Category: SAP

What are preconfigured solutions?

SAP Preconfigured solutions are implementations featuring standard functionality or common patterns. Since they include common enterprise features such as supply chain, finance, and inventory management, preconfigured solutions can be deployed rapidly. In simple terms, SAP preconfigured solutions are simple, ready-to-consume solutions that adapt to your business needs.

SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions allows the development of preconfigured solutions for specific functional areas, complete with pre-built reports, preconfigured content, and predefined best practices. Such suites enable enterprises to deploy software easily, with accelerated implementation times, and predictability in cost and scope.

Each preconfigured solution is a complete, end-to-end implementation. Enterprises may adopt it as such, or use it as a base for developing a full-blown customized solution. Open source solutions allow enterprises to download the source code and customize the solution.

Traditional preconfigured solutions came on-premise. The SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud heralds the cloud version of preconfigured solutions.

Related Reading: What is Business Process Expertise in SAP and Why You Need it

How preconfigured solutions enhance industry operations?

Preconfigured solutions spare enterprises from “rediscovering the wheel.” When solutions exist for standard requirements, it avoids the wastage in development efforts. Preconfigured solutions save time, trial-and-error, and labor. The in-built accelerators allow rapid implementation and configuration. The shortened time to market delivers a competitive advantage to firms.

A preconfigured solution offers a working model with glitches removed. These solutions connect key functional areas, to streamline operations and improve communication flow across departments. It automates routine and repetitive functions and offers well-structured content that improves visibility into key fields.

SAP offers built-in support for industry best practices. Solutions developed using SAP combines the latest technology, industry best practices, and processes in a single package.

Developers using SAP to build preconfigured solutions can adopt a modular and scalable approach. They mix modules to create targeted solutions such as CRM, field management suite, ERP and more. Clients may choose the most relevant reporting tools for their reports using SAP Business Intelligence Adoption rapid-deployment solution. SAP Predictive Analytics Content Adoption rapid-deployment solution helps to implement a predefined predictive analysis use case.

Transforming various industry verticals

Preconfigured solutions deliver efficiency improvements in several industries and verticals. Five of them are mentioned below:

1. Real Estate

Unstandardized information, inefficient processes, and weak communications often affect the real estate industry. Preconfigured solutions enable enterprises to streamline data and workflows. 

Developing preconfigured solutions for key functional areas of the real estate industry allows business owners to access information in real-time, prevent opportunities from slipping through the cracks, and remain in control of the business. Here are a few key functional areas where pre-configured solutions can come to the rescue of real estate enterprises:

• Document management with powerful search and sort functionality.
• Process automation functions to streamline operations.
• Contact maintenance to keep track of customers and upcoming tasks.
• Reporting and analytics to generate and share data and other critical information.

2. Supply Chain and Logistics

Preconfigured solutions make the complex supply chain relationships simple and easy to handle. SAP’s Model Company for supply chain planning offers a ready-to-run, comprehensive solution, complete with relevant business content, accelerators, and enablement services.

The suite co-opts:

• Demand planning to manage demand streams and increase productivity.
• Response and supply planning.
• Supply and allocation planning.
• Deployment planning.
• Sales and Operations planning.

The inbound and outbound integrations with SAP S/4HANA ensures seamless integration with other functional areas, such as sales. Businesses gain improved visibility to the upstream and downstream business value chains and can visualize the entire supply chain network. The preconfigured solution aligns demand and supply plans with financial targets and key performance indicators.

Related Reading: Seamlessly migrate to S/4HANA with these tools and methodologies

3. Healthcare

The healthcare industry is under pressure to innovate while keeping up with regulations. Preconfigured solutions automate regulatory concerns and compliance. Ready-to-run process models and scenarios enforce standardization with tight quality controls. It improves efficiency in research and development. Accelerators support rapid design and implementation.

The most popular modules of SAP’s preconfigured solutions in healthcare are meant for:

• Research and development
• Production
• Regulation
• Quality and traceability
• Logistics and transport
• Purchases and provisioning
• Marketing and commercial

4. Sales and Marketing

SAP preconfigured solutions infuse efficiency to customer-facing functions and increase customer satisfaction. Its most popular implementations in the sales and marketing domain include:

• Predicting customer demand based on real-time data.
• Tracking sales history.
• Automating sales operations. The solution tracks all processes, from ordering of raw materials till the delivery, and takes care of auditing, notifications, and reporting.

5. Financial Services

The SAP Model Company solution for Financial Services offers a ready-to-run, comprehensive solution to support the core financial processes, including:

• General accounting
• Cash and treasury functions
• Planning and forecasting

These preconfigured solutions come with relevant business content for a specific use-case, accelerator, and enablement service. These solutions enable gap analysis, address resource bottlenecks, and support lean implementations.

Today’s enterprises seek efficiency improvements and cost savings without compromising quality. Fingent uses SAP to build pre-configured solutions that enable enterprises to realize such goals. Implementing these custom-built pre-configured solutions helps you transform your processes across various business areas and improve your customer relationships. 

Contact us to get a free consultation with our SAP Experts. 

What is SAP Leonardo?

Though businesses are flooded with Big Data, IoT, Machine Learning, Blockchain, and other latest technologies that support innovation, many of them are unaware of how to bring these technologies together for enhanced business results. This is where SAP Leonardo comes in. SAP Leonardo brings these technologies together by integrating the key features of innovation to drive business outcomes. It is a “digital innovation system” that allows you to innovate at scale, thus rethinking your business models.

