Today, the 11th of November 2015, is a momentous day that will likely be remembered for

a long time for ASUG members: SAPs S/4HANA Release 1511 brings its flagship ERP
software into the 21st century.
Its been a long time coming. The last time the SAP ecosystem saw a similar event was
R/3s introduction more than 20 years ago. Upon release, R/3 changed the ERP landscape
forever, launching SAPs preeminence atop the enterprise software category. As expected,
there are some similarities between the occasions most especially that once again SAP
completely rewrites its market leading software to the benefit of its customers.
As we saw this past spring, when SAP debuted Simple Finance, the re-creation began with
the core processes of ERPfinance and accounting. Now with the announcement of SAP
S/4HANA Release 1511, customers will discover a complete ERP system beginning to
emerge.
Make no mistake: With an undertaking of this size, the complete re-creation of ERP is not
what Release 1511 gives to us. (There are approximately hundreds of million lines of code
in ECC 6.) That overhaul will take a while to completely update the entire system,
especially since SAP is not just modifying the software to work with the SAP HANA
database, but also sun-setting the tired SAP user interface in favor of the SAP Fiori UX.
More Than Just the Code
Release 1511 comes with changes beyond the code. There are plenty of new names. For
instance, what was called SAP Simple Finance is now renamed SAP S/4HANA Finance.
You may have heard about the impending Simple Logistics launch, but that has been
completely replaced.
The overarching name for the new ERP is SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management, which
includes S/4HANA Finance, but also: S/4HANA Human Resources, S/4HANA
Manufacturing, S/4HANA Supply Chain, S/4HANA Sourcing and Procurement, S/4HANA
Marketing, S/4HANA Sales, S/4HANA Service, S/4HANA Asset Management, and
S/4HANA Research & Development.

If your head is spinning a bit, let me put this in terms familiar to ECC 6.0 users. One can
think of this as a redesign and relaunch of FI/CO, HCM/OM, SD, LE, PM, PP, EHS, PLM,
MM, QM, LO, CS, PS, and so forth.
What Customers Can Expect
To dig deeper, we see that the table simplification begun in S/4HANA Finance has
continued through several other subsystems. SAP has eliminated redundant data, such as
aggregates, indexes and history, and continued the reduction of the memory footprint and
table design, including clear separation of master data from transactional data.
What that means for SAP customers is more powerful, functional and easier-to-use
software. Smaller database sizes lead to better performance and lower hardware cost.
Improved, faster processes allow customers to take advantage of the extra time created,
thereby creating value for the enterprise.

Of all the industry solutions provided in ECC, roughly three-quarters of all customers use
SAP Discrete Industries and Mill Products, or DIMP, in their configuration. So S/4HANA
now includes DIMP in its core code making it easier for all customers to access its
functionality.

There are, to be sure, additional improvements in Release 1511. Heres a sampling:

Increased throughput using INSERT only

Real-time analytics on transactional data

A new user experience using SAP Fiori

Major simplifications in Materials Resource Planning (MRP), Inventory Management,

Capacity Planning, Sales & Distribution, and Procurement

PP/DS side-by-side with S/4HANA

Increased throughput of standard price utilizing Material Ledger

Extended S/4HANA material number

Since S/4HANA cannot be described in just one blog post, ASUG and SAP will be
publishing much more on S/4HANA and Enterprise Management. For right now, here are
some places to go:
ASUG Briefing | What Is S/4HANA Enterprise Management?
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What You Need to Know

The next major update of SAPs Business Suite for HANA (S/4HANA), release 1511,
is a broadening of supported functionality beyond financials and into areas of logistics,
such as production planning and inventory management

Gone are product names Simple Finance and Simple Logistics, in favor of the
overarching S/4HANA Enterprise Management, an expanding set of core S/4HANA
business suite functionality that links to a variety of S/4HANA Lines-of-Business (LoB)
applications

On-premise and cloud are the primary deployment models; managed cloud is on
offer, but more as a staging post on the way to the public cloud

