Conclusion

Deep in the financial district in the epicenter of the investment world, a small room within the New York Stock Exchange stood as the backdrop for the 2017 SAP Capital Markets Day. The entire SAP SE executive board, including SAP CEO Bill McDermott, and Jennifer Morgan, president of SAP North, were in attendance for another important SAP S/4HANA Cloud announcement.

The day was meant to highlight many of SAP’s recent innovations and its future outlook, but no product raised more excitement than SAP S/4HANA Cloud. It’s true that SAP S/4HANA Cloud’s existence was announced only 21 months earlier at SAPPHIRE 2015—but the product’s true celebration party was now.

Darren Roos, the newly anointed SAP S/4HANA Cloud president, was on hand to showcase its elevated relevance in the world. He announced: “Decades ago, SAP invented and became the leader in first-generation ERP. Later, we were early to build first-generation cloud ERP along with other new cloud vendors. While many cloud ERP vendors remain on this early architecture, SAP did not stop there, and invested in innovating the next generation of cloud ERP. SAP S/4HANA Cloud encompasses the latest architecture and technology innovations, along with SAP’s proven set of business management expertise to usher in a true new generation of intelligent ERP in the cloud.”

SAP is positioning SAP S/4HANA Cloud as a primary software product within its portfolio. As we’ve explored in this book, SAP S/4HANA Cloud continues to evolve and increase its reach, both in functionality and use case areas, and both wide and deep. We believe that SAP S/4HANA Cloud will not only begin to replace other SAP midmarket ERP products, such as SAP Business ByDesign and SAP Business One, but also will begin to expand north into the large enterprise space (Fortune 1000) as a major complement to on-premise SAP ERP offerings such as on-premise SAP S/4HANA. Too much energy, investment, buzz, and executive leadership is being deployed to think otherwise.

Within this book, we explored the basic tenants of SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Throughout Part I, we defined the basics of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, including answering the question “What is S/4HANA Cloud?” in Chapter 1 and reviewing fundamental cloud-based ERP basics such as the concepts of SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS.

In perhaps arguably the most important chapter of the book, Chapter 2 detailed the use cases for deploying SAP S/4HANA Cloud, including the two common and distinct scenarios of the two-tiered federated SAP ERP landscape and the single SAP S/4HANA Cloud ERP installation as an organization’s SAP ERP choice. We continued to discuss additional important deployment factors, such as implementation requirements from a delivery perspective (Chapter 3) and SAP S/4HANA Cloud investment needs, such as software, implementation, and long-term production support costs (Chapter 4). Chapter 5 rounded out Part I with things to think about regarding post-go-live SAP S/4HANA Cloud support requirements.

Part II focused more on the what of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, probing deep into its product functionality. Chapter 6 was another crucial cornerstone chapter of the book, in which we detailed SAP S/4HANA Cloud’s module and corresponding business process functionality. In essence, this chapter illustrates a key decision-making factor for whether SAP S/4HANA Cloud is the right solution for your organization. Chapter 7 dug into the analytics functions of S/4HANA Cloud’s embedded business intelligence capabilities. Rounding out Part II, Chapter 8 explored integrations and how built-in integrations and custom integrations have the ability to add to SAP S/4HANA Cloud’s core functionality through customer enhancement.

Finally, in Part III, we explored how an organization can extend SAP S/4HANA Cloud as a digital core with extensibility options. Chapter 8 focused on integrations, and Chapter 9 covered extensibility, including in-app and side-by-side extensibility. Both features enhance SAP S/4HANA Cloud by filling in those gaps the product doesn’t fill in its core form. Leveraging the extension concept increases SAP S/4HANA Cloud’s reach and functionality, which truly increases the application of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud platform as a digital core. Finally, Chapter 10 presented a look into the future, contemplating where SAP S/4HANA Cloud is going. Although predicting the future is impossible, especially with this ever-evolving product, this chapter did provide a glance into SAP’s documented future innovation plans based on published roadmaps. Without question, however, the greatest value of this chapter can be found in the resources and websites provided. These real-time SAP links provide current information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud’s new innovations and future functionality.

