning
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Select SAP S/4HANA -> User Experience in the menu
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Choose playlist EXPERT USER EXPERIENCE
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选择视频 "Introduction to Structuring SAP Fiori Launchpad with Spaces" 和 "Tools for Structuring SAP Fiori Launchpad with Spaces"
2. The new function of sourcing and procurement-fast launch of suppliers
In the procurement business scenario, the buyer company purchases materials or services from the supplier, and after creating a purchase order on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, it expects to interact with the supplier in real time through the online channel of SAP Ariba Network, a mature product. Interactive content includes order confirmation, shipping notice, shipping notice, etc. At this time, if it is found that the new supplier is not a registered user of SAP Ariba Network, the online procurement process will be interrupted and will be transferred to offline communication and guidance, which will virtually reduce procurement efficiency.
The good news is that this will no longer be a problem after the SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2011 version. The purchase order can be sent to SAP Ariba Network via EDI. At the same time, the supplier email receives the purchase order, and the invitation link to register as a SAP Ariba Network user will also be sent. The supplier clicks on the hyperlink to log in to the SAP Ariba Network and becomes a member within a few minutes after filling in the necessary information, and automatically establishes a transaction relationship with the buyer's corporate account. Since then, the purchase order data channel has been opened, and the cooperation between buyers and sellers will become more efficient.
In the long run, the rapid activation of integration by suppliers will provide infinite possibilities for buyers and sellers to expand new business opportunities on the broad trading platform of SAP Ariba Network.
3. Advanced Availability Check (aATP) New Function-Supply Protection (1JW)
In many cases, companies do not want to sell their products in the order of the sales order. They want to reserve a certain number of products for special groups, and may also want to prioritize these groups. Therefore, the idea of supply protection (SUP) came into being, which allows for quantitative protection and prioritizes demand.
A typical example is the fashion industry. Sales orders from wholesale customers will be placed early in the peak season, while sales orders from our own e-commerce channels will be placed later. However, the profit margin of e-commerce is usually high. From a strategic point of view, it becomes very important to maintain at least a minimum number of products for each channel. At the end of the quarter, when protection needs are no longer needed, the first-come, first-served principle can be restored.
Supply protection can be core (horizontal) protection, where complete protection groups protect each other; or priority (vertical) protection, where protection is performed according to priority, and each group protects only lower priority requirements. The core protection and priority protection can be combined.
4. Production of new functions-product hierarchy
In the SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2011 version, you can use the product hierarchy for production. Product hierarchies are helpful for organizing materials along multiple levels, and are often required. For example, production supervisors can display information about the product hierarchy used for production in the work list, which provides more support for their daily work.
You can use the product hierarchy for the following purposes:
Production Planning-Application for monitoring material coverage
Production execution-an application used to manage production orders
In both applications, you can add columns to display the product hierarchy and product hierarchy nodes to which materials are allocated.
Only in the "Manage Product Hierarchy" application, the material is assigned to the "Product Hierarchy" node of the product hierarchy, and the status of the node is Active or In Revision, the product hierarchy and nodes will be displayed. In addition, in the "Assign Product Hierarchy for Production" application, the product hierarchy must be assigned to 01 (production planning purpose), an application used to monitor material coverage, or 02 (production execution purpose), for management Application for production orders.
5. New Sales Function-Quickly Edit Sales Order
Sales orders are the key to managing orders in the sales department. The SAP Fiori application "Manage Sales Orders" can provide different methods to create sales orders according to specific needs.
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With the SAP S/4HANA Cloud version update: Users will immediately be able to upload sales orders via spreadsheets, which means that you can directly create sales orders in batches from XLSX spreadsheet files. After the data files are uploaded, the system will automatically create sales orders.
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Users can also use the new SAP Fiori application to create sales orders, which is different from transaction code VA01. The new SAP Fiori interface brings fast and convenient user experience. The header can directly display commonly used data such as credit limit, net sales, overall status, etc.; visualized voucher flow and quick links make business more efficient.
