SAP S/4HANA 2020 - Innovation, Automation, Intelligence (Part 2)

With the 2020 release of SAP S/4HANA, the Walldorf-based company has once again introduced many new features and improvements to the system under the motto “It’s all about innovation, automation and intelligence”. In this blog series, we will present some of the highlights, divided into the respective business areas.

In the first part of our series, we looked at the topics of Manufacturing, Finance and Sales/Marketing and Extended Warehouse Management. We will now focus on the new features from the areas of Procurement and R&D as well as Service and Asset Management.

Procurement (Sourcing Management)

Real-time transparency is increased as part of the central procurement analysis in the SAP Analytics Cloud. Real-time dashboards provide insights into the consumption of central framework agreements.

Raw material prices in central contracts

To increase productivity, it is now possible to integrate automatically calculated raw material prices into central contracts. An integrated Gantt chart clearly shows the validity of the prices depending on the main condition.

User-defined criteria for supplier evaluation

To enable a more customized supplier evaluation, customers now have the option of defining and activating up to five individual evaluation criteria as well as the respective weighting and evaluation factors.

R&D - Research & Development

Dangerous goods management

By supporting regular content such as UN numbers, phrases and legal information from ADR, IMDG, CFR 49, UNRTDG, IATA, TDG, NOM, ANTT and NCh382, Dangerous Goods Management now enables the automated classification of dangerous goods for unpackaged and packaged goods.

Gantt chart for monitoring multiple projects

The new Gantt chart for monitoring multiple projects is now UI5-based. This is a first step towards an alternative to the current Java-based version.

Service

The 2020 release of SAP S/4HANA also offers some important updates relating to service management. One of the highlights is the ability to schedule recurring services using a maintenance plan. To support business scenarios with planned service, maintenance plan functions have been integrated into SAP S/4HANA, as regular maintenance of assets certainly helps to avoid customer escalations and increase the availability of assets.

In-house repair

With in-house repair, services for products and assets returned by customers can be managed internally. This process includes scheduling repairs and recording received devices with the necessary follow-up actions, as well as reviewing repair results before shipping and billing are triggered.

Recurring services

It is now possible to schedule recurring services using maintenance schedules and templates linked to service contracts.

Asset Management

Reporting on EHS incidents

The reporting of EHS (Environment, Health & Safety) incidents has been improved: incidents are presented in a better and more intuitive way and the newly designed homepage offers even easier insights.

Maintenance management

In order to organize the maintenance backlog in maintenance management more efficiently, it is now possible to divide maintenance processes into preliminary, main and follow-up work.

Treasury Executive Board

Based on the SAP Analytics Cloud, the Treasury Executive Dashboard provides a global overview of treasury key figures. It enables close integration with SAP S/4HANA.