Today was one of must attend Mentor Monday session and I was lucky to be in a supporting timezone to attend the same.
carl.dubler joined the session to share the November updates on S/4HANA. I say the session was must attend because a lot of information combined with practical examples were shared in an hour. The message was crisp and delivered in a way that most of it could be understood by developers like me.
I joined the call by mobile and somehow the Adobe connect app in ios did not let me enter the room by throwing error as "Room does not exist" and hence I could only consume the voice data.
The call started in an interesting tone with Carl explaining his journey to SAP and him being from development background. The purpose of this blog is to share the information I found most interesting and hence I would be omitting few parts on purpose. The opinion and views are strictly my interpretation from attending the session.
If someone googles S/4HANA, one of the referred site is discover.sap.com and the headline is SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA, it may be inferred that S/4HANA is Suite on HANA. Well, Carl quoted that this is one of the most asked question by customers as to what is the difference between Suite on HANA and S/4 HANA.
S/4HANA = Suite on HANA + Extended capabilities.
Extended capabilities could be the architectural changes in the system to get the most of HANA and the personalized user experience with SAP Fiori.
Examples from Finance were repeatedly given to highlight the capabilities of S/4HANA. The underlying factor being Simplified data model combined with great User Experience.
SAP Fiori was repeatedly emphasized as being integral part of S/4HANA.
It was good to see Carl giving a demo by taking MRP as an example. He highlighted the changed user interface and also customers could run it several times a day as opposed to once a day because of it being faster. I found a related document on space.
Another interesting topic of discussion was Simplification of database. He quickly touched upon few tricks of reducing redundancy and concluded that following strategic archiving techniques (with caution) could be one of the best ways. This is one topic which he could detail in a next public Mentor call.
At few moments I had the feeling of being part of a keynote session (for good reasons). The session was certainly packed with many buzzwords with two being added to my list - transformation and Enterprise Management. I missed the word "Platform"!
Customers could transition to S/4HANA with a view of transforming business rather than considering it to be a maintenance project. This was further proved by detailing the techniques of migrating to S/4HANA. Landscape transformation (System consolidation), System conversion were highlighted here. He reiterated that to migrate to S/4HANA it's not mandatory to have Suite on HANA, though it might be the easiest path to transition. Some examples of concerns expressed by customers over migration was discussed. Then he went on with the slide detailing the migration prerequisites check boxes.
One of my takeaways is developers and system administrators are going to have exciting times ahead.
I strongly recommend going through the detailed document shared by tammy.powlas3 regarding the same. It has highlighted every topic in detail with screenshots from the slide.
I am certainly looking forward to the next Public Mentor Monday call on the same.
