The SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1608 release is less than two weeks away and we want to give you an idea of what innovations and enhancements are being delivered in 1608. Anyway you are able to see that we have put lots of innovations into this release to provide more functionality to our customers and accelerate our path to the cloud.less than two weeks away and to give you an idea of what innovations and enhancements are being delivered in 1608. Anyway you are able to see that we have put lots of innovations into this release to provide more functionality to our customers and accelerate our path to the cloud.

Our new accelerated extended four quarter roadmap

We want to build customer trust and drive innovation adoption by showing the evolution path of our product and solution landscape with a focus on business value and share more insights about upcoming innovations with customers. To mitigate this we accelerated the SAP S/4HANA Cloud roadmaps by unleashing the planned innovations and feature related to upcoming releases, with a plan of four quarters ahead. You will find this new roadmap being launched August 29th with the RTC of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1608 release.

For this release the scope will be significantly enriched across all LOBs. From the more than 30 scope items, 3 additional localizations and many more self-service UI´s we have selected a few highlights for you per edition.

SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management Cloud

With the advanced Available to Promise (aATP) comes the ‘Release for Delivery’ app, which minimizes the impact of material shortages by supporting the users to efficiently work and keep their deadlines. It allows any user to easily gatekeep which sales order requirements should be delivered and efficiently distribute the available stock to the most important sales order requirements. An automated selection of work lists according to the user specific area of responsibility avoids dependencies and double work.

Based on SAP HANA Cloud Platform, SAP RealSpend uses cloud technology to pull data from core financial reporting systems, allowing organizations to perform ad hoc spend analysis and other “on-the-fly” calculations enabling live business processing. This app enhances traditional ERP data model with future data to provide real-time insight into the forecast of the company. Managers are enabled to anticipate upcoming spent more precisely improving their ability to make informed decisions and the tagging engine allows managers to create their own analytical models on the fly.

SAP S/4HANA Professional Services Cloud

The event-based revenue recognition in project-based services will be launched with the 1608 release. With this functionality costs and revenues will easily be realized in one single picture with real time accurate data and at any time. A real-time income statement and costs of sales reporting by posting revenue recognition with prima nota supports the increase in transparency. Also the cost management reporting will be enhanced with reporting attributes derived for all revenue recognition postings. And last but not least will the audit efforts be reduced through a transparent link between every revenue recognition posting and prima nota.

SAP S/4HANA Marketing Cloud

The Customer Journey Manager will be launched with 1608 release based on the great feedback obtained in the current Beta phase. It enables marketers to design their strategic marketing activities, and to orchestrate marketing campaigns and other related activities such as service calls and lead generation.

Profiles is, of course, a very hot and important topic. Therefore, you may not be surprised to find it very visible in SAP S/4HANA Marketing Cloud 1608, most prominently through a new profiles application and through the integration with SAP Hybris Profile for Web tracking to enable even better personalized targeting.

There is great news also in analytics. SAP’s new generation of Cloud analytics, SAP BusinessObjects Cloud (f.k.a. Cloud for Analytics), can be connected to SAP S/4HANA Marketing Cloud for state-of-the art data visualization and storytelling. In addition, the SAP S/4HANA embedded analytics will be made available for flexible day-to-day reporting.

Find more 1608 release highlights here. Stay tuned for a more detailed information on the 1608 release coming up on August 29th.

More information about SAP S/4HANA you will always fond here, including the test drive:

• www.sap.com/s4hana
• www.sap.com/s4-roadmaps
• www.sap.com/s4-paths

Follow us via @SAP and #S4HANA, or myself via @SDenecken

With the TOP Simplification List Items approach we want to start a S/4HANA SCN Blog series to provide more information about dedicated simplification items. Simplification items where we assume that any customer project has to deal with. The following S/4HANA SCN Blog is collecting these TOP Simplification Items with the links to the dedicated S/4HANA blogs.

The TOP Simplification List Items

Within this blog we want to provide additional information regarding the Simplification Item:

Sales & Distribution: Rebate Management Replaced by Condition Contract Settlement

Description

• There are redundant object models in the ERP system. Here, the rebate agreements are used. The (mandatory) target approach in SAP S/4HANA is the condition contract settlement approach followed by Settlement Management.
• Condition contract settlement is capable of centrally managing master and settlement-related data for all kinds of subsequent settlement-related business processes. In the context of current development, the condition contract settlement application is the single point of entry to create, edit, and settle the conditions according to the contractual terms and conditions.

Business Impact

• SAP Business Suite customers can move from various releases to SAP S/4 HANA, on-premise edition and still process the existing rebate agreements. It is not possible to create or extend existing rebate agreements.
• The user interface for SAP S/4HANA, on-premise edition 1511 is transaction WCOCO. The specific transaction codes to create SD Rebate Agreements, which users may be familiar with from SAP Business Suite, are not available in SAP S/4HANA.
• Condition contract settlement offers additional functions and features that allow you to modernize the implementation of your existing business processes and define additional business process variants.

Recommended Action

• Condition contract settlement is also available in the SAP Business Suite. Therefore we recommend that you use condition contract settlement if you are planning to create new rebate agreements before you upgrade to SAP S/4 HANA.
• Customize the conditions contract settlement application to implement your rebate processes based on standard content.

For more details see the PPT attached to the following SAP Note:

https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/2267377/E

Overview:

Consider a migration scenario of analytical reportsfrom SAP BW to S4H Embedded analytics. There will be lot of customizations and it’s difficult to replace all of them in short time. It will be good to useCDS views marked with data extraction as a source to embedded BW objects and use Bex features on top of these to develop analytical reports referring to existing BW system. After successful conversion, analytical reports which can be replaced by CDS consumption views can be identified.

    I am considering sales scenario, to identify Quotation, Order & Contract amounts by Customer and Sales value by Material.

    I will develop CDS views (Extraction capable) & BW objects as one flow. I will develop CDS Views (Consumption) as another flow.

    Then validating the results of both approaches will help in deciding the right source of analytical reports.

Architecture:

Step by Step Process:

I. Create Basic views for all the required dimensions with required attributes.

• Customer Basic View – Includes Account group, Region & Country
• Material Basic view – Includes Material Group, Base UOM

II. Create View for Sales order Header and associate with Customer. Mark this view for Data extraction

          Below annotations are required to mark the view for data extraction

          @Analytics.dataCategory: #FACT

          @Analytics.dataExtraction.enabled: true

III. Create Sales order Item and associate with Material. Mark this view for Data extraction

IV. Create Data sources based on CDS views enabled for data extraction

    Select ODP - ABAP CDS Views as Source System type

    Select CDS views created for Data extraction

  Data source based on Sales Header CDS view was created

    Repeat the same steps to create the data source on Sales Item CDS view

    Data sources queues will be identified in ODQMON

V. Develop Open ODS views referring data sources created on CDS views earlier

    BW Modeling perspective is required in Eclipse to carry out these steps.

