SAP Community - SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud

Quality Assurance Approval & Instant Forward for Transport Requests in S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition

2024-07-23T11:09:12.904000+02:00

Introduction

Among the variety of features offered by SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition in their 3 System Landscape (3SL), 2 new features have been introduced to enhance the management and control of Transport Requests (TRs) in the Test tenant, focusing on ensuring the quality of these TRs.

3SL consists of 3 Instances viz. Development, Test and Production to develop, test and deploy various configurations and customisations to the Productive environment. These changes are transported via TRs to move the objects from one tenant to the other in a quality-assured and systematic way. You can find more details on 3SL and TR Management on the SAP Help Portal.

Quality Assurance Approval

With the launch of the “Quality Assurance Approval” (QAA) feature, the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition Test tenant now enables users to set the Quality Status of their TRs to either “Approved” or “Rejected”. Firstly, the user needs to have the Administrator Business Role for them to be able to access this feature. To activate this feature, the user must select the QAA option using the Settings button in the Import Collection app.

Fig 1 - QAA under Settings

A pop-up appears for the user to switch the QAA toggle from OFF to ON and then Save. Once the user enables this feature, a new column named “Quality Status” is displayed in the Import Collection app.

Fig 2 – QAA Toggle Pop-up

Fig 3 - Quality Status column

As and when a new TR is transported to the Test tenant, Quality Status is always assigned as Open. The old TRs which have already been forwarded to the Production tenant will also have the Open status. However, no action is required to be performed on the old TRs. Below are a few important points to remember while working with the QAA feature-

The user can Approve/Reject a TR by providing a Note along with it, irrespective of the Import status.
TRs can be forwarded to the Production tenant only once they are Approved.
Open or Rejected status will not let the user forward the TR. However, if the QAA settings are off, then TRs will be forwarded as per the initial “Forward Automation” settings.
Also, it’s required for a user to approve all the SAP Central Business Configuration TRs to move it to the Production tenant. If the user tries to reject those TRs, an error message will appear stating- “Collection of type SAP Central Business Configuration can't be rejected.”

Fig 4 - Approve/Reject dropdown

Additionally, the QAA feature is also available in SAP Cloud ALM (CALM) as “Approve for Production” button. The user can assign a TR to their Feature app and consequently Approve the assigned TR using the mentioned button. As of now, the user can only Approve the TR via CALM and not Reject it.

Fig 5 - Approve for Production in CALM

Instant Forward

When a user imports a TR successfully into the Test tenant, the TR will then be forwarded and visible in the Production tenant as per the scheduled batch job frequency which runs every 30 minutes based on the user’s Forward Automation Settings. Hence, the “Instant Forward” feature enables the user to let their TRs get transported from the Test tenant to the Production tenant as soon as the TR is imported into the Test tenant. However, if QAA is On, then only the Approved TRs will be forwarded instantly. Whereas, if QAA is Off, then all transports will be forwarded immediately.

To activate this feature, the user needs to open the Forward Automation option using the Settings button available in the Import Collection app. Once the Instant Forward checkbox is selected, all other options will be removed from the Forward Automation Settings pop-up.

Fig 6 - Instant Forward in Forward Automation Settings

Let’s deep dive into how these two settings work together through the below table:

Quality Assurance Approval Toggle	Instant Forward Checkbox	Quality Status	Forward Status Observation
On	On	Open / Rejected	Not Forwarded
On	On	Approved	Forwarded instantly
On	Off	Open / Rejected	Not Forwarded
On	Off	Approved	Forwarded as per Forward Automation Settings / Manually
Off	On	NA	Forwarded instantly
Off	Off	NA	Forwarded as per Forward Automation Settings / Manually

However, if there is an inter-dependency between the TRs then the scenario plays out a bit differently. Let’s say there are 2 transports TR1 and TR2 where TR2 is dependent on TR1.

Quality Assurance Approval Toggle	Instant Forward Checkbox	TR1 Quality Status	TR2 Quality Status	TR1 Forward Status Observation	TR2 Forward Status Observation
On	On	Open / Rejected	Open / Rejected	Not Forwarded	Not Forwarded
On	On	Approved	Open / Rejected	Forwarded instantly	Not Forwarded
On	On	Open / Rejected	Approved	Not Forwarded	Forwarded instantly but will not be imported in Production tenant due to dependency
On	On	Approved	Approved	Forwarded instantly	Forwarded instantly
On	Off	Open / Rejected	Open / Rejected	Not Forwarded	Not Forwarded
On	Off	Approved	Open / Rejected	Forwarded as per Forward Automation Settings / Manually	Not Forwarded
On	Off	Open / Rejected	Approved	Not Forwarded	Not Forwarded as per Forward Automation Settings. On manually forwarding, user will get an error stating that TR1 is not Approved.
On	Off	Approved	Approved	Forwarded as per Automation Settings / Manually	Forwarded as per Forward Automation Settings. On manually forwarding before TR1, the user will be prompted to forward the TR1 along with TR2 due to dependency. However, user can forward only TR2 by removing TR1 as dependency (i.e., by switching off the toggle, refer Fig 6) but TR2 will not be imported into the Production tenant until TR1 gets imported.
Off	On	NA	NA	Forwarded instantly	Forwarded instantly but TR2 will not be imported into the Production tenant until TR1 gets imported.
Off	Off	NA	NA	Forwarded as per Automation Settings / Manually	Forwarded as per Forward Automation Settings. On manually forwarding before TR1, the user will be prompted to forward the TR1 along with TR2 due to dependency. However, user can forward only TR2 by removing TR1 as dependency (i.e., by switching off the toggle, refer Fig 6) but TR2 will not be imported into the Production tenant until TR1 gets imported.

Fig 7 - Dependency Toggle for interdependent TRs

Please note that if the Production tenant is not provisioned then the user will not be able to see these 2 features since none of the TRs can be transported to the Production tenant i.e. the Test tenant will not have a target tenant. Hence, this will disable the need to have the Quality Assurance Approval and Instant Forward features.

Conclusion

Together, these features offer a robust framework for managing TRs, enhancing both control and efficiency in the deployment process. Users benefit from reduced manual oversight, streamlined workflows, and improved tenant reliability, ultimately leading to better management of enterprise resources and smoother operational processes.

Thank you for reading this blog post, hopefully, the blog post was informative and helped you to understand in detail how to use Quality Assurance Approval and Instant Forward features.

Configuring Standard API in S/4 HANA Cloud

2024-07-23T12:20:55.988000+02:00

Generating OData of standard API :

First we have to login to SAP business accelerator hub account and go to SAP S/4 HANA Cloud Public edition.

Choose a standard API as shown below

In this case I have choose the product master standard API.

Select the overview tab, under that we can see Communication Scenario ID.

Copy communication scenario from standard API. Now Move to the

S/4Hana cloud system -> Communication Arrangements

Select the Option New, and add a Scenario ID which we have copied from the Standard API

Create new communication system:

Search for Communication System in S/4 HANA cloud, here we need to create user and password for all OData services

Click on New,

System will ask for new communication system id and system name. we can give the ID & Name of our choice. And Click on create.

Give the Host name as shown below,

In User for Inbound Communication, click on Add and Create New Inbound Communication User. Click on “New User”

Give the username and description and select on proposed password to get the password which will give by system itself. (Copy the user name and password and paste somewhere so that, Once the user and password has created we can use the same for all the OData service Consumption.)

Click on create

Click on Save

Then add your custom communication system in this communication arrangement

Then you get required ODATA URL

Now will connect S/4HANA Cloud to Power BI or any other reporting tools through OData Feed. Example:Open Power BI->get Data->OData feed.

In the OData feed enter the OData URL generated in S/4HANA Cloud. And give user name and password that we have generated in S4hana cloud “Communication System” to get the OData url.

Then Click on connect.

Select the checkbox to data preview and click on Transform data or Load.

Overcoming Challenges in Staffing Customer Projects with SAP Project and Resource Management

2024-07-23T14:30:42.485000+02:00

One of the main challenges of staffing customer projects is ensuring that you have the right skills and expertise available to meet the specific needs of each project. This can be particularly challenging when customer projects are diverse and require a wide range of technical and functional skills. In order to effectively address this challenge, resource pool managers should maintain a thorough understanding of the skills and capabilities of their available resources. This may involve conducting regular skill assessments, keeping detailed records of each resource's expertise, and staying informed about industry trends and emerging technologies.

Another challenge is managing the availability and workload of resources. It is common for resource pool managers to be responsible for allocating resources across multiple projects simultaneously. This can be a complex task, especially when resources are in high demand and have limited availability. In order to address this challenge, resource pool managers have to prioritize projects based on their strategic importance, assess the availability and workload of resources accurately, and communicate effectively with project managers to ensure that resources are allocated effectively.

Additionally, resource pool managers may encounter challenges related to resource allocation and scheduling. It is essential to ensure that resources are utilized efficiently, and that they are allocated to the right projects at the right time. This may involve developing comprehensive resource allocation plans, establishing clear communication channels with project managers, and being adaptable to changes in project scope and requirements.

In order to overcome these challenges, resource pool managers nowadays have to rely on information technology that enable them to streamline the staffing process and cope with the growing number of resources requests.

SAP has therefore added a new cloud-based solution to it’s solution portfolio “SAP Project and Resource Management ” formerly also known as "SAP S/4HANA Cloud for projects". This solution specifically targets the resource planning and staffing process in service industries, but which can be also applied to any other industry managing large pools of project resources for internal and customer projects.

SAP’s latest project resource management solution offers three major capabilities to streamline the staffing process for customer projects.

Specify Resource Requirement

The first capability is to specify the resource requirement, which includes details such as the requested period for resources, total effort in hours, and required skill set for the job. This request can be created manually or automatically pre-filled from related projects in SAP S/4HANA cloud such as Professional Service Projects ( Customer Projects) and Enterprise Projects (planned to be available by August 2024 - Note: Roadmap is subject of change).

Traditional SAP S/4HANA customers with a private cloud or on-premise installation can create project demands in SAP Project and Resource Management using available APIs.

Review Resource Request

Review Resource Request Details

The Resource Manager receives via the resource request all necessary details to start the resource search process, while the resource requestor can retrieve the latest status and validate assignments.

Search and assign resource to request

The second capability is to search and assign resources to the request, where the resource pool manager can compare and assign resources that match the minimum availability and required skill sets. This ensures that resources are allocated efficiently and effectively. Details from the resource request are automatically used to generate a list of matching resources that full fill the minimum availability and required skill sets. In the Comparison View the resource pool manager can compare multiple resources head -to head to check e.g. Proficiency Level for each skill.

Before hitting the assign button the resource pools manager can adjust how much of the demand should be covered by this resource and in which period. The Quick Assign button skips this step and directly assigns the resource to fully cover the required demand.

Resource Comparison View

Comparison View in the Assignment Section of the Resource request

Optimize the utilization

The third capability is to optimize utilization, allowing resource managers to receive an overview of resource utilization in projects and available capacities for additional project work. This helps in distributing workload and achieving better utilization across all resources.

The Manage Utilization view is great way to quickly retrieve the status of the resource pool showing utilization and assignments per planning period and individual resource. Here the resource pool manager is able to drill down to individual project assignments and adjust the assignments, which allows him to distribute the workload in the team and achieve a better utilization across all resources.

Team Utilization

Team Utilization Overview Screen

In order to fully optimize the utilization of a pool of project resources, it is essential to have up-to-date information on their skills and job experience from previous projects. SAP Project and resource Management provides a self-service function that empowers employees to continuously update their skills, qualifications, and proficiency levels after completing new trainings or customer projects.

Resource Profile Page

Maintenance of skills and experiences in Resource Profile View

In conclusion, staffing customer projects as a resource pool manager can be a complex and demanding task. However, by maintaining a comprehensive understanding of available resources, managing resource availability and workload effectively, and leveraging technology to streamline the staffing process, resource pool managers can overcome these challenges and ensure that the right skills and resources are allocated effectively. SAP Project and Resource Management supports organisations with large resources pools to facilitate the collaboration between project managers , resource manager and team members during the entire staffing process. This leads to more accurate information about demands and capacities, shorter staffing cycles and reduced manual backoffice efforts.

For additional information on SAP Project and Resource Management please visit following pages:

Product page on www.sap.com

SAP Community Blog - The Two Project Control Possibilities

SAP Community Blog - How to improve Project Collaboration with Contractors and Suppliers

SAP Help Portal - SAP Project and Resource Management

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408亮点前瞻：技术话题（Technology Cross Topics）

2024-07-24T04:20:20.282000+02:00

1. 数据迁移

在SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition的2408版本中，Migration Cockpit新增了以下迁移对象：

以下迁移对象被标记为“Deprecated”：

如想了解关于数据迁移在2408版本中的更多信息，请查看以下链接：

Change Overview for SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2408 | SAP Help Portal

2. Belize主题弃用

在2408版本更新中，界面显示外观主题的Belize系列将被弃用。如果您正在使用这些主题，建议您更新到Horizon主题。

3. 锁定产品主数据特定字段不可编辑

在产品主数据应用中，新增了一个复选框可以锁定指定字段，被锁定的字段将变得不可编辑。

4. 更方便的查看扩展对象的更新

在之前的版本中，我们会在不同的文档链接中发布那些已更改、已删除、已弃用或新的扩展对象，比如CDS视图、API、业务对象接口等等。那样你会需要查看很多文档链接，不够方便。

现在，我们将在一个统一的链接里公布所有的扩展对象的更新，你可以使用不同的过滤器查看你感兴趣的更新。

你可以记住以下地址，该链接会始终打开最新版本的内容：

https://help.sap.com/S4_CE_CHANGES_EXT_OBJ

5. 在IAM Information System里查找业务角色和预定义空间的关系

当我们在给业务角色分配空间，想知道什么预定义空间分配给了哪些角色。那么，我们可以在IAM Information System应用里查找到这些信息。

点击Business Role - Launchpad Space，我们可以快速查找相关信息。

Highlights of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 Release

2024-07-24T11:36:16.508000+02:00

The second major release of the year 2024 is here! The SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 release is filled with innovations that boost your productivity and support your everyday work life.

I am thrilled to give you further insights on our fully-fledged cloud ERP, supporting your journey to the intelligent, sustainable enterprise in this blog post.

If you prefer rather watching than reading, you are welcome to check out my product update video:

Figure 1: Check out my top highlights of the release in this video.

Before I start with feature-based innovations, I am proud to announce that we have generally uplifted our system availability service level agreement for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and Integrated Business Planning from 99.7% to 99.9% for all our customers. This leap signals our reliability and the investments into technology, hardware, procedures, and automation that we continuously make to deliver a world-class SaaS ERP service to you. This marks another superior level of service availability and helps customers to plan business operations with greater precision at less risks. To put it into context: This cuts the upgrade downtimes by another 66%.

The new service level agreement sets a high standard for our cloud operations moving forward.

And there’s more: Since mid-July, GROW with SAP premium subscription has expanded to include SAP Sales Cloud and Concur Expense solutions. Both enhances our Cloud ERP and gives it more horizontal width to allow customers bring more use cases onboard our solution.

And we keep the good news coming! While delivering more functional and technical based value to our public cloud customers, we reduce the complexity of monetizing digital business models by bringing contract accounting and invoicing capabilities into the core SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition offering. With the 2408 release, SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition for contract and accounting will be part of GROW with SAP. We are giving our customers full access to the high volume, high performance and high automation invoicing, and subledger solution that focuses on service, subscriptions, pay-per-use, and multi-sided business models, without extra metering based on revenue and expenses. No action required for our existing GROW customers, the expanded functionality is included up to their licensed GROW FUEs and will automatically become available from SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 for all customers.

Learn more about GROW here: https://www.sap.com/products/erp/grow.html

Figure 2: Discover the value of GROW with SAP.

We offer you even more room to GROW: Constantly updating our methodology stays important! For this release, we are excited to announce significant updates to our GROW Adoption Plan, designed to streamline and enhance the adoption process for customers and partners. By integrating new deliverables and accelerators into the GROW Adoption Plan and SAP Cloud ALM, companies can achieve a faster and more efficient implementation experience. This release features GROW Adoption Plan tagging, combining new adoption deliverables and related accelerators, including the Multi-Country Deployment and Application Lifecycle Management accelerators with new content. Additionally, our updated quality gates now include the first iteration of adoption elements, which will further integrate into SAP Cloud ALM.

Available for some time, but in between releases and therefore, potentially new to some, we are also offering our customers guidance for transitioning from the two-system-based landscape to the three-system landscape of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.

Figure 3: We are offering our customers guidance for transitioning from the two-system-based landscape to the three-system landscape of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.

Also, SAP introduces new sustainability capabilities to support organizations in meeting their sustainability ambitions and goals as well as regulatory requirements. These include automated ESG reporting via the SAP Sustainability Control Tower and AI-enhanced carbon footprint calculations through the SAP Sustainability Footprint Management solution. Additionally, both solutions feature a carbon calculator engine for comprehensive emissions reporting, and the upcoming SAP Green Ledger will integrate greenhouse gas emissions into financial decision-making.