SAP Leonardo uses a rapid innovation process that embraces design thinking by utilizing the power of core technologies like Big Data, Analytics, IoT, Blockchain, Machine Learning. SAP Leonardo is built on the SAP Cloud Platform. It is the first digital enterprise platform that gives you the freedom to choose any infrastructure provider you want: SAP, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform. So, whichever IaaS provider you choose, you do not have to compromise on agility and ownership costs.  

Related Reading: Create Intelligent Organizations with SAP Model Company

SAP Leonardo: The future of intelligent ERP   

SAP Leonardo offers a basket of features intended for transforming organizations into intelligent enterprises. 

1. Rapid innovation process: 

SAP Leonardo’s rapid innovation process is a combination of innovation services and design thinking methodology. It helps companies to move from concept to blueprint by driving the process of picking the best projects that are more likely to succeed while minimizing risks. This process encourages users to think about big ideas or challenges by taking small steps at a time. Design thinking being the core of the process will help you amplify your human-centric activities with the help of technology. This is done by embracing empathy and collaboration in a rapid and iterative environment.  

2. Automated innovation: 

SAP Leonardo empowers companies to innovate based on real-time information. Fiori apps can directly interact with IoT systems located on-site through the SAP Cloud. Thus the IoT system can learn and adapt automatically to the ongoing processes that can impact its performance. However, the company will always hold control and can accept or reject the recommendations made by the system. Thus, SAP Leonardo enables companies to gather and process data most efficiently.

Six core technological domains: 

SAP Leonardo combines 6 core technologies and builds solutions on that foundation. 

Following are the six core technologies:

1. IoT: With SAP Leonardo you can connect people, processes, and things based on real-time data received from IoT services. You end up with enriched IoT data on a unified semantic model. Thus you watch your insights turning into business outcomes.

2. Machine Learning: Though machine learning has been around for some time, these projects always existed in silos. With SAP Leonardo, machine learning is made available to everyone and everywhere by embedding it into enterprise applications. With this integrated intelligence, users can solve common problems and also facilitate the deployment of deep learning models for continuous improvement of business processes.

3. Blockchain: With Leonardo, SAP has moved into the BaaS technology accompanying giants like IBM and Microsoft. These companies have incorporated blockchain as the core of a secure transaction-based business. The SAP BaaS is ready-to-use and allows you to experiment on the distributed ledger technology with minimum risks.

4. Analytics: Analytics is crucial to all business processes and applications. With SAP Leonardo, embedded analytics is combined with machine learning, enabling you to create new processes and applications based on insights. Using Predictive Analytics you can leverage machine learning to take proactive actions and improve transparency across your team. 

5. Big Data: The SAP Data Hub, which is a part of Leonardo, helps to turn your chaotic data into context. It combines business with IT and simplifies data sharing. Thus, you can easily promote complete data transparency in your company.

6. Data Intelligence: SAP Data Intelligence combines the salient features of SAP Data Hub and SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation into a single integrated service in the SAP Cloud Platform. SAP Data Intelligence helps you to monetize your data and leverage open source technologies.

SAP Leonardo comes with a set of industry accelerators: 

In order to maximize ROI, you have to innovate quickly at scale. SAP Leonardo makes rapid innovation possible as it is delivered with a set of industry accelerators. They combine software and services that reduce the time of implementation considerably. In other words, the digital innovation system capabilities of SAP Leonardo are wrapped in a set of industry best practices gained from years of experience. All these accelerators combine industry knowledge, data intelligence, and software needed on an open innovation path.

Related Reading: What is Business Process Expertise in SAP and Why You Need it

SAP Leonardo has powered SAP’s own digital transformation: 

SAP is using Leonardo throughout the SAP portfolio to make its business suite and system of applications powerful. SAP Leonardo powers everything from SAP Ariba to SAP S/4 HANA, making them more intelligent.

In addition to improving reliability and efficiency, today’s ERP solutions have to be the foundation on which future business models are built. Rather than just making profits, businesses should focus on altering customer experiences and gaining new market shares. To become an intelligent enterprise, you need an intelligent ERP and SAP Leonardo is definitely the future!   

Contact us if you have a query on how SAP Leonardo can benefit your business. Our consultants will be able to assist you. 

5 Tips to verify business process expertise of your IT outsourcing partner

From creating growth models to maintaining healthy margins while managing ever-rising prices – industries today face a number of challenges. Being able to face this challenge is what sets successful businesses apart from their competitors. Business process expertise in SAP has helped businesses achieve just that in today’s hyper-competitive environment.

This blog will help you decide if you need industry and business process expertise in SAP. It also gives a few tips to help you verify if your IT outsourcing company is truly a business process expert or not. But before that, let’s find out what is industry and business process expertise in SAP.

What is Business Process Expertise in SAP?

Business process expertise in SAP can be attained internally or externally with individuals or groups of people who are experts in this field. Their job is to bridge the gap between business professionals and information technology.

Related Reading: Create Intelligent Organizations with SAP Model Company

Individuals with business process expertise are not only tech-savvy; they also understand the implications of the business process requirements and factors such as data volume, existing landscape, programming language, and security. They need to frame strategies by keeping in mind the legacy of the organization. They use their expertise in driving innovation within the organization and use best practices that go beyond the scope of a single department. They are ones who can recommend, design, and implement SAP solutions that are tailored for your business.