    Select source Type 'Data source' and select the data sources created in previous step to get the fields into Open ODS

    Create Open ODS views for Sales Header & Item data.

              Net Price will set with aggregation 'Maximum' to check the behavior.

          No need to generate the data flow as we will use these objects as logical layer

VI. Include these open ODS views into Composite provider

          Aggregation to be set again at composite provider if it is different from 'Summation'.

VII. Develop Bex queries on top of the composite provider

        Bex queries were also developed in Eclipse editor.

          RKFs were created to get Order, Quotation & Contract amount separately.

VIII. Develop CDS views on top of basic views created and mark them for analytics

          Composite views were built to pass parameters for currency conversion & Union of different document types.

          Attached document has details of the CDS views Z_PY_SALES & Z_PY_Sales_Itm

        To mark the views for consumption below annotations were required.

          @VDM.viewType: #CONSUMPTION

          @Analytics.query: true

          Output of these queries can be verified in Fiori launch pad.

          We can validate the same using RSRT by prefixing with '2C'. Output for the consumption views was shown in next step.

          CDS view - Sales value by Customer                                            CDS view - Sales value by Material

              Source - Sales Header Data                                                            Source -  Sales Item Data                                               

IX. Validate the data from CDS & Bex queries output

    Customer Sales Validation between CDS & BEx   

    Sales Value & Price validation between CDS & BEx using Sales Item data flow

As both are matching these reports can be replaced by CDS views easily. The reports referred in example are quite simple but analytical reports in BW

will have lot of logic in transfomrations & Bex Query Designer. Hence this approach will help in identifying the analytical reports which are good for converting to S4H Embedded Analytics using CDS consumption views.

As most of you certainly knew SAP published a whitepaper on the extensibility options in S/4HANA in the mid of 2015 (S/4HANA Extensibility – The new White Paper). Within this paper, the basic concepts and options for the extensibility in S/4HANA for partners and customers have been presented.

Now one year later a new version of the white paper was published (announced in a comment on the above-mentioned blog). A year is quite some time and one might think that a lot has happened in between which will influence the new version of the paper that serves as the first entry point when it comes to the extensibility of S/4HANA.

Obviously, there are some changes, but not in a direction I would have expected them and I want to highlight the changes in this blog (the pdf does not offer a change history, so you really have to compare the versions )

What about Managed Extensibility?

The first very obvious change is the number of pages: they have been reduced. For me, that was a surprise as I would have expected an increase due to the experiences that have been gathered with the options over the last year, but this is not the case. Taking a closer look at the document the most drastic change happened to the section on Managed Extensibility (= coded extensibility for SAP S/4HANA cloud enterprise edition to develop tightly integrated ABAP add-ons). This section (and all relevant references e. g. in the lifecycle sections) vanished from the document. However, it is still mentioned in the section on the "Big Picture".

Here one example based on the overview picture in the guideline in the 2015 version ...

... and in the 2016 version

Remark: The picture might make you guess that the Key User Extensibility has newly become part of the on-premise flavor of S/4HANA in the 2016 version. This was already the case in the 2015 version of the paper (and it was in the 1511 onPrem version of S/4HANA). This picture was just consistently changed as well as some further references in the paper.

One could only make guesses why this was removed from the new version. Perhaps no commercial success (yes you had to pay for that), perhaps no customer demand, perhaps too difficult to handle in the cloud. Whatever reason caused this removal, the consequence is that the extensibility options in the cloud seem to be reduced and this has to be considered when thinking about a move to the cloud.

What about The Lifecycle of Combined Extensibility Options?

The 2015 version of the paper dedicated a whole section on the topic of lifecycle management aspects of combined extensibility options. In this section, some specific scenarios have been discussed when it comes to the lifecycle management of different extensibility options that are used in parallel. This section is omitted in the new version. Although this section was not well structured in the 2015 version it offered some useful information about real-life extension scenarios. Here it is really hard to guess what caused this change.

Some details

When taking a closer look at the document you will see that some additional changes have been made, that are not that obvious at a first glance. The first one applies to the artefacts that can be whitelisted in order to access the system from outside: the option "IDocs from SOAP" is no longer on the list as you can see from the following screenshots.

This is the section from the 2015 version

And here comes the shorter section of the 2016 version

The remaining options for the whitelisting remain unchanged.

Another small change can be found in the section "Lifecycle Management for Key User Extensibility in the Cloud". Here the principals that a solution has to adhere in order to support the extensibility in the cloud comprise custom artefacts being clash-free. This means that in order to support extensions stemming from different parties they have to have some kind of namespace-layering i. e. the sequence shall the extensions are executed has to be defined (comparable to the sorting of BAdI implementations when a BAdI can have multiple implementations). In the 2015 version, the restriction was stated that this layering is not in scope in Q1-Q3 of 2015. This restriction got extended for the complete year 2016, so this layering will not be supported within this year. This definitely has some impact on partner solution that could/should be made available in the S/4HANA cloud edition   

Conclusion

I was quite happy to see that a new version of this central whitepaper was published, but unfortunately not too much changed within the last year. Being a positive person one can state that the extension options are quite stable which is true on a high-level. Nevertheless, I would have expected more changes due the on-going experience with the solution and as a consequence with these options.

In addition, I would have hoped that some more word would be dedicated to partner solutions. It is obvious that partners can use the extension options offered by S/4 as a customer can. But this is definitely not sufficient for partner add-ons. One important aspect is the layering of the solutions (here at least we know that this is not supported in the cloud). But an even more important aspect is that if I want to build an add-on on S/4HANA I also want to offer the extensibility option to my customer e. g. my add-on shall also offer the option of key-user extensibility. This question remains unanswered also in the new version. So let's see if the next version (or other papers) will bring more answers on these topics.

I know that I must have written this blog long ago when the project finished. Although I started writing I could not finish it somehow .

I decided to finish it when we had chance to represent our project as success story at Teched Barcelona.

In my blog Going to Teched 2016 Barcelona I already mentioned about our first S/4HANA migration project and my boss's (Hüseyin Bilgen) blog SAP S/4HANA Journey started in Turkey - TechEd Barcelona 2016 and about the Teched session.

