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My top picks from the SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005 – 2020 Q2 release

I will admit I am always extremely excited to check out what’s new with each SAP product release. Check out my previous posts for the 1909 and 2002 updates to learn more about other prior innovations.

Q2 is here and SAP has just released its newest version of the S4/HANA cloud system, version 2005. This release is a great new update with many functional and technical innovations. In this release alone, there are 100+ new features being introduced. That said, you can imagine how hard it was to pick my top handful items but let me try to take a stab at it and share with you what I consider to be the most interesting updates.

Let’s talk numbers first

My top-picks for the 2005 release

Before I go through my top updates, let me tell you my thought process. First, I have decided to only look through the new features in the 2005 release. Second, I have pre-determined 3 groups to help me stratify my most important updates. Lastly, I mapped my top picks against the pre-determined groups and rationalizing toward the most interesting ones I saw.

Area 1 – Compliance updates: These are the key changes related to management compliance and risk management activities including access management, audit logs configurations and any configurations supporting core SAP activities.
Number 1 – Enhanced features in the IAM Key Figures app to better manage user credentials.

  • The charts in the IAM Key Figures app support you to increase the security in your area and to reduce costs by displaying which business users are inactive and can be removed. They also provide a good overview that can be useful before go-live to help, for example, you evaluate if the business user and role distribution in your area is ready to be used.
  • With this app you can get a quick overview of critical issues of your business users and business roles. A new feature is introduced; with this feature you can display locked business users and/or business users that are outside of the validity date.

Number 2 – Enhanced IAM features to allow for a better user and role management experience.

  • In v2005 release, SAP allows you to the ability for an easier transport of roles between quality and production (i.e. import and export Business Roles).
  • This features also allows SAP cloud administrators to be able to lock inactive business users. Specifically, with this feature you can lock business users who have been inactive for a certain number of days.
  • In this release too, if you add a catalog that has dependencies to a business role, SAP S/4HANA Cloud would automatically display the dependencies in a list, and you can select or deselect them as required.

Bonus point: Like any new release, changes to the Identity and Access Management (IAM) objects require the Security team to recheck the business roles and the business catalogs assigned to them. The team must ensure that the restrictions included in the business catalogs are set correctly to allow the users to use their business apps as needed. There is a central spreadsheet listing all changes relating to identity and access management (IAM) that have been introduced since the previous release. These changes affect applications, business catalogs, business role templates, and restriction type assignments. You can find this spreadsheet attached to SAP Note 2902340

 

Area 2 – Automation and Analytics updates: These are the key changes related to how SAP S4 assists business leads in conducting their daily operations by either automating repeatable tasks or providing new insights across the business processes.
Number 3 – SAP Cash Application now intelligently propose reprocessing rules based on your past data.

  • Rather than only creating reprocessing rules manually, the enhanced SAP Cash Application app will create reprocessing rules automatically by learning from your past data. Based on your past postings and clearings, the intelligent technology of SAP Cash Application gives each rule template some key performance indicators that help you understand and decide how useful the rule templates are for your work.

Number 4 – Embedded with SAP Analytics Cloud, pre-loaded analytics content is integrated out of the box for easier data reporting integration.

  • As part of the 2005, SAP is delivering the “Financial statement planning” and “Internal order planning” Integrated Financial Planning for SAP S/4HANA business content. This allows you to easily start with SAP Cloud Analytics right within SAP S/4HANA Cloud. For example, for the “Financial Statement planning”, it facilitates profit and loss planning, offers the possibility to define trading partner allocation factors, and balance sheet planning as well as it allows planning administrators to pre-populate planning screens based on past actual data.
  • SAP S/4HANA Cloud offers “Credit Management Reporting” app to analyze the credit data of business partners with the reporting and data visualization with SAP Analytics Cloud. The complete integration is part of the content delivery and is available out of the box.

 

Area 3 – Business Process Design updates: These are the key changes related to execution of key business process activities and tasks, including update to any workflows, new reports, key business process configurations.
Number 5 – Sales order created outside SAP system can be uploaded using a new process.

  • With the “Import Sales Order” app, you can create/upload sales orders from an XLSX spreadsheet file. It is recommended to use an SAP standard template before importing sales orders. This template provides a list of sales order fields that are either required or optional for importing sales orders.
  • Each import of sales order is logged and tracked by the application. Specifically, you can track the history of sales order imports in the system, including order creation time, order creation status, the application log, and other information about each import.

Number 6 – Additional details can be maintained for Customer and Suppliers/Vendors master data.

  • Manage Supplier Master Data and Manage Customer Master Data Fiori apps offers you some new features including: Display of Mandatory Field Indicator, Maintaining Dunning Data and Maintaining Interest Calculation.
  • Business can now send payment reminder or a dunning notice as well as post interest receivables for open items.

 

As mentioned earlier, the above are just a glimpse of the changes introduced in the latest S/4HANA Cloud 2005 release. If you have not started planning to integrate the S/4HANA Cloud version, make sure that you reach out to me and we can chat about your options and how the cloud solution can fit in your environment.

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The views, information or opinions expressed in this short article are views of my own. All information in this article is provided “as is”, with no guarantee of completeness, accuracy, timeliness or of the results obtained from the use of this information.

Original Article:
https://blogs.sap.com/2020/05/04/my-top-picks-from-the-sap-s-4hana-cloud-2005-2020-q2-release/

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