1.4    Summary

The SAP S/4HANA offering is a significant step in—or perhaps a disruption of—the evolution in the traditional SAP product offerings. It’s a move toward the future and a transition from an enterprise management platform to an innovation platform. SAP S/4HANA supports the move from the traditional on-premise offering to a cloud-based technology, with major advancements in functionality. It also provides the SAP Fiori apps to migrate from traditional computer transactions to support a myriad of devices and hardware offerings. The in-memory capability speeds up processing times to allow for greater analysis functionality and a shift into predictive functions. It’s built to be scalable and more agile than traditional technology offerings. SAP S/4HANA is SAP’s technology of the future for the digital age.

This chapter focused on introducing SAP S/4HANA in the supply chain, including key technology and infrastructure concepts that make the SAP S/4HANA offering unique from the traditional SAP Business Suite. We discussed key terminology frequently used in the SAP HANA environment that will be common in the SAP S/4HANA world, such as SAP S/4HANA core and SAP Fiori apps.

This chapter also highlighted the new SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management business processes, which replace the SAP Business Suite module terminology. Finally, we overviewed the available on-premise versus cloud deployment offerings.

The next chapter will go into specific details of the Inventory Management (IM) functionality offered via SAP S/4HANA.