As the technical consultant of the project I want to share what I did in the project, what the difficulties were and what I got from the project as a technical guy.

First of all, What I did during the project;

When we migrated to SAP Simple Finance, the version was "SAP Simple Finance, on-premise edition 1503 support package stack 1508".  The name was "SAP Simple Finance" at that time and now it is called as "SAP S/4HANA Finance". HANA DB version was revision 102 of Stack 10. The documents were according to these versions.

Since it was a new topic I searched for the guides firstly. I knew that I had to read guides, notes and any referred documents carefully.

There was an install and upgrade checklist attached to the note "2157996 - SAP S/4HANA Finance: Checklist for Technical Installation / Upgrade". You can find the checklist of current version attached to this note.

There were notes to apply to the system before, during and after upgrade.

I went through the info given SAP Simple Finance Administrator's Guide at http://help.sap.com/sfin200 (for release 1503) in mentioned note. The name of the guide was SFIN_ADMIN_GUIDE_202.pdf.

The upgrade sequence was described as below in the admin quide.

There are also tables that describes the sequence of the upgrade. I followed those tables, too.

After the preperatory steps we copied the production system to a test system (System Copy). This step is crucial for upgrades, because of having a close system to the production system and simulation of the real upgrade process.

I run Maintenance Planner (it was maintenance optimizer before as you know) to get stack xml and download required support packages.

Latest Software Update Manager 1.0 SP14 (SUM) was the tool that I used to upgrade our system from source to target system version as seen below.

There were Post Installation Steps mentioned in the admin guide and there were also notes  which must be applied directly after the upgrade to "SAP Simple Finance on-premise edition 1503 support package stack 1508" mentioned in RIN "2117481 - Release Information Note: SAP Simple Finance, on-premise edition 1503".

One of the post installation steps was "Technical Installation of SAP HANA Live 2.0, Virtual Data Model for SAP Simple Finance, On-Premise Edition". I had some problems when I was installing Live components to HANA DB and I solved the problem with the help of SAP guys. ALM was the tool to install HANA Live components.

With HANA Live Browser (http://<HANAHostName>:<port>/sap/hba/explorer/) application you can quickly and easily search, browse, tag and consume HANA analytical content views using an internet web browser. You can open definiton or content of views,  Open View in SAP Lumira, Open View in Analysis Office.

I can give some usefull links abbout HANA Live.

SAP HANA Live Help Portal

SAP HANA Academy - SAP HANA Live: Introduction to the View Browser

Here is a screenshot from HANA Live Browser.

I must mention about the Setup of SAP Fiori System Landscape for SAP Business Suite as one of the key topics of the project. We installed a gateway system landscape (dev-prod) for the implementation. Here are some useful links for the topic.

Setup of SAP Fiori System Landscape for SAP Business Suite

SAP Fiori for SAP Simple Finance, On-Premise Edition

SAP Fiori Implementation Information

The "SAP Fiori apps reference library" enables you to explore, plan and implement SAP Fiori, the new user experience for SAP software.

Here is the architecture of the System Landscape for SAP Fiori Apps.

And the FioriLaunchpad and an example screenshot of a fiori app.

As the Second, what were the difficulties?

* Landscape was big enough. HANA DB, HANA Live, Business Suite, SFIN, Fiori are all included in the project.

* The topic was so new as it was the first implementation of SFIN in our country.

  We opened some OSS messages to get help. SCN discussions were not enough.

* Keeping track of all implementations in order was difficult. (Thanks to Onenote helping me about this)

As the Third, what I got from the project as a technical consultant?

* I practiced many topics about HANA

* I will have a chance to goto Teched with this project

* I have been the very first technical guy that implemented SAP Simple Finance in Turkey

* I had an experience of implementing HANA Live and SAP Fiori

* Good feeling of finishing a successful project

And as the final words, the project was successfully implemented as the first implementation of SAP Simple Finance in Turkey.

Customer was happy about the project. Users were happy about the performance of the new UX and new transactions. They are using HANA Live Browser, too.

I hope I will be included more S/4HANA projects in the future.

Thank you for your interests.

Following on from my blog on what S/4HANA On Premise edition was all about, I am now going to explain what S/4HANA public cloud is all about. At the time of writing we have 3 different cloud editions, one for marketing, one for professional services and one for Enterprise Management. I expect the number to grow with various pre-packaged editions for various industries and lines of business. These various packages will either limit the features you can access and / or come with content to accelerate implementation.

In this blog I am going to focus on Enterprise Management, but technically the other editions are based on the same ABAP/HANA technology platform and will have the same restrictions / features. The exception is the Marketing Edition which is based on the Hybris marketing tools and runs natively on HANA.

As I did before I have split the topic into 4 separate areas :-

• User Interface
• Business Logic
• Database
• Interfaces

I will discuss each one in turn - looking to explain how they work in S/4HANA Public Cloud.

User Interface

Access to S/4HANA Cloud is via the Fiori LaunchPad with no access via the SAPGUI fat client. The Fiori tiles that you see are controlled via authorisations and divided up by functional role. Some of the tiles will start Fiori Apps (HTML5) and some will start classic WebGUI transactions. Some of the Fiori Apps have been enabled for Key User Extensibility, where fields can be added / hidden etc. For any "new" apps these must be built on top using HANA Cloud Platform.

Owen Recommends : Start to understand how you can use BUILD/Web-IDE to build apps on top of API's using the HANA Cloud Platform

Business Logic

The business processes and the associated logic are configured using Guided Configuration using a Model Company as the basis for your system. The idea is to try to fit your company to "standard" model one. New features are added to the system every quarter and these are pushed into the system - so you can't pick a choose when to take them.

You will not have access to the classic Implementation Guide (IMG) and SAP have restricted the options available in the Guided Configuration to keep down implementation effort. For someone used to classic SAP this will be a big difference.

Very limited business logic can be added in specific places but only a restricted sub-set of the ABAP programming language is allowed so you can't impact the rest of the system. If you want to write any major custom business logic then HANA Cloud Platform is the recommended solution.

Owen Recommends : Start to understand how you can use HANA Cloud Platform to build custom business logic on top of API's

Owen Recommends : Start to explore the range of features that are available in S/4HANA Cloud and how these are configured using Guided Configuration.

Database

The S/4HANA Cloud edition uses the same simplified data model as the on premise S/4HANA. However no direct access to the database is allowed and as this is a public cloud model database size, back up and DR are all covered by SAP. So you get the benefits of HANA without having to understand it.

