This blog provides you with the latest and greatest innovations that our SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1908 release has in store for you in the area Hybrid Cloud Deployment .
As part of 1908 release of S/4HANA Cloud, we have 4 major innovations:
Centralised management of Pricing Master
Let’s understand the first topic of centralised pricing master.
One important factor impacting sales as well as procurement business of a customer is pricing. Carefully defined pricing strategy is not only important for an organisation to optimise the sales volume and profit margins but also to save the procurement costs.
Our customers need to handle a plethora of materials/products in their businesses and have operations spanning across multiple entities/ERP systems. Having a central system to maintain the pricing master will help our customers to streamline their business. With 1908 release, we will provide API for replication of pricing master data from / to SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
You can identify a leading system in your landscape and maintain the pricing master (referred as Pricing Condition Record). Let’s assume you have identified SAP S/4HANA Cloud as this leading system. Now, You can read this data and update other systems within your landscape. In case you decide to have SAP S/4HANA On Premise or external system as the leading system, you can also replicate (create/update/delete) the pricing master into your SAP S/4HANA Cloud systems.
One important factor to be kept in mind is that the replication is supported only for condition records that are supported in S/4HANA Cloud. You can find further information on the supported price relevant fields for condition records in the API reference part under the following links:
In S/4HANA Cloud, use the communication scenario SAP_COM_0294 to do the following operational activities:
You can also replicate purchase-price condition records using the data replication framework (from SAP S/4HANA Cloud) to SAP and non-SAP software systems. Not just this, tracking and monitoring of replication activities with drill-down capabilities is also supported in S/4HANA Cloud.
Advantages:
Current Restriction:
Centralized Financial Closing
The second topic is focused on the enhancements in Advanced Financial Closing.
Today, organisations are always seeking ways to increase the efficiency and timelines of their financial close and compliance processes. In S/4HANA Cloud, we support our customers to plan, execute, monitor, and even analyse financial closing tasks for all entities within their group with Advanced Financial Close (Scope Item ID: 2V8).
However, in hybrid deployments customers need to perform the closing activities in both On Premise as well as cloud systems. Thus, it becomes difficult to get holistic view of the financial close activities for entire enterprise.
In 1908, we have introduced financial closing integration to enable direct connectivity of S/4HANA On-Premise system with SAP S/4HANA Cloud to orchestrate, schedule, execute, and report on activities taking place in the On-Premise system.
You should use the communication scenario SAP_COM_0416 (Financial Close Integration) in S/4HANA Cloud to connect one or several On-Premise systems.
When the integration process is completed, your financial on-premise system will be visible as folders in the hierarchy of your closing task template and task list so that you can conduct your financial close with a single task list across all your distributed systems.
Advantages:
E2E business process for Procurement of Project Services in HQ-Subsidiary model
Like mentioned earlier, Customers have multiple entities. In such set up there is always a possibility of entities taking each other’s support for project execution. Hence, even though the end-customer signs a deal/contract with one of the entities (can be HQ as well), the project can be fully implemented by another entity.
Also, in many corporates’ subsidiaries implement internal projects for their HQ. Subsequently, the subsidiary bills HQ for the services provided.
3TQ (Procurement of Project Based Services between HQ and Subsidiaries)
Business Benefits
Monitoring of integrations across Hybrid Solutions with SAP Cloud ALM for Operations (CRUN)
In a Hybrid scenario, organisations have multiple integrated systems. This includes On-Premise as well as Cloud and there are numerous integrations set up among these systems.
Integration Monitoring as a part of SAP Cloud ALM for operations provides one central overview of data exchange processes at application level in cloud-only and hybrid scenarios.
Customers can do the following with integration monitoring functionality within SAP Cloud ALM:
Advantages:
Current Restriction
Products in scope currently are:
Follow us via @Sap and #S4HANA, or myself via srivatsan.santhanam, @srivats_s and LinkedIn
As part of 1908 release of S/4HANA Cloud, we have 4 major innovations:
- Centralised management of Pricing Master
- Centralised Financial Closing
- E2E business process for Procurement of Project Services in HQ-Subsidiary model
- Monitoring of integrations across Hybrid Solutions with SAP Cloud ALM (CRUN)
Centralised management of Pricing Master
Let’s understand the first topic of centralised pricing master.
One important factor impacting sales as well as procurement business of a customer is pricing. Carefully defined pricing strategy is not only important for an organisation to optimise the sales volume and profit margins but also to save the procurement costs.
Our customers need to handle a plethora of materials/products in their businesses and have operations spanning across multiple entities/ERP systems. Having a central system to maintain the pricing master will help our customers to streamline their business. With 1908 release, we will provide API for replication of pricing master data from / to SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
You can identify a leading system in your landscape and maintain the pricing master (referred as Pricing Condition Record). Let’s assume you have identified SAP S/4HANA Cloud as this leading system. Now, You can read this data and update other systems within your landscape. In case you decide to have SAP S/4HANA On Premise or external system as the leading system, you can also replicate (create/update/delete) the pricing master into your SAP S/4HANA Cloud systems.