Why Do Businesses Require Industry and Business Process Expertise?

“Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.”-Benjamin Franklin.

True to these words, a business process is not a project with a defined beginning and an end date. If you desire the best results and want to ensure that your process grows and adapts to your business, you need to keep improving them continually. And that is where business process expertise comes to play. Business process experts ensure that your business experiences continual and long-term improvements on various metrics within the organization.

Having business process expertise adds to the skill set required to develop ongoing assessments and action plans, communicate changes and provide the necessary training that impacts your business units. The expertise could be used to identify who is truly performing statistically better or worse compared to others in the unit. This way, business process expertise helps businesses measure and monitor performance improvement initiatives. 

Let’s say you are now convinced that your business needs to incorporate industry and business process expertise. The next step is to choose the right IT outsourcing partner with the expertise you need. How can you tell if the company you are looking to hire is a business process expert or not?

Related Reading: 7 Tips To Ensure A Seamless Transition To SAP S/4HANA

Five Critical Skills to Look For In Your IT Outsourcing Partner

Your IT outsourcing partner should be able to understand both your business process requirements and the technologies needed to map, model and implement the required changes within the given time frame and budget. To this end they would require these five skills:

1. Experience: Your IT outsourcing company’s staff should have business process experts who have grown into their role by participating in multiple projects that involved members from both, business and IT. 

2. Modeling knowledge: Along with the knowledge of basic principles and theoretical concepts, business process experts should know modeling. They should be able to artfully describe objects, rules, and roles and should be able to relate them to your business process with a descriptive language from your viewpoint. 

3. Tool knowledge: An increased number of model-driven tools that go beyond the classical tools are hitting the market. Since the role of your IT outsourcing partner is to build the business process, they should be able to use SAP tools. They should be able to use those tools to impact the level of granularity or modularity of the model.  They should also be capable of implementing it within the same tool environment. 

4. Internal and external expertise: The company’s experts should be familiar with the internal structures, the evolution, the history and the long-term strategy of your business. They should know who or which unit would give them the needed support. You will have to check their aptitude in understanding your business. Externally, they should be able to bring in fresh views, especially those that have a long-term positive impact on your business.

5. Communication: The experts of the IT outsourcing company need to have the ability to move diplomatically on the slippery floor of communication. They should be able to explain the terminologies to each team without compromising the facts required for decision making and implementation. They should be able to break down complex facts to simple yet accurate definitions. 

Take the Next Step – Leap Into the Future

At Fingent, our SAP experts focus on creating measurable results that are customized to your needs. Fingent can help organizations to implement and manage SAP and non-SAP applications using the central SAP Solution Manager platforms. 

Talk to us to understand how you can take the leap with our SAP business process expertise. 

Seamlessly migrate to S/4HANA with these tools and methodologies

Digital transformation or innovation has become the topic of discussion in every boardroom and LOB agenda. However, many business leaders find that the complexity associated with digital innovation is a major obstacle preventing them from realizing any true value. Companies need a digital core to overcome complexity and drive digital transformation. SAP S/4 HANA is such a digital core that can help companies overcome complexity and thrive in today’s disruptive market. S/4 HANA helps you reinvent your business model by providing easy access to real-time data.

Related Reading: 7 Tips To Ensure A Seamless Transition To SAP S/4HANA

S/4 HANA implementation Methodology

Let’s jump ahead and have a look at the ‘new implementation’ scenario with SAP S/4 HANA. SAP recommends the SAP Activate Methodology for SAP S/4 HANA implementation. It succeeds the ASAP and SAP Launch methodologies and combines 3 core pillars – SAP Guided configuration, SAP Best Practices, and Methodology. SAP Activate Methodology offers both Cloud and on-premise solutions. It is a modular and agile framework that accelerates migration or implementation to S/4 HANA. 

SAP Activate consolidates the knowledge and accelerators to help you innovate faster than before. Throughout the project life cycle, SAP Activate follows 6  phases: Discover, Prepare, Explore, Realize, Deploy, Run. 

The SAP S/4 HANA Roadmap provides detailed information on implementation and specific methodologies. The Roadmap Viewer Tool is based on Fiori and aims to guide you on your SAP S/4 HANA journey by providing you project accelerators, templates for key deliverables and other relevant information on the product implementation. The methodology content is divided into the following hierarchy: Phases, Deliverables, Tasks. Additionally, companies can make use of the Value Assurance Packages for SAP S/4 HANA projects that follow the SAP Activate methodology.

Create Intelligent Organizations with SAP Model Company

Tools for S/4 HANA implementation

Data Migration is an important aspect of any system implementation. After moving to the SAP HANA platform, your data has to be of high-quality and should assist your business in achieving organizational goals. SAP provides tools to simplify this process. These tools do not require any programming by the customer and help you to reduce test effort and minimize downtime. 