Interfaces

To interface into/out of S/4HANA Cloud you need to use the White Listed APIs. You will not be able to write any business logic for pre / post processing for interface files, so this will drive the need for middleware. HANA Cloud Integration is the recommended solution to encapsulate any pre / post processing.

Owen Recommends : Evaluate how S/4HANA can be integrated to using pre-packaged content in HANA Cloud Integration

Conclusion

All of the above differences are designed to lower the TCO associated with S/4HANA. Some customers will love having the robust "digital" core SAP is famous for without the hassle of having to run the system, others will find them too restrictive and will accept higher costs for increased flexibility/control. I guess the key is making sure you actually need the flexibility/control in the first place and/or making sure you can't achieve the flexibility you need using HANA Cloud Platform to build on top.

This blog summarizesinsights and highlights at a glance for the released #SAP #S4HANA Cloud 1608.

This product version was released on August 29^th.

The new scope was developed thanks to the massive contribution from Customers, Co-Innovators, Partners and many teams across SAP. We included several links providing in-depth information about the added functionality.

The third shipment of this year for the SAP S/4HANA Cloud, includes updates for:

• SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management Cloud
• SAP S/4HANA Professional Services Cloud
• SAP S/4HANA Marketing Cloud

See this video for a quick overview

A comprehensive Highlight overview can befound here.

Extended 4 Quarter Roadmap in the Cloud

In the cloud it is all about transparency. We want to continue to build customer trust and drive innovation adoption by giving more visibility into our product roadmap with a clear focus on business value.

We drive the SAP S/4HANA Cloud roadmap as a frontrunner by sharing the planned innovations and features related to upcoming releases, with a horizon of 4 quarters ahead as demonstrated below.

The SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1608 Roadmap can be viewed here.

Business Innovations with SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1608

Let’s talk about business processes first. All processes delivered are built on extensible turn-key business scenarios, provided by SAP Activate.

The blog only contains highlights, for a complete list of the existing scope shipped, click here.

Key highlights: SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management Cloud 1608

Key highlights: SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management Cloud 1605

SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management Cloud covers the most important business scenarios to run a company, from finance to procurement to manufacturing and supply chain like

• Streamlined Procure to Pay
• Accelerated Plan to Product
• Optimized Order to Cash
• HR Connectivity
• Core Finance
• Project Services

Country availability: 1 country has been added: Switzerland (now covering 13 countries and 10 languages)

Additional business processes for

Streamlined Procure to Pay

• Supplier Activity Management
• Supplier Classification and Segmentation
• SAP Ariba – Sourcing Integration
• Requisitioning
• Basic Functionality for Serial Number Management

Accelerated Plan to Product

• Make-to-Order Production – Semi finished Goods, Planning and Assembly

Optimized Order to Cash

• Sales Contract Management
• Credit Memo Processing
• Debit Memo Processing
• SAP Fiori Overview Pages for Sales and Distribution
• Accelerated Customer Returns

Core Finance

• Accounting and Financial Close - Parallel Ledger
• Statutory Reporting Framework Reports (not applicable for all countries)
• Asset Accounting - Parallel Ledger
• Asset Under Construction - Parallel Ledger
• SAP Ariba - Integration for Finance
• Profit and Loss Plan Data Load from File
• Bank Integration with Financial Services Network (need additional license)

Project Services

• Customer Project Analysis
• Utilization Analysis

Enhancements in the areas of Streamlined Procure to Pay for

• Collaborative Sourcing and Contract Management
• Operational Purchasing

Enhancements in Basic Production

Enhancements in Order and Contract Management

Enhancements in Core Finance for

• Accounting and Closing Operations
• Cost Management and Profitability Analysis
• Treasury and Financial  Risk Management

Enhancements in Project Services for                        

• Contract to Cash
• Project Management

SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management Cloud 1608 is integrated with SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central, SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer, SAP Ariba Network and SAP Financial Services Network.

For a complete list of the new scope items shipped with 1608, click here.

Key highlights: SAP S/4HANA Professional Services Cloud 1608

Integrates with SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central, SAP C4C, SAP Hybris, and SAP Ariba network.

Key highlights: SAP S/4HANA Professional Services Cloud 1605

This edition supports end to end customer project services delivery.

Project planning, costing, staffing, billing and financial accounting are the key pillars.

The solution supports customer with:

• real time information for better decision-making
• always accurate financial figures for projects and revenue recognition
• improve of people utilization and external resources
• reduce time from projects delivery to cash collection

Supported Countries: 3 new countries have been added: Switzerland, Luxembourg and United Arab Emirates (now covering 17 countries and 10 languages)

Additional business processes for

Project Services

• Event-Based Revenue Recognition - Project-Based Services
• Customer Project Analysis
• Utilization Analysis

Core Finance

• Ariba - Integration for Finance
• Bank Integration with Financial Services Network (additional license required)

Enhancements in the areas of Project Services and Finance

• Contract to Cash
• Project Based Services (Time Recording with single timesheet process for both employees and contingent workers, Sales Order processing including capability to create credit memo requests)
• Accounting and Closing Operations
• Treasury and Financial  Risk Management (additional license required)

SAP S/4HANA Professional Services Cloudis integrated with SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central and SAP Ariba Network.

For a complete list of the new scope items shipped with 1608, click here.

Key highlights: SAP S/4HANA Marketing Cloud 1608

This edition leverages the full SAP Hybris Marketing scope in the cloud by extensible out-of-the-box scope for

• Consumer and Customer Analytics with extensible scores visible in the Contact Profile and available for segmentation
• Contact Segmentation and Campaign Execution by E-Mail and Text Message with A/B Testing
• Offer Management with Loyalty through out-of-the box integration to SAP Hybris Marketing, loyalty option

Additional business processes for

• Offer Management with Loyalty

Enhancements for following business processes

• Consumer and Customer Analytics
• Segmentation and Campaign Execution by E-Mail and Text Message

Standardized interfaces for data load and business integration scenarios e.g.

• Load Social Media for SAP S/4HANA Marketing Cloud
• File Based Data Load for SAP S/4HANA Marketing Cloud
• Integration with SAP Cloud for Customer
• Integration with SAP Hybris Commerce
• SAP ERP Actual and Committed Spend Integration

For a complete list of the new scope items shipped with 1608, click here.