Speaking of artificial intelligence: A lot has happened here in the past months. With SAP’s Business AI strategy, we are defining the future by embedding SAP Business AI along our entire portfolio:

Relevant – Reliable – Responsible

Figure 4: With SAP Business AI, we accelerate your business processes and optimize decision-making.

Enough upfront news–without any further ado, let’s check out what I additionally consider as highlights of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 release.

Modern and Intelligent Experience

SAP User Experience

Through artificial intelligence, we help to get your work done faster and change the user experience–starting with our generative AI copilot, Joule. After a successful phased roll-out in the Early Adopter Care program, Joule will grace your SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition system with a continuous delivery shipment very soon, at current state of planning in quarter 3/2024. Joule works as follows: Formulate your business need in natural language and Joule will provide easy access to applications and data, lowering manual tasks and boosting productivity.

Figure 5: Our natural-language, generative AI copilot Joule provides easy access to applications and data.

SAP Business AI offers you a cutting-edge SAP Fiori experience via smart summarization and easy filter. Smart summarization jump starts your collaboration or follow-up by extracting the essential information of the object pages of the SAP Fiori elements applications you are using in the system. With easy filter, you can select data of “list report-based" SAP Fiori apps instead of defining filter values manually. All of this in natural language. These AI use-cases are available in beta testing. Check out the SAP Customer Influence page to sign up: https://influence.sap.com/sap/ino/#campaign/3698

Figure 6: AI-assisted smart summarization extracts the essential information of the object pages of the SAP Fiori elements apps you’re using in the system.

Figure 7: With easy filter, you can select data of “list report-based" SAP Fiori apps instead of defining filter values manually.

To enhance transparency around significant system changes, we’ve established a scalable communication strategy, allowing the delivery of important messages to specifically chosen customers and users, following the "need-to-know" principle. This in-app communication was highly requested by our customers and partners through advisory groups and our influence portal and permits us to spotlight essential customer activities in the system. Catering messages to such specific requirements facilitates delivering reminder information solely to those customers who haven't yet performed important requisite system activities and those users who possess the necessary authorization to carry out these tasks. A first example of this approach is the targeted communication pertaining to SAP Fiori launchpad settings, i.e., the switch to spaces and pages.

Figure 8: Target users get system pop-ups after login showing critical must-dos and must-knows for their user role including a linked document for details.

Finance

In finance, we introduce new review booklet for cost centers. This app provides a concise display of both actual and planned costs, organizing several predefined reports under 'Actuals' and 'Plan/Actuals' pages. It provides business applications that embed crucial insights into the relevant business context, supporting the answering of critical business queries effectively and efficiently. It seamlessly integrates application logic, guidance, and multidimensional insights and upholds the promise of "insight to action" within embedded analytics, enabling users to analyze actuals and plan data in a single report while providing the flexibility to toggle between guided views and generic slicing, dicing, and pivoting based on specific business requirements.

Figure 9: Display, analyze, and validate cost center data with the new review booklet.

Additionally, we enable you to analyze and summarize data from the cost-center review booklet into actionable financial business insights with the help of generative AI. This use case is available in beta testing. Check out the SAP Customer Influence page to sign up: https://influence.sap.com/sap/ino/#campaign/3698

Figure 10: Gain financial business insights with the help of generative AI.

GRC, Trade, and Tax

This release delivers an innovative experience in managing US-internal tax configuration powered by Joule. The process of maintaining tax jurisdiction codes and rates has been simplified from a dozen steps to only three! Users just can use a natural language prompt to retrieve detailed information from the AI, then verify, simulate, and save the configured tax jurisdiction codes and rates. Once the connection between your SAP system and the LLM is configured, users can chat directly with the AI to retrieve detailed address-based tax jurisdiction information. Furthermore, the LLM delivers links to the respective state tax or revenue authority, providing users with an easily accessible way to verify their tax rate information prior to simulating and saving the changes. This use case is currently available in beta testing. To register, check out the SAP Customer Influence page: https://influence.sap.com/sap/ino/#/campaign/3698

Figure 11: Joule helps to simplify the process of maintaining US-internal tax configuration.

Sales

One of the key highlights here is the auto-activation of the intelligent scenario for input recommendations for sales orders. This feature significantly boosts efficiency and cost savings by hastening the activation of the intelligent scenario for sales order recommendations. Implemented when scope item 73P gets activated, the system employs an auto-training mechanism that periodically trains the machine learning model based on the business data from the past year. Users have the flexibility to enable or disable this auto-training in the ‘Intelligent Scenario Management’ app. This functionality guarantees automatic set-up, training and operation of the intelligent scenario, making the sales order completion more efficient and intuitive while reducing costs.

Figure 12: Auto-activation of the intelligent scenario for input recommendations makes the sales-orders process more efficient and intuitive.

Product Compliance

With this release, we enable the generation of product compliance documents with integration into the safety data sheet process. Users can now generate a first selection of sections of an EU safety data sheet (without country/region-specific additions) for product compliance solutions using Adobe Document Services. This not only extends the product compliance solution with integrated document generation capability but also streamlines the generation of documents for product compliance data. This is based on versatile Adobe form templates and form data providers. The generated documents are seamlessly integrated into the safety data sheet process. This also comes with new apps to manage and release data for handling and storage as well as stability and reactivity of products, making it a comprehensive tool for product compliance.

Figure 13: You can now easily generate a first selection of sections of an EU safety data sheet using Adobe Document Services.

ERP Innovations

Manufacturing

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 introduces advancements in the ‘Monitor Material Coverage’ SAP Fiori apps. The ‘Monitor Material Coverage – Net Segments’ and the ‘Monitor Material Coverage – Net and Individual Segments’ apps now offer additional columns displaying the number of rescheduling proposals for a material. This improvement assists businesses in avoiding supply shortages or an excess of supplies. This is achieved by indicating the number of Material Requirements Planning (MRP) supplying elements with rescheduling proposals for each material. Additionally, the system can reschedule in, reschedule out, or cancel a process based upon a calculation for the entire planning horizon. The enhanced features enable better management of supply shortages and excess supply with MRP material coverage apps, providing a more effective and streamlined operation.

Figure 14: Manage supply shortages or excess supply with additional columns in the ‘Monitor Material Coverage’ SAP Fiori apps.

Supply Chain Management

In this release, we ship the warehouse-driven split of the outbound delivery order. This feature empowers organizations to separate packed and unpacked items, quantities, or handling units from an existing outbound delivery order into a new one. This offers increased flexibility in case a complete picking is not possible, added functionality if space in the truck is limited, and the ability to split outbound delivery order items for which no warehouse task has been created yet. It’s also possible to split handling units into a new outbound delivery order. The release therefore provides businesses with improved logistical abilities, offering greater adaptability in managing outbound delivery orders.

Figure 15: The warehouse-driven split of the outbound delivery order empower organizations to separate packed and unpacked items, quantities, or handling units from an existing outbound delivery order into a new one.

Solution and Subscription Business

Here, I want to highlight a feature from the latest CFD release which I believe has huge business value for organizations transitioning to solution-led business models. The introduction of advanced solution bundling enables you to pre-configure complex solution orders which can contain multiple configurable and non-configurable items, and sell them on a single solution order, providing greater flexibility whilst saving effort on manual input. This enables the sale of complex end-to-end solution offerings tailored to specific customer needs.

Figure 16: Pre-configured bundles can be added to a solution order and processed for further fulfilment.

Service

In this release, we enable you to add maintenance plan templates in service contracts. This enhancement simplifies the workflow drastically, particularly for those dealing with service contracts that include maintenance plans. During the creation process of service contract templates, you can already add maintenance plan templates to service contract items. After creating a service contract from a service contract template, the maintenance plan templates are also copied. When you release a service contract item, a new maintenance plan is automatically created using the maintenance plan template. If you don’t use service contract templates, you can add maintenance plan templates directly in a service contract.

Figure 17: Maintenance plan templates facilitate the service contract process significantly.

Enterprise Porfolio and Project Management

To better support the engineer-to-order process, we ship an innovation to reserve materials using project demand. When it comes to project demands, we offer three categories: resources, services, and materials. In the category of materials, we now offer ‘Project Stock Reservation’. A project procurement controller or project manager can select the WBS element, the plant, the material ID, the quantity, and eventually also the storage location, and then reserve material for a project on a certain date. Once the demand is requested, a reservation number gets generated. With the monitoring capabilities, you can view how many quantities have been delivered in case certain quantities in stock are issued against the material. This creates transparency for the project procurement controller.

Figure 18: The ability to reserve material using project demand makes workflows more efficient and project management more effective.

Professional Services

The shared risk-based revenue recognition for professional service projects feature addresses potential customer projects that exceed the initial scope, allowing service providers to bill at regular rates before charging reduced rates for any additional work. A new revenue recognition key (SPTMSR) supports this shared risk model. This enables more precise revenue recognition where additional work is required, increasing flexibility for revenue recognition and reducing manual efforts to adjust accrued revenues. In this model, if the need for additional work is identified, the system considers the reduced rate during revenue recognition. The feature signifies an important step towards enhancing accounting accuracy and transparency in service-oriented sectors, promoting mitigation of financial risk, and improving overall project management.

Figure 19: Shared risk-based revenue recognition for professional service projects enhances accuracy and transparency.

Sourcing and Procurement

A purchase contract is an agreement between a buyer and a supplier with agreed pricing, quantity, terms, and conditions. Since purchase contracts are long-term documents, they are subject to change over time. By enabling versioning of purchase contracts, businesses can meticulously track various versions of contracts each time a modification is made to an active purchase contract. Following alterations to fields set for versioning, the system automatically creates a new version. The new version can then become an active document, subject to the approval process. The versioning feature enhances transparency and efficiency by enabling comparisons between two document versions, including changes notable in pricing. This function ultimately aids in fostering improved collaboration between buyers and suppliers.

Figure 20: Versioning in purchase contracts fosters improved collaboration between buyers and suppliers.

Asset Management

In this release, we introduce an enhanced feature of recording the "As-Found" condition in the 'Perform Maintenance Jobs' app. The app offers maintenance technicians an improved way to record the initial condition of an asset during proactive and routine maintenance jobs, even when the maintenance order does not have a maintenance notification assigned. If the specific technical object differs from the overall order header, a new notification will be created automatically while the technician records the "As-Found" condition. Previously, the malfunction data tab was enabled only if the order has an associated notification. Now, these tabs are accessible by default in orders with notifications. Additionally, configurations can allow users to maintain malfunction data, thereby providing users with better recording of asset reliability data which in turn enhances the overall user experience.

Figure 21: We enhance the recording of the “As-Found” condition in the ‘Perform Maintenance Jobs’ app.

Environment, Health, and Safety

A new application for managing the investigation process significantly improves the tracking and oversight of investigation projects, allowing for more effective and efficient processes. The ‘Manage Investigations’ app offers a comprehensive platform where pertinent details such as investigation phase, persons involved, and timelines can be meticulously documented and managed. Administrators can determine the course and progression of investigations, and delegate necessary tasks for seamless operation. This new tool pursues both procedural integrity and simplicity, with a user-friendly interface coupled with robust functionality. Ultimately, it enhances user experience, strengthens accountability, and fosters greater efficiency in managing the investigation process.

Figure 22: The new ‘Manage Investigations’ app fosters great efficiency in managing the investigation process.

Two-Tier ERP

In two-tier ERP, Tier 1 acts as an original equipment manufacturer on SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition and Tier 2 acts as a service subsidiary on SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. With this set up, organizations can perform claims processing and subsequent reimbursements between their service organization and original equipment manufacturer. In this release, we introduce a refined warranty claim process, aiding you in effectively managing and navigating through the complexities of warranty claims. The process offers improved visibility into various aspects such as claim creation, processing, submission, and tracking. In addition, the solution accelerates assessment and administration of warranty claims with built-in automation that streamlines the end-to-end warranty management. As a part of service management, this efficient mechanism ensures quicker resolution time, reducing both manual effort and the overall operating cost for the business. Essentially, the enhancement in the warranty claim process signifies an evolution towards improved customer satisfaction and a more strategic approach to service operations.

Figure 23: The new warranty claim process offers improved customer satisfaction and a more strategic approach to service operations.

SaaS Foundation

Extensibility

The cloud extensibility model with a three-system landscape in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition enables customers to seamlessly leverage SAP innovations, resulting in future-proof extensions that are compliant throughout their lifecycle and do not require adjustments during cloud innovation cycles. With this model, we can develop cloud-ready business apps, services, or custom extensions that are both upgrade-stable and cloud-ready. With developer extensibility, as a customer or partner, you can use one-off delivery for ABAP development intended to remain within your SAP S/4HANA Cloud landscape which enables you to import the developed custom ABAP code in a three-system landscape into the test and production system of the current landscape.

With multi-off delivery, we take it a step further. Custom development can be performed by a partner on behalf of a customer, in a separate development system which is not connected to the customer landscape, and then deployed on the customer's three-system landscape using the ‘Git-Enabled Change and Transport System’ (gCTS). The source code of ABAP extensions is stored in remote Git repositories, with gCTS being used to transfer (push and pull) the ABAP custom code between SAP S/4HANA Cloud landscapes and Git repositories. This is especially useful for scenarios where source and target landscapes can't be connected via transport routes. The SAP Fiori app ‘Git-Enabled CTS (gCTS)’ helps to manage tasks such as connecting to remote Git repositories, pushing and pulling commits, and managing branches. Commits are created in the development environment using ABAP development tools for Eclipse (ADT) when a task of a transport request is released. Find more information here.

Figures 24 & 25: Multi-off delivery brings a multitude of possibilities for custom development.

Public Sector Management

Public sector functionality within SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition is broadening in terms of geographical availability. In addition to the US, Canada, and Germany, services such as grants management, budget management, and fund accounting is now also available in the UK, the Netherlands, and Australia. The global deployment of our service has started and is gaining great momentum. Be prepared for the availability in additional countries by the year 2025.

Additionally, we bring new, comprehensive budget management functionalities:

Addition of a Substitution Tool for Budget Maintenance.
Enhancement allowing the consumption of budget for expected expenses rather than the posting date.
Feature to check Public Sector budget availability using project hierarchies.
Updates to facilitate the generation of budget documents.
Improved reporting on budgets versus payments and open invoices.

Figure 26: This release includes significant updates to the early release enablement cycle for public sector.

R&D Engineering

In this release, we ship the integration of CAD design for data and file management. With this SAP Product Lifecycle Management solution, seamless interaction between engineering designs and SAP business processes is now feasible, i.e., you can easily transfer engineering bills of material (EBOMs) from the SAP Product Lifecycle Management solution and continue to work on them as manufacturing bills of material (MBOMs) in the relevant ‘Maintain Bill of Material (Version 2)’ app. The CAD tools extend their capabilities by being able to store files in the SAP PLM Product Data Integration (PDI), leading to the development of an Enterprise Product Structure within SAP’s Product Lifecycle Management. This integration simplifies the transfer of product data via product handover to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, reducing the number of interfaces and facilitating a smoother operation. The end result is higher efficiency in engineering processes, holistic product description for increased transparency, and reduced operating costs. Overall, it signifies a major stride towards optimizing product data management in industry-specific CAD applications.

Figure 27: The integration of CAD design for data and file management enhances your engineering processes.

Business Partner Data

This release presents an enhancement in data privacy management, allowing users to concurrently assign data controllers along with specific purposes to business partners. This upgrade significantly bolsters the concept of “privacy by design and default” by permitting users the flexibility to manually or automatically attach data controllers to business partners. With options to leverage this feature via the ‘Maintain Business Partner’ and ‘Manage Business Partner’ SAP Fiori apps or through API channels, businesses can effectively manage their partner master data. This advancement not only ensures timely compliance with stringent data protection regulations but also molds business processes to instill trust among partners and customers. By enhancing the data privacy landscape, this feature equips businesses with the edge to meet legal requirements and foster a venerable relationship with their customers.

Figure 28: You can now assign data controllers along with specific purposes to business partners.

Information Lifecycle Management

SAP Information Lifecycle Management (SAP ILM) allows users to manage the lifecycle of live and archived data. Users can set rules for managing data throughout its lifecycle, specifying how long it should stay in the database, how long it should be archived, and when it should be deleted. This can be done consistently across development, test, and production systems. With the 2408 release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, one key feature is the self-service configuration user interface (SSCUI). This tool allows users to centrally maintain SAP ILM settings and transport them across the system landscape i.e., development, test and production systems, reducing the risk of errors and inconsistencies. Another key feature with this release is the storage of archive files to SAP HANA Cloud data lake files, ensuring fast and efficient access to archived data. Previously, these files were stored in the Neo platform. This change helps to store the SAP ILM archive files on a future-proof, fast, and cost-efficient technology stack, supporting both SAP ILM use cases: data volume management and data privacy. This change exclusively affects the underlying technology stack, with no impact on usability.

You can find more information here.

Figures 29 & 30: SAP Information Lifecycle Management (SAP ILM) allows users to manage the lifecycle of live and archived data.

