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Key Challenges
■ SAP's revised positioning and naming changes from Simple Finance and Simple Logistics to S/
4HANA Enterprise Management will create additional short-term confusion among users
considering the move to SAP S/4HANA.
■ The announcement of SAP S/4HANA, On-Premise Edition 1511 (the "1511 update") delivers
more of the simplified architecture, new conversion tools, and transition options that will
increase interest in S/4HANA, but skills and knowledge will take time to build in the SAP
ecosystem.
■ Many existing SAP ERP users are struggling to balance early adoption risks against the
potential benefits of S/4HANA due to the rapidly evolving scope of the solution.
Recommendations
■ Understand the scope of the 1511 update and its impact on your business processes to identify
how this impacts your potential S/4HANA adoption. Do not assume all functionality will operate
in the same way in S/4HANA.
■ Perform a benefit analysis to decide if S/4HANA has a role in your ERP strategy, taking into
account the potential impact of the 1511 update.
■ Do not treat the transition to S/4HANA as a technical migration, otherwise you risk missing out
on potential benefits from changes in business processes.
■ Evaluate the three S/4HANA transition options and identify the best match for your risk profile
and ERP strategy.
■ Understand key project considerations and tools to support the transition to S/4HANA.
■ Implement risk mitigation strategies if you cannot find appropriate S/4HANA references.
Table of Contents
Introduction............................................................................................................................................ 2
Analysis.................................................................................................................................................. 4
Understand the Scope of the 1511 Update...................................................................................... 4
Perform a Benefit Analysis to Decide if S/4HANA Has a Role in Your ERP Strategy.......................... 6
Do Not Treat the Transition to S/4HANA as a Technical Migration..................................................... 6
Evaluate the Three S/4HANA On-Premises Transition Options.......................................................... 6
Understand the Key Project Considerations and Tools That Support the Transition to S/4HANA.......9
Implement Risk Mitigation Strategies If You Cannot Find Appropriate S/4HANA References........... 10
Gartner Recommended Reading.......................................................................................................... 11
Introduction
On 11 November 2015 at SAP TechEd Barcelona, SAP announced the next update for SAP
Business Suite 4 SAP Hana (S/4HANA), on-premises and cloud editions (the "1511 update").
■ The next wave of architectural simplification for S/4HANA. In addition to the simplified
architecture of the financial capabilities of S/4HANA, SAP has now rearchitected many other
capabilities like inventory management, material valuation, material requirements planning, and
maintenance management to better exploit the in-memory computing (IMC) capabilities of the
Hana platform. The range and scope of the simplifications is much wider than the initial Simple
Finance releases, and this is described in the Simplification List for S/4HANA. The 1511 update
also includes new Fiori roles and analytic applications.
■ Dropping the Simple Finance and Simple Logistics naming. Simple Logistics was always an
internal project name but it was widely used in the SAP community to refer to the simplification
that was to come after Simple Finance, and that next wave of simplification is now part of the
1511 update. SAP now uses the umbrella term "Materials Management & Operations" instead
of Simple Logistics.
■ The simplified core S/4HANA functionality was renamed as S/4HANA Enterprise Management
and this represents a simplified core ERP suite, effectively a next-generation ECC 6.0. SAP now
positions this as a "Digital Core," which is in line with how Gartner sees the role of ERP
changing to support digital business (see "How to Renovate Your ERP to Provide a Digital-
Ready Core").
■ Definition of 10 domains in S/4HANA Enterprise Management that can be extended by line-of-
business (LOB) solutions (see Note 1), many of which are cloud solutions. This strategy is in line
with the evolution of the ERP market from a world of on-premises megasuites to postmodern
ERP in which cloud and on-premises capabilities coexist in a loosely coupled hybrid
environment (see "2015 Strategic Road Map for Postmodern ERP").
The 1511 update includes all the previous simplification for FI and CO ("Simple Finance") along with
the new simplification of materials management and operations. Thus an existing Business Suite
customer can move to the full S/4HANA Enterprise Management solution in a single step. However,
existing S/4HANA on-premises customers that have deployed Simple Finance do not have to
transition to the 1511 update immediately. SAP has stated that there will be at least one further
update of Simple Finance (now called S/4HANA Finance) on a stand-alone basis, so existing S/
4HANA Simple Finance customers can defer deployment of full S/4HANA Enterprise Management.
