SAP Business Suite Powered by SAP HANA — Business Scenarios

The brand-new offering “Business scenario recommendation for SAP BUSINESS SUITE powered by SAP HANA” gives you advice on which business scenarios in your SAP Business Suite applications benefit from SAP HANA and also helps you find and assess the areas  where  SAP  HANA  will  bring  the  most  value  to your  company’s SAP Business Suite implementation. This tool provides a report that includes tailored recommendations for optimizations and scenarios based on your actual current production system usage data.

                                          

To obtain your personalized assessment, you need to fill out the form at suiteonhana.com and then upload a screenshot of your ST03N-Workload Monitor screen in your production system. The entire process takes about 5– 10 minutes. SAP will then input your actual workload data into the tool and prepare a customized report that highlights the various scenarios that will benefit from adding SAP HANA to your SAP BUSINESS SUITE LANDSCAPE.

SAP Business Suite applications using SAP HANA as (the only) database

In this scenario, applications including SAP ERP, SAP CRM, and SAP Supply Chain ManagemenT (SAP SCM) can fully run on top of SAP HANA in an integrated manner*. As part of this first wave of innovations, SAP delivers optimizations for 23 business value scenarios across key lines  of business (e.g., finance, sales, marketing, service, procurement, and HR) and more than 400 industry-specific reports to achieve unprecedented performance. See the details below for examples of scenarios in the SAP Business Suite that leverage SAP HANA.

The available SAP Rapid-deployment solutions in these areas are:

• CRM rapid-deployment solution with SAP HANA, is bringing together software and services to give you essential marketing, sales and service functionality.

With SAP ERP powered by SAP HANA Rapid-Deployment Solutions, SAP is simply  combining  together  the  best  suite  of  applications  and  the    next generation best performing platform for doing real-time business:

• SAP ERP for Finance  & Controlling Rapid Deployment Solution powered by SAP  HANA

With this rapid-deployment solution, you can implement a financial and management accounting solution quickly and affordably.

• SAP ERP for Trading Rapid Deployment Solution powered by SAP HANA

With this rapid-deployment solution, you can quickly and affordably implement functionality to enable predefined business scenarios that are crucial for companies active in trading industries.

• SAP ERP for Manufacturing Rapid Deployment Solution powered by SAP HANA

With this rapid-deployment solution, you can quickly and affordably implement functionality to enable predefined business scenarios that are crucial for companies active in the process, discrete, and repetitive manufacturing industries.

Business Scenarios that directly benefit from running on SAP HANA

In this section, we will review the current SAP HANA–enabled business scenarios included in the SAP Business Suite. A business scenario, in this context, consists of a comprehensive set of business processes that are enabled by one or more applications within the SAP Business Suite. For example, Strategic Purchase Optimization utilizes data from multiple areas including Supply Chain Management and Procurement, and Accelerated Organizational Changes Publishing draws primarily from HCM data.

Irrespective of the data source, the critical point conveyed in the following scenarios is that many of these business functions can be performed much faster — and, consequently, much more frequently — by utilizing SAP HANA. For many businesses, this capability represents a wish that was difficult, if not impossible, to fulfill in the pre-HANA days. In some cases, the ability to perform certain scenarios more frequently enables businesses to perform more “what-if” type analyses, which in turn help key personnel to make better decisions   in  a   more   timely  manner.   This   ability  to  perform  complex transactions and reports in “real time” is a significant boost to drive value within the enterprise.

Fast Financial Close

A financial close defines the financial results of a group as required for presentation to external and internal stakeholders by valuating business activities from an accounting perspective. It closes the books for all individual companies. A corporate close for the group and subgroups and financial disclosures combine quantitative data with comprehensive qualitative information. A fast financial close is a core element of financial excellence.

Support for real-time, fast financial close offers a single multi-dimensional database and shared functionality for accounting and consolidation, providing governance, compliance, and transparency throughout the financial close management. With deeper and faster insight down to the lowest level of detail, it delivers quality at the source, process efficiencies, a common view across financials (invoices) and logistics (goods receipts), and faster reconciliation. Drill-through for simulation of organizational changes is available.