Identity and Access Management

Unlock the full potential of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition with the unified access to documentation about Identity and Access Management (IAM) on SAP Help Portal! With this, we provide a simplified, one-stop shop for all IAM-related documentation, making it easier for users to access everything you need to know about user and identity management, roles, authorization, and authentication. The documentation covers all IAM-related tasks in the different phases of implementation (prepare, realize, run, and upgrade) making the process more streamlined and efficient. This unified access to IAM documentation provides a holistic view on IAM for SAP S/4HANA Cloud and integrated products from initial system access to tasks which need to be completed before, during, and after upgrading SAP S/4HANA Cloud and allows you to familiarize yourself with its key concepts.

Figure 31: Check out the documentation about Identity and Access Management on SAP Help Portal.

Summary

You see, the world is turning fast, and we keep you at the forefront of progress–but these are by far not all innovations we have in store with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408. Stay tuned for the individual blog posts diving deeper into selected lines of business and industries.

Don’t hesitate to leave a comment and check out our community page to ask your questions and engage with the experts. Follow the PSCC_Enablement tag to stay up to date with our latest blog posts.

📽️ Watch the Replays of Our SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 Early Release Series!

From July 8 to July 12, we hosted a series of 20 compelling live sessions to highlight the exciting innovations shipped with the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 release. Missed the live sessions? We've got you covered! Take advantage of the entire series or pick and choose the sessions most relevant to you. Don't miss this chance and watch them on demand–anywhere, anytime.

🔎Find All of Our Assets

SAP S/4HANA Cloud is the foundation of the intelligent, sustainable enterprise and is an innovative, robust, and scalable ERP. We at Cloud ERP Product Success and Cloud Co-Innovation offer a service as versatile as our product itself. Check out the numerous offerings our team has created for you below:

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408: Final What's New & Product Assistance available

2024-07-24T15:01:24.404000+02:00

With immediate effect, the final What's New information for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 is now available. SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition is based on the technical product SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

To access the Final What’s New information, please use the What’s New Viewer.

For further formats and languages of the What's New information, as well as pre-filtered views, please use the following SAP S/4HANA Cloud Help Portal page.

In addition, the final Product Assistance (aka Application Help) for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 is available. Please use the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition Help Portal page to access the Product Assistance in multiple languages.

For you as a customers, we recommend to also use the Release Assessment and Scope Dependency (RASD) tool.

The Release Assessment and Scope Dependency (RASD) tool provides you with a personalized and tailored view on What’s New information based on the activated and used scope within your system. The information for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 will be available in RASD within the next few days. A valid Customer S-user ID is required for login. We recommend to use RASD to prepare for upgrades and updates of your system and to focus on the new and changed features that are relevant for you as a customer.

There is a new commenting feature available for the What’s New in the release SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2408. The feature is now available for this release as part of a pilot that will end on August 21, 2024. During the pilot, authors will evaluate your feedback and incorporate it into the documentation, if needed. We hope that by opening this channel of communication, we can learn how to further improve our What’s New content for you.

To use this feature, you need to be logged into the Help Portal. The feature will only be available in the English version of the documents. To learn more about how the feedback process works in SAP Help Portal, see Giving Documentation Feedback.

Finance in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408

2024-07-24T15:44:29.849000+02:00

Hello everyone, Uli here from SAP's Product Engineering Finance Team. I'm thrilled to share an update on our latest release - SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 for Line-of-Business Finance. This update highlights significant innovations including business AI:

Financial Planning and Analysis: Cost Center Review Booklet
Financial Planning and Analysis: Review Booklet for Cost Centers: Gaining Financial Business Insights Powered by AI (Beta)
Financial Planning and Analysis: Service Profitability Review Booklet
Financial Planning and Analysis: Review Booklet: Updated Value Help, Additional Dialogs and Commenting for Review Booklet
Financial Planning and Analysis: Hotspots in Multidimensional Data Grid Apps
Accounting and Financial Close: SAP Fiori app ‘Manage Operating G/L Accounts’
Asset Accounting: AI-assisted Explanation of Fixed Asset Depreciation Keys (Beta)
Asset Accounting: SAP Fiori app ‘Post Asset Revaluation’ to Manually Readjust Asset Values
Asset Accounting: API for Asset-revaluation Postings
Group Reporting: SAP Group-level Green Ledger: Managing Greenhouse Gas Emissions for Group Reporting
Contract and Lease Management: Intercompany lease processing enablement in Contract and Lease Management
Event-Based Revenue Recognition: Support for imminent-loss handling for fixed-price customer projects and project-based sales
Event-Based Revenue Recognition: Shared-risk-based Revenue Recognition for Professional Service Projects
Cash Management: Optimization of Cash Flow Reporting by Including an Estimated Value of Default Bank Accounts
Advanced Payment Management: Migration Concept from In-house Cash to In-house Banking
Advanced Payment Management: Integration of Bank Account Management and In-house Banking Through Electronic Messaging
Accounts Receivables: Automated Fallback Processing Rules

Video 1: Release Highlight Video for Finance in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408

Here are the topics covered in the release video:

Financial Planning and Analysis: Cost Center Review Booklet

First off, we introduce the new Cost Center Review booklet, the second member of our highly acclaimed Review Booklet series. This tool allows overhead accountants to analyze and validate cost center data through predefined reports. It offers transparency in cost center reporting with business applications that combine application logic and comprehensive insights tabled in a user-friendly interface. You can effortlessly analyze and strategize actuals and plan efficiently for different scenarios.

With this app, you can display, analyze, and validate cost center data. The app displays information about actual and planned costs and groups several predefined reports under Actuals and Plan/Actuals pages.

Value Proposition

The cost centers review booklet helps overhead cost accountants achieve more transparency into cost center reporting by:

Providing business applications that embed insights into the relevant business context and help answer critical business questions for daily jobs out of the box.
Representing a new category of SAP Fiori apps that combine application logic and guidance with integrated multidimensional insights.
Helping to fulfill the promise of insight to action within embedded analytics.

Demo 1: Cost Center Review Booklet

Capabilities

Analysis of actuals and plan data in one report based on predefined pages to answer critical business questions efficiently.
Switch between guided views and generic slicing, dicing, and pivoting based on your business needs.

For more information, see Cost Centers Review Booklet

Financial Planning and Analysis: Review Booklet for Cost Centers: Gaining Financial Business Insights Powered by AI (Beta)

You can now gain financial business insights powered by AI. This feature employs a digital assistant to radically streamline your data analysis process. Whether it's analyzing tabular data or sharing results directly from our app, managing cost center data has never been easier. What's more - this feature is currently in our AI beta program, offering you a sneak peek into the exciting future expansions of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.

Value Proposition

This feature supports you, as an overhead accountant, with the following tasks:

Analyze cost center data with increased efficiency.
Understand and interpret data with the help of the digital assistant (powered by generative AI).

Demo 2: Gaining Financial Business Insight Powered by AI

Capabilities

Based on the Actuals or Plan/Actuals page you’ve selected, you can:
Analyze tabular data.
Summarize tabular data.
Edit, copy, export, and share the results directly from the app.

For more information, see: Get Involved Early. Register and experience the latest AI features in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and influence upcoming AI developments.

Financial Planning and Analysis: Service Profitability Review Booklet

We present the third member in the review booklet series: the Service Profitability Review Booklet for sales accountants. This booklet offers an in-depth, interactive glance at service-related financial Key Performance Indicators. You can now validate KPIs like billed revenue, recognized revenue, revenue adjustment, deferred revenue, accrued revenue among others under Margin Views - demystifying all dimensions of service profitability for service orders and service contracts. Easily stay ahead of your finances and ensure your service profitability stays right on target.

Value Proposition

You can analyze the following KPIs under Margin Views:

Revenue KPIs: Billed Revenue, Recognized Revenue, Revenue Adjustment, Deferred Revenue, Accrued Revenue.
Cost KPIs: Actual Costs, Recognized COS, COS Adjustment, Deferred COS, Accrued COS.
Margin KPIs: Recognized Margin.
Other KPIs: Reserves (You can monitor plan and actual comparison for P&L accounts).
KPIs: Actuals, Baseline, Ongoing.

Demo 3: Service Profitability Review Booklet

Capabilities

For Service Order you can report on margin views, actual view, and plan information.
For Service Contract you can report on margin views and actual view.
Line items will only be included in the calculation if the journal entry is assigned to a service (the service document is filled in the journal entry). Values are Shown in the company code currency.

For more information, see What's New Service Profitability Review Booklet

Additional innovations not covered in the video:

Financial Planning and Analysis: Review Booklet: Updated Value Help, Additional Dialogs and Commenting for Review Booklet

The Group Financial Statements Review Booklet has been enhanced with the following features: Active Page Filters button, Add Calculation function (see image), Conditional formatting dependent on threshold values in views and hierarchy in context menu.

Capabilities:

Active Page Filters button: It displays the number of active filters, and you use it to open the Page Filters panel in the side panel. This is where you add and remove page filters and their values.
Add Calculation: You can create calculations based on the measures or structures of your data source and add them to your table and chart.
Save conditional formatting in views: On the Formatting tab, you can define threshold values and display them with different background colors or as colored values. Now you can save such formatting as part of a private or public view.
Hierarchy in context menu: You can open the context menu of a hierarchy to drill to a lower level in the hierarchy or open all levels.

Figure 1: Add Calculation in Group Reporting Review Booklet

For more information, see: SAP Help Portal.

Financial Planning and Analysis: Hotspots in Multidimensional Data Grid Apps

As of release SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2408, you can see for which UI elements in-app help is available.

Value Proposition

So far, the in-app help was displayed in the help panel but you couldn't see the connection between the information and the UI. This has not been resolved.

Capabilities

How it works: Choose the question mark in the upper right corner to open the in-app help. The help panel on the right opens, and the little question marks (hotspots) tell you for which UI elements in-app help is available. To display the help, choose the question mark for the UI element you're interested in.

Figure 2: Hotspots on Help Topics in Multidimensional Data Grids

For more information, see: SAP Help Portal.

Accounting and Financial Close: SAP Fiori app “Manage Operating G/L Accounts

With the Manage Operating G/L Accounts app, you can perform actions to master data of operating G/L accounts depending on your role and the system that you access.

Value Proposition

View the master data of operating general ledger (G/L) accounts.
Create a new operating G/L account by copying an existing one, and adapt it according to your need.
Efficiently activate a new operating G/L account in a company code by copying company code-specific settings from one source company code to one or multiple target company codes.
Enable mass change of attributes of multiple operating G/L accounts.

Capabilities

Streamline processes by focusing on operating G/L accounts.
Increase performance through a modern SAP Fiori app.
Smooth the user experience with a harmonized UI.

Figure 3: New Manage Operating Chart of Accounts App

For more information, see: SAP Help Portal

Asset Accounting: AI-assisted Explanation of Fixed Asset Depreciation Keys (Beta)

Analyzing asset values for different depreciation areas can be difficult due to complex depreciation key settings. Powerful SAP Business AI helps you to easily understand the configuration settings of depreciation keys, resulting in efficiency and better decision-making for asset accounting and financial reporting.

Value Proposition

Reduce the time to onboard an asset by reducing the time to understand the complex setup of depreciation keys.
Improve business user productivity by easily understanding the asset and depreciation values.
Reduce the time to process periodic activities by reducing the time it takes to understand depreciation values. Periodic activities can be performed efficiently and in less time.

Demo 4: AI-assisted Explanation of Depreciation Key Configuration

Capabilities

Explains how depreciation keys operate and the rationale behind the system's depreciation calculations in a user-friendly and easy-to-understand natural language for business users.

More information: Customer Influence Page under SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, AI-assisted explanation of fixed asset depreciation keys in Finance.

Asset Accounting: SAP Fiori app ‘Post Asset Revaluation’ to Manually Readjust Asset Values

Use the SAP Fiori app Post Asset Revaluation (F7775) to manually post revaluations for assets and adjust asset values to either reflect inflation or apply market value principles. From the Manage Fixed Assets app (F3425), you can navigate to the SAP Fiori app Post Asset Revaluation (F7775) by choosing the Post menu button.

Value Proposition

Improved flexibility in asset revaluation postings, for example, by processing revaluation postings to offset an inflation-related cash devaluation or to apply market value principles in Asset Accounting.
Apply revaluations to acquisition and production costs (APC) and ordinary depreciation amounts.

Demo 5: New Post Asset Revaluation App

Capabilities

Post revaluation for an asset acquired either in the current fiscal year or in a previous fiscal year.
Revaluate an asset for selected ledgers and depreciation areas.
If necessary, adjust the specified revaluation amounts before the actual posting, by displaying the asset line items and choosing the Adjust Translated Values button.

More Information: Help Portal (Documentation) under Post Asset Revaluation.

Asset Accounting: API for Asset-revaluation Postings

Import asset revaluation postings into your SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition system using the API Fixed Asset – Post Asset Revaluation (API_FIXEDASSETREVALUATION_G4BA). You can use the OData version 4 service to post a one-time revaluation for one or more assets.

Value Proposition

Increase flexibility in asset revaluation postings.
Improve data accuracy compared to manually entering revaluation postings.
Reduce costs compared to manually entering revaluation postings.

Capabilities

Perform asset revaluations for multiple assets in one request.
Revaluate assets for selected ledgers and depreciation areas.
Apply revaluations to acquisition and production costs (APCs) and ordinary depreciation amounts.

More Information: Help Portal (Documentation) under Fixed Asset – Post Asset Revaluation.

Group Reporting: SAP Group-level Green Ledger: Managing Greenhouse Gas Emissions for Group Reporting

With this release, Group Reporting provides you with specific additional fields to support you in fulfilling mandatory quantitative disclosures for the emissions of greenhouse gas. After activating a business function, the following new fields are available to maintain the greenhouse gas emission quantity breakdowns in your SAP S/4HANA Cloud system:

GHG Scope
GHG Categor
Scope 2 Calculation Method
Mode of Transport
Scope 2 Contractual Instrument

These fields are visible in the Define Consolidation Master Data Fields configuration step.

Value Proposition

The fields support you in becoming aware of your company's carbon emissions, understanding their financial implications and increasing efficiency in managing greenhouse gas emissions.

Figure 4: New Fields to Maintain GHG Emission Quantity Breakdown in Group Reporting

Capabilities

Define additional master data for greenhouse gas.
Import consolidation-related greenhouse gas entries into the consolidation system.
Define selections for restricting the data range for relevant greenhouse gas fields.
Upload reported greenhouse gas data for one or several periods.
Check the logs of the consolidation task for reclassification along the consolidation process for greenhouse gas data.
Make manual postings to adjust the reported greenhouse gas data.
Post multiple manual journal entries to adjust the reported greenhouse gas data.
Display line items of posting documents relevant for greenhouse gas data.
Display different views on consolidated greenhouse gas data.
Display, analyze, and validate greenhouse gas data.

For more information, see: Fields for Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Additional Fields for Greenhouse Gas.

Contract and Lease Management: Intercompany lease processing enablement in Contract and Lease Management

With this feature, you can manage real estate lease processes between two companies that belong to the same corporate group.

Value Proposition

Streamline the process of tracking and managing assets and their use across different divisions of a company, boost operational efficiency, and increase transparency.
Ensure optimal use of company assets by clearly defining the rights and responsibilities of each entity.

Figure 5: Intercompany Assignment of Usable Object

Capabilities

Manage intercompany lease-out contracts.
Manage intercompany lease-in contracts.
Make periodic postings for intercompany lease contracts (accounts receivable and accounts payable.
Run periodic valuation for intercompany lease contracts.

For more information, see: What’s New: Intercompany Lease Processes in Contract and Lease Management.

Event-Based Revenue Recognition: Support for imminent-loss handling for fixed-price customer projects and project-based sales

With this release, Event-Based Revenue Recognition provides a new option to automatically handle imminent loss for your projects. If you enter into a contract with a customer, you would expect the potential revenue of the contract to exceed the expected cost to generate profit. However, this might not always be the case. Per accounting standard, if the costs of a contract that the company expects to incur to fulfill the contract surpass the economic benefits it expects to receive from it, this contract is considered onerous. If a loss is expected in this type of contract, the entire loss should be recorded in the income statement.

Using the integration with customer projects, Event-Based Revenue Recognition assists in adhering to the accounting requirements for fixed-price projects with an expected loss including professional service projects and revenue-carrying enterprise projects.

Value Proposition

Enable automatic imminent-loss handling for fixed-price projects in project-based services and project-based sales.
Automatically identify a WBS billing element as onerous, if the planned costs are higher than the planned revenue.
Record a loss reserve for the expected loss in the income statement.
Adjust the loss reserve according to the cost-based percentage.

Figure 6: Record a Loss Reserve

Capabilities

Support customers in meeting international accounting regulations.

For more information, see: Loss Handling with Event-Based Revenue Recognition

Event-Based Revenue Recognition: Shared-risk-based Revenue Recognition for Professional Service Projects

With this release, the new revenue recognition key SPTMSR is available. Its purpose is to support the shared risk model for customer projects of the time and expenses contract type. In the shared risk model, the service provider agrees with the customer on an initial scope within which the customer can be billed at regular sales rates. The possible risk of having to provide services beyond the initially agreed scope is already foreseen at project creation. These additional services or costs shall be billed to the customer at a reduced sales rate. Billing at reduced sales rates for the same billing element can be achieved by creating a second work package assigned to the billing element with dedicated sales rates defined for the second work package. With this revenue recognition key, you can conduct revenue recognition for this scenario and calculate revenue recognition values for both work packages.