SAP has not stated any time limit for this.
SAP also announced that over 1,300 organizations had licensed S/4HANA and has stated that 55%
of these are midmarket enterprises and 45% large enterprises, while 50% are net new customers.
Although SAP has changed the naming conventions around S/4HANA, the licensing has not
changed. For S/4HANA Enterprise Management, On-Premise Edition there are still three licensing
elements:
■ SAP application and user licenses (which can be carried over to S/4HANA for existing ECC
customers).
■ Hana database licenses (15% of "SAP Application Value" for limited runtime edition for
applications. Full-use licenses are based on RAM).
■ S/4HANA foundation-promotion license, which gives access to current and future S/4HANA,
On-Premise Edition updates. There is no charge for this until the end of 2015.
S/4HANA, cloud edition has subscription-based pricing based on the scope of the edition that is
licensed. There are no separate subscription fees for the Hana in-memory database management
system (IDBMS).
Existing SAP ERP customers evaluating a move to S/4HANA need to consider their transition
options based on these announcements and customer experiences to date.
These best practices focus on transitioning to S/4HANA, On-Premise Edition. Another option is to
move to S/4HANA, Cloud Edition as described in "Users Face Key Decisions as SAP Clarifies the
Way Forward for S/4HANA." SAP provides automated migration of data and master data to S/
4HANA, Cloud Edition, provided users have first migrated their database to SAP Hana. However, at
the time of preparing this research, there are no live customers for S/4HANA, Cloud Edition, and it is
Gartner's opinion that existing on-premises SAP ERP customers are unlikely to transition existing
deployments to this new, highly standardized public cloud offering in the next 12 to 18 months. This
option is more viable for new deployments.
There are also changes in the way many business processes are managed in S/4HANA Enterprise
Management as SAP has continued its strategy of simplification by retiring some components
where there are new (or updated) offerings that deliver similar capabilities. For example FI-AR-CR
credit management is not available in the 1511 update and SAP credit management (FIN-FSCM-CR)
must be used instead, which will impact organizations using FI-AR-CR for credit management
processes. Also, some capabilities are not supported in the 1511 update. For example, "advanced
order processing and billing" in SD (transaction VACB) is no longer available and there is no direct
functional replacement, so in this case business processes will have to be remodeled. There are
many such changes across the spectrum of the 1511 update, which means the potential impact on
business processes will be much greater than was the case with Simple Finance.
There are also underlying technology changes. For example, S/4HANA real-time analytics are now
based on Advanced Business Application Programming (ABAP)-managed core data services (CDS)
views rather than reading directly against the database through SAP Hana Live. This change allows
for a unified set of security roles for transaction processing and analytics. Consequently, any
reporting built with SAP Hana Live content in Business Suite on Hana or Simple Finance
The magnitude of the changes in the 1511 update also mean that potential business benefits could
be significant. The simplified architecture now covers financials, sales and distribution, materials
management, product life cycle management, production planning, and other capabilities. SAP
states that this revised architecture could deliver a range of business process improvements
including:
These are all in addition to the potential benefits associated with the earlier release of Simple
Finance.
Recommendations:
■ Get your functional leads and key users to review the scope and impact of the 1511 update in
their respective domains.
■ Ensure that key business users (typically "business process owners" and "super users") study
available material and spend time reading SAP blogs, product roadmaps and marketing material
(see Note 3 for some key links) as these are being frequently updated. Ensure they are allocated
time to do this as part of their measurable objectives as this is too important to be a "spare-
time" activity.
■ Ensure that key staff attend appropriate SAP training on S/4HANA concepts and the 1511
update specifically (although at the time of preparing this research no such course was
available).
■ Identify any restrictions related to the 1511 update that may affect the time scale of your
transition to S/4HANA. For example, allocations in Controlling (CO) do not currently support
parallel valuation (transfer pricing, cost of goods sold solution) so this would prevent any
organization already using this functionality from transitioning to S/4HANA until this is
addressed. Any such restrictions may be addressed in future feature packs and updates, so it is
important to monitor these if you are contemplating adopting the 1511 update.
■ Review your use of Add-Ons to see if this will be impacted by a move to S/4HANA and review
SAP's roadmap for Add-Ons that you use that are not currently available with the 1511 update.