Modular concept of SAP S/4HANA Cloud

SAP S/4HANA Cloud has a modular concept. Customers might want to start their public cloud journey somewhere and expand overtime. To address this our next package will be the SAP S/4HANA Finance Cloud, which is launched at the Finance Connect in Las Vegas on August 29^th. What is it? SAP S/4HANA Finance Cloud provides basic processes for Procurement, Sales and the integration into HR, as depicted in the Release video above and we will share more information shortly.

LABS preview – Two-Tier-ERP based on a single codeline with multiple deployment options

And one special topic which is key for our clients in respect to their ERP landscape TCO, and the two-tier ERP approach.

Many companies still have a patchwork of ERP solutions across their business. Rationalizing these applications can deliver economies of scale via global standardization. As SAP S/4HANA’s code line and platform are similar for cloud and on premise, it is naturally offering a best-in-class two-tier ERP landscape. Just to name a few key advantages: A consistent data model and taxonomy between our cloud and on-premise applications, a single user experience, and native integration.

For a Two-Tier ERP, the combinations are endless. We are showing here one option where the manufacturing plants run their local finance and consolidate on the headquarter level, whereas the manufacturing, inventory process run locally only. This approach would equally apply for example to Warehouse Management or to Retail processes.

Find more information about SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1608

• Watch a Professional Service Highlight with the “SAP S/4HANA Event Based Revenue Recognition” in 1608 
• Innovation showcase interactive experience:

SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management Cloud

SAP S/4HANA Professional Services Cloud

SAP S/4HANA Marketing Cloud

More information about SAP S/4HANA Cloud Editions

The following links on the SAP Help Portal are helpful:

• Understand the complete  scope of the solution with the Feature Scope Description
• Have a look on “What’s New” to see what has been added with the 1608 release
• Find additional details on 1608 on the SAP Help Portal
• SAP Best Practices for

SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management Cloud

SAP S/4HANA Professional Services Cloud

SAP S/4HANA Marketing Cloud

Follow us via @SAP and #S4HANA, or myself via @SDenecken

To further help customers with the adoption and create more trust in the market space it is all about transparency.

I am happy to share with you that the first portion of implementation-related S/4HANA FAQs is made available on SCN:

SAP S/4HANA - Frequently Asked Questions - The Collection

This knowledge is based on the experiences SAP experts gathered from the first SAP S/4HANA customer implementation projects in collaboration with different groups involved in onboarding SAP S/4HANA customers.

One of these groups is the back-office support for customer engagements lifecycle, another unit is the market introduction team, working on customer’s side in a common approach with us, the SAP S/4HANA RIG - Regional Implementation Group.

The purpose of SAP S/4HANA RIG is the first hand information exchange between SAP S/4HANA RIG product experts, development, customers and the SAP ecosystem. The mandate is to: ensure the successful first SAP S/4HANA implementations across all regions, spread knowledge, give feedback to improve product and services and ensure successful onboarding projects of SAP S/4HANA. The SAP S/4HANA RIG helped setting around 40 SAP S/4HANA customers live on the 1511 code line as of today and are supporting roughly 130 active SAP S/4HANA projects.

Covering experience from different industries like: Consumer Products, Professional Services, Wholesale Distribution, Industrial Machinery and Components, etc. and using SAP Best Practices in more than 50% of the new implementations. The SAP S/4HANA RIG is engaged in a small but leading edge part of the overall number of SAP S/4HANA customer projects.

We are working hand-in-hand with the SDBO - Service Delivery Back Office under the Leadership of Dirk Rebmann, that is a trusted advisor to Service Hubs in the regions to help accelerate early knowledge for upcoming SAP S/4HANA projects. This team ensures project quality and best practice implementation on larger scale in a full remote setup.

With the implementation-related SAP S/4HANA FAQs, the SAP S/4HANA community has now the opportunity to benefit from the most recent SAP S/4HANA experiences first hands. This is the first step. More SAP S/4HANA related FAQs will be published in waves and also kept updated.

How can you engage?

Be part of the FAQ creation process! If you have any questions on your mind or you feel you can enhance an answer, just let us know by leaving your comment below. For the next iterations of FAQ updates, your thoughts will be helpful in making sure they contain the right content. Thank you for your support and feedback!

If you like you can follow us under saps4hana or myself under @BeSchulze

The SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1608 release is the first SAP product based on the next iteration of the SAP Fiori design, the award-winning SAP Fiori 2.0. To get an initial impression of the new user experience, have a look at this video:

The main aspects of SAP Fiori 2.0 which are coming with SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1608 are:

• Visual Design: the new, more attractive visual theme, which is applied everywhere.
• Navigation and personalization via the new Me-Area, which enhances users’ navigation options by giving direct access to recent activities, i.e. recently used apps. It also provides access to personalization options – you can see how users can personalize the SAP Fiori Launchpad home page very easily.
• Search: the search experience now provides more information directly in the search results list, and gives users flexibility in narrowing down their searches.

Let’s also take a look at one of the new features of SAP Fiori 2.0 which is planned to be released for procurement and sales with the 1611 release:

• Overview Page: The overview page is an important new pattern in SAP Fiori, as an example procurement is one of the first areas supporting it: it gives a buyer an overview of the important information for him or her to get their job done efficiently and effectively, using cards to summarize information from different aspects of the job. These can be list-based or analytical, i.e. chart-based. In addition to giving users an overview, it also provides direct actions for them to address issues shown in the overview. Finally, users can easily personalize their overview page.

For those of you interested in design, have a look at this explanation of the Overview Page by Kai Richter, SAP’s Head of Design Concepts: SAP Fiori 2.0: The Ideal Overview.

The overall Fiori 2.0 concept goes beyond what is included in this first shipment, so you can expect further innovations beyond the Overview Page down the road. To keep up to date with what is planned, have a look at the SAP Fiori Road Map, which is updated on a quarterly basis. If you would like to participate in the SAP Fiori community on SCN, please have a look at All Things SAP Fiori.

With the brandnew release of the 1608 version of the SAP S/4HANA Marketing Cloud, I want to quickly address some common misconceptions about the SAP S/4HANA Marketing Cloud.  To clarify the positioning of the Marketing Cloud both within the S/4HANA portfolio and as a Marketing solution within the overall SAP portfolio of offerings.

Take a look at the Mythbuster video below, You can also find the main points of the video in this blog.

Myth # 1

“The marketing cloud is a set of marketing functions that is part of the overall S/4HANA Suite.”

This one probably stems from the name and close association with S/4HANA. It is assumed that Marketing is a kind of „module“ of the S/4HANA Suite, to complete the offering with some core Marketing functionality.

