· SAP® S/4HANA (SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA) is a new product and the biggest innovation since...

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WHITEPAPER NovEmbER 2015

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SAP® business Suite on HANA and SAP® S/4HANA: Why waiting is not an optionHow SAP HANA® (Suite on HANA and Sap® S/4hana) drives significant and immediate benefits

HOW SAP HANA® (SUITE ON HANA AND S/4HANA) DRIVES SIGNIFICANT AND IMMEDIATE BENEFITS | NOVEMBER 2015

© 2015, HCL TECHNoLoGIES. REPRoDUCTIoN PRoHIbITED. THIS DoCUmENT IS PRoTECTED UNDER CoPYRIGHT bY THE AUTHoR, ALL RIGHTS RESERvED. 2

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 3

BENEFITS OF ADAPTING SAP HANA® 3

STREAMLINING IT 4

INCREASING AGILITY 4

IMPROVING REPORTING 5

INCREASING PRODUCTIVITY 6

ENABLING CROSS-FUNCTIONAL TRANSPARENCY 6

DRIVING SIMPLIFICATION 7

AGILE BENEFITS CREATION FROM HCL 7

CONCLUSION 8



INTRODUCTIONThe business world is more unpredictable and fast-moving than ever before. To compete in this dynamic environment companies need the ability to respond rapidly to changing circumstances, creating a demand for technology with the horsepower to harness the wealth of information generated in the marketplace,

Which is why the SAP HANA® platform is a game changer.

Consider the jet engine. It didn’t start a new mode of transport. Flying already existed. But the jet engine did revolutionize the flying business. It made existing journeys faster and safer. It opened up new, longer journeys. It enabled bigger planes to be built that could take more passengers. In turn that reduced the cost of flying and brought air travel to the masses. Plus, it enabled freight routes to be established, opening up trade around the globe.

The SAP HANA® platform revolutionizes business software in the same way, by allowing massive quantities of data to be leveraged for business purposes in real time. Just as the jet engine provided the airline industry with more power to support a revolution in transportation, SAP HANA® provides SAP customers with the power and agility to support a digital (r)evolution. You can address today’s demand for real-time business insights by creating business applications that previously were neither feasible nor cost-effective.

SAP® S/4HANA (SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA) is a new product and the biggest innovation since SAP R/3. The next-generation business suite SAP® S/4HANA is fully built on the most advanced in-memory platform today – SAP HANA® – with modern design principles and SAP® Fiori user experience (UX).

The journey to SAP® S/4HANA starts with a migation to Business Suite on HANA (SoH) followed by the activation of SAP® S/4HANA. Currently, SAP® S/4HANA is only available for Finance, though Logistics is scheduled for release in November 2015, introducing even further simplifications.

BENEFITS OF ADAPTING SAP HANA® HCL’s point of view for our clients is that the benefits and value that can be realized by migrating to Suite on HANA in the short term is substantial enough to warrant immediate action. Outlined below are the six benefits in adapting SAP HANA® platform:

Streamling IT IncreasingAgility

ImprovingReporting

IncreasingProductivity

Enabling cross functional

transparencyDriving

Simplifications



STREAMLINING ITWe already know that SAP HANA® provides significant technical benefits associated with a columnar database in the form of increased speed and substantial reduction in database size.

Increased speed and reduced database size now allows multiple functions to exist in a single environment – ERP, Business Intelligence (BI), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Supplier Relationship Management (SRM), etc. – substantially reducing costs.

In addition, running analytics directly on an ERP instance eliminates the need for extracting data into secondary data storage for analysis, reducing landscape complexity and enabling business reporting and analysis to be done in real-time.

These benefits in themselves are significant from an IT perspective. But there are even greater advantages to the business to be gained by running the SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA®. At HCL we have identified several enablers that can be leveraged to drive value and innovation across the various business areas.

INCREASING AGILITYSAP HANA’s real-time processing capabilities enable business users to gain greater insights into the business and, as a result, react faster to changing situations.

In finance, organizations can improve accounts payable processing and management, with real-time insight into payment obligations including ageing, invoice profiles, and trends. Supplier invoices requiring attention can be prioritized in real time. Improved analysis leads to better financial decisions and the ability to take advantage of discounts. Ultimately it results in a reduction in the cost of goods and services and a better cash position.

