Describing Cloud ERP Business Processes & Line of Business Functionality

Recruit to retire is one of the critical business scenarios needed by every customer, regardless of country, industry, or size. A company's workforce provides the human energy to achieve their objectives.

Employees need to be hired, trained correctly, assigned to the tasks relevant for their job role, kept healthy, and paid in line with their job task difficulty, years of experience, and performance.

SAP provides the ability to understand, manage, and optimize all aspects of workforce (employees and external workers) in line with business objectives, and with a clear financial impact. The Human Resources LoB is focused on time recording and setting up an integration with the customer's HR system of record to populate employee data through an integration.

Lead to cash is an end-to-end scenario that manages all aspects of the customer experience, from the initial interaction in the Sales LoB, to order fulfillment and service delivery with the Service LoB and/or Professional Services LoB (public cloud only), with opportunities to drive and realize revenue along the journey.

The processes can be adapted or extended based on a customer's specific requirements and may vary depending on the industry type, the type of customers, and the sales channel(s) used (e-commerce or direct sales).

Source to pay focuses on maximizing the impact and potential of the end-to-end sourcing and procurement processes in the Sourcing & Procurement LoB by leveraging core data, predictive analytics, and machine learning to ensure the right suppliers are chosen for direct materials, indirect materials, and services.

Buyers can create connections with millions of suppliers, and suppliers can create connections with buyers to efficiently manage their sales cycle and cash flow. Business processes exist in both SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP Ariba to provide end users with a seamless sourcing and procurement experience.

Plan to fulfill enables companies to manage a resilient, sustainable digital supply chain encompassing all business processes related to planning, manufacturing, and delivering their products.

Through business processes in the R&D Engineering, Manufacturing, Supply Chain, and Asset Management LoBs, customers experience a responsive and customer-centric supply chain that is the backbone of a resilient business.

Discrete manufacturing can be used to produce tangible products through assembly (e.g. cars), or process manufacturing can be used to combine ingredients in a mixture to create the final good (e.g. pharmaceuticals).

Record to report is the measurement, processing, and communication of financial and non-financial information about economic entities, such as businesses and corporations.

Financial close is the process of verifying and adjusting account balances at the end of an accounting cycle (often the end of the quarter or end of the year) to produce financial reports representative of the company's true financial position as of a certain date.

These processes are critical because they serve as the foundation for financial management, reporting, compliance, and decision-making across the other core end-to-end processes.

Financial management solutions include a collection of solutions intended to help customers grow revenue, control costs, minimize risk, and align with legal sustainability requirements.

For example, a customer may be looking to build on the existing finance functionality within SAP S/4HANA Cloud (Public or Private Edition) by integrating the SAP Cash Application to automatically match payments to invoices by learning from and adopting historical manual actions and processing rules for bank statements. This can significantly decrease the daily repetitive manual activities of invoice to payment matching.

Spend management solutions include SAP Ariba for direct and indirect spend, SAP Fieldglass for external workforce management, and SAP Concur for travel and expense.

For example, business processes within the sourcing and procurement LoBs for SAP S/4HANA Cloud (Public or Private Edition) cover the basic requirements of identifying and buying goods necessary for the business. However, a customer may be looking to create a simplified purchasing experience for employees when they need to replace their laptops or other company-owned technology assets. SAP Ariba Buying and Invoicing offers a centralized requisitioning process where procurement owners can specify policies and guide users if there are policy conflicts.

Supply chain management solutions include a collection of solutions intended to connect processes and collaborate within an entire supply chain ecosystem. This includes solutions such as SAP Integrated Business Planning to simplify and integrate demand planning in the cloud and SAP Extended Warehouse Management to automate and manage inbound and outbound warehouse processes.

For example, organizations that deliver products to customers may need deeper transportation management capabilities than the standard LoB processes offer in SAP S/4HANA Cloud (Public or Private Edition). The SAP Transportation Management solution integrates fleet and logistics management throughout the network to reduce complexity increase efficiency, and improve agility throughout the supply chain.

Human capital management (HCM) solutions include SAP SuccessFactors for managing the entire lifecycle of the employee, including core HR and payroll, talent management, employee experience management, HR analytics and workforce planning, and sales performance management.

For example, customers can create users and manage permissions within SAP S/4HANA Cloud (Public or Private Edition), but it's really designed to be integrated with an HR system of record to populate people data through an integration. We recommend the SAP SuccessFactors suite of HCM solutions, or if you only need core HR, just the Employee Central solution (within SAP SuccessFactors).

Customer experience management solutions include a collection of advanced products for commerce, customer data management, marketing, sales, and customer service. This includes solutions such as SAP Sales Cloud to streamline sales processes and improve sales outcomes through AI-based insights, and SAP Commerce Cloud to transform online shopping into adaptive customer-centric experiences.

For example, the Professional Services LoB is unique to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. Because this LoB doesn't exist for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, we recommend the Customer Experience suite of solutions to handle the entire lifecycle of gaining and maintaining relationships with your customers.