• SAP S/4 HANA Migration Cockpit: This is a web-based tool that helps to migrate Legacy data into S/4 HANA. It is packed with a set of pre-existing objects that are updated with every release. Apart from the set of standard objects, you can also develop new objects or enhance the existing ones based on your specific needs. Migration Cockpit is available for S/4 HANA Cloud and on-premise from the S/4 HANA Release 1610.
• SAP S/4 HANA Migration Object Modeler (MOM): As mentioned earlier, the standard objects that come with the Migration Cockpit don’t always meet customized requirements. For such cases, SAP has provided another tool: SAP S/4 HANA Migration Object Modeler (MOM). Using this tool, you can create new source structures, manipulate existing ones, change field mappings, add rules to manipulate data and create totally new objects. The Migration Object Modeler consists of global data, source structures, target structures, structure mapping, and field mapping.  
• SAP Rapid Data Migration with SAP Data Services: SAP Rapid Data Migration with Data Services allows you to safely migrate your data within SAP systems. With SAP RDS, you can cleanse, transform and load data into new SAP applications easily and quickly.  
• SAP Readiness Check: SAP Readiness Check is a self-service tool to check the pre-requisites in software, requirements in infrastructure, functional implications of SAP S/4 HANA, custom code adaptations that are required and data migration requirements. This tool helps you to analyze whether your existing ERP system is ready for S/4 HANA adoption. You can find valuable information on sizing, add-on compatibility, use of Fiori and other details.  
• Guided Configuration for SAP S/4 HANA: In a cloud-based system, customers prefer pre-configured solutions for fast ROI. Hence, SAP provides a guided configuration for S/4 HANA which provides easy-to-use, web-based activities for personalization. With Guided Configuration you won’t have to define parameters in tables as you did in ERP systems. Thus you can greatly simplify the implementation process.   
• SAP Landscape Transformation (SLT) software: SLT is an ETL tool that helps to migrate and align any type of data in your current SAP landscape. This tool can steer you through business reorganization of any size. It automatically supports non-Unicode and Unicode conversion during replicating or loading. Thus the SAP LT tool allows easy and fast deployment.  

SAP has notified that from 2025, they will stop supporting ECC. So migrating to S/4 HANA is inevitable, to keep your business running. Since the clock is ticking, you need to make your move soon. The digital core that powers S/4 HANA combines CRM and traditional ERP and also enables a whole slew of cloud applications like SAP Ariba, Successfactors, C/4 HANA and many more. Get in touch with our SAP expert to get free guidance on migrating to SAP S/4HANA seamlessly.

SAP Model Company: Understanding the Significance and More!

With changing business requirements, you need IT systems that support rapid business transformation. Your company needs to focus on innovation that is result-driven. Traditionally you had an on-premise style of implementation where you spent around 6-18 months implementing a solution. But this approach is not feasible in today’s ever-changing environment. If only you could find tried and tested solutions that could speed up your digital transformation. Here’s where SAP Model Company comes in.

What is SAP Model Company?

The SAP Model company is a set of pre-configured, ready-to-use, end-to-end business solutions that focus on ramping up the company’s digital transformation process. These solutions are customized for a particular industry or line of business. There are many teams working to outline the core processes of an industry or LOB. They combine the best practices of various successful business transformation projects which are powered by the most modern applications. In other words, you get prepackaged reference solutions that are based on what other companies have done successfully. Thus, the SAP Model Company is so much more than the older typical environments like IDES. 

SAP Model Company is an industry solution that helps companies in their move to SAP S/4 HANA. Apart from S/4 HANA, the SAP Model Company also contains SAP C/4HANA, SAP SuccessFactors and many other SAP solutions. It can be used in both Greenfield and Brownfield applications. 

SAP HANA Technology – The Game-Changer

Why you need SAP Model Company?

• The complexity of SAP solutions overwhelmed users and hence they demanded guidance.  
• SAP users had little or no knowledge of how to use or implement industry and LOB-specific processes using standard practices.
• Changing times demanded rapid innovation. Companies required accelerators that helped to reduce the time of implementation and also reduced the risks of failure.
• Enterprises spent a considerable amount of time on the blueprint phase just to find out that their concept could not be implemented using current technologies.  

Significance of SAP Model Company

The SAP Model Company is a true reference solution. In other words, you are to use the Model Company as a dictionary. You look into it for the terms and definitions and choose what you would like to take into your landscape. If you find a 100% fit, you can directly import the processes from the Model Company into your development environment. 

However, the Model Company focuses only on really important processes. For instance, a Model company in oil and gas has a very limited scope on how to manage a pipeline, whereas in a real-life scenario you have more than hundreds and thousands of pipelines. You can refer to the configuration guides in the Model Company and then scale out as required. 

SAP Model Company is Future-proof!

In the words of Stephan Klein, SVP and SAP Model Company Lead, the Model company is set to become the baseline for the entire SAP product portfolio. It spans across all SAP solutions for on-premise, single-tenant, multi-tenant cloud and hybrid platforms in industries and LOBs and is completely interoperable. 

The planned portfolio for 2020 constitutes more than 30 model companies for industries and LOBs. The industry model companies include Consumer Industries, Service Industries, Discrete Industries, Public Services, Energy and Natural Resources. These industry model companies are structured on top of the LOB model companies such as Digital Supply chain, CRM and Customer Experience, Financial Services, HR and People Engagement. The very baseline of the portfolio is built on S/4 HANA Best Practices or on SAP S/4 HANA Multinational Corporation. 

Accelerate your business growth and intelligence with SAP Model Company

The SAP Model company contains market standard business processes together with their configurations. It aims to transform business processes by enabling enterprises to adopt industry best practices and incorporate innovative technologies wherever possible. 

Here are a few benefits of SAP Model Company:

• Faster time-to-value, freeing up your resources for further innovation.
• Accelerate your digital transformation by reducing costs and risks of implementation.
• Choose the right solution based on the industry reference architecture.
• Lower ratio of service costs compared to software costs. 

