SAP S/4 HANA – Covalsys

What is S/4 HANA?

SAP S/4HANA is the biggest update to SAP’s ERP solution in over 20 years. So it’s hardly surprising that it’s been a gamechanger for many organizations at a time when extracting more, and better, insights from data is a primary business aim.

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Traditional business systems
Traditional business systems have fast become sprawling and unwieldy networks of disparate processes, tools and applications each offering limited functionality and powered by a separate database.
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SAP S/4HANA signals
SAP S/4HANA signals a move away from your business processes operating individually, towards a highly connected network of tools that all run on a single database. And it’s this increased interactivity between your business applications that opens up a new world of data-led decision-making.
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S/4HANA
S/4HANA is extremely innovative in the way it enables SAP users to utilize their database. Instead of merely being a transactional system that records data, S/4HANA gives end-users active decision-making support in real time, from insight based on a mixture of external and internal sources.

Why migrate ?

SAP S/4HANA delivers all the functionality you’d expect from traditional SAP systems but with the added benefits of increased connectivity and communication between your business applications.

Instead of each business function using individual siloes of data, S/4HANA id able to provide a deeper level of insight into your whole organization- with analytic software now drawing from the vast pool of information contained in the shared database.

When all your business processes run quickly and reliably on the same database, there’s no need to manually update programs independently. Instead the shared database is automatically updated in real-time, as different applications extract relevant data from it as required.

You’ll also benefit from the use of improved new user interfaces, reduced data footprint, greater flexibility, higher throughput and a “single version of the truth” across your organization.

Your Pathway to S/4 HANA

Every organization’s path to S/4HANA is unique, because they all begin with different systems in place and have different requirements from their new solution.

In this guide/ebook, we will only be focusing on the migration from existing SAP Business Suite systems to SAP S/4HANA.

One of the biggest changes is S/4HANA only runs on the SAP HANA database, which uses completely new architecture and data models.

Identifying and adapting your custom ABAP code to make it compatible with S/4HANA is therefore a key element of a Systems Conversion and probably the most time-consuming.

Starting your S/4HANA journey this way empowers you to wrap up a time-consuming aspect of the migration earlier and has no negative effect on performance-in fact, it could result in more efficient code.

S/4 HANA System Migration Overview

Flexibility and Versatility. One of the greatest benefits of SAP HANA is its compatibility with other databases, hardware and software, making it one of the most versatile data solutions available. This means your team can achieve greater analytic capabilities, without giving up the interfaces they trust.

Advantages of S/4 HANA

Faster ROI
Cost Effective
Increased Business Agility
Increase Employees Productivity
Improved Efficiency
Governance & Compliance

S/4 HANA System Migration Overview

4 Benefits of migrating to S4 HANA

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The Power to Handle Bigger Data
With SAP HANA your organization is much better equipped to handle, and even go beyond, the Big Data trend. Not only will you be able to process a far greater volume of data, but, thanks to changes in the way it’s stored and accessed, you’ll also be able to make use of a much wider range of data.

HANA seamlessly integrates information from a wide range of external and internal sources. Its machine learning and advanced analytic capabilities also mean that vast amounts of unstructured data can be incorporated – including text, predictive, spatial, event streams, and time series.

Soon, all businesses will realise they need to change the way they think about data if they want to keep up with competitors. Many organizations don’t yet see the value in processing floods of unstructured data, but as bigger Big Data becomes the norm, the ability to find insights at a much more granular level will prove to be invaluable.
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Real-Time Analytic Capability
If your organization has a need for up-to-the-moment information or processes reports that take a long time to generate, SAP HANA can undoubtedly help you.

In-memory technology means you’ll waste no time loading data from one location to another, and we’ve seen basic HANA setups process data up to 10-times faster. This drastically reduces the amount of time needed to perform even the most comprehensive of reports.

Accelerated business intelligence functionalities are built into HANA itself, which, combined with the increased speed, means you can process data in near-real time. This radically reduces thow long it takes you to make business decisions.

In short, with SAP HANA you can react in almost real time to events affecting your business and take appropriate actions to capitalize on opportunities or overcome challenges
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Scalable Solutions
No business should be aiming to remain static, and one benefit of migrating to SAP HANA is that, when your needs increase and your business grows, you can very easily increase the size of your HANA solution.

In fact, there are basically no limits to how large you can grow with SAP Business Warehouse, with the largest certified configuration reaching a colossal 168TB RAM.

SAP HANA also introduces dynamic tiering, which means frequently accessed data remains in memory, while less used data automatically moves to disk when space is low.

This is an extremely cost-effective way to manage large data volumes, especially when combined with HANA’s advanced compression and columnar storage – which results in 3-5x data footprint reduction.
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Flexibility and Versatility
One of the greatest benefits of SAP HANA is its compatibility with other databases, hardware and software, making it one of the most versatile data solutions available. This means your team can achieve greater analytic capabilities, without giving up the interfaces they trust.

This also means you’re able to apply these new analytic capabilities across your old systems, allowing you to derive new insights and rethink old assumptions based on misleading data.

Although SAP HANA is compatible with a huge range of systems, it’s columnar data models mean some existing custom ABAP code will no longer perform optimally and can potentially even cause system errors.

One of the challenges you’ll have to overcome when migrating to SAP HANA is preparing your existing code-base by manually adapting instances of HANA-incompatible code.