Real-Time Financial Performance

Managing performance from a financial perspective is becoming more crucial every day. SAP HANA can help companies improve performance across a variety of financial processes and functions, and achieve real-time financial insights into critical business drivers such as future market trends and hidden revenue opportunities. 

On-time results for all audit- and analysis-related inquiries and an ability to react to risks and opportunities exemplify the need for a transparent and efficient processes to deliver financial information on time and accurately. You need to manage operations and related performance successfully in today’s volatile business conditions:

• Integrated planning uses a case-driven environment that allows new planning scenarios and user-interaction scenarios.
• Real-time close helps ensure accelerated closing activities through  faster processes, reporting without data latency, and heterogeneous consolidation landscapes.
• Product costing enables the modeling and simulation of design-to-cost product cost in real time, management of the impact of products and production cost across an organization for volatile resource and commodity prices, and comprehensive product-cost management analytics.

Efficient  Receivables  Management

Receivables management is a core finance function to manage the payment  of customer invoices. SAP software enables automated, integrated, and collaborative processes for receivables management. 

By reducing the number of  days  sales  outstanding (DSO) and bad-debt write-offs and by managing billing disputes and collections activities, you can constantly monitor the credit risk of your customer base. The goal of receivables management is to optimize the working capital to enable investment and growth.

Support for increased effectiveness of receivables management offers algorithms to match incoming payments and invoices, freeing headcount to focus on value-added activities and processes such as collections, dispute, and credit management. All information is in real time, not batch, to increase the transparency of the working capital provided in the payment and working capital dashboard. Exceptions in the process can be pushed to a mobile  device to offer immediate action from everywhere.

Checkout SAP HANA Interview Questions

Efficient Payables Management

Payables management focuses on evaluating, validating, posting, and managing  payments,  and  archiving  of  an  invoice.  Key  elements  of    the accounts payable process include integration, automation, standardization, and workflows. Close collaboration with the treasury team optimizes DSO. In addition, e-invoicing becomes more prominent, but paper-based invoices remain the same.

Support for this business scenario combines reports in payables and cash position to helping payables clerks to make the right flnancial decisions. Real-time and accurate insight into vendor-opened receipts leads to better scheduling of payment runs and provides flexible and automated payments in real time through parallelization of different payment runs.

Central Treasury Exposure management

Treasury and flnancial risk management involves a variety of processes, from cash and liquidity management to the management of financial transactions like a money market, foreign exchange, derivatives, debt instruments, securities, and commodity paper deals. You need a holistic view of these processes to be able to respond to changes in a quick, efficient, and compliant manner, taking into account the data from past, present, and future planning.

The treasury exposure hub powered by SAP HANA is part of support for the comprehensive process of treasury and financial risk management. It enables global financial risk management on the ERP software system at headquarters as the central integration platform. The platform offers a lower total cost of ownership, central monitoring, data consistency, and traceability of business events for financial and external auditing. The treasury exposure hub is the starting point for analytical applications that provide key performance indicators.

Access Control Role Analytics

As a result of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the United States and similar legislation in other countries, nearly all publicly listed companies now have a dedicated compliance function. Elimination of segregation of duties was initially a main reason to implement a solution to identify access risks. But companies are now striving to evolve many risk and compliance tools, from bottom-line savings and risk avoidance to top-line strategic advantage.

Using SAP HANA, role administrators can perform real-time analysis on the roles, their usage, similarity with other roles, and options for reuse to advise business owners about the most effcient usage to avoid creating new roles. Business executives can analyze roles to uncover hidden downsides and reduce the uncertainty of many financial and operational planning  decisions, such as reorganization.

Automated Cross-System Process Control

You need process control to perform automated testing (focused on compliance) and continuous control monitoring (focused on compliance and on process efficiency and effectiveness). Because of increasing regulations and policies, you must deliver traceable monitoring and remedial activities to demonstrate compliance. Using queries, reports, events, and analytics, you keep business processes and systems under  control.

