SAP S/4HANA for beginners and 7 key things you should know

  So what is S/4HANA? Today I want to share with you seven things that you should know about S/4HANA. At the very end, I'm going to share with you some really cool resources and I'm going to talk about one of the things that really blew my mind when I heard it the first time. So without further a due, let's get started. So what is S/4HANA? Well in the nutshell it is the next generation of ERP.  

In 2015 SAP announced its next big thing. And that was S/4HANA. So here you can see the evolution of the ERP suite by SAP.  We started off in 1979 with R/2. In '92, we released R/3 and then 2004 we came out with ERP. And in 2015, we came up with S4/HANA. So number two, S4HANA has a really really fast in memory database. It can consume and process very very high volumes of data. So why is S/4HANA so fast?Well it has to do with how data is stored in an S/4HANA database and there's a great article that I pulled up here on LinkedIn that explains how data is stored in S/4HANA.  

So traditionally data is stored in forms of rows. But with S/4HANA this is transformed into columns which makes it much much more easier and efficient to access high volume of data.. S/4HANA comes with a beautiful user experience. In that context you might have heard about SAP Fiori. I'm going to show you an example of an SAP Fiori screen. So I went to Google type in SAP Fiori, did an image search. 

And one ofthe images that pop up is this. And this is a very typical as SAP Fiori screen. SAP Fiori is responsive that means you can run it on virtually any device can run it on the desktop and run it on a smartphone and you can run it on the tablet. And based on on the device you use it automatically adjusts its time. So this is really cool. In the context of S/4HANA you might have heard about digital core or digital transformation. And S/4HANA is really the digital core of the enterprise of the future. And the core enables customers to make use of the Internet of Things, for example.

 So you can connect the sensors with your digital core and use that information from those sensors to make better business decisions. And those sensors typically generate a lot of data and so you need a fast database that can process all this data now. We can access the digital core with all sorts of devices and that goes back to the beautiful user experience with SAP Fiori Next we can leverage embedded analytics, so we can run reports on real-time data. We no longer have to have a business warehouse. We can have it, but we don't have to have it anymore. And we can run reports real-time and get insights real-time.  The digital core also connects to other SAP Cloud solutions like SAP Success Factors,related to people. Or business networks like our solution Ariba. And it also links to social networks. And one of the networks that SAP developed is SAP jam, which is a social network for a company and is very much like works like Facebook. S/4HANA supports ten LOBs (lines of business) and 25 industries.

 Let me show you what are the LOBs that  S/4HANA support. So, I went to the home page for S/4HANA and I scroll down and there's a list of all the lines businesses that S/4HANA supports. So it starts with Finance, Human Resources, Sourcing and Procurement, Supply Chain,Manufacturing, Research and Development, Asset Management, Sales, Marketing and Commerce, and Customer Service. So, all these 10 LOBs are part of S/4HANA. The sixth thing that you should know about S/4HANA is that you can run it in the cloud or you can run it on-premise. And little bit later in this video  I will show you how you can actually get a free trial for both cloud and on-premise. 

And here's the thing that really blew me away when I saw this the first time. S/4HANA dramatically simplifies the data footprint. So, I went to YouTube into the SAP technology channel. And there's one video "Why S/4HANA?" And in that video someone from SAP explains how they simplified the Inventory Management data model. So, on the left-hand side you can see 26 tables that were in the traditional Inventory Management database. And then on the right-hand side you can see, that that was simplified to just one single table. One single table!Isn't that fascinating? From 26 to just one single table. When I saw this the first time, this really blew my mind.

 As I said in the beginning, I want to share some resources. The number one resource I want to share with you is the S/4HANA homepage. So, here's the S/4HANA homepage and it has a wealth of information about features, the customers, deployment options, training and community. So go to SAP.com/S/4HANA and you will get to this page which has a lot of very cool information. From that website, you can get to a couple of resources I want to just highlight. Number one is this value advisor. So for example, it starts by asking you to select a line of business and then it asks you what are your top priorities and then it generates the report and gives you more insight as to how S/4HANA drives value for your Manufacturing business.

 The second resources that you can access from that S/4HANA homepage are the top ten reasons to choose S/4HANA today. And this is a nice visual website. For example, you can discover how to improve order fulfillment by 25%. And the third resource that I want to share with you, that you can access from the S/4HANA homepage is "S/4HANA in about two minutes." So this is a series of videos and other resources to show you the dramatic impact of S/4HANA on ERP. The second resource I want to recommend are the Learning Maps that SAP created. From the S/4HANA homepage you have a link to these learning maps. And I pulled up a learning map for a Big Data Architect. 

The nice thing about this is it shows you not only all the classroom trainings or online trainings that are available but it also shows you courses in OpenSAP. So OpenSAP is a massive online open course just like the courses on Courser a for example. And when you click on the link that will get you to OpenSAP and it has a host of all different sorts of courses not only for S/4HANA but also related to other topics that are relevant for the SAP ecosystem. For example here is the course Digital Transformation and its impact. So that's from that learning map that I showed to you before.

 Last but not least SAP offers a free trial for is Cloud and On-premise Edition. So directly from the homepage, you can get to your free trial or just clicking this button and that will bring up the homepage for the SAP S/4HANA trials and when you scroll down, you have a free trial for the Cloud Edition and that is 14 days and you have a free trial for the On-premise Edition and that's for 30 days. So that's it, SAP S/4HANA in a nutshell and the most important things that you should know about S/4HANA.