6. Financial Management-Fund Director Dashboard
The Money Supervisor Dashboard app can now display liquidity by country on the map. Users can see the distribution of liquidity among different countries. Liquidity is identified as a bubble, where the amount of liquidity determines the size of the bubble.
In addition, the treasury supervisor dashboard also provides new market risk metrics: current and historical net present value and current value at risk. Users can calculate the risk value through historical simulation, Monte Carlo simulation or variance/covariance methods.
A new chart has been added to the "Bank Relations" tab of the "Treasury Manager Dashboard" application, showing the financial status of the bank group. This form allows users to classify their assets, liabilities, and financial balances according to company codes and bank groups, and quickly find the bank with the highest balance. This information can help users evaluate which banks are most likely to provide loans.
7. Service new function-resource management system and project service system integration
In today's business management, financial and business project plans are usually separated from the resource management system. This is because some detailed parameters must be defined in resource management, but the scope of work, required skills, and rolling projects are not related to financial and business plans. This means that whenever the project changes due to delays, if you want to reflect the details of the change in two different systems, you usually need to notify the resource manager, rebook the consultant, and communicate the change with everyone involved in the project. This process will undoubtedly be very time-consuming.
With the SAP S/4HANA project cloud resource management integration solution, you can easily specify the relevant staffing details to meet the needs of project managers, resource managers, and consultants.
How to create a customer project in SAP S/4HANA Cloud? First in resource management, the project manager looks at the resource request and adds detailed information about the consultant. For example, related skills, project roles, detailed project dates, estimated workload and scope descriptions. Then send this information to the resource manager responsible for the consultant. When the resource manager selects a request, the system will give a list of candidates who are available in the relevant time period and possess the required skills. If no suitable candidate is available, the resource request can be forwarded to another organization.
Once the resource manager is equipped with a consultant, the project manager will see that the resource request has been staffed. The consultant will be notified of new tasks through a dedicated application. The app also allows consultants to keep up-to-date information on their skills and project experience.
Resource management makes everyone aware of personnel allocation and makes information sharing easy.
8. New function of embedded analysis-export story
Business users can now export embedded stories in SAP Analytics Cloud. This function is not only open to the dashboard pre-provided by SAP, but the dashboard built by the customer can also be exported.
The specific functions are as follows:
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Ability to export stories to PDF / Microsoft PowerPoint, allowing users to easily include specific page ranges.
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Each exported story page corresponds to an image on the PDF page/Microsoft PowerPoint slide.
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Batch export allows you to export story content in a merged manner based on filter settings.
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Add an appendix that contains detailed information about data sources, timestamps, and applied filters.
9. New functions of intelligent robots-SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation 2.0 and SAP S/4HANA pre-configured robots land in China
Following the launch of SAP Intelligent RPA in China's data center in June 2020, SAP's heavy release of SAP Intelligent RPA 2.0 in December provides a new user experience for the process automation between the SAP S/4HANA system and other platform systems. In SAP Intelligent RPA 2.0, a new cloud development studio (Cloud Studio) based on the cloud platform is launched to bring a complete cloud development experience to users' robot construction. Its low-code and no-code experience is more friendly to civilian developers and business personnel without programming skills, making the construction of robots easier and more efficient.
In addition, for SAP S/4HANA customers, we have also launched more than 70 sets of free predefined robot templates. The robot content templates cover finance, sales, procurement, production, supply chain and data management and other fields. Users can rent in RPA Query, subscribe, and deploy robot templates in the SAP robot store, or choose to expand these robots in the development tool to meet their custom requirements, thereby accelerating the implementation of the entire RPA project.
The above are the representative new features of the 2020 SAP S/4HANA Cloud product selected by the SAP S/4HANA Product Success team in various fields. Welcome to leave a message on the new features of the year in your mind. We look forward to hearing from Chinese customers.