In fact, to prove this very point, during the writing of this book we experienced the fluidity of SAP S/4HANA Cloud firsthand. When we began writing the book, SAP S/4HANA Cloud had established “editions” focused on specific features such as finance, professional services, and so on. Soon after writing a full chapter on editions, the concept changed, and we had to rewrite several sections to align our book with the new SAP S/4HANA Cloud changes!

Key Takeaways

This book covered a great deal of content and several new concepts. To reinforce the book’s most salient points, we’ve compiled the following list of the most important takeaways from our perspective:

• Building the business case is paramount.
  SAP S/4HANA Cloud as an ERP platform isn’t for every organization. If you’re reading this, then there’s a high probability that your organization is exploring SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Thus, being able to effectively articulate the business case for yourself and your leadership is a first fundamental step. If the balance between preconfigured SAP Best Practices and more limited functionality/configuration on the one hand and lower overall IT costs on the other resonates, then SAP S/4HANA Cloud could be the right solution. However, if your organization requires extensive customer-specific configuration and/or customization, on-premise SAP S/4HANA most likely is the better choice.
• Extensibility is a key method for digital core extension.
  SAP S/4HANA Cloud provides a digital core for cloud-first landscapes. With a host of extensibility options available, such as in-app extensibility, side-by-side extensibility, APIs, and SAP Cloud Platform, the opportunities to link other applications (both SAP and non-SAP), build customer-specific SAP Cloud Platform applications, and increase an organization’s business process scope all exist as excellent methods for expanding SAP S/4HANA Cloud’s functionality. Extensibility is an excellent solution for expanding SAP S/4HANA Cloud’s reach via integration with other apps.
• Accelerators and SAP Best Practices ease SAP S/4HANA Cloud deployment.
  Like no other ERP product before it, SAP S/4HANA Cloud doesn’t just promote the usage of industry best practices or accelerated methodology; its design is based on it. Because SAP S/4HANA Cloud has limited end user configuration to a major extent, implementing it is truly driven by and on the back of accelerators in the form of delivered preconfigured functionality. These accelerators not only are tremendous cost savings implementation mechanisms but also ensure users deploy ERP in a proven, SAP Best Practices way. Furthermore, SAP S/4HANA Cloud is meant to be delivered via SAP Activate. SAP Activate’s implementation approach is founded in the fit-to-standard methodology, stressing (imploring!) that SAP S/4HANA Cloud should be implemented as an out-of-the-box solution.
• SAP S/4HANA Cloud is an economical choice for ERP.
  SAP is pushing cloud hard in product, practice, and messaging. In a major move, SAP S/4HANA Cloud has been created to present SAP’s first true SaaS ERP offering built for the primary purpose of driving cloud-based ERP. As such, the economics factors of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, from monthly user subscription pricing through rapid implementation and lean long-term production costs, are very competitively priced. For those familiar with on-premise SAP pricing, the new SAP S/4HANA Cloud cost structure is not only refreshing but eye-opening.
• SAP S/4HANA Cloud is always evolving.
  This message has been reinforced throughout the pages of this book, over and over. As a relatively new SAP innovation, SAP S/4HANA Cloud is continuing to grow in breadth and depth. In fact, the quarterly innovation cycle in which new functionality is added to the product says it all. Thus, it’s imperative to understand what resources exist to help you remain abreast of what new functionality is available and when. Fortunately and strategically, SAP has created a wealth of knowledge sources available for the SAP S/4HANA Cloud user community, including release info, how-tos, and extensibility insight. Staying close to these resources provides an organization with the opportunity to maximize its SAP S/4HANA Cloud investment.

The new world of SAP S/4HANA Cloud is exciting. Although the analogy of building a car while you’re driving it doesn’t necessarily apply to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, the product is constantly evolving, and information in the greater marketplace is scarce, frankly.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud is the future. This is not marketing. This is not salesmanship.

Just like SAP bet the farm on the concept of and commitment to SAP HANA in 2010 (which has paid off), it’s now investing an equal amount of resources into what SAP S/4HANA Cloud is and its impact on the greater ERP SaaS market. We believe that the promise of this product platform is real and will continue to grow in adoption, importance, and functionality within the greater ERP space.

We wish you the best of luck on your SAP S/4HANA Cloud journey!