SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1705 Release

SAP released SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1705 on May 9, 2017. This latest release marks another key milestone in SAP’s journey to the cloud: From this point on, SAP are extending their cloud ERP offerings beyond the more user-centric domains of finance, procurement, travel, and HCM to include functions for manufacturing and other industries.
The 1705 Release brings updates for Finance, Manufacturing, Procurement and much more. For collaboration between the different functionalities, SAP now offer SAP CoPilot, the digital assistant for your enterprise. There are also increased efficiency made possible through usage of machine learning capabilities. In this blog you can find a compilation of information about the new release.

SAP CoPilot – Your digital assistant

SAP CoPilot is available on Fiori 2.0. With Co-Pilot, SAP have taken the first step towards a unique, digital assistant for the enterprise, helping users get their work completed more efficiently. It allows the user to take notes and screenshots in the business context, and create business objects via embedded QuickCreate UI’s. This data can also be shared with other users, which lays the foundation for a faster and more seamless collaboration within the enterprise.

Read more about SAP Co-Pilot HERE

SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Finance

The main highlights of finance available with SAP S/4HANA 1705 are:

• Statutory Financial Consolidation: This application provides statutory financial consolidation capabilities for customers with a legal financial group structure. It automates consolidation processes to help you meet reporting requirements according to International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).
• Business Planning Integration: The integration between SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP BPC allows you to upload actual financial data from your SAP S/4HANA Cloud system to SAP BPC to conduct your planning cycle and bring the plan data back to SAP S/4HANA Cloud for real-time plan vs. actual reporting
• Extended Credit Management and SAP S/4HANA Finance Cloud for credit integration: The Credit Management extensions supports your company in making early determination of the risk of losses on receivables from your business partners and in efficiently making credit decisions based on automatic calculation via pre-configured formulas based in internal assessments and/or external credit risk information provided by external credit agencies. The Credit Controller has less manual work and credit decisions can be taken even faster.
• SAP S/4HANA Finance Cloud for customer payment integration: SAP S/4HANA Finance Cloud for customer payments integrated with SAP S/4HANA Cloud enables your customers to view bills, make payments, and view their master data.
• SAP S/4HANA Finance Cloud for Real Estate Integration: SAP Cloud for Real Estate provides centralized information for an organization’s corporate real estate portfolio. Built on the SAP Cloud Platform, this solution assists CFOs and corporate real estate managers in answering key questions regarding space utilisation, facility costs, portfolio composition, and partner collaboration through a beautiful, customer-grade user experience from anywhere on any device.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Manufacturing

With this release SAP have focused on discrete manufacturing companies like component manufacturers utilising production processes such as:

• Maker-to-Order,
• Make-to-stock, or
• Repetitive Manufacturing

SAP S/4HANA Cloud now provides an end-to-end solution to transfer material from one plant to another within the same company code. Customers have full transparency about stock between plants, monitoring the warehouse from issue to delivery to shipment.

RFQ Integration with SAP Distributed Manufacturing provides the option to collaborate with suppliers, and to design and produce parts through additive manufacturing. Considering 3D printing is becoming more and more important for the global industry, it allows customers to connect 3D printing with end-to-end visibility.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Procurement

This update sees updates in terms of predictive capabilities in procurement. Predictive analytics for contract consumption forecasts the point in time when a purchasing contract is expected to be consumed at 100%, so that it is possible to renegotiate them in time.

There are also updates for:

• Operational Purchasing
• Supplier Management
• Collaborative Sourcing & Contract Management
• Invoice & Payables Management
• Inventory Management
• Procurement Analytics

SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Professional Services

Included in this release is:

• Better transparency in revenue allocation in the professional services processes – allowing several contributing profit centers to contribute to one project
• Project Cost Forecasting – The cost forecast allows use to adapt cost planning to constantly changing circumstances. For the cost to be completed, the system determines and values the remaining work on the basis of the plan, forecast, and actual work performed. During this process, the system freezes the previous period and takes over any cost to complete from previous periods to future periods.
• Speeding up the invoicing process with the “Notify Missing Times” app – In the 1705 release we delivered a new app for the project manager, called “Nofity Missing Times”. This can be used to check if all the timesheets are up to date before creating a billing proposal. This ensures that every month before creating a billing proposal, he or she can review the timesheets and notify consultants if there are missing time entries so that there are no errors during billing process.
• Collaboration on the go with the SAP Project Companion apps – The SAP Project Companion is a useful tool for project management, and a collaboration between Apple and SAP. It is an application for you and your project team. Whether you are a manager or a consultant, there is a role-based version for both. The mobile app helps you and your team to work better together. The app provides an overview of the most relevant project information, quick insights and a personalized timeline with the most important milestones for your project. To secure a fast collaboration, it is possible to get push notifications. If you want to have this app on your mobile phone, just go to the app store, search for SAP Project Companion and download the free demo version.
   

Predictive Analytics

With SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1705 SAP improve the Predictive Analytics capabilities to add further strength and depth. Machine learning models are built in to the solutions to enrich the basis for decision making, for example, by forecasting the future value of a KPI and therefore help to anticipate.