Reality

The Marketing Cloud is a standalone and full featured Marketing solution that is most often purchased and used independently of any other S/4HANA functionality. Actually, the S/4HANA Marketing Cloud is the Marketing solution by SAP. Period.

(But: Of course it can be activated together with another S/4HANA Cloud edition.)

Myth #2

“If I want a feature rich Marketing Solution from SAP I surely need to go with the on prem version.”

This one is hard to get your head around if you know how both versions are made. Since both are actually based on the very same basic business logic.

Reality

You can do everything in the Cloud that you can do on premise. You may have to change your approach slightly to get the desired results, but ultimately you can perform the same marketing functions:

• segment your customers based on actual and predictive criteria
• bring together data from various channels to create 360 degree marketing profiles
• plan and execute campaigns in your channel of choice. Email, text message, Google-Ads, Newsletters, lead integration with Cloud4Customer
• set up your own external channels via open interfaces.

You can do all this in B2C, B2B and B2B2C marketing scenarios. All on one platform.

Myth #3

I have no catchy phrase for this one, it boils down to the notion that you are stuck with a standard process in the cloud with no means of tailoring it to your needs.

This myth sticks to a lot of cloud solutions. But in a marketing context it is quite critical. A marketing solution absolutely needs the ability to adapt to one’s individual needs and to the very different and specific views of customers, contacts and the interactions between them and your company. And that is why we have worked so hard to make the Marketing Cloud flexible.

Reality

To start, we have the ability to load data into the Marketing Cloud from many different channels. You can load data initially but also on an ongoing basis, as interactions happen on Facebook, Twitter, or any other channel the system is connected to.

But of course the data and the process itself need to be configurable. And here I am happy to say that with 1608 all necessary customizing is self-service enabled through so called Self Service Configuration UI‘s. They exist for tasks such as creating market definitions, enabling approval workflow, activating campaign categories and actions, changing marketing permissions, and many more. Remember, this is in the cloud, so all the settings changed will be included in the solution‘s lifecycle!

In addition, there is a full extensibility concept in place. To add custom fields and objects to your data to use within the marketing process. Let‘s say you‘re in the automotive industry and you are looking to load dealership data including the car a customer purchased or the car a prospect currently drives as an additional object. To complete your 360 degree view of the customer.

To do this your administrator would go into the system and add a custom object. You could already load the data now and use it in the system, for example include it in your campaign content. But, to take full advantage of the new information we need to make the new object known to our segmentation engine. Once that is done the marketing expert can use it in segmentation when creating target groups for campaigns.

All of this is possible. In the cloud. And in cloudlike fashion. For a short video demonstration click below.

Let‘s review.

The SAP S/4HANA Marketing Cloud is:

• standalone
• full featured
• highly configurable

I think we can safely consider all 3 myths as busted and focus on some of the amazing features and functions of the Marketing Cloud next time.

Meanwhile, if you want to know more, why not sign up for a trial?

http://www.sap.com/s4hana-trial

Thank you and

Happy Marketing!

Henrik Kiessler

Edition Owner SAP S/4HANA Marketing Cloud

Hello,

I would like to point your attention on the document "Elements for Designing a Transition Roadmap to SAP S/4HANA" provided by our service colleagues.

The document can be accessed based on the following link: https://dam.sap.com/mac/download/ad/OymUv.htm

Summary

SAP S/4HANA is SAP’s next-generation business suite. Many SAP customers are interested in learning more about SAP S/4HANA, and in particular about how they can transition their SAP landscape to SAP S/4HANA. This document is a collection of facts and discussion points with respect to the transition to SAP S/4HANA. It is meant to provide guidance to customers who are designing the roadmap to SAP S/4HANA. The document focuses on transition aspects; it does not talk much about the potential value of SAP S/4HANA, which is also important when developing a business case for SAP S/4HANA. The intent of this best-practice document is to help establish a baseline understanding of the key topics to consider when constructing a roadmap for your company. It is not a “one size fits all” roadmap. SAP offers SAP S/4HANA Value Assurance service packages, which can help to define a concrete customer-specific SAP S/4HANA roadmap and transition plan. Nevertheless, we wanted to share some general thoughts behind constructing a roadmap, clarify questions and misunderstandings, provide guidance on what would be typically the best approach for a specific situation, and share some examples of SAP S/4HANA roadmaps.

Kind Regards,

Frank

The SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1608 was released on August 29th and brings along innovations and enhancements  in all three S/4HANA Cloud solutions: SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management Cloud, SAP S/4HANA Professional Services Cloud and the SAP S/4HANA Marketing Cloud.

With SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP is providing a new generation of business applications, listening closely to the needs of Customers and Partners in developing a rich scope that delivers a simple, yet efficient enterprise software for big data and agility.

The SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management Cloud provides pre-configured content for core business processes in areas of finance, procurement, manufacturing and supply chain.

These processes are supported by SAP Fiori for a role-specific, intuitive and simpler user experience. To complement the business processes, embedded analytics and Fiori Overview pages add real-time insight into data.

The pre-configured content is based onSAP ActivateandSAP Best Practices for SAP S/4HANA that are tailored specifically to accelerate and simplify the adoption of SAP S/4HANA for faster time to value, by providing tested configuration, content and methodologies for ready-to-run business processes, optimized for S/4 HANA.

In addition to core business processes, the SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management Cloud offers SAP Best Practices for integration to other cloud solutions, such as SuccessFactors Employee Central and Ariba.

SAP Best Practices for Migration complement the foundation and offer customers a non-disruptive, simplified transition to SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management Cloud.

The guided configuration allows a simpler configuration, automated testing, and content life-cycle management to support agile adoption of continuous innovation even after go-live.

Customers and Partners can accelerate and simplify the adoption of SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management in the cloud for faster time to value, using SAP Best Practices based  business processes with the knowledge of being legally compliant in different countries.

The SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management Cloud  helps you reduce cost of operations by using standardized processes, manage multiple geographies, divisions, subsidiaries, and ledgers with global and country-specific content, as well as update and change customer specific configuration using SAP S/4HANA life-cycle management tools, all the while complying with regulations.