With the new SAP Integrated Business Planning solution (a part of the SAP® S/4HANA product suite), business planning is integrated into the transactional ERP system, accelerating planning cycles by using live data and improving the organization’s ability to adapt to a world of increasing business volatility.

Elsewhere in the organization on-demand back order processing also drives better customer service by ensuring that back order priorities are processed and allocations updated more frequently especially during critical events like promotions or new product introductions. The days of having a multi-week unprocessed order backlog after a major promotion are over. Similarly, with real-time processing of invoices and chargeback/rebates organizations can avoid month-end labor spikes and reduce processing times significantly.



Running the SAP® Business Suite on HANA can also provide real-time visibility into the value of Work in Progress (WIP), a key component of the balance sheet in certain industries.

In addition, because maintenance plans can be restated more often, it becomes easier to adapt to constraints - equipment or maintenance crew availability, for example. This will allow a more agile approach to maintenance schedules, driving down cost and reducing costly disruptions to critical business processes

IMPROVING REPORTINGAs we saw with the IT benefits, with the SAP® Business Suite on HANA analytics and reporting are run on the ERP instance, rather than sent off to a separate BI system. This has significant benefits for business users as data is available in real time – no more waiting for the latest inventory snapshot to reach the SAP® BI server before getting your most useful order fulfilment report.

With a large number of SAP HANA® based standard reports now reading data directly, cycle times are reduced, productivity is increased, and the user experience is improved dramatically.

In addition, real-time reporting capability enables organizations to rapidly connect the dots on the root causes of underperformance and to immediately take actions to stop value leakages. Real time access to key operational process metrics and KPIs across dimensions such as product, customer, and channel can measurably improve an organization’s performance and ability to respond to opportunities and threats as they present themselves.

Furthermore, having the ability to perform complex simulations in real time enables organizations to make better and timelier decisions about what products to produce, where and how. It can significantly improve cost and pricing competitiveness. For example by:

y Analyzing make-to-order/engineer-to-order options, including product substitutions and costs

y Modeling various purchasing choices based on different sources, discounts, and rebate thresholds

y Evaluating various make versus buy alternatives based on criteria such as capacity, cost, and time.

Finally, running the SAP® Business Suite on HANA also allows organizations to unleash the power of predictive analytics. Mathematic algorithms tap into the wealth of data available directly from the database to track trends and trigger early warning signals.



INCREASING PRODUCTIVITYAs we have seen in the previous two sections, running the SAP® Business Suite on HANA provides the opportunity to not only accelerate processes and run them on-demand, for example costing, demand planning, and invoicing, it also makes it possible to embed real-time analytics into business processes. As a result, organizations can deliver real-time alerts that drive actions and improve decision making at every level.

In addition, the SAP® Business Suite on HANA allows organizations to take advantage of the SAP® Fiori user experience (UX), which delivers a personalized, role-based user experience (UX) for SAP software. Using modern design principles, it simplifies the user experience across all lines of business, tasks, and devices – to reflect the way employees actually work throughout their day.

Role based personas in Fiori allow users to process transactions from a single access point, avoiding the need to access different screens to complete a single process. Comparative analyses between running processes in traditional SAP screens and optimizing them with Fiori have shown it is possible to achieve a reduction in processing time of up to 50%.

In addition, significant productivity gains can be gained in labor-intensive high volume transactional environments by digitizing business processes across multiple divisions to improve the user experience and drive productivity.

ENABLING CROSS-FUNCTIONAL TRANSPARENCYThe combination of the SAP® Business Suite running on HANA and SAP® Fiori UX also provides key opportunities for providing greater cross-functional visibility than organizations have ever had before.

An obvious example of this is being able to pull data from multiple functional areas to create more meaningful reports for executives and managers, merging SAP ERP information with external data sources for example.

Customer service agents can also benefit too. By bringing together product, supply chain, and sourcing contact information they can quickly identify the best option for fulfilling back orders and present customers with accurate shipment dates, improving on-time deliveries.

Sales is another area that can benefit significantly from cross-functional transparency by having the full picture of a customer’s dealings with the company at the sales people’s fingertips, including previous orders, payment status, and other back office information. But, perhaps more importantly, by comparing customers and/or what they buy sales people can identify opportunities to move customers to more profitable products and services.