Value Proposition

Focus on time and expense-based projects in which the customer agrees to share risk by being charged a reduced rate if additional work is needed to achieve the project scope.

Figure 7: Shared-risk-based EBRR Posting Scheme

Capabilities

Enable more precise revenue recognition for the described scenario, where a reduced rate is agreed upon if additional work is needed to achieve the scope. During revenue recognition, the reduced rate for additional work is considered not only once the additional work is done but also once it is known that additional work is needed.

Cash Management: Optimization of Cash Flow Reporting by Including an Estimated Value of Default Bank Accounts

Since SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2408, you can keep the liquidity item through the whole document chain when the cash flows are moved from the Treasury and Risk Management data source to the One Exposure data source.

Value Proposition

Empowering the cash manager to define the rules for estimating cash flow values for the default bank account without having the bank account information, such as cash flows from accounts receivable or accounts payable invoices.

Figure 8: AP Fiori app Short-Term Cash Positioning to view forecasted cash flows

Capabilities

Provide the cash manager with a complete view of cash flows including bank accounts Use the SAP Fiori app Short-Term Cash Positioning to view forecasted cash flows.

For more information, see: SAP Help Portal

Advanced Payment Management: Migration Concept from In-house Cash to In-house Banking

Setting up an in-house bank can lead to increased manual effort. Using an automation concept, master data should be created automatically.With edition 2408 there are two new migration object within migration cockpit available for in-house banking.

Value Proposition

Enable migration services to automate the creation of master data in in-house banking.

Demo 6: Master Data Migration from In-House Cash to In-House Banking

Capabilities

Provide a straightforward way to help customers move from in-house cash to in-house banking.
Provide migration object for in-house banking accounts and in-house banking conditions.

For more information, see: SAP Help Portal

Advanced Payment Management: Integration of Bank Account Management and In-house Banking Through Electronic Messaging

The new bank correspondence framework in the Manage Bank Accounts app allows users to efficiently manage their bank account-related attachments and electronic messages in a centralized location. With this feature, the bank account opening processing in Bank Account Management is now connected with In-House Banking to provide you with a more simplified and streamlined process of opening in-house bank accounts based on electronic messages of ISO20022 standard.

Value Proposition

Simplified integration between Bank Account Management and In-House Banking enables easy setup of individual in-house bank accounts, complementing the existing mass creation method via XML upload.
Streamlined and traceable process of opening in-house bank accounts through electronical messaging-enabled bank correspondence.
Enhanced transparency and traceability in bank related communications.
Easy access to important documents organized in one central place.

Demo 7: In-House Bank Account Opening via eBAM

Capabilities

Centralized management of all correspondence objects, including electronic messages and attachments, related to the account opening process.
Streamlined and traceable process of opening in-house bank accounts in Bank Account Management by integrating with In-House Banking.
Creation of new in-house bank accounts, sending requests to In-House Banking, receiving responses, and updating both the in-house bank account master data and the bank account master data.

For more information, see: Opening In-House Bank Accounts via Bank Correspondence and Managing Bank Correspondence

Accounts Receivables: Automated Fallback Processing Rules

In the Manage Processing Rules – For Bank Statements and Manage Processing Rules – For Lockbox apps, you can create and automate processing rules that make bank statement processing and lockbox processing easier and smoother. Sometimes, bank statement items and lockbox items do not apply to any of the processing rules’ conditions in your system. In such a case, the system cannot process the items and you need to manually reprocess them.
To address this problem, we have created a special type of automated processing rules: “Fallback Rules”. As the name suggests, the system can now use automated fallback processing rules as a fallback. Fallback rules have a more simplified Conditions section where you can only enter conditions for company codes. This way, you can determine that items that could not get processed by other processing rules are processed in a certain way, according to the actions that you have defined in the fallback rule for the respective company code.

Value Proposition

Reduced number of unprocessed bank statement items and lockbox items.
Reduced manual effort in reprocessing items.
Easy to use and simple to create.

Figure 10: Automated Fallback Processing Rules

Capabilities

The Conditions section is already partly filled in, so you just need to enter the respective company codes.
You can immediately decide whether you want the fallback rule to carry out a one-step or two-step posting.
You can choose any of the four available action types: G/L Posting, AP/AR Posting, Clear in Sequence and Reprocess Items.
Fallback rules are immediately active as soon as you have created them.

Don’t hesitate to leave a comment and check out our community page to ask your questions and engage with the experts. Follow the PSCC_Enablement tag to stay up to date with our latest blog posts. Follow us on @Sap and #S4HANA, and myself on LinkedIn and X.

Watch the Replays of Our SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 Early Release Series!

From July 8 to July 12, we hosted a series of 20 compelling live sessions to highlight the exciting innovations shipped with the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 release. Missed the live sessions? We've got you covered! Take advantage of the entire series or pick and choose the sessions most relevant to you. You will find a xx-minute-long recording and a presentation for LoB/Industry/Topic as well as 19 other topics of interest. Don't miss this chance and watch them on demand–anywhere, anytime.

Find All of Our Assets

SAP S/4HANA Cloud is the foundation of the intelligent, sustainable enterprise and is an innovative, robust, and scalable ERP. We at Cloud ERP Product Success and Cloud Co-Innovation offer a service as versatile as our product itself. For finance, check out the completely revised collection blog with great first-hand content and background information:

In addition, check out the numerous offerings our team has created for you below:

Intelligent ERP use cases in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408

2024-07-25T07:49:03.524000+02:00

Hello SAP Cloud ERP Community 🔊

the second major release of the year is out since July 24. You certainly have read the very comprehensive release blog post from Bert Schulze.

In this blog post, which is as well part of our intelligent ERP blog post series, I'll share the key innovations with the usual focus on "intelligent technologies" like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Intelligent Scenario Lifecycle Management framework, and their added value on business processes. We will look at some use cases for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408, delivered to the customers on July 24.

If you'd like to have a quicker understanding of this blog, we have summarised the key "intelligent ERP" innovations in this video for your convenience:

🎧SAP User Experience Update with Joule and My Home

Let's start with an innovation that is changing completely the way customers will work with SAP: of course this is Joule, our natural-language, generative AI copilot, embedded into SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. Joule is also embedded in other SAP solutions like SAP SuccessFactors, with the ambition to enrich the entire SAP portfolio. Joule is your co-pilot. Yes you are right, this has a history at SAP, for those who know and remember the former SAP Co-Pilot assistant, now brought to the next level thanks to the GenAI revolutionising technology. Joule completely changes the way users works with the system and the daily application they use: it is one click away, increases efficiency, shares insights and analytics, always in the right business context.

Simply said: Joule will support you in getting your work done faster, making every task simpler, reducing mundane tasks, and driving better business outcomes in a secure and compliant way.

After a successful early adopter program about to end, we have great news: Joule is planned to be in general availability with the next “continuous delivery” later this year. If you are interested in the implementing it: make sure to follow the enablement offering of our team (see the Wheel below for more details) as we will share exclusively the key learnings of the early adopter program with our ecosystem, like at the next Product Expert Training planned to start September 23 for our partners and SAP colleagues.

In a nutshel: stay tuned for an amazing SAP experience transforming how you interact with the entire SAP suite!

Next, I'd like to continue with the focus on the end user and present some additional SAP User Experience innovations. We have introduced "My Home" to the market with the release 2208. With the My Home in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, end users benefit from a personalised interface tailored to their needs, with important to-dos and insights readily accessible.

In this release, we offer new customers intelligent app recommendations. Those are based on several factors such as usage of the app, geography, or access. We also offer intelligent generation of pre-delivered cards.

Additionally, we support situations of the standard situations framework, as well as of the extended situations framework in the To Dos section.

💡SAP Business AI Use Cases

Let's move on to SAP Business AI. What does this term mean at all? SAP Business AI is simply SAP Artificial Intelligence built for the business, embedded into the business processes like order to cash, plan to fulfil etc. AI built-in, for your precise role, available in all line-of-business solutions. It elevates the value of the ERP process with an approach unique to the industry. In addition to the last technology, come the learnings of more than 5 decades of partnership and projects with thousands of customers, running their businesses with SAP, managing a gold mine of transactional data, master data, and more. SAP Business AI spans across the entire SAP portfolio, as depicted in this illustration.

With this release, we have embedded AI at the heart of several business processes such as Finance, Manufacturing and Project Management.

Let’s pick Finance as example, where I’d like to mention 2 innovations in beta shipment. The first one is a reporting case, that makes it possible to use generative AI to analyze and summarize the data from a cost-center-review booklet, into financial business insights supported by our digital assistant Joule

The second example is a quite specific tax configuration case for the Unites States.. It offers to leverage Gen AI in a US Tax Configuration solution powered by Joule, that massively helps reduce complexity of this exercise. This will speak to all experts is this domain, what a release...

Next on - resource management, In our Technology Industry – it is all about project management, with the imperative to optimise all kind of resources: money, time, people,.... Is this field Artificial Intelligence can massively improve business processes too, and provide a very different project management experience.

I’d like to introduce an innovation that will help all of us, and help get to a more efficient project management planning and staffing. In the new SAP Project and Resource Management, resource management is supported by a new Intelligent matching of employees, to the expected skills on the project.

Searching skilled employees for a resource request has never been easier thanks to the advanced skill match supports. This is part of beta testing as well.

📡 Intelligent Scenario Lifecycle Management Framework Update

To close this update, I’ll dig into the Intelligent Scenario Lifecycle Management framework – short ISLM.

ISLM is a framework that allows you to perform lifecycle management operations on machine learning scenarios.

For this release, let me mention 2 scenarios. The first one is a GenAI use cases support: ISLM acts as the bridge between the application and the LLM models, and allows exploration and activation of out of the box scenarios

The second example is called "Auto enablement (turnkey) of Machine Learning use cases". As the name says, it means less manual effort, not specific knowledge needed, more outcome of the business users, when is comes to search, activation and usage of machine learning cases provided by SAP.

Thanks for your time reading this update. Don’t hesitate to leave a comment and check out our community page to ask your questions and engage with the experts. Follow the PSCC_Enablement tag to stay up to date with our latest blog posts.

📽️ Watch the Replays of Our SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 Early Release Series!

From July 8 to July 12, we hosted a series of 20 compelling live sessions to highlight the exciting innovations shipped with the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 release. Missed the live sessions? We've got you covered! Take advantage of the entire series or pick and choose the sessions most relevant to you. You will find a 88-minute-long recording and a presentation for Artificial Intelligence & Technologies" as well as 19 other topics of interest. Don't miss this chance and watch them on demand–anywhere, anytime.

🔎 Find All of Our Assets

Sourcing & Procurement in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408

2024-07-25T08:30:00.042000+02:00

Hey procurement fellows,

I'm back from parental leave and bring the energy down to this new blog giving you insights on SAP S/4HANA Cloud release 2408 for Sourcing & Procurement. To get an overview on the release highlights, please watch this video by my colleague @sangdao. Kudos go to the colleagues in development!

For other releases please see here.

Operational Procurement

Shipping notification in document flow of self-service purchase requisition
Document Management System (DMS) attachments on the purchase order header
Edit during approval for supplier confirmation
Sending DMS-based header attachments in EDI, print and e-mail channels for purchase order output

Contract Management

Versioning in purchase contracts

Central Procurement

Mass change of centrally managed purchase requisitions in offline mode
Display of overall invoice consumption on central contract item and distribution levels

Operational Procurement

Shipping notification in document flow of self-service purchase requisition

With this release we enable requestors to track the shipment of their goods by pulling up any order acknowledgments or advanced shipping notifications from their respective supplier. This way we improve requestors' visibility of purchase requisition ordering and shipping status by integrating shipping notifications into the self-service requisition document flow. For more information, see: My Purchase Requisitions - New

Document Management System (DMS) attachments on the purchase order header

With this feature, purchasers can add DMS (Document Management System) attachments to the purchase order header via the Manage Purchase Orders or Create Purchase Order – Advance app. The attachments can be sent along with the purchase order to the supplier. With this innovation you will be able to change the default customization. We speed up the processing with the Harmonized Document Management (HDM) for purchase order header attachments in the SAP Fiori app Manage Purchase Orders. HDM allows your purchasers to work with documents from different document frameworks in a single user interface once activated by the configuration expert. This way we allow to change the default customization and let your restrict the use of new purchase order attachments through Generic Object Services (GOS) attachments, i.e. no new GOS attachments can be created, existing GOS attachments are visible. Your benefit is an increased efficiency through a similar behavior for header attachments. For more information, see: Manage Purchase Orders and Create Purchase Order - Advanced

Edit during approval for supplier confirmation

Purchasers can now edit supplier confirmations that are presently undergoing approval workflow. When a supplier confirmation that is presently undergoing approval workflow is changed, the approval workflow is restarted. This improves flexibility and useability of supplier confirmation which requires to be updated before getting finally approved. For more information, see: Manage Workflows for Supplier Confirmations

Sending DMS-based header attachments in EDI, print and e-mail channels for purchase order output

As of now DMS attachments which are stored in the purchase order header level can be sent through output generated via EDI, Print and/or Email channel. The DMS attachments (Doc.Type SL1) that are configured for the purchase order outputs can be sent through purchase order output channels, when HDM (Harmonized Document Management) is active. Configuration experts can activate it via SSCUI ID 105346. DMS attachment allows to you classify attachment by document type. Each document type for output can be configured individually. This improves efficiency for business user in attaching and sending important documents to supplier for the respective purchase order at the header level. For more information, see: Purchase Order Header Attachments in EDI Channel Output

Contract Management

Versioning in purchase contracts

A purchase contract is an agreement between a buyer and a supplier with agreed pricing, quantity, terms, and conditions. Since purchase contracts are long-term documents, they are subject to change over time. Versioning of purchase contracts enables you to track different versions of the contract each time you make changes to an active purchase contract. When you make changes to the fields that are set up for versioning, a new version is created. Depending on the approval process, this new version then becomes the active document. This way we enable you to retain an active purchase contract as the operational contract until the new version of the purchase contract is approved. In addition, it allows the creation of follow-on purchase orders even if the new version of the purchase contract is still in approval.

Purchasers can compare changes between two versions of a purchase contract along with pricing information, thus helping you track changes for a long-term purchase contract. In order to make this available for end users, configuration experts need to define version-relevant fields in SSCUI ID 103497 and set up version management in SSCUI ID 103498, i.e. activate versioning for specific contract types and purchase organizations. For more details watch the demo video below.

SAP Ariba Central Procurement*

Mass change of centrally managed purchase requisitions in offline mode

WIth release 2408 central purchasers are able to create, update and delete purchase requisitions in all the backend systems connected to the central procurement hub by offline Microsoft Excel up-/downloads.For example to close or delete unwanted requisitions, generate demands from external planning systems, or add missing accounting information to an Unknown account assignment. A central purchaser can also trigger a simulation run of planned mass changes and display potential update errors before the actual release of the mass changes. This will increase flexibility and usability in the mass management of purchase requisitions in a multi-ERP procurement landscape through Microsoft Excel uploads. For more information, see: Process Purchase Requisitions Centrally

Display of overall invoice consumption on central contract item and distribution levels

Central purchasers are now able to track the usage and performance of their central contracts. Showing the overall invoice percentage as a consumption bar at item and distribution levels, a central purchaser can monitor and compare the invoice consumption to the goods receipt consumption and overall consumption of a given contract. We hereby improve transparency of actual invoice consumption directly within the central contract without the need to navigate into each connected system. This saves time and money. For more information, see: Manage Central Purchase Contracts

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Don’t hesitate to leave a comment and check out our community page to ask your questions and engage with the experts. Follow the PSCC_Enablement tag to stay up to date with our latest blog posts.

📽️ Watch the Replays of Our SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 Early Release Series!

From July 8 to July 12, we hosted a series of 20 compelling live sessions to highlight the exciting innovations shipped with the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 release. Missed the live sessions? We've got you covered! Take advantage of the entire series or pick and choose the sessions most relevant to you. You will find a 60-minute-long recording and a presentation for Sourcing & Procurement as well as 19 other topics of interest. Don't miss this chance and watch them on demand–anywhere, anytime.

🔎Find All of Our Assets

Customer Projects with T&E Billing & PoC-based Revenue Recognition

2024-07-25T09:28:10.114000+02:00

Relevant for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408.

Co-authored by Stefan Walz, Sven Nachtigall, Volkmar Zahn, Frank Hennrich, and Andreas Hammerschmidt.

Introduction

In a Time & Expense (T&E) scenario, billing and realized revenue are based on cost postings such as time and expense confirmations. With every time recording or expense posting, revenue is calculated based on the determined billing material and its sales price. If the maintained sales price is, for example, 100 EUR/h, the realized revenue for 1 hour time recording is also 100 EUR/h. A more detailed explanation on revenue recognition for T&E projects can be found in this blog.