In the case of a cloud environment, Model Company services can be accessed immediately, within hours. If you want to use the Model Company on-premise, then you can start with your business users, fit-gap analysis or even your business blueprint design right away. You thus accomplish value-based outcomes in weeks rather than in months. Along with greenfield implementations, you can also use the Model Company as a sandbox system to facilitate back to standard discussions with your business. The end-to-end LOB-proven processes allow you to minimize customizations and benefit from the latest innovations with proven standard practices. 

Need help with your SAP Model Company implementation? Why not ask the pros? Contact us now!

Accelerate Your Transition to SAP S/4HANA With These Tips

Increasing digitization has caused businesses to face a multitude of challenges in their working environment. In order to map business processes and forecast better business decisions, your data and work processes to be analyzed in real-time. SAP S/4HANA is an intelligent ERP software designed to cover all your day-to-day enterprise requirements. It integrates crucial functions from various lines of businesses as well as industries and incorporates parts of SAP Business Suite Products. 

SAP will be offering its support for its ECC ERP software until December 31, 2025. Any business that seeks continued support from SAP will need to migrate to SAP’s flagship ERP software, SAP S/4HANA. Prior to performing SAP S/4HANA implementation or migration, you need to define your business needs and priorities. Having an appropriate migration strategy is crucial for achieving your goals with minimal disruption. 

Here are a few tips that will help you ensure a smooth transition to SAP S/4HANA. 

Tip 1: Analyzing The Right Platform That Addresses Challenges

Switching to SAP S/4 HANA successfully requires businesses to first analyze their requirements and budget. 

With the on-premise deployment of SAP HANA, the user gets to manage the entire HANA database, applications, OS, middleware, servers, networking, data centers, and virtualization. On-premise deployment of SAP S/4 HANA thus ensures control in addition to maximum risk reduction. This requires choosing a certified SAP HANA appliance from a hardware partner of SAP. Additionally, SAP HANA’s TDI (Tailored Data Center Integration) helps in reducing infrastructure costs.

Related Reading: How To Choose Best IT Infrastructure For SAP HANA

SAP S/4 HANA Cloud integration which is the SaaS version of S/4 HANA can function without the need for hardware, databases, or IT personnel. SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud is SAP’s very own cloud offer and provides improved flexibility, and scalability. 

TIP 2:  Providing User Support For Improved Decision-Making Process

The simple data model provided by SAP S/4 HANA makes it easier for decision-making and performance improvement. Hence, analyzing and identifying master grids in the system, specifically the key values that were not being used even after a key date provided by the user. This will prevent errors happening in the future. These benefits and necessary changes need to be provided to the users for better support to enhance the decision-making process. 

TIP 3: Real-Time Insights From Prepared Data To Ensure Reduced Down Times And Costs

Real-time insights are crucial for businesses to be able to optimize various processes involved. SAP S/4HANA platform involves a simplified data model that makes data migration quick and simple. SAP HANA provides advanced analytical tools that help in analyzing large chunks of data in real-time. A preparatory activity of cleansing data is crucial to avoid risks of licensing, downtimes, and so on.

TIP 4: Creating A Deployment Group Of SAP Experts

A proficient group of SAP experts is the key to ensuring a successful transition to SAP S/4HANA. The deployment requires conducting workshops on functional planning, which can be performed by an SAP partner or can utilize internal resources with adequate training as well. Getting the deployment group of experts on board might even require prototypes and test systems to be installed. This can be done quite inexpensively with the cloud.

Related Reading: SAP HANA Technology: The Game Changer

TIP 5: Creating A Detailed Road-map For Business

Mission-critical applications can now be separated from peripheral LoBs (Business line applications) with the SAP BIModal IT. These applications are developed on the SAP cloud platform and allow SAP S/4HANA to perform as the digital core of organizations. Additionally, SAP business services provide technical support services during implementation.

TIP 6: Planning Migration with High Industry Standards

All actions from the planning phase to migration are critical and require to be methodical. The SAP must be in its latest version for a smooth transition. Also, it is equally important to have backups and archive points to avoid unnecessary risks.

TIP 7: Create SAP Sandpit Environment Initially As A Proof Of Concept

Implementing a proof of concept is vital before performing the actual migration process. This helps in identifying various issues and resolving risks if any. It also supports the decision-making process and improves the overall performance of the project. 

SAP S/4HANA is the future of SAP. Ensuring a smooth transition to SAP S/4HANA is crucial for outcomes concerning data processing, analytics, overall performance improvement, and improved profitability. Get in touch with our SAP expert to get free guidance on migrating to SAP S/4HANA seamlessly.

Step By Step Guide To Help You Choose The Best Infrastructure For SAP HANA

Businesses today are undertaking the move to SAP HANA following the 2025 deadline by the Enterprise giant SAP who assuredly states that after 2025, all its’ systems will be built to run on only a single database, which is SAP HANA.

Why Choose SAP HANA

Along with providing a single and secure environment for all your mission-critical data assets, SAP HANA can ensure an increased improvement in the total cost of ownership as it is capable of managing large chunks of structured as well as unstructured data.

SAP HANA is tailored to enhance business outcomes as it is one of the prime data management platforms that came into being first and also is competent enough to handle all transactions and also memory analytics on a single data copy. Data integration and quality are other 2 key characteristics.