DRIVING SIMPLIFICATIONFrom the above it can be seen that the advantages of moving to SAP® Business Suite on HANA from both an IT and business perspective are significant. But why stop there? The fact is that moving to SAP® S/4HANA, SAP’s next generation business suite, involves little extra effort, cost, and risk.

Built on the SAP HANA® platform and the personal user experience of SAP® Fiori UX, SAP® S/4HANA delivers massive simplifications in the way transactions are recorded. The in-memory technology has allowed SAP to drastically reduce the amount of tables compared to traditional databases. Transaction data for different functional modules is now captured in a single table instead of being spread across different tables. This single source of truth reduces the amount of reconciliation errors and increases the reliability of the data across functional modules.

These simplifications, combined with the speed of the SAP HANA® platform, allow companies to rethink traditional period end closes. Processes that could only be run at the end of a period can now be executed during the month, resulting in a reduced close schedule. The reduced table structure also reduces the amount of reconciliations required and provides more reliable financial and management reports.

SAP has already proven that the migration from the SAP® Business Suite to SAP® S/4HANA is seamless and non-disruptive. Regular users may not even notice the difference if they choose to continue using the traditional user interface. As a result, organizations can move from their current position directly to SAP® S/4HANA with no disruption, yet put themselves in a position to take advantage of the additional simplification benefits as and when it is convenient for them to do so.

AGILE BENEFITS CREATION FROM HCLHCL’s Agile Benefits Creation™ (ABC) program has been designed to guide clients through their journey to the SAP® Business Suite running on SAP HANA® and/or SAP® S/4HANA. Split into three phases (123) – and incorporating proven tools, methodologies, and expertise - it helps to rapidly maximize the value and benefits clients achieve while ensuring minimum disruption to the business.



CONCLUSIONTo compete effectively in the digital economy, organizations need to create a business model that is agile and capable of responding rapidly to changing business conditions.

With the power of real-time analysis and reporting, the SAP® Business Suite running on the SAP HANA® platform enables organizations to acquire these two key characteristics. However, given the small extra effort, cost, and risk involved, organizations should consider moving directly to SAP® S/4HANA, which will give them the benefits of SAP HANA® now while allowing them to take advantage of its other breakthroughs in the future.

The question is not if companies using SAP® should move to the SAP® Business Suite on SAP HANA® and/or SAP® S/4HANA, but rather a matter of how quickly. Delaying the decision may give competitors who adopt the new technology an advantage that proves difficult to overcome.

To know more about HCL’s SAP and SAP® S/4HANA capabilities and solutions,

please write to [email protected] or

http://www.hcltech.com/systems-integration/sap

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About HCL Technologies

HCL Technologies is a leading global IT services company working with clients in the areas that impact and redefine the core of their businesses. Since its emergence on the global landscape, and after its IPO in 1999, HCL has focused on ‘transformational outsourcing’, underlined by innovation and value creation, offering an integrated portfolio of services including software-led IT solutions, remote infrastructure management, engineering and R&D services and business services. HCL leverages its extensive global offshore infrastructure and network of offices in 31 countries to provide holistic, multi-service delivery in key industry verticals including Financial Services, Manufacturing, Consumer Services, Public Services and Healthcare & Life sciences. HCL takes pride in its philosophy of ‘Employees First, Customers Second’ which empowers its 106,107 transformers to create real value for customers. HCL Technologies, along with its subsidiaries, had consolidated revenues of US$ 6 billion, for the Financial Year ended as on 30th June 2015 (on LTM basis). For more information, please visit www.hcltech.com

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HCL is a $6.9 billion leading global technology and IT enterprise comprising two companies listed in India – HCL Technologies and HCL Infosystems. Founded in 1976, HCL is one of India’s original IT garage start-ups. A pioneer of modern computing, HCL is a global transformational enterprise today. Its range of offerings includes product engineering, custom & package applications, BPO, IT infrastructure services, IT hardware, systems integration, and distribution of information and communications technology (ICT) products across a wide range of focused industry verticals. The HCL team consists of over 110,000 professionals of diverse nationalities, who operate from 31 countries including over 505 points of presence in India. HCL has partnerships with several leading global 1000 firms, including leading IT and technology firms. For more information, please visit www.hcl.com

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