About a quarter of the Add-On solutions are available with the 1511 update, and more will be
released in future.
Consequently, after first understanding the potential impact of the 1511 update, existing SAP ERP
users must then perform a benefits analysis to identify if they should move to S/4HANA using the
six categories we identified in "Users Face Key Decisions as SAP Clarifies the Way Forward for S/
4HANA." Ensure that the benefits analysis of the impact of the simplified architecture and
associated Fiori applications takes into account the scope of the 1511 update.
Our fundamental advice regarding S/4HANA remains the same. After performing the benefits
analysis and taking into account potential costs, all existing SAP ERP users must decide on their S/
4HANA adoption profile: whether they are a potential early adopter, a second-wave adopter, or have
no plans to adopt. Organizations that view themselves as potential early adopters or second-wave
adopters should work through the remaining best practices in this research to plan their transition
approach.
Any transition planning for S/4HANA should be conducted as part of an ERP strategy review and
update. If you don't have an ERP strategy in place, this would be an ideal time to create one (see
"How to Develop a Postmodern ERP Strategy").
With this option, the SAP SLT tool is used to perform a gradual migration to S/4HANA Enterprise
Management. Current SAP ERP source systems remain in place for live operation, but an additional
S/4HANA system is installed to run part of the business (perhaps one that needs to replace legacy
ERP capabilities) or perhaps a specific LOB. Many organizations are considering a Central Finance
deployment in this way (see the Central Finance section of "Users Face Key Decisions as SAP
Clarifies the Way Forward for S/4HANA"). Initially the Central Finance instance is used as a
corporate finance system, with finance transaction data replicated from other SAP systems. In the
first phase, only corporate finance processes are executed in the Central Finance system but other
business processes are subsequently moved from the existing SAP systems to the S/4HANA
instance. In each phase, live application data can be migrated and transitioned to the new
application data model.
Advantages:
■ A gradual transition will be less risky than either of the other options. Business process change
is introduced in phases that can be more easily managed by the organization.
■ This approach could work well if it is aligned with an SAP instance consolidation project.
■ This approach can break the overall migration downtime of large databases into more
manageable projects, each with acceptable business downtime.
Disadvantages:
■ Additional cost and complexity in the short term through the creation of a new instance of S/
4HANA, which will require additional licenses and new hardware. This will also increase internal
IT support costs.
■ Longer time to deliver the full potential business benefits of S/4HANA.
In this option the transition to S/4HANA is performed in two steps. First, a technical migration is
performed to move existing SAP ERP system from a third-party database to the Hana IMDBMS,
thus converting the SAP ERP deployment to a BSoH deployment. Second, at a later date, the BSoH
system is transitioned to an S/4HANA deployment. If you have signed an S/4HANA foundation-
promotion license, there is no time limit within which you must convert your BSoH deployment to S/
4HANA.
The two-step approach is mandatory if the source SAP ERP system running on a third-party DBMS
is not Unicode-enabled.
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
In this option an existing SAP ERP source system is migrated and transitioned to a new S/4HANA
target system in a single-step operation. This type of conversion is currently available only from
ECC 6.0 Enhancement Pack 7; although SAP plans that, from January 2016, it will be possible to
perform the single-step system conversion from any ECC 6.0 Enhancement Pack level, provided the
source system already supports Unicode.
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
■ Higher risk than other options at least for the next 12 months S/4HANA is early in its life cycle.
Skills and knowledge of S/4HANA will take time to build in the SAP ecosystem and there are no
organizations live on the full scope of the 1511 update at time of writing.
■ Largest amount of system downtime of any option.
■ Highest impact on existing business processes and the greatest potential for business
disruption.
At the time of preparing this research, SAP stated that more than 1,300 organizations had licensed
S/4HANA, but Gartner estimates that between 30 and 50 were live. These organizations are all live
Also, Gartner has not yet spoken to any organizations that have performed the move to S/4HANA in
a single step. Most clients and the references we have spoken with favor either the two-step
approach (using BSoH as a transition phase) or a reimplementation using a new installation. Gartner
expects the majority of existing users transitioning to S/4HANA, On-Premise Edition will favor the
two-step option, at least for the next six months, as this reduces risk and the complexity of the
transition. As skills and experience with the 1511 update start to build in the SAP ecosystem, the
number of organizations adopting the single-step option will increase. Consequently, Gartner
anticipates that second-wave adopters may be more likely to adopt the single-step approach.
