SAP S4 HANA - The BackStory - A Rough Cut Rewind to the HardRock Era !!

SAP as a company was formed in a small town of Mannheim in the year 1972 by 5 Ex-IBM

Engineers. Their first implementation was done for a German brethren company, Imperial Chemicals Ltd. The first product coming out of the SAP shop was RM1 - R stands for RealTime and M stands for Materials Management. The softwares around that time primarily revolved around materials management.

Later R2 was introduced which was a more advanced version of RM1. The early 90s turned the fortunes around for SAP when they introduced the R3 software - ClientServer Architecture. It meant that the servers can be housed remotely anywhere while user cansit literally anywhere sipping a bacardi or a cappuccino. This was truly a game changer for SAP as the software crossed the Atlantic to enter the Wallstreet arena from the humble beginnings of Waldorf. SAP was no longer a German software but a global ERP behemoth. Imagine the company servers being housed in the colder Icelandic plains or the Greenlandic mainland to negate the server refrigeration costs. Even Northern Norway could be a server home but then getting too close to Russia would be unwise for a German Entity.

Then came a period of dabbling with many new introductions with limited success like SAP

Netweaver and MySAP. SAP Netweaver was kind of an Enterprise SOA while MySAP was a suite of applications more like a MCD Happy meal. In 2006, SAP introduced the ECC platform which till 2015 was the bullwark of the whole SAP Ecosystem. ECC was robust yet flexible and served the purpose. Meanwhile, SAP AG converted itself into a European Entity, SAP SE ( Societas Europa). This move was made to save Euro Tax Dollars and to go full-monty into the market as a EU Powerhouse backed by a 27 state union ( +UK if we talk of Year 2011).

By 2011/ 2012, ECC has stabilised, most of the SAP clients were on ECC and the new

developments were linear and incremental. Amidst this backdrop, a " New Database " was planned in SFO. It was called as High Performance Analytic Appliance ( HANA ). The database was in-memory, columnar and a relational database. It adopted all the best modern technologies to give a razor edge to the software. The new HANA database was fathered by two SAP Veterans, Vishal Sikka & Hasso Plattner( Hasso was the common denominator between SAP RM1 and HANA since he was one of the original founders of SAP) HANA was a powerful database which cannot be tested directly on a OLTP production

server.HANA was gradually introduced on the OLAP BW server and later migrated to the

transactional production boxes.

The database was so powerful, it did not communicate to the older plain jane UI, it had to be mated to a equally powerful user interface. Imagine a Lambo V12 Engine trying to talk to a Mazda.Then came S4 HANA -Fourth Generation User Interface to counter the excessive GForce of the HANA database.

The first SAP S4HANA Implementations were started in 2015 in mainland Europe. As we all

know, Europe is the early adopter of any innovation while Asia is the last picker of goods

after they are tried and tested.

Introducing S4 HANA as a frontend was not easy, the present established ecosystem cannot

be just plucked out, the existing SAP Customers would have created a ruckus. SAP played it

safe by introducing Simple Finance as a solution, the logistics processes were still on the older route. Simple Finance provided financial insights with the core offering of a "Single Source of Truth", many redundant tables were eliminated and replaced by a single table. Ex: ACDOCA for the Universal Journal.

Once Simple Finance was comfortably deployed as a solution, the SAP Army marched

toward the " Simple Logistics " Solution. All the logistics processes were to run on the

Simple Logistics platform. Purchase Orders, Sales Orders, Production Orders were all being

created on this platform.

Technically, it can be stated that Simple Finance & Simple Logistics were a subset of the

wider S4 HANA Suite which was introduced 2 3 years later than the original introduction

dates of Simple Finance & Simple Logistics.

The original motto of SAP was to run simple but they realised gradually that some complex

scenarios do not have a simple rendition, so they dropped the " simple" highlighter from the

solution name.

The initial SAP S4HANA adoption by existing SAP customers was low, the ECC customers

were furious since their ECC ROI had not yet reached the break-even point. The ECC

customers were getting a raw unfair deal. But as S4 HANA Implementations in mainland

Europe gained traction in the year 2018 and the SAP customers saw the real benefits of a

super-fast and super-reliable cloud connected ERP, the earlier efforts of SAP manifested into

a effort-less reign of ERP Supremacy.

SAP introduced S4HANA as releases with YYMM as the naming convention. So S4HANA

1510 meant that the solution was released in the year 2015 in the month of October. This

naming convention continued till Year 2019, post 2019 SAP released their versions with

YYYYconvention, Example : 2020, 2021, 2022

SAP S4 HANA suite is perceived as a whole solution rather than a assembly of different

modules. SAP APO was to be sunset replaced by a young blue eyed boy SAP IBP.

SAP IBP was cloud friendly and most importantly it hugged the excel worksheet which was

previously shunned by APO. There were numerous other changes in S4HANA as compared

to ECC.

Business Partners were introduced to avoid duplication of data. Rebate Settlement process

was tweaked to make it more user-friendly for the Enterprises. New Purchasing document

types were created by SAP so that the customers follow the standard process.

The S4HANA Ecosystem is getting stronger and the ECC to HANA Upgrade customers are

providing the perfect tailwinds for SAP to grow exponentially as a Enterprise. As per Gartner

data, 70% ECC customers are yet to board the S4HANA Platform. Also factor-in the net new

S4HANA Customers who would directly implement S4HANA from a non-ECC ERP.

SAP Aspirants have a golden & quot; beat the queue & quot; opportunity to shine as SAP Consultants it hey acquire the right SAP S4HANA Skills. Do not expect the SAP Implementation partners to hire you for your freshness and ignorance. SAP Implementation partners are looking for seasoned players who are deployable on S4 HANA projects. If you lack real time experience,you have to compensate by acquiring SAP Expert Knowledge.

If anyone wants to know a clear roadmap for a successful SAP career through training , do

touchbase : connect@salianconsulting.com

www.salianconsulting.com