This product version brings with it updates in its core content, in the form of enhancements to 35 existing scope items, as well as 21 additional scope items in core areas: like Optimized Order to Cash, Streamlined Procure to Pay, Accelerated Plan to Product, Project Services and Finance:

Optimized Order to Cash:  Sales Contract Management , Accelerated Customer Returns , Credit Memo Processing , Debit Memo Processing , Fiori Overview Pages for Sales and Distribution;

Streamlined Procure to Pay: Serial Number Management, Supplier Activity Management, Supplier Classification and Segmentation, Ariba -Sourcing Integration, Requisitioning;

Accelerated Plan to Product:  Make-to-Order Production - Semifinished Goods Planning and Assembly;

Project Services:  Customer Project Analysis, Utilization Analysis, Event-Based Revenue Recognition - Project-Based Services;

Finance:  Statutory Reporting Framework Reports, Accounting and Financial Close - Parallel Ledger, Asset Accounting - Parallel Ledger, Asset under Construction - Parallel Ledger, Bank Integration with Financial Services Network, Profit and Loss Plan Data Load from File, Ariba – Integration for Finance.

In addition, the new Flexible Ledger will allow companies to choose between single or parallel ledger accounting,  by enabling them to adopt leading ledger to IFRS, switch assignment of accounting principles for preconfigured ledgers, change the leading ledger key name and deactivate the not needed ledger.

The SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management Cloud  1608 is covering 13 countries, with Switzerland newly added to the list, as well as 10 languages:

Countries:

Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hungary, Netherlands, Philippines, Singapore, Switzerland *, United Kingdom, USA

Languages:

English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, Portuguese, Chinese (simplified), Dutch, Hungarian

For a complete break-down of the scope, please take a look at the SAP Service Marketplace: http://service.sap.com/s4ce

As always,  if you want a first-hand experience of SAP S/4HANA, you can start with the SAP S/4HANA trials:https://go.sap.com/cmp/oth/crm-s4hana/index.html

For user assistance for SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1608, take a look at the SAP Help Portal:https://help.sap.com/s4hana_ce_1608#section1

For an overview of highlights for 1608 and a sneak peek on hot topics like the SAP S/4HANA Finance Cloud, check out this blog:http://scn.sap.com/community/s4hana/blog/2016/08/30/product-management-update-on-sap-s4hana-cloud-1608-release

Curious what’s in store for the SAP S/4HANA Cloud? Now you can see what’s planned four quarters ahead. See the latest Roadmap updated on the 29^th of August here:https://support.sap.com/content/dam/website/roadmaps/en_us/cross-topics/SAP%20S4HANA%20Cloud%20Road%20Map.pdf?logActivity=true

Highlighted in previous blogs http://scn.sap.com/community/s4hana/blog/2015/11/05/hana-journey-and-features-of-scm-products-in-s4-hana-simple-logistics and http://scn.sap.com/community/s4hana/blog/2015/11/19/sap-s-road-map-for-supply-chain-solution-with-s4-hana-and-its-expected-benefits on the advantages and SCM applications being natively integrated in digital core of S/4 HANA (S4H). This blog is very specific to EWM integration with S4H.

It appears from below SAP slide (though stated as Labs preview) that EWM will be embedded in digital core of S4H in On-premise edition of 1610 release i.e functionalities of EWM will be made available in digital core and there is no need for running EWM as a separate application.

Advantages will be

• Master data and transaction data need not be transferred between the systems and CIF and q RFC connections are not needed (Reducing TCO , inconsistency and downtime of systems)
• Material master , business partners stored only in one system (thus reducing the data footprint )
• Customizing objects like HU types need not be transferred to EWM  (thus reducing data footprint , inconsistency and complexity of the systems)
• There will be no duplication of business documents ( Presently ECC delivery document are replicated as separate document numbers , thus reducing data redundancy and time spent in matching the documents numbers in reports etc)
• Common maintenance / down time

Now , the question is whether this native integration of EWM with S4H will be relevant / beneficial for all customers or scenarios ? Answer is NOT as

One of the main USP of SAP EWM is its capability to operate in decentralized mode i.e both ERP (ECC or S4H) and EWM can run independent of each other i.e all Goods receipt (GR) , Goods issue (GI) and other warehouse activities like VAS etc can be performed in EWM even if the connection with ERP (ECC) is broken. All these transactions / documents get transferred / updated to ECC once the connection is restored.

So, the stand alone deployment of EWM will continue for

• Business critical warehouse operations 
• Risk mitigation (during migration to S4H etc)
• Scalability for large warehouses

Hence, if the warehouse operations are de-centralized, then it needs to be ascertained  whether the option of native integration of EWM with S4H core should be chosen or not.

SCN great place to share knowledge and learn from experts.

To develop skills on a new topic, it looks sometime difficult to know from where to start, found the right documents to read....

These documents will definitely worth your time.

I'm keeping a track of the documents I read in this blog and will keep it updated if I see anything new and useful.

If you want to start to understand SAP S/4HANA, check out the following blogs

S/4HANA in 2 Minutes

Introduction to SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA

S4HANA – What it means to consultants

S4 HANA-The future is here!

Beginners Guide to S/4HANA Public Cloud

How to get to SAP S/4HANA at TechEd 2016

SAP BW

Data Extraction supportability of SAP S/4HANA, on-premise edition 1511 FPS02

How to use extraction capability of CDS to SAP BW

Tcode SACM(Access Control Management) to check authorization issues of CDS Views

How to load data from S/4HANA into BW via SDA

Best Practices

How to Activate Best Practices Content in S/4HANA 1511 FPS1

How to Activate Best Practices Content in S/4HANA 1511 FPS2

Your S/4HANA environment - Part 3 - Best Practices Content Activation

Now available: SAP Best Practices for UX in S/4HANA

ABAP

ABAP custom code adaptation for SAP HANA – The efficient way

Eliminated tables in S/4 HANA on Premise Edition 1511 – what’s behind them?

Make the S/4HANA Custom Code Analyzer work for you

Finance

Preparing S/4HANA Finance 1605 Installation with Maintenance Planner

First S/4HANA Simple Finance Experience

S/4HANA and direct activity allocation (KB21N)

Simplification Item: Rebate Management Replaced by Condition Contract Settlement

Supply Chain

SAP’s road map for Supply chain solutions with S/4 HANA and expected benefits of unification

How to use Maintenance Planner for S/4HANA Conversion

SAP S/4 HANA Logistics – Production planning processes changes to run business in a simple and faster way in a digital world

Simplification Item: Material Field Length Extension

SAP S/4HANA Logistics : A Functional Perspective

Inventory Management

S/4HANA Session 1 Intro and Inventory

#S4HANA use case series: 2a - next generation inventory management (biz view)

Sales & Distribution

S/4HANA – Enterprise Management – Order to Cash Notable Simplifications

SAP S/4 HANA: Simplifications in Sales & Distribution Data Models

Simplification Item: Business Partner Approach / Customer-Vendor Integration (CVI)

How to mark Business Partners for Deletion in S4 HANA

Simplification Item: Subcontracting in MRP

S4HANA with S4CORE: Material Ledger Deep Dive after Simplifications

Uploading Business Partner Data using LSMW

FAQ

The Fast FAQ to SAP Activate Methodology

SAP S/4HANA - Frequently Asked Questions - The Collection

FAQ document Available on Strategy and roadmap for SAP S/4HANA and SAP Extended Warehouse Management (SAP EWM) - Update in July 2016

Available now: Deep Dive implementation-related SAP S/4HANA FAQs based on customer projects

Roadmap

Elements for Designing a Transition Roadmap to SAP S/4HANA

SAP S/4HANA and solutions of the SAP Suite: strategy and roadmap

What are the challenges for new SAP S/4HANA?

