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SAP S/4HANA 2021 Release Highlights

Paul Smitherman |

The SAP S/4HANA 2021 release is hot off the press for October 2021, the 7th version to come out for this Intelligent ERP. There are a lot of exciting new features and innovations and it’s very clear that SAP is continuing to invest and rapidly evolve SAP S/4HANA. The name change of the release reflects the year of publication, which makes things a lot easier than with ECC.

The 2021 release is available SAP S/4HANA on premise and Cloud Private Edition, and of course on RISE with SAP, which offers you a simple and holistic approach to your SAP S/4HANA transformation. For more information on RISE with SAP, go to:

Find out more about RISE with SAP

Enjoy mainstream maintenance and support for 5 years

It’s important to note that each new release of SAP S/4HANA is mainstream maintained and supported for 5 years, before customers need to upgrade to the next version. There are many advantages to this, the biggest one being that the software is constantly offering new innovations.

The challenge to customers is that they are obliged to upgrade after 5 years which often takes a lot of effort and time. Our new software tool, MIGNOW, makes this much easier and more cost-effective by automating both your SAP S/4HANA conversion and your upgrades. MIGNOW works by using the latest data-driven techniques to create agile process execution and new functionality. It encompasses Machine Learning for prescriptive analytics and decision engines and Artificial Intelligence with deductive analytics based on neural networks and deep learning.

Find out more about our new software tool MIGNOW

Main innovation highlights for SAP S/4HANA 2021

The 2021 release brings innovation to all lines of business and industry sectors. Here are some of the main take-aways that we know our customers will be excited about. For a full overview watch the video below :

S/4HANA for Finance updates

Profitability and Analysis: new features include the use of financial planning content in SAP Analytics Cloud through the integration with SAP Integrated Business Planning for your sales and operations planning.

Receivables Management and Payment Handling: reconcile sales and distribution billing documents are now posted with greater cost controlling and visibility for third-party and partner-based services.

Overhead Cost Management: seamless handling of intercompany relationships in overhead cost management, supporting the needs of international businesses.

Governance, Risk, and Compliance: you’ll get best practice content for financial compliance management, as well as pre-defined automated common controls that check for suspicious behaviour such as overpaid goods receipts or invoices approved without goods received.

Sales Order Management and Processing: create fast sales orders using the new SAP Fiori app, by simply entering the most important data, while pricing is determined immediately, and ATP checks are carried out. In addition, the automated creation of sales orders from unstructured data reduces manual process also makes the process much more efficient for your sales teams.

Manufacturing updates:

Material Requirements Planning: seamless integration of MRP with your supplier systems so change requests are automated. This will help improve your supplier collaboration.

Quality Management: with the records and inspection app, you can record and process results for one or more characteristics in the inspection lots.

Supply Chain updates:

Inventory Management: the new Kanban control cycles analysis lets you, as a production supervisor, control Kanban cycles with a focus on the checking of the container statuses. The analytics status also helps to identify critical situations and solve them early and quickly.

Transportation Management: cross-delivery handling units are supported more effectively with the improved integration of SAP Extended Warehouse Management.

Asset Management updates:

Maintenance Planning: The new maintenance backlog app provides your maintenance planners with a single screen view of the details of all your maintenance backlogs.

Maintenance Execution: uses machine-learning to give suggestions for object part code or damage code notifications to your technicians. This decreases the time needed for analysing incidents and will reduce downtime per asset.

Sourcing and Procurement updates:

Commodity Procurement: the introduction of central sourcing with a commodity pricing engine (CPE) reduces manual effort by enabling purchasers to consider commodity prices already in the sourcing process and take them over to the central contract using the CPE.

R&D / Engineering updates:

Product Marketability and Chemical Compliance: with this new release you get continuous delivery of embedded phrases of regulatory content service such as dangerous goods management.

SAP Product Footprint Management updates:

Environmental Footprint Assessment: start discovering your product footprint and its impact on climate change within your day-to-day operations, from vendor choices to buying behaviours.

There are loads of exciting new innovations in the industry sectors too. These include:

In Consumer industries, support of van sales with effective tracking of stock availability and sales on routes gives much greater flexibility. In Wholesale distribution, you can now schedule condition contracts for royalties settlement for sales using scheduling worklists.

In Utilities, sales contract management allows multi-end, change contract items and differentiated product selection. And in Public Sector, you get improved budget structure processing including field extensibility, usability, and file uploading capabilities.

If you are interested to get a demo, please contact us. We can also help you with identifying the value of these innovations for your organisation thanks to our Value Management platform, helping you to create a business case.

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