On a second note, if machine learning and predictive analysis along with advanced analytical processing are paramount for your business, then SAP HANA is definitely the best choice as your data management platform.

In this era of digital reinvention, SAP HANA can reduce administrative efforts considerably now and in the future by rapidly improving application development capabilities in today’s digital landscape.

Related Reading: Read on to learn how SAP HANA adoption is the new game changer trend. 

Ways To Choose SAP HANA As A Digital Growth Strategy

S/4HANA can be an integral part of a digital deployment and management platform for creating innovation and building business value for your company.

Also, obtaining real-time updates is crucial that SAP HANA provides along with big data analysis. When HANA is implemented into your SAP system, it helps in building an in-memory database which helps in providing faster execution. This can provide a wider digital reinvention strategy now and in the future to increase business outcomes. Let us now look at ways to choose the best infrastructure for SAP HANA and what it can offer to your business:

Related Reading: Find why should you choose SAP and how should you plan your budget for it.

1. Real-time problem solving

Real-time update paves the way into an increased business size. With SAP HANA, the data architectures have moved to complex data structures to provide a business process analysis using these real-time updates. The advanced analytical processing power of SAP HANA gets complex calculations performed in real-time and provides answers to the most pressing concerns in your business.

Also, creating visual insight-filled applications have been made easy with SAP HANA implementation.

2. Big data Analysis

Decisions are well-informed than ever before with the implementation of SAP HANA. Multidimensional analysis that leverages spatial and business data to create applications that overcome the performance of traditional databases.

SAP HANA can be thus used as the enterprise database for market-leading solutions.

3. All-Transactions On A Single Platform

SAP HANA is set up to be incorporated as an in-memory database system. High speed is a major advantage. Data integration and effective analytics contribute to the infrastructure.

Analyzing malicious use of the system and predictive analysis is thus made easier through this high-speed data processing technique.

4. Flexibility

Appliances and Tailored Data-Centre Integration (TDI) are the 2 major types of HANA platforms of SAP. This includes a pre-integration of both hardware and software systems. The integration of hardware can provide increased performance and response times. This also ensures key features such as peak performance, memory space, disk space, average load, CPU space, etc. These values are based on the various business processes, a number of users, other factors such as data retention times and much more.

5. Resilience Power

If long term performance is one among your core requisites, the SAP HANA requires the right infrastructure for faster in-memory execution. A proper environment and infrastructure can support application migration as well with ease before failures can happen.

For this, it is important to ensure that the data is not changing rapidly and unpredictably as it can cause the in-memory to slow down considerably.

6. Scalability

Statistics show that SAP HANA, though slow initially can increase the natural growth of structured data by about 20 percent yearly. Unlike other platforms, SAP HANA can take all the data onto the same platform, thus enabling scalability, in the long run.

This feature as it provides scalability feature for the company, it also provides the company with an added advantage of not having to implement fragmented deployments or other complex settings.

7. SAP Suite Of Comprehensive Services

 Big data analytics, a well-optimized and simple data structure, and an incorporated in-memory database together under a single roof ensure a suite of comprehensive business services from SAP HANA that enables users to work with high speed and virtualization capability.

8. S/4 HANA Suite

When a user needs to migrate, the Suite on HANA is readily available. A Suite is a tool that can be used for migrating from databases such as Oracle to SAP HANA. It provides users with optimized objects and code that yields a better and improved business performance and migration.

9. Accelerated Insights

Multi-threading features in SAP HANA ensure the availability of insights for your business. This helps in analyzing what changes are to be made to the existing system or what new features to be incorporated are.

10. Spatial Solutions

The advanced analytical power of SAP HANA can help in real-time calculations. This helps in building a better forecast on how to approach your business for profitable outcomes and also to understand what SAP HANA integration can do to your newly transformed system. Spatial and business data are thus leveraged to gain solutions for a faster business process.

11. Data Protection

Business analytical processes demand protection. SAP HANA is well-structured to store hybrid applications from entry-level to large businesses. This also reduces data center footprints and increases performance.   

SAP Insider has introduced ‘Iterative Sizing’ feature to analyze and measure system requirements. They are a 5-step process and is described as follows:

• Create a sizing project and enter relevant data.
• Obtain an initial sizing result for CPU, disk, and memory.
• Apply according to all SAP HANA guidelines.
• Check to verify all hardware configurations as provided in the SAP HANA directory.
• Provide the required SAP HANA vendor.

These 5 steps provide all the required steps to gather information about the infrastructure.

Related Reading: SAP Vs Oracle- Find who is winning in the race.

The quality operations of SAP HANA are essential as a good level of infrastructure build is required for the transfer of data to the server RAM from the disks. This can successfully implement SAP HANA into your business process. To get personalized assistance on choosing the right infrastructure for SAP HANA, get in touch with us today!

Despite the industry buzz over the past few years, benefits realization and simple operational stability after go-live are arguably the biggest challenges companies are facing when implementing their new ERP systems. Recently, 60% of organizations failed to realize the business benefits they expected from their ERP implementations!

Among the business management tools available today, numerous studies illustrate the key factors to consider before choosing an ERP system for your business. The “Clash of the Titans” report by Panorama Consulting summarized quantitative results from hundreds of ERP implementations across the globe. The results showed that implementing the SAP ERP system, and implementing the Oracle ERP system produced very different results for different businesses!

