Here's What's New in SAP's Latest S/4HANA Release

Germany’s SAP has released the latest iteration of its cloud-based enterprise resource planning SAP S/4HANA platform, with an array of new features bundled into the 1902 release, generally available this week.

S/4HANA is an ERP software suite on top of SAP’s “HANA” in-memory relational database. It can be run on SAP’s managed private cloud platform, via AWS, Azure or GCP, or via an on-premises data centre.

5 New Features in S/4HANA 1902

1) Advanced Financial Closing

This helps users to plan, execute, monitor, and analyse financial closing tasks for the entities of their group. The aim is to help users closer their books faster and more accurately, with lower resource use.

As SAP puts it: “This way, you can more readily deploy finance professionals to forward-looking activities that improve other business outcomes such as the evaluation of new business opportunities.”

2) Improved Quality Management

Traditional goods movements processes require users to slot in incoming items before performing quality inspections. This increases the potential for substandard inventory and redundant stock movements. Features in the new S/4HANA release lets users perform quality management activities during goods receipt.

3) Time-based Revenue Recognition per IFRS15 standard

This lets users perform time-based revenue recognition according to IFRS15 (International Financial Reporting Standard) covering multi-element arrangements of provider contracts in contract accounting and invoicing.

4) Transportation Management

This extends capabilities set in the 1811 release such as allowing users to view transportation charge details and manually calculate charges; see the transportation charges based on the relevant freight agreement between a user’s company, the purchasing organisation, and the carrier; and get the freight cost broken down at the level of each delivery item based on gross weight.

5) Service Management

This new feature synchronises external service orders and service confirmations through APIs, provides functionality for execution of field services in conjunction with an external system, and stores data in universal journal, among other capabilities.

A final note: Enterprise users running SAP’s ERP software on non-HANA databases like Oracle have until 2025 to migrate their entire database if they want to keep using it, as SAP ends support for third-party databases…