This month SAP has announced the general availability of their SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1902 release. This blog gives an overview of the 1902 innovations:

Finance

Advanced financial closing: Thanks to this key highlight in Finance, you can significantly speed up your closing processes by planning, executing, monitoring, and analysing financial closing tasks for the entities of your group. Advanced Financial Closing provides full transparency regarding the complete closing process and allows for multiple persons involved in the same activity. On top of that, it supports you with periodically recurring closing activities with a fixed chronological or dependent sequence.

Group reporting: The new matrix consolidation functionality comprises consolidation for management-oriented organisational units such as profit centres and business segments. It enables business unit managers and group controllers to rapidly respond to changes resulting from internal restructuring. In addition, the group structure manager allows you to main consolidation group specific settings for consolidation unit and consolidation unit assignment.

Supply Chain

Inventory: With the brand new ‘Inventory KPI Analysis’ app, you can effectively ensure forecast and inventory accuracy for your inventory. With its attractive user interface, the app allows you to effectively monitor the inventory flow according to critical key performance indicators (KPIs) such as stock changes, consumption changes, inventory/ageing changes, inventory/turnover changes, and range of coverage changes. On top of that, inventory analysts can investigate potential issues and, for example, identify potential outliers affecting the fixed capital situation.

Quality management in warehousing: With the new quality management functionality, you can now perform quality inspections during goods receipt. This allows you to inspect products which have been delivered by production or external suppliers before put-away in the warehouse. You can also record usage decisions for partial lots if only part of the stock items in the inspection show the desired quality.

Asset Management
Mass generation of orders for maintenance notifications: The Fiori app ‘Maintenance Notifications’ allows you to perform mass generation of orders for maintenance notifications. You can either generate separate maintenance orders for every maintenance notification that you have selected or you can generate one single maintenance order for all selected maintenance notifications.

Sourcing and Procurement
Analytics for changes in purchase order items: In the Fiori app ‘Purchase Order Changes’, you can now monitor changes to purchase order items, such as purchasing group, supplier, quantity, material group, and price in real-time. You can drill down to purchase order item level to take necessary actions.

Service
Service contract management: The new functionality for service contract management enables you to handle service contracts coming from external systems. Service contracts are outline agreements with business partners that define services offered for a particular period and usually represent a long-term service agreement with customers. In addition, 1902 provides a holistic view of all services that a customer has subscribed to. This way, you can manage pricing agreements and discounts to have the flexibility to offer services priced based on your customers’ needs.

Professional Services
Maintenance of work location in timesheet: You can now maintain country, state, and local work locations of employees or service performers in the timesheet. This allows you to handle or track location-specific processes, such as tracking project tasks executed at a customer site.

Situation Handling
Proactive alerts in procurement: With situation handling, you can now mitigate several potential business risks in Procurement. The system proactively alerts you regarding non-deliverable items based on supplier confirmation, missing confirmations for demands that are due soon, overdue purchase orders in connected systems, as well as contracts which will expire soon or are almost consumed. Thanks to this, you can take the necessary steps at an early stage and avoid potential negative implications on your business processes.

SAP Enable Now
Thanks to the integration of SAP Enable Now in S/4HANA Cloud, you can customise and enrich the Web Assistant – the context sensitive in-app end-user documentation. This allows you to customise any SAP in-app standard content and to create your own guided tours and context help for specific application functions. Furthermore, any SAP Enable output – such as interactive simulations, courses, documentation, or videos – can be embedded easily into the Web Assistant

SAP Activate
Last but not least, you can now work in the implementation portal within Cloud Application Life-cycle Management (CALM) for SAP S/4HANA Cloud. CALM makes use of SAP’s well-proven SAP Activate methodology and provides a smooth journey to Cloud ERP by providing you with guided to-do lists that contain all necessary implementation tasks, such as fit-to-standard analysis and scoping.

If you would like to learn more about SAP S/4HANA Cloud please get in touch.

Source: https://blogs.sap.com/2019/02/04/intelligent-erp-update-sap-s4hana-cloud-1902-release/