However, not all T&E contracts allow full realization of revenue based on the maintained sales price. Contracts can also include a shared risk agreement, in which the supplier and customer agree on a certain planned effort for delivering a certain scope. If the actual efforts exceed the planned ones, the burden of the additional unplanned efforts are shared between the supplier and customer. As a result, the recognized revenue should not only consider delivered effort with normal sales prices, but should incorporate as well already known future additional efforts which can be charged with a reduced sales price only. While billing is carried out periodically based on efforts incurred to date, revenue accounting considers the progress of the project based on the cost-based percentage of completion.

This blog describes the steps and procedure to set up and manage such a customer project arrangement.

Solution architecture and capabilities

Costs and revenues should not be recognized as they occur but should consider future additional efforts at lower rates. underlying foundation for the cost-based Percentage of Completion (PoC) revenue recognition in a T&E scenario is the new financial planning version PRO03. This planning version, similar to the current ongoing planning version PRO02, is populated through the application job "Transfer Project Forecast to Finance". However, there is one significant difference with PRO03 compared to the others: Costs and revenues are distributed over periods; only one sum is assigned to the fiscal year in which the project end date falls.

Additionally, there's a new revenue recognition key, SPTMSR (Cost-Based PoC for DIP based T&E projects), which executes revenue recognition as described above. It is recommended to create a new contract material (for example, P005), from which this new revenue recognition key is derived. The configuration activity ‘Derivation of Recognition Key for Projects’ (SSCUI 102517) can be used to configure SPTMSR for the necessary company codes in combination with contract type PS02 (Time and Expenses) and the new contract material. The latter is then used as the material in the sales order item.

Project plan categories in Finance

Exemplary business process

The original project planning and agreed standard work for delivering a specific service include 100 hours of Senior Consultant work at a cost rate of 65 EUR/h and a sales price of 100 EUR/h. Although the project has not yet started, the project manager is already planning an additional 10 hours in a second work package that will be needed. As per the contract agreement with the customer, the sales price can only be 50 EUR/h for this package. This is accomplished through a specific price that is maintained for the customer project and work package.

Figure 1: Project planning in the Plan Customer Projects app

For billing, standard T&E with the contract material P005 is defined and both work packages are assigned to one billing item. As explained above, this new material would determine the new revenue recognition key SPTMSR.

Figure 2: Billing part of customer project in Plan Customer Projects app

The next step involves using the job application "Transfer Project Forecast to Finance" to populate the PRO03 plan category in the financial planning tables. If a forecast isn't maintained in the Review Customer Projects application, as illustrated in this example, the application job considers the ongoing plan.

Please note that the product (e.g., P005) can serve as a filter criterion in the job application. This method allows the transfer of forecast values solely for those WBS Elements (across various customer projects) that were configured for the use the revenue recognition key SPTMSR. This approach considerably reduces the runtime of the job application.

Figure 3: The application job Transfer Project Forecast to Finance

Figure 4: Plan category PRO03 in the Projects – Plan/Actual application

In this example scenario, the customer project is now up and running, and 10 hours have actually been booked on the first work package. Contrary to the standard T&E revenue recognition key, SPTM, these actual bookings lead to a recognized revenue of 954.55 EUR. When using SPTM, the recognized revenue would have been 1000 EUR.

𝑅𝑒𝑐𝑜𝑔𝑛𝑖𝑧𝑒𝑑 𝑅𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑛𝑢𝑒 = (𝐴𝑐𝑡𝑢𝑎𝑙 𝐶𝑜𝑠𝑡𝑠/𝑃𝑙𝑎𝑛𝑛𝑒𝑑 𝐶𝑜𝑠𝑡) ∗ 𝑃𝑙𝑎𝑛𝑛𝑒𝑑 𝑅𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑛𝑢𝑒

= (650 EUR / 7,150 EUR) * 10,500 EUR

= 954.55 EUR

Forecasted costs as well as forecasted revenue would be considered if maintained in the Review Customer Projects application.

Figure 5: Event-Based Revenue Recognition after posting 10h actuals

Additional considerations, especially for Finance

So far, planned revenues in revenue recognition have been calculated either based on T&E billing simulation (Time and Expenses, Usage Based Billing) or the billing plan (Fixed Price, Periodic Service). For the first time, the new method explained in this blog uses financial planning values from ACDOCP, including ETC/EAC values. This also leads to a different behaviour for repricing and the cap scenario, as outlined below.

The ETC/EAC values entered in the Review Customer Projects application are also considered when using SPTMSR. Please remember to transfer the forecast values to the financials before running revenue recognition, so that the latest planning is reflected in PRO03. This remains true even if you do not sustain forecasts; as a result, the application job is solely based on ongoing planning.

After running the application job "Transfer Project Forecast to Finance"

Revenue recognition for already existing cost postings is revaluated based on the most current available EAC data in the revenue recognition run.
The updated plan values for cost and revenue are displayed in the Event-Based Revenue Recognition - Projects application.

Although a cap can be defined on T&E contract types, its amount is ignored when the revenue recognition key SPTMSR is used. Additionally, write-offs will reduce the EAC revenues, but EAC cost will not be impacted. In contrast to the standard T&E revenue recognition, writing off cost items will not directly update the recognized revenue in EBRR.

In similar terms, a repricing run does not update unbilled revenue in EBRR for billing elements with SPTMSR. Instead, changes in sales rates must be reflected in updated PRO03 plan values. For this, the planned revenue in the work package needs to be recalculated before transferring the plan data to finance.

Please remember to always synchronize the project financial data with finance through the application job "Transfer Project Forecast to Finance" before running revenue recognition at the end of the period. This ensures up-to-date data in the financial planning version PRO03, even if no dedicated forecast is maintained.

One limitation to mention is that when cost postings already exist, the revenue recognition key can only be changed to "no revenue recognition key" and back.

Summary

T&E billing, in combination with PoC-based revenue recognition, allows for billing as per work performed (T&E), but realizes revenues based on Cost-based PoC. This provides an increased level of flexibility in financials. Additionally, manual efforts to adjust the accrued revenues can be avoided.

SAP UX Latest 2024 Innovations in Public Cloud: Joule, GenAI and More

2024-07-25T12:12:59.234000+02:00

We are taking SAP’s user experience to the next level by incorporating new AI design patterns into our products. These last six months our public cloud products have been leading the way, so let us have a look at concrete examples of how users can get their jobs done more easily thanks to these patterns for Joule and Generative AI (GenAI) in SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Ariba, SAP Customer Experience and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408. In addition to AI patterns, our product teams have also invested in specific user experience improvements. Finally, our technology teams have made it easier to build UIs, leveraging GenAI built into SAP Business AI.

We are accelerating our use of AI in our user experience, to make work easier for users – so much so that you might even feel overwhelmed by all the new announcements and features across our portfolio! However, there are some fundamental patterns which we have identified and which our designers have baked into our SAP Design System. Understanding these patterns will help you understand how we are incorporating AI into our user experience. It will make it easier for you to put the many announcements of new AI-enabled features into context.

In this post, we’ll look at:

The AI design patterns, with concrete examples in our products.
User experience improvements in selected products.
UI technology innovations.

These are the AI design patterns we’ll be looking at, each with their own section:

Joule UX innovations, with a focus on the new informational pattern for customer documents provided by SAP SuccessFactors.
Triggering GenAI actions, such as
- Providing a summary of a given business object or context.
- Creating proposals, such as performance goals in SuccessFactors, or for a category segmentation in SAP Ariba.
- GenAI prompts within application UIs – for using natural language directly within the application.
- Guided AI Prompts – for example for writing assistants, so that users don’t have to worry about what prompt text to enter to get the desired result.

We expect these patterns to be used broadly across the SAP portfolio in the future; the examples below are from products which have adopted them first.

Transformational as AI is for the user experience, it is only a part of the overall interaction a user has with an application. Hence, in addition to introducing AI into our UI, we are continuing to work on ensuring that we provide a good overall user experience, by improving existing applications and by building new ones. In this post, I’ll give you a brief overview of some of the major innovations of the last six months, and provide pointers where you can find out more, in the sections:

User Experience Improvements in Selected Products
- SAP SuccessFactors
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408

The same goes for our UI technology, where we are embedding AI to make it easier to build applications with great UX – I’ll give you a brief overview along with pointers to more details, in the sections:

UI Technology Innovations
- AI-enabled UI Development
- Further UI Technology Highlights

Joule User Experience Innovations

Joule is your AI-enabled copilot for working with SAP, allowing you to use natural language to gain insights and achieve results. Today, it is generally available for SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Customer Experience, SAP Customer Data Platform, SAP Build Code, and SAP Integration Suite. It is also available to early adopters of SAP Start and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. The navigational pattern (see below) is already available for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition.

First, let me recap the main interaction patterns provided by Joule, before introducing a new capability available today with SAP SuccessFactors.

Joule Interaction Patterns

Joule has these three interaction patterns, examples of which you can see in Figure 1.

Informational Pattern: allows you to query documentation with natural language, typically with a “How do I…” question. Joule provides concise summaries of content from documents, such as SAP documentation in the Help Portal, along with three links to the most relevant sections of the documents.

Navigational Pattern: Joule recommends relevant applications and facilitates seamless navigation to these applications – typically in response to a “Where can I…” question.

Transactional Pattern: Joule offers insightful information about business objects. It also allows you to make updates to business data directly within Joule, eliminating the necessity of opening the corresponding application.

Figure 1: Examples of each of the three interaction patterns for Joule: informational, navigational, and transactional, from SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition (for early adopters). ALT Text: Three images of Joule are shown. On the left, the informational pattern shows that the user has typed “Can I configure a workflow for my purchase requisitions”. Below that, the eight-line written answer is shown, followed by a “Search results” selector and three top search results. In the middle, the navigational pattern, the user has typed “Where can I execute mass changes on my purchase requisition?”, below that, the reply from Joule “Here’s what I’ve found” is followed by a card containing three lines, each with an application name and an “Open” button. On the right the transactional pattern, the user has typed “Show Purchase Requisitions”, Joule responded with “Sure, here is what I found” and a card containing three lines, each with a PR number followed by an “Open” button.

New: Informational Pattern for Customer Documents

We have now extended the informational pattern to allow customers of SAP SuccessFactors to upload company policy documents which can be queried via Joule. This means that users can use natural language to ask a question, such as “What’s the expense limit for business meals in Germany?”, and Joule will provide a concise summary from the customer policy document(s). Not only that: Joule will also provide links to the relevant documents. Think about how much time you can save that way! Figure 2 shows an example, and Video 1 shows an example from 0:57 to 1:30.

Figure 2: Example of a user using Joule to query a customer expense policy document. ALT Text: The image shows the top part of the SuccessFactors home page with Joule as an overlay on the right. The user has typed in to the Joule chat “Can I use my private car for my business trip?”. Below that, Joule’s nine-line response is shown, followed by a link to the source document.

Technically, the customer documents that have been uploaded are grounded into the underlying AI large language model, which means that we can use the power of generative AI to extract information from these documents without the risk of hallucinations.

You can find out more about this new Joule use case supported by SAP SuccessFactors, along with a large number of new transactional use cases in the What’s New Viewer for 1H2024:

SAP SuccessFactors Documentation: New Use Cases Supported in Joule.

Have a Look at How Joule Energizes You at Work

Joule, your copilot for working with SAP, is intended to give users a natural language based single entry point (in the web or on mobile) for all their applications and business data – complementing the UI-based single entry point in the web provided by SAP Start, and the UI-based mobile entry point provided by SAP Mobile Start.

As such, Joule will also support many of the AI interaction patterns I listed in the introduction above. Indeed, already today you can see these patterns in action in Video 1 below:

Summary of a business object (in this case a customer account summary, combining data from SAP Sales Cloud and SAP S/4HANA Cloud).
Summary of customer requirements from an email message.
Transactional pattern: interacting with SAP Intelligent Product Recommendation, to get a best-fit product for the customer request.

Informational pattern for customer documents: a query to the company expense policy about how much employees can spend on dinner for entertaining a customer

Video 1: Joule in action for SAP Start, SAP Customer Experience and SAP SuccessFactors informational pattern for customer documents.

Joule also supports developers building new applications and their UIs, you can see an example of this towards the end of the blog post.

Watch these videos to see more examples of Joule in action for SAP Customer Experience (CX) and SAP S/4HANA Cloud:

Outlook

Here are some forward-looking statements about what we plan to deliver in the near future. As always, these are subject to change, but of course we hope to deliver as planned.

Towards the end of Q3/2024, we plan to make Joule generally available in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, with the informational pattern available everywhere, and the other two patterns available for selected business areas.

Later this year, SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain and SAP Ariba Category Management plan to provide Joule integration.

Just as we have extended the informational pattern to support customer documents for SAP SuccessFactors, so we plan to provide this capability also for customer documents relevant to other products.

A major step forward planned for later this year is support for analytics in the transactional pattern, so that users can query analytics and get responses as charts. We also plan to incorporate GenAI into the major workflows of SAP Analytics Cloud – read more about this in:

Generative AI for planning and analytics – statement of direction.

So far Joule is only available in English. Later this year we plan to support further languages, including French, German, Spanish and Portuguese.

For more details, have a look at the road map for Joule in the SAP Road Map Explorer:

Joule Road Map

Triggering Generative AI Actions in the Application UI

A simple yet powerful way of helping users achieve better outcomes is to embed a generative AI action within an application UI, so that the system can for example generate a proposal based on initial data entered into the UI or already in the system. We can distinguish between the following kinds of actions:

Creating a written summary of existing business data, be it from an incoming email or data in the system, such as a customer account, a sales order or financial data.
Creating a proposal for new or updated business data or business objects, such as a performance goal for an employee, or a procurement category segmentation.

Creating a Summary of Business Data

I’d like to show you an example from SAP Customer Experience (CX) for creating an account summary, and two examples available now for Beta testing with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition: summarization of object pages, and financial business insights.

SAP Customer Experience Example

SAP Customer Experience offers users various AI capabilities for working more effectively, one of these being summarizing business data, for example summarizing an incoming email for SAP Service Cloud. This capability is also embedded in Joule. You can see examples of this, and more, in this video (the summaries are from 0:25 to 0:50):

Video: Generative AI for Intelligent CX Overview (2:37 minutes).

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition Examples

The following two examples are currently available as a Beta release.

Summarizing Object Pages

For all object pages which have been built with SAP Fiori elements, users can ask the system to summarize the business object. For example, if a manager sends an email asking for a summary of a sales order, the internal sales representative can use this feature to create a written summary, edit it as needed, and send it to their manager, saving a lot of time. Figure 3 shows what this looks like; you can also see it in action with this video:

Video: AI-assisted Smart Summarization of a Sales Order (1:10 minutes).

Figure 3: Smart summarization of a sales order in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, available as a Beta release. ALT Text: the image shows a popover above a sales order UI. The popover contains text with a title “Order Summary” and sections “Introduction”, “Date and Location” and “Key Highlights”. The bottom right of the screen has a “Copy All” button.

AI-Assisted Financial Business Insights

Interpreting financial data can be challenging, and explaining them in an easy-to-understand way even more so. Hence, we provide AI-Assisted Financial Business Insights, which make this task much easier. Figure 4 shows an example of how the system will provide a summary report of the financial data. You can see it in action here:

Video: SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud Edition AI-Assisted Financial Business Insights (1:20 minutes).

Figure 4: Summarizing financial reporting data in easy-to-understand language as provided by SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, available as a Beta release. ALT Text: the image shows a table on the left with 27 lines and 5 columns of cost center information, and on the right a comprehensive summary with a heading and five paragraphs. The screenshot is overlaid top left by an explanation box with the text “Increase financial reporting efficiency with quick actions supported by generative AI”, and at the bottom with an explanation box with the text “the company seems to have increased costs in 2024 compared to 2023”.

Generating proposals for business data

Let me show two examples for this pattern available today, from SAP Success Factors and from SAP Ariba. Note that SAP Customer Experience also offers GenAI support for creating business data, as already mentioned in the previous section.

SAP SuccessFactors Example

SAP SuccessFactors now supports managers who need to formulate performance goals, by providing a “Generate” with AI action. Managers can provide a brief description of the goal, and SAP SuccessFactors not only generates a longer description, it also makes proposals for milestones, with a suitable task description along with start and end dates. Of course, goals need to be well thought out by managers; nevertheless, having an initial starting point, especially with a break-down of potential goals on a timeline, can be very helpful, especially for less experienced managers. Figure 5 shows an example which showcases our AI button with the AI icon (to the left of the “Generate” text in the button).

Figure 5: Example from SAP SuccessFactors of an AI action for triggering generative AI to help managers formulate performance goals, along with suitable milestones. ALT Text: an animation showing how a user can enter the text “AI strategy for our production plant by Q4” and then click on the “Generate” button, which features the AI icon on the left. The result is a form with a goal description and metrics, followed by a table with proposed milestones and their start and end dates.

SAP Ariba Example

SAP Ariba Category Management also provides an additional AI action for creating a procurement category segmentation from scratch. As in the previous example, a Generate button with the AI icon is used, see Figure 6.