The Name Game: Lets Talk Enterprise Management

Perhaps the best way to think about SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management is this: Its the
start of the full realization of what a Business Suite birthed on HANA will really look like and
be capable of.
Previously, S/4HANA focused on what the financials piece of Business Suite would be like
on HANA. S/4HANA Enterprise Management addresses functionality beyond financials,
mostly in the area that SAP internally likes to call logistics, such as inventory management
and production planning, though SAP promises that theres much more to come. (Also see:
ASUG Community Advocate Kevin Reilly opines on the S/4HANA 1511 ReleaseMore
Than Just Code Changes.)
Now that the S/4HANA release covers both financials and logistics, much of the core
functionality of a traditional ERP system, SAP decided to use the term Enterprise
Management. The idea is that S/4HANA can span all lines of business and SAP systems
so finance, sales, service, marketing, commerce, procurement and sourcing,
manufacturing, supply chain management, says Uwe Grigoleit, SAPs Global Head of
Business Development for Suite on HANA and HANA Applications.
SAP was also keen to move away from its previous Simple product naming since that
term might imply a simple version of finance just covering the core part of finance rather
than a fully-fledged finance system thats simplified, Grigoleit explains.
The simplification of the data model and coding enabled by the underlying HANA platform
is allowing SAP to deliver a lot more functionality, he adds, such as predictive analytics for
finance and for materials planning. It really makes sense to give it a new brand, he adds.
The Big Picture
If you look at the SAP graphic below, youll see the blue outlined box represents whats in
S/4HANA Enterprise Managementcore elements of S/4HANA finance, HR, sourcing and
procurement, supply chain, manufacturing, marketing and commerce, sales, service, asset
management and research and development.
Effectively, whats going on, Grigoleit says, is the reintegrating of capabilities of products
that, previously, due to the limitations and constraints of the database architecture for R/3,

couldnt be included within Business Suite. In turn, they were built out as additional
complementary solutions.
What were starting with S/4HANA Enterprise Management, we will continue with the next
releases, so more core capabilities of Supply Chain Management will be redeployed and
integrated into S/4HANA, he says. The same will be true for SRM (Supplier Relationship
Management), where some elements like core contract management are being integrated
into S/4HANA Enterprise Management.
Our goal is to take back more of SCM, SRM, CRM and BW into one central component to
completely simplify the landscape for our customers, Grigoleit says. It will take some time
for us to be completely done, but were starting to deliver re-integrations across other
components.
S/4HANA will be both a loosely coupled and a hybrid suite with integrations to the S/4HANA
Lines-of-Business (LoB) solutions. Those include members of SAPs on-premise and cloud
product portfoliothat functionality provided by Ariba, Concur, Fieldglass, Hybris and
SuccessFactors, which may be available in more than one deployments or purely in the
cloud (see chart below).

SAP plans to release project system, quality management and sales and distribution
functionality in 2016, Grigoleit says. Well continue to simplify solutions and data models
and make them ready to run on HANA, he adds. Next, we can deliver innovations with
new capabilities on those solutions.
Cloud vs. On-Premise vs. Managed Cloud
SAP is still offering three deployment flavors for S/4HANA, but the two major options are
on-premise or public cloud, Grigoleit says.
The managed cloud type of deployment with HANA Enterprise Cloud is also possible for
S/4HANA, he adds. Most of our [Business Suite] customers are on-premise and most are
likely to go to the cloud. Managed cloud could be the perfect bridge technology to move
with all their current complexity, processes and add-ons and then use services from SAP to
reduce complexity and go back to simplicity and then be ready with their systems and
processes to move into a public cloud scenario.
As SAP announced during its Q3 2015 earnings call, the current S/4HANA promotion has
been extended through Dec. 31, 2015, but there are no plans to extend it further than the
end of this year, Grigoleit said.
This is the final extension for that promotion. Wed given customers nearly three quarters,
but, even so, it was still not enough time for a lot of customers to take advantage of the
promo, and Q4 is a classical buying quarter, he adds. The license promotion allows
customers who have licensed HANA platform for Business Suite to upgrade to S/4HANA
licenses at no charge.
Who Are the S/4HANA Early Adopters?
S/4HANA is SAPs fastest growing product to date, with more than 1,300 customers since
its launch in February. So, just who are these early adopters?
The nice thing about them is that were not seeing a lot of trends, Grigoleit says. Theyre
in roughly 80 countries and across all 26 industries we support. Some verticals are

adopting S/4HANA at a faster rate than others, such as consumer products companies.
Other sectors, such as financial services, which have yet to be fully impacted by
digitization, are moving more slowly, SAP says.
Were seeing all types of organization moving to S/4HANA, he adds. Were finalizing a
reference with a very small customer with only 30 employees. For small companies, they
see the benefits of S/4HANAs predefined scenarios. Grigoleit estimates that the vast
majority, more than 70 percent of new SAP customers, are moving to S/4HANA and not
heavily considering any other SAP option.
Partners have been crucial to SAPs early success with S/4HANA, Grigoleit says. SAP
estimates there are now more than 2,000 resellers selling S/4HANA, and SAP partners
manage more than 80 percent of all S/4HANA-focused projects.
The partner network has been very important, he says. Weve invested a lot of time and
effort into the partner ecosystem. Its very important for our customers, wherever they are,
that they will find partners that are enabled on S/4HANA.
SAP will likely roll out additional tools to help customers make the business case for and
then migrate to S/4HANA to join the likes of the S/4HANA SAP Business Scenario
Recommendations (BSR) report and the SAP Activate implementation framework, Grigoleit
says. There may be tools to analyze the old coding of customers to identify how they can
optimize that coding to apply the same techniques and routines that SAP has applied in its
move to S/4HANA, he adds
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