9 must-knows before implementing SAP Simple Finance (sFin)

When talking to the VP of Enterprise Architecture in a Swiss-based manufacturer, he told me he was quite confused with all the recent SAP marketing around S4/HANA, SAP Simple Finance, HANA Enterprise Cloud and the user interfaces that come along with all this like Fiori. He was looking for the big picture, the real no-nonsense one. So…shutterstock_112746598

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SAP Release Strategy 2014+

The new online version of the SAP Release Strategy is now available in SAP Support Portal and is of particular relevance if you are faced with one of the following questions:
• How can I plan SAP implementation and upgrade projects?
• How does SAP’s Product Portfolio and Strategy support my business needs?
• How is SAP standard software made available to me?
• Which maintenance strategy rules apply to SAP software products?
• How is integration assured between different software product versions?

The online SAP Release Strategy provides SAP customers and partners a comprehensive view of the SAP portfolio, product strategy, release and maintenance strategy, availability dates of software product versions, as well as support and maintenance schedules.
You will also find relevant information on SAP’s latest innovations, such as SAP Fiori, SAP Smart Business, the financials add-on for SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA, hybris Commerce Suite, SAP HANA Live, SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, SAP HANA Cloud Platform, and the SAP HANA platform and other innovations. To access the SAP release strategy, go to http://support.sap.com/release-strategy.

SAP strategy beyond 2014

SAP reinforced the two key elements of their overall strategy at SAPPHIRE NOW 2014:

1. SAP’s product strategy will be HANA centric

2. The move/push to Cloud

SAP’s mantra for customers is changing from “run better” to “run simpler” under the slogan “Simplify everything, so you can do anything”. Their formula for simplified technology is cloud + SAP HANA aided by simplifying the user experience and pricing model. Everything revolves around simplicity.

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Unilever’s HANA adoption

Unilever has chosen for ‘soap’ and expects to double its turnover from €40bn to €80bn by 2020. The company readies their SAP systems by moving to HANA databases. HANA so far has already enabled Unilever to speed up the month-end close from three days to one, which is leading finance users to push for more HANA. In a proof-of-concept application, HANA enabled Unilever to reduce the time it takes to process 200 million records from 440 seconds to just 30 seconds, allowing the company to determine the cost of how much a product costs using pricing information for raw materials. Unilever’s European HANA roll-out is set to begin in January 2013. It is expected to roll-out the following HANA accelerators: Continue reading “Unilever’s HANA adoption”

Key differentiators of SAP HANA

Wondering why SAP HANA is such ground-shaking technology? What are the key advantages of SAP HANA over disk-based database solutions? Well, there are quite a few technical differences between databases that were designed to be stored on a disk versus one that was built to be entirely resident in-memory, as per the SAP HANA Essentials e-book. Here is a brief summary of some of the key advantages of SAP HANA over its disk-based cousins. Continue reading “Key differentiators of SAP HANA”

ABAP for HANA – Strategy and Roadmap

With the rise of key technology trends like Cloud, Mobile, and In-Memory you may start to wonder how these affect the good old ABAP Application Server (AS). A recently published document describes SAP’s vision, strategy, development, and commitment to enable ABAP for SAP HANA. It addresses the following questions:

  • What ABAP support do customers and partners get with regard to the technology trends?
  • How does the AS ABAP help to leverage the benefits of the technology trends?
  • What is the impact on customer-specific developments (existing ones, new ones)?

In essence, SAP has started improving the AS ABAP in a step-by-step approach:

  •  Step1 – “ABAP can access SAP HANA”: ABAP-based applications can use the SAP HANA database as secondary persistence (side-by-side scenarios)
  • Step 2 – “ABAP runs on SAP HANA”: ABAP-based applications can use the SAP HANA database as primary persistence (analytical use-cases)
  • Step 3 – “ABAP optimized for SAP HANA”: the optimization of ABAP-based applications for the SAP HANA database is actively facilitated by the AS ABAP (transactional/hybrid use cases)

The new enhancement package to optimize ABAP for SAP HANA is planned to be available to first customers and partners by the end of 2012. Standard availability is planned for 2013. SAP intends to invest in ABAP technology beyond 2013. This means that SAP plans to continuously update the AS ABAP which might involve the deprecation of some selected functions.

– Mendel

ENSEAD Advisory selected reading – June 2012

Dear Senior and Executive Management in Enterprise IT and staff,

There’s no need to deny it, you are flooded with information. Before you’ve evaluated the one hype, the next buzz word is already dominating your tag cloud and screaming for attention all over your screen. To relieve this burden a bit ENSEAD Advisory started to share a selection of noteworthy reading for you through Facebook.

Topics all relate to the IT Supply side – mainly SAP – and range from planning and preparing for projects and programmes with an IT element; via their inception to the phase out of the delivered IT solution. In other words, topics span across the entire lifecycle of IT solutions. To make it even more compact for you, here’s a summary of topics and items and comments ENSEAD shared with you during June!

Gartner says worldwide spending on Enterprise Application software [Enterprise IT] is expected to increase 4.5 percent in 2012. That’s excellent news for (SAP) Enterprise Architects!  Because what every great architect should understand is that if you don’t get it built, your work doesn’t matter – as per the words of marketing guru Seth Godin.

Gartner even has more encouraging news for senior IT staff. “In spite of clouds and outsourcing, the need for a smart internal group that helps a business explore, define and exploit technology enabled change opportunities will not disappear.” How else can businesses survive this age of “Continual Enterprise Transformation”, as ENSEAD Advisory likes to call it? Happy to help here by the way: this is the core business of ENSEAD Advisory (next to turning opportunities into tangible solutions).

Enterprise IT Applications are sourced more and more as-a-service these days, delivered from the internet (yep, aka cloud-based solutions). Contracts with well-defined and transparent Service Level Agreements are not market standard yet, Gartner seems to say. The debate about what went wrong (and who is to blame) around cloud outages, happens mainly through public interviews, blogs and articles. It seems that when something goes really wrong, transparency quickly becomes the norm again.

Good news for SAP: they celebrate the one-year anniversary of SAP HANA. Reason for a party: SAP’s combination of SAP Sybase ASE, SAP Sybase IQ, SAP Sybase SQL Anywhere and SAP HANA revenue enabled SAP to secure fourth place in global market share, says IDC. ENSEAD Advisory was one of the first to share the news on the SAP HANA Essentials e-book, which causes traffic to the ENSEAD Advisory site to explode… The Newsletter from the Business Process Experts Community also starts with SAP HANA but also features an article on Enterprise Mobility, as well as on when to use PI, BPM and Business (ABAP) Workflow.

– Mendel

SAP HANA Essentials e-book now available for free

SAP HANAEssentials e-bookThe new SAP HANA Essentials e-book by Jeffrey Word is being published intermittently. The first version is now available free of charge and contains a good overview with customer success stories and use cases, an overview of hardware vendors and their solutions, as well as a chapter on implementation projects . A bit annoying is the hammering all the time on selecting the right consulting partner. Expected around fall 2012 are the chapters on SAP HANA Architecture, Business Cases & ROI Model, SAP HANA Applications, SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse on SAP, Data Provisioning with SAP HANA, Data Modeling with SAP HANA, Application Development with SAP HANA, SAP HANA Administration & Operations, and SAP HANA Resources.

– Mendel