Figure 6: Example from SAP Ariba Category Management of an AI action for triggering generative AI to help create a category segmentation. ALT Text: an animation which starts with a screen with an illustration and text “No Segmentation to Display”. The user clicks on a button which features the AI icon before the text “Generate”, and the result is a proposed category segmentation chart on the left with a text summary on the right.

Generative AI Prompt within Application UI

We can go a step further than the simple AI action by letting users use natural language to interact directly with the application UI. We do this by enabling them to enter a prompt directly in the UI.

Since most users will not be familiar with formulating powerful GenAI prompts (prompt engineering), we use this simple input field in cases where it is obvious to the user what kind of input is expected.

The first example I’d like to share is the powerful “Just ask” feature now generally available with SAP Analytics Cloud. You can use natural language to create a query, and SAP Analytics Cloud uses AI to interpret the text as well as to decide on the most appropriate chart to use to visualize the result. Figure 7 shows an example.

Figure 7: “Just ask” in SAP Analytics Cloud. ALT Text: the user has entered “gross margin product”, and the appropriate chart representation (a horizontal bar chart) has been used to display the gross margin per product on the left. On the right you see that the system gives suggestions for suitable texts in buttons, which when clicked enter the text displayed in the button. The first such proposal shown is “Gross Margin per Category”. There is also a “Save question” section with a button with the text “gross margin product”.

The next example is now available as a Beta in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, allowing users to use natural language to filter lists, as an alternative to using the individual filter fields in the filter bar. The AI icon in the “Go” button indicates to users that AI is behind this functionality. Figure 8 shows an example for sales orders.

Figure 8: Using natural language to filter a list of sales orders in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition (available as a Beta). The user has entered the text “Show me all open sales orders for December 2023”, the list only shows entries matching this query. ALT Text: the image shows a list report. At the top there is a toggle for the filter mode, with the options “Classic” and “SAP Business AI”. Below that, a disclaimer text, that generated content may not always be accurate. Below that, the text field for the query, to its right a button which features the AI icon before the text “Go”. Below that, the result list with 11 lines and 8 columns.

Technically, this feature is provided by applications built with SAP Fiori elements using OData V4. You can watch an example here:

Video: SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, AI-Assisted Easy Filter (0:51 minutes).

Guided AI Prompts

Creating good text proposals with Generative AI requires good prompts – something which most users of business systems have no or little expertise in. Hence, we have come up with guided AI prompts, which give users a UI element that allows them to tweak the kind of outcome they want, so that users don’t have to worry about what prompt text to enter to get the desired result.

SAP Customer Experience Example

Figure 9 shows how SAP Customer Experience enables service and support users to easily create response emails, in this case with sliders to influence the style, tone and length. As you can see, users don’t need to know exactly what kind of generative AI prompt text is needed, they can simply adjust the sliders to get the desired outcome – which they can of course further edit if needed.

Figure 9: Guided AI Prompt from SAP Customer Experience, showing the sliders for choosing the style, tone and length of the email on the left and a possible generated draft email text on the right. ALT Text: the slider and draft mail are visualized as a popover. Below the sliders there is a button which features the AI icon before the text “Generate Draft”. The popover has a language selector top right, with English now chosen, and “Apply” and “Cancel” buttons bottom right.

SAP SuccessFactors Writing Assistant

Managers often need to write text, be it formulating goals or giving feedback – but not everyone is a gifted writer! SAP SuccessFactors has found a novel way for generative AI to assist users in their writing. Figure 10 shows the approach, with an example where a manager is giving feedback to an employee. The “Give feedback” UI already provides good usability, by helping the manager formulate the main aspects (what went well?, what could I improve on?, any additional comments).

The new Writing Assistant takes this to the next level: by marking the text, a context menu appears, as you can see on the left in Figure 10; clicking on the AI icon brings the drop-down menu shown in the middle, where the manager can choose from various options to adapt the text with generative AI. On the right you see how the Writing Assistant shows you the original text and the suggested new text – in this case improving the original text, in particular by replacing “…they can be difficult” with “…even though they can sometimes be challenging”.

User Experience Improvements in Selected Products

This section gives updates on our Web Entry Point, SAP SuccessFactors, and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. I'll keep this section fairly short, and mainly point you to sources where you can find the details.

Web Entry Point: SAP Start, SAP Build Work Zone, SAP Task Center

SAP Start is now integrated with SAP Fieldglass, which provides two insight cards. Also, SAP SuccessFactors has provided three additional insight cards for SAP Start – read more here:

What’s New for SAP Start – May 2024

The SAP Task Center now provides APIs for integrating tasks from 3rd-party products. Read more about it here:

SAP Task Center’s New 3rd Party Integration

SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition also has a number of enhancements:

What’s New in SAP Build – Q2 2024 Edition

SAP SuccessFactors

The 1H2024 release comes with a large number of UX innovations across the whole portfolio. To get the complete picture, have a look at these two blog posts:

Here, I would like to highlight the new design for the organizational chart, along with the new user experience for the people profile, with a brand new public view of your profile (public within your company) consisting of Profile Preview and Spotlight, along with more intuitive user interactions.

Figure 11: The new org chart in SAP SuccessFactors. ALT Text: The image shows an org chart, with each employee summarized in a box with their image on the left and their name and job role on the right. The image has a manager “Christine Dolan” at the top, below which another manager “Charles Braun” is shown, with his direct and indirect reports shown underneath: direct reports linked with and surrounded by a solid line, dotted-line ones linked with and surrounded by a dotted line.

Employees can build and represent their personal brand by showcasing skills and competencies, mentoring and target roles, and other relevant information sourced from SAP SuccessFactors solutions.

Colleagues who look at the org chart can get a quick preview of a user’s profile with the Profile Preview, shown in Figure 12, and get more information using the Spotlight, shown in Figure 13.

Figure 12: SAP SuccessFactors "Profile Preview", shown on the right. ALT Text: The image shows the preview as a popover on the right of the screen, with a photo of Aanya Singh and a “Show Spotlight” button next to it along with a button for opening the Org Chart. Below that, her role and organization are shown, along with some text she provided about herself, a photo, name and organization of her direct manager, and a link to “All Actions”.

Figure 13: SAP SuccessFactors "Spotlight". ALT Text: the image shows the Profile Preview of Aanya Singh on the left, but with the button “Hide Spotlight” instead of “Show Spotlight”. On the right, the rest of the screen shows her skills, competencies, who she is mentoring, her organization, an about me video, upcoming absence, work experience, reporting line, target roles and badges for good performance.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408

The latest release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition comes with a large number of new AI-enabled user experience enhancements, such as the smart summarization and easy filter, which I explained earlier. To get an overview of all of these, read this summary, or watch Arpan Shah, Head of Product Management for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, introduce them all at this year’s SAP Sapphire conference:

Summary: Unlock Tomorrow’s Potential with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition
SAP Sapphire Video: ERP127 – SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition: Find out what’s next.
Blog post (look at the “Modern and Intelligent Experience” section): Highlights of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 Release.

As I mentioned in the introduction, AI is only a part of the overall interaction a user has with an application. I’d like to highlight these new innovations in the user experience for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition:

Spaces and Pages replace the classical SAP Fiori launchpad group-based visualization, so all customers are automatically enabled to use My Home.
My Home: To-Dos task cards show details, and AI makes suggestions for a users’ favorites (see Figure 14 below).
Collaborative ERP: further Microsoft integration with Adaptive card-based Loop components and integration with Microsoft Copilot as a Beta release – see below for more information.
Change Management: we are introducing a toggle to allow users to switch from the existing version of an app to a new version, starting with selected apps.

My Home

The To-Dos task cards offer action buttons, for example to approve or reject items. Often, this requires some key information about the item, for example the name of the product and the value for a purchase requisition. These details are now visualized directly in the task cards, as you can see in Figure 14.

Another useful new feature is AI recommendations for applications: as you can see in Figure 14 in the Apps section of My Home, a new tab has been introduced which uses AI to create a list of applications which are recommended to the user to add to their Favorites.

Figure 14: New features of My Home in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition: the To-Dos task cards show details, and AI makes recommendations for applications which are likely to be relevant to the user. ALT Text: the image shows three To-Do cards at the top, each with header text “Approve Purchase Requisition” followed by the number, below that the name of the requestor, item description, net value, requisition date and requestor. Each card has an “Approve” and “Reject” button. Below that, the Apps section has a new tab “Recommended” with an information banner below it explaining that “Here you can see applications that are recommended to you by SAP Business AI. You can choose to disable this tab using the settings”. Below that, two rows of five apps with their icons are shown. The bottom of the image shows parts of the News (on the left) and Pages (on the right) sections.

As well as the above, My Home now provides:

To-Dos now also shows custom Situations, created using the extended Situation Handling framework, in addition to the standard situations delivered by SAP.
Intelligent generation of pre-delivered cards for new cloud customers.
Drag & drop is now enabled in the insights section, so you can directly rearrange your tiles and cards.
Information about deprecated apps.

Collaboration with Microsoft Copilot and Microsoft Loop Components

We already enable users to collaborate via Microsoft Teams, embedding applications in chats or as tabs in Teams channels. We are taking this to the next level, available for Beta testing with the 2408 release, by:

Informing users about to-dos via notifications in Microsoft Teams;
Enabling embedding of interactive cards with information and actions from SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition directly into Microsoft Teams, Outlook and Copilot. The data and actions are only shown to users with the necessary authorizations in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. Technically this is done via adaptive card-based Loop component; Figures 16 and 17 show examples.
Even more powerful: we have started integrating Microsoft Copilot with Joule, combining enterprise data residing in SAP with contextual knowledge from Microsoft 365, including Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Word, and more, helping to deliver richer insights for better decision-making.

Figures 15 and 16 show an example of integration with Microsoft Copilot and Microsoft Outlook. Figure 15 shows the response to Alice’s request to Copilot for details of a sales order, where you can see the written summary along with the adaptive card containing details, links and action buttons. Users can easily copy these adaptive cards into an Outlook e-mail or a Teams chat, using the copy button shown in Figure 15.

Figure 16 shows what it looks like if you receive an email containing an adaptive card – the example shows Frank’s inbox, with the e-mail that Alice sent him by copying the adaptive card shown in Figure 15. Frank can see the card with the details, links and action buttons.

To see it in action, watch this:

Video: Microsoft Copilot Integration for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition (2:25 minutes).

Figure 15: An example of how a user (Alice) can use Microsoft Copilot to interact with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. The image shows a summary of a sales order, with a card containing information about the sales order, including the action button “Remove Billing Block”.

Figure 16: An example of an adaptive card embedded in an Outlook email. The user Frank received an email from Alice requesting that he remove the billing block. ALT Text: the email contains text “Hey Frank, can you please help to get this sales order processed asap. Please remove the block!”, followed by a long URL to access the sales order, and the adaptive card with the heading “SAP S/4HANA Cloud”, the sales order number as a hyperlink, sales order details and two action buttons at the bottom “Set Billing Block” and “Remove Billing Block”.

If you are interested in trying this out via the Beta testing program, you can register here.

UI Technology Innovations

Before showing you the latest innovations, I would like to introduce the new SAP Application Extension Methodology, and in particular the Extension Architecture Guide, which is for enterprise architects and solution architects that are already familiar with SAP's extensibility concepts and are seeking comprehensive decision-making guidance with an emphasis on the SAP Business Technology Platform. The section Presentation Tier Guidance summarizes SAP’s guidance for the extension task "create custom user interface (UI)", which addresses the need to develop a new custom UI, tailored to meet specific business requirements.

This year, we have invested heavily in supporting developer extensibility for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. Learn more about it here:

Blog post: Extending SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition using SAPUI5 adaptation projects.
Documentation: Extending an SAP Fiori Application for S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and SAP BTP, ABAP Environment.
Documentation: SAPUI5 Flexibility (covering end-user personalization, key-user personalization and developer adaptation).

AI-enabled UI Development

SAP Build Code brings AI-enablement for application developers on SAP Business Technology Platform, giving you:

Guided development to quickly build SAP Fiori apps: web, mobile and full-stack.
Built-in guidance and SAP best practices for developers to create enterprise-grade applications.
Visual tools and a programming language of your choice: JavaScript, TypeScript, Java and more.

With generative AI in SAP Build Code, you get the following:

Joule auto-generates app logic and data models.
Automated unit test coverage.
Contextual application logic code generation based on prompts.
Automatic sample data generation.

SAP Fiori tools go even further, allowing you to describe the list report and object page application you would like to create, and then automatically generating the data model , CDS views, OData services as well as the SAP Fiori elements UI. Figure 17 shows how you can use natural language to describe the application you want to build, in this case taking the example available in the documentation and copying it into Joule. Figure 18 shows the outcome: the data and code assets visualized in SAP Build Code as well as the resulting application UI list report and object page. Read more about this, and see it in action, in this blog post:

SAP Fiori tools 2403 introduces Gen AI capability and more.

Figure 17: Using Joule with SAP Fiori tools to describe the SAP Fiori elements application you want to create, in this case taking the example text from the documentation. ALT Text: the image contains three screenshots. On the left the documentation, in the middle Joule with the initial lines of the documentation text entered, on the right Joule with the final lines of the documentation entered, where the field names are listed in the order they should appear in the list report.

Figure 18: The resulting data and code assets visualized in SAP Build Code as well as the resulting SAP Fiori elements application UI consisting of a list report and an object page. ALT Text: the image contains three screenshots. On the left SAP Build Code showing the generated entities; in the middle the generated list report UI with five lines of data; on the right the generated object page with the header and a “Contract Details” section containing nine fields.

In case you need more flexibility than provided by the SAP Fiori elements patterns, we also provide AI-enablement for freestyle SAPUI5. Read about it in this blog post:

Joule for freestyle SAPUI5 development in SAP Build Code.

Further UI Technology Innovations

Here are some further new capabilities I’d like to bring to your attention.

New features of SAP Fiori elements based on OData V4, explained in this blog post:

Unlocking Efficiency and Simplicity: A Look into the New Features of SAP Fiori Elements for OData V4 – the new features are:
- Support for recently entered values dropdown.
- Open object page in edit mode.
- Merging section and subsection title to reduce unnecessary white space.

If you program the UI of your new application using SAPUI5 and the flexible programming model, you’ll want to ensure good code quality. To help you with that, we bring you UI5 linter, a powerful static code analysis tool:

Introducing UI5 linter.

These blog posts introduce further interesting new features or offerings:

Final words

For more information about our AI innovations, have a look at this article from Philipp Herzig, our Chief AI Officer:

SAP’s New AI Innovations and Partnerships Deliver Real-World Results.

We’re looking for your feedback on the SAP Fiori design guidelines, how we communicate updates / news - in other words, on our communication strategy for the SAP Design System. Please take a few minutes to fill out this little survey:

SAP Design System: Communications Strategy Survey.

Do keep posting your experiences and recommendations yourself in the SAP Community, with the SAP Fiori and/or the User Experience tag! In case you are wondering how to get a list of the most recent blog posts on SAP Fiori and User Experience in our new SAP Community, use these links:

For general information on design at SAP and SAP Fiori, check out:

Collective Billing of Solution Order:Include Prof.Serv. Project and Other Docs into single invoice

2024-07-25T16:42:56.020000+02:00

Co-authored by Klaus Kistner

Solution Business Management in SAP S/4HANA Cloud enables you to sell bundled solutions combining products, services, subscriptions, long-term services, and projects to become a one-stopshop to solve complete customer problems [Ref : Selling Business Outcomes with Bundled Solutions].

As part of this scenario, it can make sense to create a single invoice per solution order.

In previous releases, it was not possible to converge billing data from customer projects (that are part of the same solution order) into a combined invoice with billing data from other documents that are also part of the solution order, such as service orders, service contract, and so on. [Ref: One Invoice Per Solution Order]. Customer projects had to be invoiced separately.

As of SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2408, you can use billing type CBD2 to combine all billing-relevant follow-on documents of a solution order into a single invoice. Refer to note 3413050 for an example of how to create combined invoice of the solution order document.

Release Navigator for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408

2024-07-25T20:01:37.700000+02:00

The Readiness@Scale team is thrilled to announce the 2408 updates to the release navigator for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, scheduled for August 16. This update will incorporate the latest content and enhanced user-experience (UX) features, inspired by your valuable feedback!

Side Menu

The updated release navigator now features a new Side Menu (refer to Figure 1) that improves user navigation between pages and will be available on all pages. This enhancement will also be adopted in other release navigators for SAP Cloud solutions, including SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Customer Experience, SAP Supply Chain Management solutions, and Spend Management & Business Network, to ensure a consistent design. More details on the new Side Menu are provided below.

Figure 1: The new Side Menu has been implemented on each page of the release navigator.

Product Specific Page

The former Home page has undergone a transformation and is now officially termed the Product-Specific page (refer to Figure 1). This newly designed page prominently highlights pivotal product release events and delves into pages for specific Lines of Business (LoB's), Industries, and Cross-Topics. To streamline user experience, all related resources are now consolidated within each respective topic area you can filter.

For any resources that were formerly found on the Home page, these have been moved to other designated pages, namely the General page, Get Assistance page, and User Feedback page (refer to Figures 2-4). Details of the redistribution of resources will be elaborated on in the subsequent sections. This reorganization ensures that users can access information more efficiently, enhancing the overall navigation and utility of the platform.