For instance, an Oracle customer spends less on its implementation. Compared to this, a SAP customer is able to offer an implementation timeline that is relatively close to what was forecasted to be.

Another research considered a data set of over 2000 respondents from 61 countries, to illustrate the value of the people’s respective ERP implementation. The results showed that SAP held the largest market share of three vendors, with a 22% share.

The Key Factors That Make SAP Stand Out

• SAP or Systems, Applications, and Processes deal with data planning.
• The use of SAP has been compatible with large corporations such as Microsoft and IBM. Oracle, on the other hand, stands for Object Relational Database Management Systems (ORDBMS) and can be hosted in a number of platforms.
• SAP is a business management tool that allows real-time tracking in addition to the management of sales, finance, accounting, and human resources.
• SAP does not follow the traditional information system management where each management tool is considered as an individual system that operates independently.
• SAP integrates business applications using ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning Software) and on the other hand, Oracle, an Object Relational Database Management System (ORDBMS), is used in enterprise environments.
• Development and deployment in SAP can include Oracle as a database system as it can be integrated with numerous databases.
• SAP performs with a single information pathway alone for their entire enterprise and all other common information.
• SAP applications cannot interact with their own systems but can interact with other processes in order for tangible business events to happen.
• SAP ensures easier functions of management. This includes integration and other functions.
• The SAP model runs on a programming language of the fourth generation. It is known to us as Advanced Business Application Programming (ABAP).

Related Reading: Check out how SAP HANA technology is the new game changer for industries.

On the other hand, Oracle is an Object Relational Database Management System (ORDBMS) that comes from the massive Oracle Corporation.

The Oracle Database Management System is created with at least a single instance of a particular application. These specific instances are specific processes of the operating system, also benefit the storage!

In a nutshell, the key differences between Oracle And SAP are as follows:

Related Reading: Find reasons why you should use SAP and how you can plan a budget for it.

Who is King In The Area Of Business Software?

SAP and Oracle compete mainly in the areas of Business Software like ERP, CRM, and SCM. SAP is said to have more installs than Oracle in bigger companies. Let’s have a walk-through across some key reasons:

• SAP Being The Pioneer

SAP ERP ran to the list first. SAP was already well established as a full ERP solution when Oracle was just starting to establish a Financials package for companies! By virtue of being first, SAP is well embedded in this environment.

• A Much Better Integrated Solution

The core SAP ERP modules were built from scratch to full integration. So when a change is made, all other related modules are updated immediately. This comes useful when you extend it with a CRM or SCM functionality.

• Mind-Share And Brand Recognition

Most companies/ people tend to have considered ERP implementation also as a status decree! They believe it increases their brand value.

• Support Factors

SAP has a much larger pool of developers and consultants with a much larger installation base!

Read: 5 Tips For Getting The Best Out Of Your ERP System

CIO Strategies Matter! – How SAP Drives Ahead Of The Game!!

There are several case studies to validate why SAP is preferred over Oracle by many Business and CIOs. They are as follows:

• SAP being the pioneer in ERP implementation

As SAP has been the leader and the pioneer in implementation, it preferred over Oracle with a brand value which indicates ERP leadership and preference.

• SAP is an in-house built product

SAP was built in house. It has worked with industry experts to evolve the ERP processes and is able to build a robust solution. It allows customers to customize SAP functionality and yet get the client specific processes defined in ERP.

• Robust integrated and scalable ERP

SAP has designed a highly integrated ERP which has world-class performance and scalable to multiple solutions. It also easies integrations with 3rd party solutions.

• IS –Solutions

SAP has provided additional IS solutions which are optional but they allow businesses to have specialized processes on single ERP which is well integrated and reap benefits for “best industry solutions”

• SAP Analytics

Integration on ERP and BI is notable and provides unbeatable performance and flexibility to define reports. Analytics based reporting Management to take real-time decisions

• SAP Support services

SAP provides class support services which give Business assurance of resolution in critical situations.

• SAP provides implementation methodology and Best practices and Tools

These tools provide a fool-proof implementation road map and reduce risks during the course of implementations. Following this guidance one can implement SAP in as less as 4 months; which means faster ROI.

• SAP Hana Features

SAP HANA with its “in memory” capability ensures super speed of processing data. The new UI solutions via Fiori give top class User experience.

In a nutshell, hiring the best qualified, focused and unbiased ERP can make your business more successful. So stay focused with our latest articles and blogs on SAP versus Oracle ERP implementation to go-live successfully!!

SAP, which stands for Systems, Applications and Products is an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system by SAP AG, world’s largest inter-enterprise software company based in Germany and the fourth-largest independent software supplier in the world. The basic idea of SAP was to enable employees/customers interact with a common corporate database for a broad range of applications used in companies. SAP applications have the ability to store, analyze, retrieve and process the enormous corporate data from production, operations, Human Resources, finance, distribution, and other business processes in the company. In 2015, SAP concentrates on five major market categories: Applications, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud and Database & Technology. SAP provides its products and services to more than 296,000 customers distributed in 190 countries that span small businesses to large multinational leaders, like IBM and Microsoft.

Why SAP?

