Back to basics SAP

By Cat Yong

SAP’s latest version of their flagship enterprise software, the SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA (SAP S/4HANA), is fully built on the advanced in-memory platform, SAP HANA. This means that one of the most fundamental things about the software suite – its code base – has changed, to take advantage of HANA’s fast and powerful in-memory technology.

The launch of this business suite had been dubbed as the end of the IT architecture of the 20th century, which closely links database and applications.

There are very obvious benefits that SAP S/4HANA offers as a result of this. According to Chiang, one of these benefits, is the capability for HANA to store data on the lowest level. “So, it’s a more simplified data model being put on top of HANA. There are less restrictions so process steps are reduced and it becomes more automated.”

With this, there is also more of a real-time capability as opposed to slower batch processing of previous versions. “This extends towards planning in real-time as well.”

The second benefit has to do with all different capabilities being accessible from one single interface.

“Last but not least, analytical and transactional systems can come together – you can transition from one system to the other from one view,” Chiang explained.

Overall, there is significant improvement in mission-critical business processes and reporting activities.

 SAP HANA momentum
According to Chiang, there is strong momentum for SAP HANA in-memory database platform in Malaysia, and other parts of the globe. This had necessitated the arduous work of rewriting the SAP S/4HANA code base, so that coupled together with HANA, it is able to offer massive simplifications.

SAP will extend their maintenance commitment until 2025, for SAP Business Suite customers on any other database, although on-premise customers with the latest enhancement package, can move to the new product by migrating to SAP HANA database and applying the new code to their current Business Suite environment.

Chiang pointed out, “Benefits of S/4 HANA adoption clearly outweigh the investments in licenses, migration and infrastructure, as HANA leads to significant savings with regard to business processes and creates new business scenarios:”