Using SAP HANA, you can centralize all data from multiple systems into a single repository with excellent performance and gain the ability to use complex business rules for detailed analysis. SAP HANA increases the usability and power of automated testing and monitoring.

Optimized  Quote Management

Informed customers expect a superior sales experience, and internal stakeholders want to use the almost unlimited amount of Big Data on sales. It is essential to embrace these trends early in the order-to-cash business. Quote management, thus gains importance as a step in this business process. A huge amount of customer data from diverse categories must be captured in one quote.

SAP HANA enables smart and context-based recommendations based on historical customer and sales information. Individually tailored offers can be made to fulfill customer needs in a fast and user-friendly way. The recommendations also embrace predictive information, such as the conversion rate and time from quote to order and the likelihood of paying on time based on sales volume. Recommendations can also take into consideration orders and materials for sales representatives to offer the best quote in real time to customers when serving them.

Real-Time Inventory management

Inventory management handles the recording and tracking of stocks of materials on a quantity and value basis. It covers the planning, entry, and documentation of stock movements like goods receipts and issues, internal physical stock transfers, and transfer postings. These movements lead to a large volume of business documents. Inventory management is also responsible for the performance of physical inventory control.

Real-time inventory management provides stock insight  and monitoring with high performance to support demand-driven procurement. It increases process efficiency in adjacent procurement processes such  as  purchase  order or invoice processing. An analytical monitor for inventory management, including various dashboards and performance improvements, is available to enhance the user experience and improve the efficiency of the process.

Efficient Procurement

Because of intense competitive pressure, you often absorb increased costs for commodities, goods, or services to avoid passing them on to your customers. You aim to boost productivity and drive innovation to lower additional costs. To drive cost-effective, competitive global supply chains, you leverage procurement software to relieve slow and costly paper-based processes, disproportionately high transaction costs, frequent errors, and maverick spending.

Because SAP HANA lets you analyze massive quantities of data in local memory, the results of complex inquiries and transactions are available at your fingertips. You can update plans, run simulations, and execute decisions based on real-time data.

Accelerate lengthy processing of purchasing documents that arise from a multitude of line items and a long purchase order history. Provide top  business intelligence reports in procurement side by side to help ensure that you get real-time data with high performance and a modern user interface. Support fast business decisions and user adoption with flexible configuration options for procurement analysis, and provide complete visibility into end-to- end procurement activities.

Strategic Purchase Optimization

Pressured to reduce supply costs while maintaining high-quality output, you seek greater efficiencies and savings from your procurement operations. You know that high-performance organizations employ spend-analysis tools, sourcing and process automation, and standardized procurement operations. A centralized model facilitates negotiations and better supplier relationships.

Provide the purchaser with a comprehensive, complete, and the real-time working environment and view of business transactions and business data related to the strategic suppliers. Offer company-wide search for purchasing business documents to influence actual payment conditions and rebates. Influence  contract  negotiations  proactively  by  getting  insight  into   sales planning and sales orders.

Maximized Asset utilization and Uptime

In asset-intensive industries, you need to handle multiple maintenance plans that must be scheduled frequently. SAP software streamlines planning such activities with maintenance work orders. In traditional systems, this transaction is triggered at regular intervals using a batch program. To remain competitive, you look for new ways to get the most out of your assets by ensuring that they stay up and run.

With scheduling transaction IP30H, based on SAP HANA, you can schedule all existing maintenance plans within a specific time frame. The software now uses the power of SAP HANA to automatically preselect maintenance plans that are due. This feature avoids the need for any parameter restrictions. This approach helps ensure that the software processes only maintain plans that are due and that no call objects are missed. It delivers the results much faster and in a user-friendly transaction.

Accelerated  Organizational  Changes  Publishing

The performance of HR applications and related reporting, analytics, and planning depend to a large extent on how quickly the software can work through hierarchies in any given context. More important, the resulting wait times have a direct bearing on the overall user experience and satisfaction.

