Eisbart Yosh - SAP S/4HANA Cloud: use cases, functionality, and extensibility

Businesses must run differently in the digital age. Customers demand service anywhere, any time, on any device. Enterprise processes have to change with the availability of real-time data that enables competitive advantage. The cloud is the key enablerit matches the modern business need for innovation and speed of service and is the only delivery system for enterprise resource planning (ERP) capable of helping an organization to run ahead. Businesses that dont adopt public cloud services wont just be at a disadvantagetheyll become cautionary case studies in business history.

While the first generation of cloud ERP was focused on speed of adoption, the new generation of cloud ERP is intelligent. Through artificial intelligence (AI), it learns, anticipates, and is one step ahead, offering unrivalled agility in business operations and instant business value. SAP is the leader in intelligent cloud ERP through its significant investment in SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

The business case for intelligent cloud ERP is strong. Businesses can offer their talent a digital age user experience, driving higher rates of adoption and productivity. Total cost of ownership (TCO) can be reduced as the need for expensive architecture decreases. Crucially, businesses can adopt SAP S/4HANA Cloud rapidly, transforming into a fully digital operation and seeing near instant value.

Implementation is a clear measure of speed to value. In traditional deployments, CIOs are responsible for tremendous overhead in provisioning, application management, middleware, and maintaining IT support systems, not to mention ongoing security. For SAP S/4HANA Cloud, you need only two things: a browser and your companys data. No servers, no front-end rollout, no monolithic change management are necessary.

This new model speeds that time to value. SAP S/4HANA Cloud averages 14-16 weeks from order to full implementation and that time will decrease with further automation. SAP provides quarterly updates to continuously expand the innovative potential of this intelligent cloud ERP.

What could you do accomplish if you focused on delivering business value instead of keeping the lights on?

The future of software is in applications that learn from your business, provide information in context, and offer real-time analytics on streaming data. The future of enterprise software is in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

To date, in all ERP, theres only one product that has machine learning live: SAP S/4HANA Cloud. SAP CoPilot, a truly intelligent digital assistant, provides in-context alerts that help every one of your users take daily actions to increase productivity. Machine learning can also greatly reduce manual taskssuch as automatically matching payments against invoicesfreeing up time for the talent in your organization to focus on innovation. SAP S/4HANA Cloud currently has over 30 machine learning-powered scenarios live or in the works to aid productivity and simplify processes, which well continue to roll out on our quarterly update schedule.

Not every business may be ready to go all in on the cloud. However most business leaders I speak to plan starting or extending their cloud journey today. Together with our partners we are engaged in countless conversations of this kind every day, working to find the best possible solution for each business need.

SAP is migrating businesses to the cloud and one of our key partners is NIMBL. As an experienced and recognized SAP ecosystem thought leader with countless successful initiatives to their name, NIMBL fully understands the potential of cloud ERP and the business benefits for customers. NIMBL was one of the first companies to embrace SAP S/4HANA Cloud, becoming an official Lighthouse Partner in 2016. NIMBL knows what it takes to implement SAP S/4HANA Cloud. This experience ensures customers are in the best possible position to find a solution that fits their needs.