The new fact sheet by AEB, a leading provider of global trade and logistics solutions, offers sound support in order to help businesses find the right implementation and upgrade strategy. It outlines the benefits of early and delayed migration, respectively, and even provides information on licensing models and migration strategies. SAP launched S/4HANA® in February 2015 with a veritable marketing blitz, promoting it as the next-generation ERP system and hailing it as the crux and potential centrepiece of its customers’ digitisation strategy. Some 3,200 businesses have already signed up, according to Prof. Hasso Plattner, SAP’s co-founder and Supervisory Board Chairman. That’s quite an impressive launch. Among the main benefits of S/4HANA® are the simplification of the overall system architecture, the programme structure, and the data model. Compared with SAP® ERP (ECC 6.0, Enhancement Package 8), S/4HANA® has over 50% fewer lines of code, tables, and data elements. That means less maintenance, shorter innovation cycles, and quicker system response times – all of which translates into better performance. Performance gains also come from the SAP HANA® in-memory platform, which replaces the conventional relational databases. A third benefit is the new SAP Fiori® user interface, which is much more user-friendly.
Critics in the business community cite the scarcity of use cases, saying there are not enough applications to actually justify the expense of a migration. Many SAP® users have begun to hammer out an S/4HANA® strategy and are analysing the relevance of its strengths and weaknesses for their own companies.
AEB’s free fact sheet “SAP S/4HANA® – What the new generation of ERP brings to businesses” can be downloaded free of charge at https://www.aeb.com/intl/media/fact-sheet-sap-s4hana.php.