General Page

The main page for release resources covering multiple LoB's, Industries, or Cross-Topics, such as the SAP Release Assessment & Scope Dependency Tool 2.0, is the General page (refer to Figure 2). On this page, users can also find a wealth of additional resources on numerous topics expanding beyond release readiness. Finally, release navigators for other SAP cloud solutions are also accessible on this page.

Figure 2: Browse the new General page for a wealth of useful resources.

Get Assistance Page

For help with the release navigator and to get information on the most recent updates from Readiness@Scale, you can visit the new Get Assistance page (refer to Figure 3). Also, if you need the release navigator in another language, you can access the authenticated version via the link provided on this page, which will necessitate the use of an S, D, I, or Universal ID.

Figure 3: Discover specific guidance for using the release navigator on the Get Assistance page.

User Feedback Page

Do you have any specific suggestions for improving the user experience? Are there any specific content resources or information that you would like to see included in the release navigator? The User Feedback page (refer to Figure 4) features a brief and anonymous two-question survey that will be sent directly to the developers.

Figure 4: Leave us any recommendations you have via the User Feedback page.

Card Badges

The Badge provides extra information to enhance understanding without crowding the interface. In the release navigator, you will notice a ‘New’ badge (refer to Figure 2) on resource cards with new content. Additionally, you may see a ‘Featured’ badge on certain cards, highlighting important release details, tools, or content.

About this Card

The About this Card feature has been added to the General page resource cards in the release navigator to provide additional information about each resource. By clicking on the ... icon (refer to Figure 2) on any resource card, users can access more details about each resource.

To reduce the impact on your user experience, starting after 2408, the release navigator for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition will only include new UX elements once a year, in August, when new release content is also integrated. Here you can find the UX innovation & content update plans for 2025.

Disclaimer: These dates are for informational purposes only and may change. The Readiness@Scale team has the final decision over any UX modifications.

Note: Just a reminder, no tasks are required for the updates to the release navigator, as everything is automated. For more detailed information on product release dates, please refer to the Release Calendar card (refer to Figure 1).

If you have feedback or specific requests of what content you would like to see featured in the release navigator, please do not hesitate to let us know! Use our feedback survey or reply to this blog post in the Comments section below.

You can learn more about how the Readiness@Scale is a cross-solution team responsible for release readiness topics in the SAP Enterprise Support portfolio at our Release Ready page. Find all our teams blogs with the tag Readiness@Scale.

SAP Screen Personas and Adapt UI for classic apps are growing in popularity. July 2024 update

2024-07-26T01:42:16.467000+02:00

It seems like generative AI is on everyone’s mind. This was certainly the case at SAP Sapphire last month. SAP continues to innovate in this area with new AI design patterns appearing across the product portfolio. In my opinion, one factor that’s driving the interest in AI for UX use cases is that people are looking for a fast and easy way to improve the user experience. The good news is that this does not require generative or even “classic” AI. SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition includes a simple and powerful feature to adapt the UI for classic apps. This is also available for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition and on-prem customers as SAP Screen Personas.

In this post, I’ll provide a short background on SAP Screen Personas, discuss its implementation as a standard feature in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, and share some interesting usage patterns we are observing. I’ll conclude with some concrete next steps so you can improve the user experience of your SAP ERP system.

SAP Screen Personas / Adapt UI for classic apps lets you simplify screens and streamline business processes

We introduced the first version of SAP Screen Personas in 2012. Fast forward to today and we are on SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP18. During that time, thousands of customers have simplified their transaction screens. My colleagues and I, along with the customers that attend our monthly practitioner forum calls, have seen a wide variety of UX transformations, ranging from merging content from different tabs or transactions onto a single screen to automating bulk updates that reduce the process time from hours to 30 seconds.

SAP Screen Personas is built into SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition

SAP Screen Personas was so popular and loved by our customers that we decided to make it a standard feature of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. Although there are over 3000 SAP Fiori apps available in SAP S/4HANA, there are still some scenarios that lack SAP Fiori coverage. Several thousand classic apps are available to accomplish these less-common tasks. There was already the ability to adapt SAP Fiori apps using SAPUI5 flexibility so we added the new functionality to adapt classic apps using the same menu.

Explosive growth in Adapt UI for classic apps in the past year

Running our software in the cloud gives us better visibility into how customers are using our solutions, which provides insights into adoption patterns. The team and I were pleasantly surprised to see that roughly 20% of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition customers are using the Adapt UI functionality. In fact, we have a 300% increase in the number of flavors running in productive systems within the past year. What are all these customers doing?

What we observed is that public cloud customers are simplifying many of the same apps that their on-prem counterparts do. These tend to be some of the more complex SAP GUI transactions in procurement, sales and distribution, and material handling. Looking deeper, we see that there is also the “long tail” of screen simplifications, with around 175 classic apps having 10 or fewer flavors.

From my perspective, the implications for SAP are clear. For the heavily used flavors, we should probably provide an SAP Fiori app. In some cases, this already exists, and we need to explore why customers are choosing to simplify the classic app rather than using the corresponding SAP Fiori app. (If this is you, please reach out; I would love to hear your explanation.)

Another conclusion I reached from this data is that it was a great idea to include Adapt UI for Classic Apps as a standard feature in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, since so many customers are using it to personalize screens to meet their unique business requirements. It also shows that public cloud customers have lots of flexibility to adapt or extend the user interface and they are using it. SAP Screen Personas is one of several powerful options. Private cloud or on-prem customers have even more extensibility options.

How to improve the user experience of your SAP ERP system

Customers

If you are an SAP S/4HANA customer, I recommend you use SAP Fiori apps, whenever possible. You can find the comprehensive list in the SAP Fiori app reference library.
For the classic apps, if there is something you don’t like, change it.
While SAP Screen Personas is built into SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, it’s a free add-on that takes less than an hour* to install into your private cloud or on-prem system. Then, you can simplify your SAP GUI transactions or classic apps, if you prefer that terminology.
* if you know what you are doing.

Partners

Learn how Adapt UI for Classic Apps fits into SAP’s UX portfolio and how to use it strategically as part of an SAP S/4HANA transformation or greenfield implementation. The most comprehensive training course on SAP Screen Personas is now on the SAP Learning platform. This training is still free.

Learn more about SAP Screen Personas

Online training. The best way to learn the basics about SAP Screen Personas (Adapt UI for classic applications) is to take our course on the SAP Learning platform. https://learning.sap.com/courses/adapting-the-ui-in-sap-s-4hana-cloud-using-sap-screen-personas
Connect with your peers. Every other month, we have a group of customers that gather online to share best practices, demo their flavors, and answer each other’s questions. Experts from the product team also join to explain how to use the latest functionality. If you are interested in joining, you can sign up online to join the SAP Screen Personas practitioner forum. This will add you to the mailing list for the monthly meeting summaries. Please contact me directly if you want to join the monthly calls.

I hope you start using Adapt UI for Classic Apps or SAP Screen Personas to make your business users happier and more productive.

For the SAP UX Engineering team, Peter Spielvogel.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408中开放Beta功能测试的AI应用

2024-07-26T03:38:25.497000+02:00

SAP Beta功能测试项目（SAP Beta Testing Program）旨在于通过客户参与测试来获取真实反馈从而完善Beta功能。客户反馈的详细程度一般涉及产品在设置、可用性、功能和质量方面的问题，以便在产品正式发布（RTC）前进行修正。

Beta测试也有助于让客户提前熟悉最新功能，提高采用率，及提升客户满意度。

Beta测试开放时间一般是在某一产品功能开发完成后，正式发布给客户（RTC）之前。

得益于AI 技术的持续创新，在即将发布的2408版本中，我们将开放非常丰富的AI相关应用的Beta功能测试，让您能够更早地体验最新的技术成果。

财务

AI 辅助错误解决功能(AI-Assisted Error Resolution）

AFC 的 AI 辅助错误解决功能通过生成可理解的错误说明和分步指南，帮助用户更快地解决财务结算流程中的技术错误，从而节省时间并减少与 SAP 支持的交互。

AI 辅助财务业务洞察（AI-Assisted Financial Business Insights: Review Booklet for Cost Centers)

发现成本中心审查手册中的数据意义、突出数据之间的依赖关系，利用自然语言快速解释和汇总洞察，并建议相应的操作。以直观的可视化视图，表格和纯语言形式呈现结果，更轻松的管理报告和注释。

AI 辅助固定资产折旧码注释（AI-assisted Explanation of Fixed Asset Depreciation Keys）

由于复杂的折旧码设置，不同折旧区域的资产价值分析可能会很困难。强大的SAP Business AI可以帮助您解释折旧码的运行方式及其折旧计算系统背后的原理，轻松理解折旧码的配置设置，从而提高资产会计和财务报告的效率和决策质量。

销售

客户退货的对象创建(Assisted Object Creation of Customer Return)

AI辅助的客户退货对象功能旨在帮助客户在创建退货订单的过程中节省时间。当用户输入重复值时, 智能用户界面会根据最有可能的输入值提供推荐。这些推荐值按概率排序，用户可以从提供的推荐值中选择。

项目管理

资源管理：智能匹配员工与项目(Resource Management: Intelligent Matching of Employees to Projects)

通过此功能，资源经理可以更轻松地根据请求和维护的高级技能，搜索、匹配并查找到符合条件的候选人。

用户体验

AI辅助智能汇总(AI-Assisted Smart Summarization)

对使用了SAP Fiori 元素的应用程序中的业务对象页面进行汇总，利用这些汇总快速启动后续操作，例如复制粘贴到邮件等，汇总内容可以根据客户需求翻译成所需语言，不限于系统默认语言。

AI 辅助轻松过滤器(AI-Assisted Easy Filter）

在使用了 SAP Fiori 元素开发的清单报表应用程序中，以自然语言输入筛选条件，获取查询结果，以得到最符合您需求的任何过滤体验。

详情请参阅 Get Involved Early

注册您感兴趣的Beta功能测试，体验 SAP S/4HANA Cloud 公有云版中的最新 AI 功能，并亲身影响即将到来的 AI 功能发布。

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408发布亮点：人工智能与技术创新（AI and Technologies）

2024-07-26T03:38:29.585000+02:00

人工智能与技术创新在优化业务流程，改进决策支持，提高用户体验方面发挥着关键作用。在 SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 版本中，人工智能和技术创新将带来众多令人期待的亮点功能，用于提升企业运营效率，改变企业应对复杂商业挑战的方式。

下面让我们看看具体内容。

SAP Joule in S/4HANA Cloud

SAP Joule（以下简称Joule）作为SAP产品的专属AI智能副驾（AI copilot），继在SAP SuccessFactors中发布之后，将在S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408.1版本中全面提供使用。

通过新一代生成AI技术，Joule将会革新用户与SAP 业务系统的交互方式，帮助用户在每个业务接触点开展有效互动，更高效地执行日常任务，从而改变 SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 的用户体验。

Joule可以帮助您：

轻松导航到财务，销售，采购，专业服务等应用程序
快速了解业务对象，例如采购订单,采购申请
快速无缝地访问SAP的帮助门户文档信息，并以更清晰简洁的答案进行总结

用户体验

本次发布引入了个性化用户界面“我的主页”、通过客户应用的使用习惯、地理位置或访问权限，智能推荐主页显示的应用程序，待办事项，预交付卡片等等，并在待办事项部分支持标准和扩展的情况管理提示，进而提升用户体验。

从订单到收款（Order to Cash）的端到端智能流程自动化功能

通过集成各种智能技术和应用程序，为客户打造全方位的端到端自动化，更好地管理订单到收款全流程，实现更加高效、透明和可追溯的业务运营。结合智能化的数据分析和实时监控，企业可以更加准确地把握业务状况，做出更加明智的决策，提高运营效率和盈利能力。

智能场景生命周期管理( ISLM)中的更新

ISLM 是 SAP S/4HANA 堆栈中用于高效集成和操作 AI 场景的统一入口点。它支持客户和合作伙伴管理和使用 SAP 的预构建 AI 场景，或者构建他们的自定义用例。ISLM 包含在 SAP S/4HANA Cloud 的许可中，目前支持超过 25 个 SAP 预构建的智能应用场景。

新功能：一键开启（Turnkey）

在2408版本中ISLM将通过全新的一键开启（Turnkey）功能，进一步自动化AI场景的激活和管理步骤。有别于传统的机器学习开启流程，客户无需具备数据科学家和机器学习的复杂流程知识，通过打开Turnkey开关，即可自动激活用例，避免在初始激活和后续管理中的繁琐操作。此外，系统还可以监控Turnkey的运行状态及其他相关部件。这将大大降低S/4HANA Cloud中AI场景的使用门槛和激活成本。

新技术框架： ISLM 支持生成式 AI （Generative AI）用例

作为管理AI场景的应用程序，ISLM 将与SAP GenAI Hub支持的 LLM 模型无缝集成。客户可以探索使用开箱即用的生成式AI用例，或者选择适合的LLM模型来部署和激活生成式AI的自定义用例。这些智能场景将统一在 ISLM 中进行管理。

另外，2408版本中，ISLM 将提供基本的提示词管理（Prompt management)功能，用于创建、生成和扩展提示词模板。

情况管理（Situation Handling）

在SAP S/4HANA Cloud中，您可以通过使用情况处理来提高业务流程的质量和效率。情况处理可以自动监测和跟踪业务流程节点中发生的问题，需要注意的特殊情况，并通知正确的用户以采取进一步的措施。简而言之，一旦情况发生，用户应该了解情况，自动收到通知。并会获得如何解决问题的建议, 最终帮助业务用户更快地处理和清理这些问题。

新用例 (31N)

在专业服务（professional Service）中用于提醒项目结束日期已到，但阶段仍未完成的项目

SAP 帮助中的新用例清单

New Use Cases for Situation Handling | SAP Help Portal

使用自定义对象创建情况对象

在管理情况对象应用程序中，客户可以使用面向 Eclipse 的 ABAP 开发工具 (ADT)创建自定义SAP对象类型（SAP object types ）和SAP对象节点（SAP object node types ）来创建自定义的情况对象，进而扩展全新的通知场景。

管理情况对象应用程序中的内嵌文本翻译（built-in translation for texts）能将被弃用。

用户可以使用维护翻译(Maintain Translations)应用程序来翻译情况对象、情况场景和情况类型的文本。详情请访问帮助文档

Maintain Translations | SAP Help Portal

更多有关2408中发布功能亮点，请关注Bert Schulze 发表的2408重点发布博客

或观看我们的 SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 早期发布系列回放！

感谢阅读。

Discover AI Innovations: Beta Testing AI Applications in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408

2024-07-26T08:25:53.897000+02:00

At SAP, we're dedicated to delivering the best possible experience for our customers. That's why we're inviting you to participate in our Beta Testing Program, where you can provide valuable feedback on new features and help us refine them before their official release.

By taking part in beta testing, you'll have the opportunity to explore the latest functionality before it's available to the wider customer base, and your input can directly impact the quality and usability of the features.

With SAP's continuous innovation in AI technology, we are excited to announce that our upcoming 2408 release will introduce a wide array of AI-related applications available for Beta testing. This provides you with an early opportunity to experience and engage with the latest innovations firsthand.

Finance

AI-Assisted Configuration for US Tax Jurisdictions

Utilize AI for extracting key information from natural language sentences or given Excel files, and automatically configure jurisdiction-based tax settings. This streamlines tax configuration processes, reduces manual errors, and enhances operational efficiency through natural language interaction and a more intuitive user interface, leading to a modernized and cost-effective onboarding experience.

Click to view the demo video

AI-Assisted Error Resolution

AFC's AI-Assisted Error Resolution effectively interprets technical error messages and context to provide understandable explanations and step-by-step resolution guides, saving time and preventing delays during the financial close process. It also empowers end-users to independently mitigate common error situations, reducing pressure and effort while modernizing the error resolution experience.

Click to view the demo video

AI-Assisted Financial Business Insights

Utilize a "Virtual Analyst" to provide instant explanation and summarization of insights in natural language and automate the discovery of significant data in Review Booklets for Cost Center. With AI, analyze and highlight data dependencies and suggest actionable insights presented in intuitive visualizations and plain language, facilitating management reporting and commentary.

Click to view the demo video

AI-assisted Explanation of Fixed Asset Depreciation Keys

Sales

Assisted Object Creation of Customer Return

Assisted Object Creation of Custom Returns feature utilizes AI to assist in the creation of return orders. The intelligent User Interface provides recommendations for recurring input values, ranked by probability, allowing the user to easily select from the offered recommendations, thereby streamlining the input process.

Project Management

Resource Management: Intelligent Matching of Employees to Projects

The feature of advanced skill match assists in finding skilled employees for resource requests. It considers similar skills to those requested and maintained in the candidate's profile, and presents a matching candidate list to the resource manager. This streamlines the process of finding the right candidates for resource requests.

User Experience

AI-Assisted Smart Summarization

Get summarizations for your object pages using SAP Fiori elements apps to facilitate decision making. Translate the summarization into languages other than your default language, and use it as a starting point for follow-ups. Easily share the summarization in your preferred solution and enjoy beta testing at no additional license cost.

