Recently SAP promised to its customers a new and clearer roadmap. There are 6 major areas of improvements :- Clearer guidance 3 year Roadmaps S/4 HANA. i.e. Think about the customer first.

Digital Transformation Navigator

The idea with the new SAP Transformation Navigator tool is for customers to lay out their technology landscape for SAP and then be given recommendations for where they should prioritise a shift to S/4 HANA and where they can afford to wait. SAP is testing the tool currently and plans for it to be available for customers by Q2 2017. The tool will tell clients here is the solution, the integration and here is how to get from A to B.

Better Buying Experience via SAP Ariba

Supplier Management  SAP Ariba provides the only end-to-end solution portfolio that lets you manage supplier information, lifecycle, performance, and risk all in one place. Strategic Sourcing Discover qualified suppliers, speed up your sourcing cycles, and create the most competitive, best-value agreements for sustainable savings with all your sourcing needs. Supply Chain Connect the people, partners, processes, and information needed to manage all design-to-deliver activities in a simple, smart, and open way. Procurement Ensure compliance and control while providing users a delightful buying experience, with innovative capabilities like guided buying and spot buy. Financial Supply Chain Transform your payables from liabilities into strategic assets to boost free cash flow, free up working capital, and deliver more bottom-line value. Platform Solutions Maximize the value of your SAP Ariba solutions with integration wizards, extensions, and templates – without burdening your IT resources. Integration Solutions Unify your apps, data, processes and devices on a single platform to deliver more value to your enterprise. Services for Buyers Before and after deployment, SAP Ariba provides support for change management, adoption, connectivity, and much more. Selling and Fulfilment Strengthen and sharpen your e-commerce capabilities to become the preferred, easy-to-find vendor of purchase-ready buyers around the world.

SAP User Experience (UX)

Aiming to meet the user’s needs in the most effective, practical and enjoyable way, SAP’s UX strategy is built upon the foundation of SAPs user’s goals — efficient and easy-to-use software, packaged with the optimal user experience. SAP’s understanding of how to create true innovation manifests in the award-winning user experience SAP Fiori. The SAP Fiori concept and design principles are key components in SAP’s design-led development process which ensures the delivery of SAP Fiori innovation through all SAP products. At the same time, SAP’s UX strategy focuses on empowering its customers and partners to design their UX journey and execute on it – via educational offerings and tools and technologies to design, develop and deliver a simplified user experience. A rich portfolio of services to initiate, drive and scale projects to improve UX in their enterprise complements this offering.

SAP Support

Simplified pricing in logistics

SAP offers some changes in pricing with S/4 HANA

• No impact on the standard SAP business processes
• The SAP internal program logic has been adapted to the new persistency and the new field lengths.
• Pricing results of existing documents created before the system conversion (that is, the content of table KONV) are converted as part of the system conversion and transferred automatically to the new data table.

Licensing Change

SAP’s new pricing model for the Procure-to-Pay and Order-to-Cash scenarios in ERP ECC or SAP S/4 HANA will now be based on orders. The procure to pay and order to cash scenarios will now be based on orders, which is a measurable business outcome for any business. In addition, static, read access in third party systems is customer data. Competitors charge you for static read in third-party systems, SAP will not. Essentially, the data inside a customer’s SAP system will not be charged to view outside of SAP. “Indirect static” read is read-only and is not related to a real-time system enquiry or request and requires no processing or computing in SAP systems. It will also be included in the underlying software licence free of additional charge when a customer is otherwise properly licensed SAP explains. SAP’s new proposal is to measure indirect usage based on orders, however, there is no indication what value will be attributed to these new license measures. Organisations should look carefully at their own circumstances and verify whether the measure that SAP is proposing is a reasonable licensing measure for the purposes of their business. Author:- Michael Renshaw is an experienced SAP ERP manager supporting clients move to the correct SAP release and roadmap.