Identifying SAP S/4HANA Cloud Core Business Processes

Intelligent Enterprises accelerate value creation, through visibility, focus, and agility. They deliver best-in-class experiences to customers. They empower their employees to do meaningful work and they do more with less, while driving top line growth through new business models. To do this, these organizations have had to make sense of a growing volume of data, allocate scarce capital strategically, and innovate with relentless speed.

SAP provides three essential components to help your business transform into an intelligent enterprise:

• An intelligent suite
• A digital platform
• Intelligent technologies

We will offer an Intelligent Suite of applications for every LoB:

• Customer Experience
• Supply Chain and Manufacturing
• Digital Core
• People Engagement
• Network & Spend Management.

We will provide a unified user experience and seamless integration across the portfolio and enable you to consume individual modules at your own pace. The data generated from these applications will then be managed and orchestrated by our Digital Platform:

• With data management, you can tap into new sources of data within your business and across value chains to derive deep and holistic insights in real time.
• With the cloud platform, you have the glue to securely connect solutions, extend them, and reuse common services.

Most importantly, the intelligent suite and digital platform will be embedded with Intelligent Technologies such as:

• Artificial Intelligence
• Internet of Things
• Advanced Analytics:

These technologies can automatically detect patterns in the data, recommend the best course of action, and optimize workflow. For customers who want to innovate even further, we offer industry accelerators and open innovation services, which apply design thinking methodologies to identify new business models. This is unique because only SAP can offer:

• End-to-end integration across the processes that matter most to your business, built on common master data, domain modes, and platforms.
• The industry expertise to help make sense of your data in the specific context of your business.

If we look more closely at the intelligent suite, we see how the digital core becomes central to orchestrating processes in a true end-to-end fashion.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud provides an intelligent, digital core, which is intrinsic to the intelligent enterprise. SAP provides integrations across its application portfolio of solutions – from customer experience with SAP Customer Experience to network and spend management with SAP Ariba. With this, SAP delivers an end-to-end, intelligent suite, to automate all aspects of your business.

With SAP S/4HANA Cloud, you can:

• Operate consistently at the speed of thought: Connect teams with modern, integrated processes to ensure complete, consistent information across your organization.
• Maximize resource utilization: Use intelligent automation to make the most of your resources at all times – from capital, to talent, to inventory, and beyond and adjust to new needs with maximum agility.
• Gain unprecedented insight into your business: Deliver total visibility and instant insights across the finance value chain and your supply chain, with an ERP suite that recommends, predicts, and solves.
• Drive new levels of productivity and efficiency: Help employees make faster and better decisions, with the world’s first hands-free ERP suite, enabled with a digital assistant you can speak to and hear from.

While not required for intelligent ERP, cloud is the ideal environment for intelligent ERP, due to the following characteristics:

• Continuous innovation
• Predictable, lower total cost of ownership
• Speed
• Simple, reliable and safe

Cloud is the accelerator for intelligent ERP.

SAP recommends all customers to consider SAP S/4HANA Cloud, where their business requirements can be met, as this offers unmatched speed of innovation, total cost of ownership, and time-to-value.

SAP S/4HANA’s code line, simplified data model, and modern user experience are consistent for both cloud versions. Designed for in-memory, SAP S/4HANA brings new business capability while simplifying the IT landscape.

Whether you decide on SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud or SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud, SAP S/4HANA maintains consistency with the data model, user experience, and code line. This is an important differentiator. Some other vendors have acquired different cloud ERP products that are inconsistent from their on-premise ERP products. This creates an integration nightmare. Whereas others only offer public cloud, in which case, if your business requirements do not match their standard processes, you are out of luck. Only SAP S/4HANA Cloud offers a consistent solution, allowing you to benefit in any scenario or combination..

SAP Best Practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud are key components of SAP Activate and provide ready-to-run business processes optimized for SAP S/4HANA. These allow customers to rest easy when it comes to system requirements or maintenance scenarios.

SAP Best Practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud are structured along LoBs to represent roles and responsibility areas of a company. To structure the processes within an LoB, the content is split in different business areas. Each business area includes a selection of scope Items, representing preconfigured, ready-to-run business processes.

Scope itemsare typically predefined business processes, such as warehouse inbound processing. They represent a best practice implementation choice for a customer. Each scope item has a set of accelerators, delivering detailed documentation that is used during the implementation project.

Each scope item has a unique ID that makes it easy to identify, for example, JB1 or BFB.

For full scope and accelerators, see the SAP Best Practices Explorer.