• Medium sized companies face the challenge of limited resources (IT staffs, budget, and skills) and therefore, need to balance between appropriate levels of business value, functionality, support, and costs.
• Gartner forecasts that BI, performance management, and analytics will be widespread by 2020, unfortunately, midsize businesses are still struggling to go beyond fundamental reporting and analysis.
• With their very limited resources, midsized businesses will need an all-encompassing system that is affordable, easy and capable to support the company’s growth and efficacy.
• Increased adoption of mobile, Big Data (increases at over 40% every year), social networking and cloud computing in enterprises have all necessitated the need for change from the traditional technology stack being used in companies.
•  Customers are seen to spend less on hardware and services, and are heading to software-based innovation, social or collaboration technologies in cloud.

SAP adapts all these changes and lessens the weaknesses, making people centric cloud applications that cross the traditional boundaries of enterprises. These enable ubiquitous mobile friendly scenarios that empower new business models in developed and emerging markets. These solutions help to increase visibility into the business via real time notifications, reporting etc., which in turn favors better planning and forecasting of processes. It allows businesses to streamline their business processes through proper standardization, better performance and provides deep insights into their business.

SAP has numerous “run your business” products, for example, SAP Business Suite that is an integrated and diverse set of software modules for running businesses of any size; SAP Business-All-in-One that is a packaged set of software modules pre-configured for small and medium sized businesses with about 450 employees; or SAP Business one, which is a software package for small businesses.
According to CMI analysis, the market opportunity of SAP Business All-in-one is expected to rise up to $65 billion worldwide in 2016, across all its five market categories. SAP Business All-in-One, for instance is a very strong solution that satisfy the requirements of medium sized companies by integrating with their core ERP and innovations (SAP HANA Live, Fiori, Mobile) combined with local expertise and industry best practices. It is an ‘all-inclusive’ solution for medium sized companies that will significantly reduce the need for add-ons, reducing the costs and complexities, and accelerating implementation. It has flexible deployment options to satisfy capital and operating structure needs that includes subscription based hosting and deployment to the cloud.

SAP Pricing
Let’s consider for example, SAP Business Suite, the installation of which primarily requires 2 license models that are offered separately: a software license and its associated maintenance and support services. The software license is paid at the time of purchase. These licenses are perpetual without restrictions. The license fee varies according to the modules installed and the hardware the company currently runs in. The support and maintenance services provided by SAP for its licensed software are done for a recurring fee.
SAP business solutions has base ERP foundation and can be extended with application extensions as required by the industry vertical or line of business processes that are to be supported. Licensed third party products from SAP are generally considered as SAP applications and the maintenance and support of such applications differs from the SAP maintenance and support mentioned in previous paragraph. Third party software license included as a part of SAP products are required to use these applications in association with SAP software.
SAP licenses its software through a combination of Named user licenses and Package licenses. SAP pricing therefore encompasses per application licensing costs and per user licensing costs. Now, Depending on the package being licensed, the application licensing costs can vary depending upon a number of factors like: Application Module, number of employees, number of orders, revenue, Master Data Objects, number of plants or locations, number of customers, flat fee, and number of Users. Any user using the licensed packages needs to have the appropriate Named User license with different costs and capabilities. For instance, the Named user license cost and permissions for a developer will be different from that of a service user.
SAP Business Suite then requires a licensed, SAP compatible database which can be obtained from SAP or other third party vendors (Oracle, Microsoft, etc.). The costs of these databases vary based on factors like its features, size, number of cores, number of current sessions, memory of server and number of users. It should be then configured according to the SAP applications deployed in the business, with necessary server memory, hardware availability and processing power capabilities.

How to calculate Contract Price?

1. Add the list prices of SAV relevant price list items to determine the SAV (SAP Application Value): SAV is determined separately for discounted and non-discounted price list items and excludes all non-SAV items.
2. Apply the correct percentage to SAV to calculate the Database price. Calculate the discounted and non-discounted part of the database price separately.
3. Determine list price for the non-SAV items (items that don’t contribute to the SAV): the list price subtotal for discountable and non-discountable non-SAV items is performed separately.
4. Determine the Total list price: The sum of above three values (which is the sum of discountable and non-discountable part of SAV, database price and the non-SAV value).
5. Based on this total list price, calculate the Standard volume discount percentage.
6. Calculate Contract Price: apply the above discount percentage to discountable part of the total list price and add this result to the non-discountable value of total list price.

For a mid-sized company offering services, having about 250 employees (~100 users), a SAP Business All-in-one solution can cost around $579,700 USD including the SAP software, implementation services and Hardware. This will include modules like, financial accounting, Controlling, Materials Management, Sales, Manufacturing, Research & Development, Services, and Cross Functions and Analytics. Each of these has its own sub-modules, for example, in the Financial Accounting module the submodules covered by SAP All-in-one solution are: General Ledger, Accounts Receivable, Accounts payable, Period end closing financial accounting and Asset accounting. Similarly, you can calculate the SAP All-in-one solution estimate for different industries of different size.
What we said above is just a rough estimate; generally the cost of the business management software you opt depends on how you deploy it, covering 5 major areas like: Deployment model (where you can pay upfront), Software Licensing (costs vary according to the number of users and access types required), Implementation (Cost varies according to business requirements), Hardware (depending on your current hardware, you may have to plan budget for upgrades or new equipment), and Maintenance: maintenance and support services, upgrades, new releases cost etc.
At Fingent, we have helped enterprises start, manage and master SAP and non-SAP solutions using solution manager platforms, to improve their operational efficiency and lessen the business challenges. If you wish to automate your IT processes with SAP services, and would like to know the detailed structure, costs of implementation or any related information about it, get advice from our SAP experts.

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