Gartner has not yet spoken with any organizations that are live with Central Finance, but there is
significant interest from larger clients with complex SAP landscapes. SAP has stated that there are
several projects underway, including one organization that is deploying this over 37 systems.
Understand the Key Project Considerations and Tools That Support the Transition to
S/4HANA
Gartner has identified the following key considerations for organizations planning a transition to S/
4HANA based on discussions with early adopters, SAP product management teams, and various
SAP partners:
■ Clean up your production database through careful data deletion and archiving. This will help
reduce both new Hana hardware costs and planned system downtime. The SAP Data Volume
Management work center within SAP Solution Manager 7.2 can be used to identify the largest
data tables in source SAP ERP systems.
■ Review all existing custom ABAP code on your SAP ERP system and remove any custom code
that is no longer being used. Adjust all actively used custom code to be fully Hana compliant.
SAP has delivered a "simplification item database" with the 1511 update that is used by the
Custom Code Check Tool to provide an overview of how the current solution scope and custom
code matches (or does not match) the scope and data structure of S/4HANA, On-Premise
Edition.
■ Size the Hana hardware for the new target system (see "Sizing SAP Business Application
Systems: Art or Science?"). If the current SAP ERP source production database is greater than
20TB in a single instance, stop and consult SAP as current Hana hardware will not be able to
handle this size of database.
■ Decide if S/4HANA systems are to be run in-house or in a managed private cloud (see "SAP
Basis Operations Teams Need to Learn New Tools to Manage SAP Hana Systems" and "Best
Practices for Selecting a Managed Private Cloud Service Provider for SAP Hana Production
Systems"). SAP's Hana Enterprise Cloud service can be used to host and run the S/4HANA On-
Premise Edition 1511 update if you are concerned about S/4HANA technical skills availability.
Early adopters will most likely be challenged to find suitable references, but even some second-
wave adopters may face these challenges. If there are no live references of a similar size and scope
to your project, this means you will face increased risks and should put in place risk mitigation
procedures, including the following:
■ Allow more time than usual for testing and user training.
■ Plan for a period of parallel running to validate that the changes to system architecture and
business processes are producing correct data output.
"Users Face Key Decisions as SAP Clarifies the Way Forward for S/4HANA"
"SAP S/4HANA Is a Transformational Shift for SAP and Its Users, but Hold on to Your Wallets for
Now"
"SAP Basis Operations Teams Need to Learn New Tools to Manage SAP Hana Systems"
"Best Practices for Selecting a Managed Private Cloud Service Provider for SAP Hana Production
Systems"
"Evaluate SAP MaxAttention Premium Support Services to Mitigate Risk in Complex or Custom
Projects"
Evidence
Discussions with several organizations that have implemented Simple Finance.
■ Finance
■ Human resources
■ Sourcing and procurement
■ Supply chain
■ Manufacturing
■ Marketing
■ Sales
■ Service
■ Asset management
■ Research and development
These are all extended by LOB solutions that enhance the core solutions. These can be additional-
cost, on-premises capabilities, such as SAP Cash Management powered by SAP Hana in S/4HANA
Finance, or LOB cloud solutions, such as SuccessFactors in S/4HANA Human Resources. Where
LOB cloud solutions are part of the S/4HANA LOB solution, SAP provides integration between these
solutions and S/4HANA Enterprise Management. For example, S/4HANA Finance is integrated with
the Ariba Network and S/4HANA Human Resources is integrated with SuccessFactors. Additional
licensing charges may apply for any of these solutions.
Note 2
SAP S/4HANA Industry Solutions
■ Chemicals
■ High tech
■ Industrial machinery and components
The following industries are supported with some restrictions (please refer to SAP documentation):
See the SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management roadmap on the SAP Service Marketplace for
details of future industry enablement plans.
Note 3
Useful Links
S/4HANA microsite.
Corporate Headquarters
56 Top Gallant Road
Stamford, CT 06902-7700
USA
+1 203 964 0096
Regional Headquarters
AUSTRALIA
BRAZIL
JAPAN
UNITED KINGDOM
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