.svg){kind=logo}
The primary assets of Professional Services companies are knowledge and people. These companies operate in very dynamic markets where competitors can easily copy their services. Day-to-day operations are characterised by high volumes of deals and increasingly project-oriented work. Many of these organisations still use multiple systems or older versions of an ERP application, which may not offer the desired flexibility and insight needed to manage their KPIs.
With SAP’s S/4HANA Cloud solution, SOA People delivers an intelligent cloud-based ERP solution to Professional Services companies. This is a proven, future-proofed solution which receives new functionalities and abilities with every quarterly release, ensuring that companies using the system can drive their business effectively in an ever more digitalising and changing world.
So, what new intelligent capabilities does the 1905 release offer your organisation? Let us take you on a quick tour in this blog.
Gain a grip on costs
With the new 1905 release of S/4HANA Cloud new functionality is introduced for the allocation of overhead costs. With the new Manage Allocations App, costs can be allocated to cost centres based on actual or plan data using freely definable allocation cycles. Furthermore, it is now possible to view and monitor budget control for cost centres in real time. This further enhances the cost control capabilities of your organisation. The final major innovation in the Finance area is the new intelligent accrual functionality. This aspect uses Machine Learning to automatically convert purchase order items into accrual items based on decisions made by your employees in the past.
Improve Time Management
Timesheet management is a very important topic in any Professional Services organisation. With this latest release of S/4HANA Cloud it is even more possible for consultants to record their overtime. Consultants can write overtime into their projects, which will then trigger a workflow prompting the project manager to approve the hours. Upon billing, it can be decided whether this extra time needs to be charged to the customer or if it needs to be written off. Another timesheet improvement is that consultants can now write time on projects which they have not been assigned to. The last enhancement which is worth highlighting is that project managers can now automatically close inactive projects by using a pre-configured batch job. Repeatable actions for closing inactive projects are no longer needed, limiting the overhead in your organisation.
Continuous improvement
Besides the highlighted areas of Finance and Professional Services, every release offers improvements and innovations across the full product. This release contains an enhanced version of the predictive contract consumption. In procurement, staff are now pro-actively alerted when contracts are predicted to be consumed early. Various improvements have been made in the Project Management area too. Numerous new apps were introduced. Amongst those are the Manage Project Rankings App which lets you rank projects and include or exclude them from your planning and the Project Planning App which helps with viewing projects and to review their timelines in a Gantt chart.
Lastly, every release adds new features to SAP’s digital assistant Co-Pilot. New skills and commands have been added. In Finance it is now possible to display correspondence history and to manage revenue contracts with Co-Pilot. For Professional Services, Co-Pilot assists with managing recourse requests and customer projects.
Did you know?
Our S/4HANA Cloud team always keeps up-to-date with their certifications as well as their in-depth knowledge of the latest releases.