AI-Assisted Easy Filter

Users can input filter criteria in natural language to obtain filter results in SAP Fiori elements-based list report applications. Verify the applied filter values in your classical filter experience and refine the filters as needed. Utilize the filtering experience that best suits your needs.

For more information, see: Get Involved Early

Register and experience the latest AI features in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and influence upcoming AI developments.

Professional Services in the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 Release

2024-07-26T10:32:49.620000+02:00

In this blog post I’d like to outline the innovations for SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2408 in the area of Professional Services. These are the topics that are covered:

Shared-Risk-Based Revenue Recognition for Professional Service Projects (1IL)
Editability of Billing Plan Items for Fixed Price and Periodic Service in Manage Project Billing (4E9)
New Configuration to Flexibly Categorize Time and Expenses on the Itemized List in the Billing Document (4E9)
Example Situation for Professional Services Projects (J11)
More Options for Integration and Extensibility in the Area of Project Costs, Forecast Quantity, and Blocked Functions (J11)
Intelligent Resource Matching (6JO)

Watch this video to get a glimpse of the new features:

Shared-Risk-Based Revenue Recognition for Professional Service Projects (1IL)

Starting off with a rather big topic in this release.

So far planned revenues in Rev Rec were calculated either on a time and expense billing simulation for contract types “Time & Expense” or “Usage Based Billing” or they were based on the billing plan for the contract types “Fixed Price” and “Periodic Service”. Now there is a new revenue recognition method which utilizes financial planning values including ETC and EAC which are entered in the Review app. This increases the flexibility in revenue recognition and avoids manual efforts for adjusting accrued revenues.

One simple example, in a normal time and expense scenario so far revenue is calculated based on the determined billing material and the sales price. If the sales price is 100€ per hour, the realized revenue for one hour time recording is 100€. However not all time and expense contracts allow such a full realization of revenue, based on this maintained sales price. Some contracts can include what we call a shared risk model. This means the supplier and customer agree on a certain planned effort for delivering a certain scope. This new revenue accounting takes into consideration a cost based POC but still allows time and expense billing.

Please have a look at this blog post for more details and the demo here:

You can also find more details on the SAP Help Portal.

Let’s move on to the new topics in the project billing functionality. But before we do, please remember that Andreas Hammerschmidt updates his detailed blog “Project Billing for Customer Projects in SAP S/4HANA Cloud” with every release, so you can find a comprehensive overview of the functionality there.

Editability of Billing Plan Items for Fixed Price and Periodic Service in Manage Project Billing (4E9)

We want to give more flexibility to the billing specialist. He can already edit billing due dates in the “Manage Project Billing! App. Now we want to extend this flexibility even further in the Fixed Price and Periodic Service scenario. The billing specialist is now able to make changes to the billing plan directly in the “Manage Project Billing” app, without the need to go back into the “Plan Customer Projects” app. This included editing the billing dates, the amounts and adding and deleting billing due dates.

For this new functionality you can also have look on the details in this video:

For even more details, please have a look at the entry of this topic on SAP Help Portal.

New Configuration to Flexibly Categorize Time and Expenses on the Itemized List in the Billing Document (4E9)

This next topic was already part of a previous CFD release, but we want to highlight it with this major release as well, for those of you who have not been aware of this functionality yet.

At the moment the itemized list, the details of the time and expense entries on an invoice output, was based on a fixed quantity-based logic. This meant if the posting period was quantity it was classified as time or if not it was classified as an expense. But customers want to create a more individualized listing criteria. For example, an expense posting, if you have a process with a purchase order and you create goods receipt in relationship to purchase orders, then this expense posting has a quantity, but you still want to see this posting as part of the expense section later on in the invoice output.

Therefore, we have now as part of the existing SSCUI (SSCUI 103637) a new option in the billing profile, where you can define, whether a line item for the billing material determination is it a service or expense. Default will be empty, which is the old logic, so existing customers will not be impacted by this change, unless it is actively changed in the system.

You want more? Take a look at this demo:

Example Situation for Professional Services Projects (J11)

This next feature is helping to make the system more proactive for the users working with it.

There can be certain situations, where you want to inform project managers or other supporting roles about special situations. Professional Services projects have been enabled for the extended situation framework. Now an administrator/key user can now go to “Manage Situation Types – Extended” app and define your own situations, which the system should run regular checks and inform defined people automatically. Project managers will be informed directly on their home screen and can take the needed action right from there.

More Options for Integration and Extensibility in the Area of Project Costs, Forecast Quantity, and Blocked Functions (J11)

We continue to work on the flexibility of our product SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. There will be more CDS views and an API released in the context of the J11 scope item. There are a couple that will only be available with the 2408.1 CFD release. Here is a list:

CDS view for blocked functions of WBS elements in enterprise projects and work packages of professional services projects
CDS view with planned costs and planned revenue for work packages of professional services projects, based on planned work package demands (e.g., team roles and expenses) (Release 2408.1 only)

oData API to set forecast month and maintain Estimate to Complete for work packages of professional services projects (Release 2408.1 only)

Intelligent Resource Matching (6JO)

The scope item 6JO is part of the Cloud for Projects functionality on the BTP.

Searching skilled employees for a resource request is one of the key activities within project management. In this context we created an AI use case to support users struggling with this task daily.

The advanced skill match supports resource managers to find the right candidates for their open resource requests. Considering similar skills to the skills which are requested and maintained in the profile. It shows resource manager the requested skills and skills maintained in the profile in the matching candidate list.

This feature makes it even easier to find candidates for resource requests.

Please take a look at the demo here:

This use case is currently in a Beta phase and is currently in the planning to be generally available later this year, but as you know this might be changes made to future planning.

For more information, see: Get Involved Early

Register and experience the latest AI features in
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and influence upcoming AI developments.

Thanks for taking the time to read this blog.

If you are interested in the latest and greatest blogs on Professional Services, please have a look at my collection blog and also take a look at the Community page for Professional Services.

Don’t hesitate to leave a comment and check out our community page to ask your questions and engage with the experts. Follow the PSCC_Enablement tag to stay up to date with our latest blog posts.

📽️ Watch the Replays of Our SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 Early Release Series!

From July 8 to July 12, we hosted a series of 20 compelling live sessions to highlight the exciting innovations shipped with the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 release. Missed the live sessions? We've got you covered! Take advantage of the entire series or pick and choose the sessions most relevant to you. You will find a xx-minute-long recording and a presentation for LoB/Industry/Topic as well as 19 other topics of interest. Don't miss this chance and watch them on demand–anywhere, anytime.

🔎 Find All of Our Assets

Publication of SAP Best Practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 and more...

2024-07-26T13:50:25.133000+02:00

We successfully launched content updates for SAP Best Practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 in EARL this week. These are now readily available to our customer channels Digital Discovery Assessment, Cloud ALM, and Process Navigator. Besides, the process updates for the following have also been deployed:

With the new Process Navigator version, we also provide new additional filters to find all Two-Tier related solution processes.

Figure 1: Filter for Two-Tier ERP to find the respective solution processes.

In conjunction with content updates, we introduced again several new features to Process Navigator on SAP for Me, based on feedback from our customers, partners, and internal users.

Following new features are available:

Enable comparison for solution scenarios and for processes of different release versions or different localizations
Show applications and application roles for solution activities in solution process flow diagrams
Enable mass assets download for selected solution processes
Show the total number of solution processes, new solution processes, and number of solution processes flow diagrams for a solution scenario
Filter solution processes by application, application roles, solution capabilities and solution components on global search page

Figure 2: Compare functionality on solution scenario level with other country/region or other version.

By using the comparison function to compare two release versions, you can easily identify the changes that have been made. The changes are displayed in color and provide a great opportunity for side-by-side comparison in the split view.

Figure 3: Compare result page in a side-by-side view pointing out all changes.

In addition to the current filters for solution scenario version and country/region, new filtering options have been introduced. Users can now apply filters for application, application role, and capability as well.

Figure 4: Filter for application, application role and capability.

Furthermore, we provide new personalization features in Process Navigator:

Enable tile sequence personalization on the homepage
Enable tab sequence personalization on the scenario and process detail page
Preferred country/region as the default filter for global search results
Notification about new features

Figure 5: Personalization options on the page, and the user default settings.

The personalization feature lets users customize the Process Navigator view according to their own needs, considering each user's distinct characteristics and behaviors. Keep an eye out for upcoming updates on personalization and continuous enhancements to usability.

In the last quarter, the Process Navigator saw over 4,000,000 visits indicating a high demand for SAP Best Practices. This motivates our team to keep improving the tool, adding valuable information, and prioritizing user-friendliness.

Don’t hesitate to leave a comment in our Feedback Service tool or ask your questions and engage with the experts.

Higher Education & Research in S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408

2024-07-26T16:44:02.549000+02:00

Dear SAP Highered & Research Cloud ERP enthusiast,

As the summer sun shines brightly, we proudly welcome the latest SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition release, 2408, for Higher Education & Research. This new release is again packed with new features, and groundbreaking UX and AI innovations. This release promises to elevate the user experience and harness the power of artificial intelligence, offering enhanced capabilities and efficiencies.

In addition to these innovations, the 2408 release introduces enhanced features in Grants and Budget (Funds) Management, crucial for higher education and research institutions. These enhancements include more sophisticated tracking and reporting capabilities for grants, allowing institutions to manage funds more effectively and ensure compliance with funding requirements. The enhanced budget management features offer comprehensive tools for planning, monitoring, and adjusting budgets, providing greater financial control and transparency.

As higher education and research institutions, globally, increasingly migrate to cloud solutions, they have a specific focus on embracing best practices and standardizing processes to boost resilience and cost-effectiveness in managing finance, procurement, and funded research project operations. The 2408 release is tailored to meet these evolving needs, ensuring that universities, colleges, K-12 schools, and research institutes can streamline their back-office processes and achieve greater operational efficiency.

One notable trend driving this shift is the focus on "Financial Keys to the Future" as highlighted in EDUCAUSE's Top 10 IT Issues, Technologies, and Trends for 2024. This trend emphasizes the critical need for modernized, flexible, ERP that drives process automation — goals that SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 directly addresses with its cutting-edge cloud capabilities and best-practices processes.

We hereby invite you to dive deeper into the exciting new features and enhancements of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 release. And explore how these innovations are set to support your higher education and research institutions, making them work smarter and more agile.

Enjoy reading and drop me a message if you have any questions!

Cloud ERP core enhancements

Before diving into the innovations for Grants & Budget Management please find below a range of new core Cloud ERP feature-based innovations for S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, and the 2408 release. Out of the range of line of business enhancements, I have selected 3 topics which I believe are very relevant for institutions of highered and research: UX, Finance, and Environment, Health and Safety.

If you are interested in other areas of innovations for SAP’s Cloud ERP, please check out the Release Video from Bert Schulze:

User Experience

Through AI, we speed up your work and transform the user experience, starting with our generative AI copilot, Joule. After a successful phased roll-out in the Early Adopter Care program, Joule will soon be available for your SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition system, expected in Q3/2024. Joule allows you to express business needs in natural language, providing easy access to applications and data, reducing manual tasks, and boosting productivity.

Screenshot: Our natural-language, generative AI copilot Joule provides easy access to applications and data.

Finance

In finance, we now offer a new cost center review booklet. This app presents actual and planned costs clearly, organizing various predefined reports under the 'Actuals' and 'Plan/Actuals' sections. It integrates essential insights into the business context, effectively answering key business queries. Combining application logic, guidance, and multidimensional insights, it fulfills the "insight to action" promise within embedded analytics. Users can review actual and planned data in a single report and switch between guided views and flexible slicing, dicing, and pivoting according to specific business needs.

Screenshot: Display, analyze, and validate cost center data with the new review booklet.

Also, you can now analyze and summarize data from the cost-center review booklet into actionable financial business insights with the help of generative AI.

Please note this use case is available in beta testing! Check out the SAP Customer Influence page to sign up: https://influence.sap.com/sap/ino/#campaign/3698

Screenshot: Gain financial business insights with the help of generative AI.

Environment, Health, and Safety

A new app for Environment, Health & Safety, for managing investigations significantly enhances tracking and oversight, making processes more efficient in managing your (investigation) projects. The 'Manage Investigations' app offers a detailed platform to document and manage phases, personnel, and timelines of investigations. Administrators can easily guide investigations and assign tasks. This tool combines simplicity with robust features, ensuring procedural integrity. It ultimately improves user experience, accountability, and overall efficiency in investigation management.

Screenshot: The new ‘Manage Investigations’ app fosters great efficiency in managing the investigation process.

Grants & Budget Management

The S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition offers a comprehensive set of features and functions of Grants and Budget Management for public sector entities that include state and local governments, cities, K-12 schools, and Higher Education & Research.

With the 2408 release, there have been a range of new enhancements delivered and made available for our (Higher) Education & Research customers. Below an overview on the new 2408 enhancements.

New country versions for: Australia, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom

The 2408 release introduces the Public Sector Management (PSM) scope bundle, now as well accessible, beside the US, Germany, and Canada, also for Australia, The Netherlands, and the UK. This specific industry scope bundle, which is built, with and for Higher Education & Research, comprises specific processes designed for higher education and research. These higher education and research-specific processes include the unique functionality required for the financial management of sponsored research, grants, and funds. Also, they are complemented by for example core processes for finance, procurement, logistics, asset accounting, treasury, leasing, sales, plant maintenance, contract account and project management.

You can use the SAP Process Navigator for further details, and to get a complete overview of which scope items are made available in this new global PSM scope bundle.

Direct link to the Roadmap Explorer: road map item

Screenshot: SAP for Me, and the Higher Education & Research specific scope items.

Navigational assistance with the Joule co-pilot

Features:

Express your business requirement in natural language and have the Joule copilot enable navigation to applications in budget management, grantee management, and fund accounting, where you can execute your business processes

Benefits:

Improve user satisfaction through the ability to express business requirements in natural language
Quickly and efficiently navigate to the ideal, relevant applications, with the help of Joule

Screenshot: SAP Joule, using to navigate through the system.

Substitution Tool for Budget Maintenance

Features:

You now have the ability to automatically derive values (for example, for account assignments, budget type, and item description) when creating a budget document using the app for maintaining budget document

Benefits:

Better usability and faster end-user input
Improve data quality by prepopulating the right data

Screenshot: SAP app for Manage Substitution and Validation Rules

Ability to consume the budget for an expected expense instead of the posting date

Features:

Configure the behavior of the budget consumption date
Leverage this feature to use a due date (or expected expense date) as a budget consumption date; for instance, update purchase orders with a delivery date of next year to consume next year’s budget

Benefits:

Post commitments into future years even when the document is created today
Avoid consuming this year’s budget and prevent unnecessary carry forwards
Improve compliance in some countries where this is a legal requirement

Direct link to the Roadmap Explorer: road map item

Screenshot: SAP configuration for define update date for budget consumption.

Checking budget availability using project hierarchies

Features:

Summarize a project budget using universal hierarchies
Use project hierarchies with work breakdown structure elements and universal hierarchies

Benefits:

You can now roll up budgets for certain projects within the project hierarchy and other projects using universal hierarchies
Capabilities to model a program structure above project hierarchies
Use project hierarchies without maintaining additional universal hierarchies

Screenshot: SAP configuration for defining availability control profile and Journal Field Dependencies.

Budget updates for generating budget documents

Features:

Allowing the generation of budget documents when the budget is uploaded, including documents from budget planning tools or Microsoft Excel

Benefits:

Give users a consistent base of budget maintenance documents for uploaded and manually created budget documents

Screenshot: SAP app to manage jobs, in this case automatic budget header creation.

Reporting on the budget versus payments and open invoices

Features:

Ability to compare budgets against payments and open invoices
Align budgetary reporting with financial and management reporting

Benefits:

Obtain real-time information about budget spending

Direct link to the Roadmap Explorer: road map item

Screenshot: SAP app to query and report on budget and payment line items.

Higher Education & Research Learning Journeys

In late 2023, three new learning journeys were released on Learnings.sap.com. These journeys provide access to close to 500 pages of educational content, with ongoing digital content updates. Seize the chance to enhance your comprehension of the solution through these comprehensive courses covering Budget Management, Grants Management, and Fund Accounting (US specific)!

Screenshot: SAP Learning Hub - Learning Journeys

More info on the Grant and Budget management functionalities can be found via the Product Documentation and Help webpage: SAP.Help.com

Screenshot: SAP Help.com

For more information on what is coming into the next release for S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition, please scroll through the SAP Roadmap Explorer.

Screenshot: SAP Roadmap Explorer

Watch the Replays of Our SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 Early Release Series!

From July 8 to July 12, we hosted a series of 20 compelling live sessions to highlight the exciting innovations shipped with the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 release. Did you miss the live sessions? We've got you covered!

Take advantage of the entire series or pick and choose the sessions most relevant to you. Don't miss this chance and watch them on demand –anywhere, anytime.

Find All of Our Assets

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Rob Jonkers - SAP Higher Education & Research