S/4HANA Extensibility – The new White Paper

The new S/4HANA Extensibility Whitepaper - Find the Difference

FIORI

Manage and Convert MRP Live Purchase Requsitions by S4HANA Fiori Transactional Apps

HANA Fiori Analytics || Technical insight into multidimensional reports (Part 1)

Your S/4HANA environment - Part 2 - SAP NW Gateway and Fiori Launchpad

What is S/4HANA Embedded Analytics?

Getting Started with S/4 HANA Embedded Analytics

SAP S/4HANA Embedded Analytics – A detailed Walkthrough (Part 1)

SAP S/4HANA Embedded Analytics – A detailed Walkthrough (Part 2)

SAP S/4HANA Embedded Analytics – A detailed Walkthrough (Part 3)

SAP S/4HANA Embedded Analytics – A detailed Walkthrough (Part 4)

SAP S/4HANA Embedded Analytics – A detailed Walkthrough (Part 5)

Youtube Links

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkzo92owKnVxO-jWmOWugBv_9WQiq8wLc

With the release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1608 on August 29^th, new innovations and enhancements were brought in all three S/4HANA Cloud solutions: SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management Cloud, SAP S/4HANA Professional Services Cloud and the SAP S/4HANA Marketing Cloud.

With SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP is providing a new generation of business applications, listening closely to the needs of Customers and Partners in developing a rich scope that delivers a simple, yet efficient enterprise software for big data and agility.

SAP S/4HANA Professional Services Cloud 1608 provides pre-configured content for core business processes, delivering advanced end-to-end, project-based services in the cloud.

The main steps of the end-to-end scenarios for Project-based Services integrate sales orders with project management, allowing you to create customer invoices for time and expenses, including external services recorded against a customer project, delivering a business outcome driven solution to prepare, plan, manage and execute projects end to end.

SAP S/4HANA Professional Services Cloud delivers a complete project accounting in real time with detailed financial figures for projects and event-based revenue recognition, improving people utilization and external resources.

Invoices can be created on a time and materials basis, a fixed-price basis, or a combination of both. After the customer invoice is issued, customer payments can be monitored.

Period end closing activities, including accounting and financial, can be performed. This scenario also supports the analysis of project profitability based on project costs and revenues.

For customers looking for a non-disruptive, simplified transition to the SAP S/4HANA Cloud, native integration to SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central, SAP jam and SAP Ariba is available to run simple in the SAP cloud.

An intuitive user experience helps in managing customer and internal projects by providing a complete view on commercials, finance, procurement and the total workforce (internal and external) in real time.

The pre-configured content is based onSAP Activateand SAP Best Practices for SAP S/4HANA that are tailored specifically to accelerate and simplify the adoption of SAP S/4HANA for faster time to value, by providing tested configuration, content and methodologies for ready-to-run business processes, optimized for SAP S/4 HANA.

The SAP S/4HANA Professional Services Cloud helps you reduce time from projects delivery to cash collection and easily adopt and implement a solution with business content to drive margin, profit and utilization across the entire project organization.

Among the benefits, it will help customers with project definition tasks like define and manage projects in an easy manner, staff projects intuitively, with project monitoring tasks like drilling-down to project related analytics and KPIs (cost performance, work performance, commercial analysis) with flexibility, as well as project review tasks like recording project-related expenses and providing one source of truth, with no aggregates.

This release brings innovations and continuous improvements through all relevant involved business processes:

Event-Based Revenue Recognition - Project-Based Services – with which postings to relevant account assignment objects lead to revenue recognition calculations.

Customer Project Analysis - an analytical SAP Fiori application that provides rich visualization and analysis of customer projects based on margin, revenue, cost, and so on.

Utilization Analysis - an analytical SAP Fiori application which provides rich visualization and analysis of utilization rate of employees across several pre-defined analysis steps.

Accounting and Financial Close - Parallel Ledger - provides ledger-specific operation postings and ledger-specific period-end closing steps.

Asset Accounting - Parallel Ledger - provides ledger-specific transactions and reports.

Ariba - Integration for Finance - With the Ariba integration to SAP S/4HANA Financials, you can forward payment advices to your suppliers, and you can take advantage of discounts for early payment. 

Statutory Reporting Framework Reports (not applicable for all countries) - deals with Statutory Reporting Framework Reports, the mandatory submission of financial and non-financial information to a government agency.

Bank Integration with Financial Services Network - With Financial Services Network, you can automatically connect to your banks for sending payment instructions and receive bank statements.

The SAP S/4HANA Professional Services Cloud 1608 is covering 17 countries, with Luxembourg, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates newly added to the list, as well as 10 languages:

Countries:

Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Netherlands, Philippines, Singapore, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, USA.

Languages:

English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, Portuguese, Chinese (simplified), Dutch, Hungarian.

For a complete break-down of the scope, please take a look at the SAP Service Marketplace: http://service.sap.com/s4ps

As always,  if you want a first-hand experience of SAP S/4HANA, you can start with the SAP S/4HANA trials: https://go.sap.com/cmp/oth/crm-s4hana/index.html

For user assistance for SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1608, take a look at the SAP Help Portal: https://help.sap.com/s4hana_ce_1608#section1

For an overview of highlights for 1608 and a sneak peek on hot topics like the SAP S/4HANA Finance Cloud, check out this blog:http://scn.sap.com/community/s4hana/blog/2016/08/30/product-management-update-on-sap-s4hana-cloud-1608-release

Curious what’s in store for the SAP S/4HANA Cloud? Now you can see what’s planned four quarters ahead. See the latest Roadmap updated on the 29^th of August here:https://support.sap.com/content/dam/website/roadmaps/en_us/cross-topics/SAP%20S4HANA%20Cloud%20Road%20Map.pdf?logActivity=true