Introducing SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition for Manufacturing

Pain Point: Balancing the manufacturing and operations cost against the need to produce and deliver on time to meet market demand.

Key features of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition for Manufacturing include the following:

• Close integration of production processes with finance, providing an immediate view of the bottom line impact of manufacturing in real time.

• The financial material ledger and single inventory table collect all information on the material documents, enabling customers to see the real-time impact of goods on costs at the time any action takes place.

• Users from inventory managers to controllers can now act immediately when they detect exceptions and enable the company to effectively manufacture while keeping costs under control.

Below, you'll find an overview of the key benefits that our product or service offers. To gain a deeper understanding of each advantage, simply click on the individual benefit to access more detailed information.

The "market of one" is becoming a reality as customers desire highly customized and high-quality products delivered at their choice of time and place and at competitive prices. This is a huge challenge for manufacturing firms. With multiple systems being deployed across multiple plants and warehouses, organizations are facing more complexity and more activities from employees, leading to a high cost of ownership, an inability to respond adequately, and poorly informed decision-making due to old, incomplete, or inaccurate information. Without an agile manufacturing process, transformed for a dynamic and resource-constrained environment, it becomes more and more difficult to service the demands of today’s customer. The best approach today is to implement advanced digital technologies, enabling a superior integrated system (internal and with the business network), streamlined processes, Big Data analytics, and resource optimization. The core of this digital technology is SAP S/4HANA and its application program interface (API) framework that drives long-term flexibility.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition enables unprecedented coordination of planning and execution processes by applying advanced machine learning and algorithms, as well as connectivity to Internet of Things (IoT) devices for even better operational visibility. SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition for Manufacturing provides the most current information on market and customer demand so that manufacturing processes, resources, and capacity can be tightly aligned to drive optimal production efficiency and profitability, and timely delivery of products. With the next-generation production planning (MRP live), optimized on the SAP HANA platform for faster planning cycles and synchronization to demand changes, customers will see results in fewer material shortages, delays, and safety stock.

Inventory costs contribute heavily to the bottom line of the company and have immediate impact on the financial health of the company. The latest trends in material management aim for reduced required system resources, improved scalability and throughput, and flexible international valuation requirements with parallel currencies and parallel accounting standards on material or product level. Inventory managers, as they analyze their turnover, can immediately get financial value of the inventory and the trend of this value over time.

Capabilities include the following:

• Inventory valuation can be performed in accordance with local legislation (such as the German Commercial Code).

• Stock valuation can be determined with real-time updates for transparency over the cost of inventory for finished and semi-finished products and with comparison analysis.

• SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition can handle up to three currencies, track historic rates in the material master, and handle local legal valuation (for example, hard or trading currency).

• The controller has applications to get details and take actions based on material inventory values. They can gain an understanding of the quantities and values of material inventories for a key date with balance summary, drill down to each line items, and view rounding differences.

Capabilities include the following:

• One common view of actual costs based on the universal journal entry

• Ability to do cost comparison and component analysis based on flexible analysis key figures

• Ability to get a view of overall and detailed production costs for manufacturing orders to quickly and easily arrive at actual costs for each cost component

• Exceptions, as defined by exception rules, are highlighted using a quickly identifiable visual indicator.

Capabilities include the following:

• End-to-end fully integrated financial and logistics processes to enable seamless viewing of the impact of operational costs on all financial analysis and statements.

• Display debit or credit balances for a specified time range with the trial balance for each ledger and all company codes.

• Display the balances of the previous and the following periods in the reporting year if you select individual periods only.

• Use various attributes and account assignment objects from Financial Accounting and Controlling for more detailed analysis (for example, material ledger).

Capabilities include the following:

• In a comparison view, you can compare the balances with the balances of a different time range to see the revenue and COGS analysis for a material over finished, semi-finished, and planned production orders.

• View the effect of the inventory costs, COGS, and other manufacturing and logistics-related costs directly on the financial statements down to the level of account granularity that you desire. Drill down to see your period balance, comparisons, and differences. Reports are generated on the fly by analyzing all the relevant line items with real-time information.