One important factor to be kept in mind is that the replication is supported only for condition records that are supported in S/4HANA Cloud. You can find further information on the supported price relevant fields for condition records in the API reference part under the following links:
- Condition Record for Pricing in Sales – Create, Read, Update, Delete
- Condition Record for Pricing in Purchasing – Create, Read, Update, Delete
In S/4HANA Cloud, use the communication scenario SAP_COM_0294 to do the following operational activities:
- Create condition record (Pricing condition can be created with their validity, pricing scales and condition record supplements)
- Read condition record
- Update condition record
- Delete condition record
You can also replicate purchase-price condition records using the data replication framework (from SAP S/4HANA Cloud) to SAP and non-SAP software systems. Not just this, tracking and monitoring of replication activities with drill-down capabilities is also supported in S/4HANA Cloud.
Advantages:
- Reduces manual efforts in creating the pricing condition record in multiple tiers which uses S/4HANA Cloud
- Avoid duplication in pricing
Current Restriction:
- Reading, creating, updating, or deleting of condition records for tax-related condition types is not supported
- Query building on the combination of condition record and validity is not supported
Centralized Financial Closing
The second topic is focused on the enhancements in Advanced Financial Closing.
Today, organisations are always seeking ways to increase the efficiency and timelines of their financial close and compliance processes. In S/4HANA Cloud, we support our customers to plan, execute, monitor, and even analyse financial closing tasks for all entities within their group with Advanced Financial Close (Scope Item ID: 2V8).
However, in hybrid deployments customers need to perform the closing activities in both On Premise as well as cloud systems. Thus, it becomes difficult to get holistic view of the financial close activities for entire enterprise.
In 1908, we have introduced financial closing integration to enable direct connectivity of S/4HANA On-Premise system with SAP S/4HANA Cloud to orchestrate, schedule, execute, and report on activities taking place in the On-Premise system.
You should use the communication scenario SAP_COM_0416 (Financial Close Integration) in S/4HANA Cloud to connect one or several On-Premise systems.
When the integration process is completed, your financial on-premise system will be visible as folders in the hierarchy of your closing task template and task list so that you can conduct your financial close with a single task list across all your distributed systems.
Advantages:
- Full availability of latest solution for automation, process orchestration and monitoring of the close
E2E business process for Procurement of Project Services in HQ-Subsidiary model
Like mentioned earlier, Customers have multiple entities. In such set up there is always a possibility of entities taking each other’s support for project execution. Hence, even though the end-customer signs a deal/contract with one of the entities (can be HQ as well), the project can be fully implemented by another entity.
Also, in many corporates’ subsidiaries implement internal projects for their HQ. Subsequently, the subsidiary bills HQ for the services provided.
3TQ (Procurement of Project Based Services between HQ and Subsidiaries)
Business Benefits
- Headquarters to implement its projects effectively
- Headquarters to have visibility into the projects managed in the subsidiary system (SAP S/4HANA Cloud)
- Reduced manual intervention in the business process between HQ and the subsidiary
- Real-time automation of the invoicing process between the subsidiary and headquarters
Monitoring of integrations across Hybrid Solutions with SAP Cloud ALM for Operations (CRUN)
In a Hybrid scenario, organisations have multiple integrated systems. This includes On-Premise as well as Cloud and there are numerous integrations set up among these systems.
Integration Monitoring as a part of SAP Cloud ALM for operations provides one central overview of data exchange processes at application level in cloud-only and hybrid scenarios.
Customers can do the following with integration monitoring functionality within SAP Cloud ALM:
- Alerting:
- Inform Integration Owner about critical issues during data exchange.
- Get an overview on scenario related alerts.
- Use forward navigation to analyse the alerts in the Alert Inbox.
- Monitoring:
- Get a detailed status overview per cloud service/business systems on the incoming/outgoing messages for different interfaces
- Tracking:
- Search and track single messages based on specific business context attributes like Order Number.
- Analytics:
- Get an overview on historical data for the different integration types to identify trends and compare different time periods.
Advantages:
- A central tool to monitor, alert, track and analyse the integrations across landscape
- End to End monitoring across all SAP applications and major technology services
- Reduce the gap between business and IT
Current Restriction
Products in scope currently are:
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud,
- SAP Cloud Platform Integration
- SAP Cloud for Customers
For more information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, check out the following links:
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud release info: http://www.sap.com/s4-cloudrelease
- Sven Denecken’s SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1908 Release Blog
- The Link Collection for Hybrid Cloud here
- Best practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud here
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud User Community: register here
- Feature Scope Description here
- What’s New here
- Help Portal Product Page here
- Implementation Portal here
Follow us via @Sap and #S4HANA, or myself via srivatsan.santhanam, @srivats_s and LinkedIn
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