Push   HR  structural  evaluations  and  authorizations  to  SAP   HANA   to accelerate the definition of structural authorizations (who gets access to what), organization and cost center hierarchy, and reporting hierarchy. Determine which manager is responsible for the organization hierarchy and define logical views in the learning catalog to provide reporting and analysis without degrading performance.

Insight-Driven Workforce Cost Management

Time and payroll processes create immense amounts of valuable operational data that can bring positive and negative trends to light. The data can provide insight into the fully loaded cost of employees and real-time costs associated with operations, projects, campaigns, and so on. An inability to tap this information source quickly and easily counteracts your efforts to drive HR efficiencies and introduce agile business processes.

Effective and efficient payroll exception handling is based on real-time data through provision of rapid insight into payroll-related workforce costs and trends in core HR functions. The functions include drill-down to employees and earning details of the fully loaded cost of employees, remuneration and overtime based on master data, and time management data stored in payroll results. Hierarchical structures are based on organizational management or cost center in reporting and analysis.

Real-Time material Planning

Material requirements planning (MRP) determines material shortages by comparing sales orders, forecast demand, and stock-transfer demand with inventory and expected material receipts. It creates planned orders or purchase requisitions for the missing material. MRP is typically performed in a time-consuming batch mode, so that decisions can be based only on the data derived from periodic runs; production and sales suffer as a result.

Faster re-planning allows more frequent MRP runs in shorter cycles by providing global, cross-plant planning where demand information is propagated faster through the supply chain. Faster reactions to demand changes reduce the risk of stock-outs and allow reduced safety stocks. This lets users run what-if scenarios in real time to make decisions faster regarding reallocation and outsourcing. This functionality instantly updates supply network collaboration with the latest demand information to help suppliers react much faster.

Instant Material Flow Control

SAP offers two solutions for the material flow control of automated warehouses (HBW, SPW, tabular warehouse, …):  

• SAP EWM-MFS  in SAP EWM
• SAP TRM as an extension of SAP LES

The results of MRP are stored in MRP lists. Material receipts and  requirements for selected materials can be checked in the stock and requirement list. Production planners can select MRP lists with problems and stock and requirement lists with a short range of coverage (when critical to performance). Production planning and purchasing departments often make decisions based on outdated information from batch runs.

Early identification of critical materials (such as range of coverage below threshold, unconsumed forecast, overconsumed forecast, inventory without demand, and so on) and a feasibility check of production orders can be done on the fly. This functionality enables better production-order sequences to help determine the fraction of demand needed for sales orders, leading to lower work in progress, shorter lead times, and better due-date performance when only the required quantity is produced.

Comprehensive  Engineer-to-Order  Project  Management

Efficiently managing your processes for engineer-to-order and project manufacturing improves profitability and competitive differentiation.

Project-driven procurement and progress monitoring are vital to executing complex projects successfully. The huge volume of real-time data and time-consuming transactions for maintaining or analyzing project data constrain project and program engineers in making decisions when needed. Waiting for the relevant data to be provided slows engineers down significantly.

Support for this business scenario combines the speed and acceleration of SAP HANA and the integrated processes in the SAP ERP application for complex projects. Real-time progress monitoring along the project lifecycle, including version comparison and combined analysis of  financials  and logistics data, enables faster decision making so you can act and react to real project execution work. New project line-item reporting with acceleration and improved user experience is available to support in-depth analysis of complex projects.

Maximized Productivity and Profitability of Complex  Projects

Monitoring of progress is a key to successful execution of complex projects. The main challenge is the volume of data. Project analysis and progress monitoring are time-consuming due to high volumes of data for complex, lengthy projects. Project or program engineers cannot provide the  information needed to decide on natural deviations (time, quality, and costs) in project execution. Cross-project or program monitoring is even more challenging.

Support for monitoring and analysis of large projects and programs in real time lets you decide faster, mitigate risks, and deliver the best resource productivity and project profitability. Progress monitoring along the project lifecycle  can   include  version   comparison,  and  a   combined  analysis   of financials and logistics data enables decisions to be made for acting and reacting within a window of opportunity. Indirect improvements through SAP HANA arise in production planning, materials management, controlling, and financials because of tight integration.