What’s New in SAP S/4HANA Logistics

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A brief on SAP HANA

SAP was earlier dependent on other vendors like Oracle, Microsoft, for its database management, which usually led to many associated drawbacks as well. Thus, there was a requirement of an in-house database management system, for which SAP developed and launched HANA which is an in-memory database works on the cloud platform.

There are many superior features of SAP HANA which made it highly popular and demanding such as an automatic mechanism for failover, high performance, great user experience and more.

In near time, many organizations have migrated to SAP HANA which were earlier running on ECC platform. Since SAP has announced that to work on S/4, one surely needs HANA as its database. Thus, SAP S/4HANA is gaining popularity rapidly.

Key Features of SAP S/4HANA Logistics

Master Data

For better performance and large scale processing, HANA is the best platform, with which Master Data is directly associated.

Customer Master

Many transactional codes which were in working order previously have been redundant now such as XK01, XK02, XD03 and MK01, MK02 and MK03, XD01, XD02, XD03 or VD01, VD02, VD03 and more. The idea is to utilize the business partner approach. Hence, an organization migrating to S/4 platform needs to ensure that it is properly analyzed and that SAP S/4HANA conversion process is carried out in their entirety.

Material Master

One of the major change in HANA is the length of characters in Material Master Field. In ECC, the material master field had 18 characters, while in HANA it has been increased to 40 characters now. Another change is in the foreign trade fields in Mater Data, which are unattainable now.

Business Suite Modules

The most promising feature in SAP S/4HANA Logistics is that it combines SAP Supplier Relationship Management, Customer Relationship Management as well as Supply Chain Management into one business suite.

SAP S/4HANA enterprise management is also available on premise as well as in the Cloud with nearly equal efficiency. The SAP S/4HANA solution can be a Cloud solution or can also be implemented as an on-premise system such as SAP ERP.

S/4HANA enterprise management functionality is such that if an organization wants to migrate S/4HANA it will have to abandon the pre-existing business suite in order to gain upgraded performance. But this does not have to be the case and migration can be a gradual process, continuing certain elements of legacy systems.

Conclusion

SAP S/4HANA Logistics (previously called Simple Logistics) is also called SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management. This module is a complete package of some very useful SAP modules in terms of stock and material data. These are Material Management, Supply Chain, Sourcing and Procurement, Demand Planning, Contract Management, and Manufacturing.

We can conclude that SAP S/4HANA Logistics is a complete package for dealing all stock and sales related processes.

Therefore, those manufacturing organizations which have still not opted for SAP as its ERP application system must do it today as SAP’s products are just excellent. Those which are still running on ECC, need to migrate to HANA platform so as to get full benefits of SAP application and bring better user experience and flexibility to their business.