By Boomi
SAP has been delivering market-leading solutions to help enterprises run operations efficiently for over half a century. However, data volumes and process complexity have grown exponentially in recent times, exposing the limitations of traditional architectures. Legacy systems are now straining under enormous workloads, struggling to produce insights in acceptable timeframes.
Recognizing the limitations of existing systems in the big data era, SAP engineers set out to transform enterprise software for the modern age. They questioned long-held assumptions and redesigned ERP from first principles. The team built an intelligent platform where in-memory computing delivers instant data access and analysis while harmonizing information across departments.
Read on to learn what SAP S/4HANA is, how it differs from previous SAP solutions, and discover the potential benefits it can offer your organization.
What Is SAP S/4HANA?
SAP S/4HANA is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software suite that unifies data and streamlines business processes. It uses machine learning to analyze data in real-time and enables large enterprises to efficiently orchestrate operations, finance, and customer relations.
With rapidly growing data volumes and digital disruption upending industries, SAP recognized that its flagship ERP suite needed more than piecemeal upgrades — it required a holistic transformation. To address this need, SAP S/4HANA was conceived.
S/4HANA involved SAP completely rewriting its market-dominating ERP system to architect it specifically for emerging innovations on two key fronts:
- In-memory: The first is leveraging its SAP HANA database to radically boost processing speeds and analytics performance. These improvements deliver unprecedented responsiveness even under heavy transaction loads.
- Cloud delivery: The second is optimizing natively for cloud delivery rather than solely for on-premises models. This focus on flexibility, agility, and consumption-based pricing opens the door to digital transformation for more organizations.
In essence, SAP has rebuilt its ERP to modernize and optimize its architecture for cloud integration and faster data delivery.
What’s the Difference Between SAP S/4HANA and SAP HANA?
Though related, the two solve different problems:
- SAP HANA: As SAP’s proprietary, in-memory database, HANA specializes in rapidly processing transactions and analytic queries by storing data in RAM rather than on slower physical disks. This enables organizations to run lightning-fast reporting on live operational data. HANA can turbocharge existing SAP or third-party systems as an underlying data layer.
- SAP S/4HANA: Whereas SAP HANA focuses narrowly on data processing speed, SAP S/4HANA represents a native digital ERP suite reinventing business-critical software like finance, supply chain, and HR. It interweaves intelligent technologies into end-to-end processes, providing unified data and analytics on a single platform. S/4HANA runs exclusively on SAP HANA, leveraging its real-time capabilities.
In short, HANA provides raw speed, while S/4HANA applies that speed to mission-critical business applications for greater agility, insights, and innovation.
What Are the Benefits of SAP S/4HANA?
Transitioning to SAP S/4HANA represents a chance to evolve your core ERP to an intelligent digital platform. Beyond technical upgrades, it enables business transformation by unlocking value across three key areas:
- Performance: Incorporating in-memory computing cuts response times from hours to seconds while enabling real-time planning, reporting, and predictive modeling. Rather than batched updates, you gain continuous insights. This performance empowers organizations to be decisive with accurate, real-time information.
- Simplicity: SAP S/4HANA simplifies your business operations by establishing a single comprehensive data source, providing a consistent user experience across devices, and enabling faster implementation through pre-built workflow templates. It also has role-based apps with embedded analytical capabilities, allowing you to access insights and analytics without switching between multiple systems.
- Innovation: As an intelligent ERP, S/4HANA embeds capabilities like AI, machine learning, and IoT into processes to automate tasks, boost strategic foresight through predictive modeling, and enable next-gen scenarios leveraging billions of data points from equipment sensors or external data sources.
- Future-Proof Investment: With legacy solutions set to be phased out by 2027 as S/4HANA becomes core to SAP’s strategy, adopting it now aligns technology frameworks with a compliant, forward-looking platform engineered to rapidly adapt to emerging paradigms.
What Industries Should Use SAP S/4HANA?
With its ability to handle vast transaction volumes while enabling real-time planning, reporting, and predictions, SAP S/4HANA is well-suited for data-intensive industries. Leading use cases span manufacturing, finance, professional services, and more. Here is a detailed breakdown:
- Finance: Financial services providers process millions of payments, trades, and transactions daily. By incorporating S/4HANA for accounting, regulatory reporting, and cash flow analysis, banks and insurers gain instant visibility into positions and financial health to mitigate risk. In-memory computing in S/4 also allows complex, on-demand projections for scenario planning.
- Sales: For sales-driven enterprises, S/4HANA empowers more strategic deal management by connecting sales activity held in CRM systems like Salesforce to back-office functions like order fulfillment, billing, and revenue recognition. This connects sales teams with real-time data on pricing, discounts, and stock levels for accurate quotes while accelerating order-to-cash.
- Supply Chain: Industrial manufacturers can leverage S/4’s unified data environment across supplier, production, and distribution processes for precise control over supply and demand. By processing sensor and transaction data in real time, issues can be identified early. Models can also predictively adapt planning as conditions change.
These are just a few of the industries that are using SAP S4/HANA to their advantage. It is important to keep up to date on which sectors are transforming through S/4HANA to determine if implementation would be beneficial for your business.
How To Plan for Your SAP S/4HANA Implementation
Transitioning to SAP S/4HANA represents a chance not just to upgrade your ERP, but to transform how your business leverages data. To maximize value, your migration strategy should be based on these best practices for SAP integration:
1. Assess & Plan
Thoroughly evaluate your existing IT landscape, including all systems, applications, and databases, as well as the critical integration flow between them that power key processes. This will identify integration needs to be incorporated upfront into the migration approach rather than as an afterthought. Understanding your connectivity requirements early on allows for the appropriate allocation of time and resources.
2. Connectivity Setup
Leveraging an integration platform like the Boomi Enterprise Platform provides pre-built connectors and adapters for SAP solutions like S/4HANA, which simplifies connectivity to modern and legacy applications without extensive coding. This accelerates the establishment of access to data across technologies, both in cloud and on-premises.
3. Integrate Data
Customers can significantly underestimate the challenges of data integration when moving to S/4HANA. Migrating existing integrations while accounting for new S/4HANA data structures and processes is imperative for continuity yet often overlooked. Using an automation-enabled integration platform as a service (iPaaS) solution accelerates pipeline building between modern and legacy applications.
4. Enable Real-Time Reporting
With S/4HANA now acting as your primary analytical data source, integration unlocks its real-time capabilities to provide business insights by extracting relevant data, transforming it into the required formats, and streaming it to visualization tools. This provides decision-makers with live operational visibility rather than static snapshots.
See how you can accelerate your S/4 transformation with Boomi’s pre-built SAP connectivity and integrations.
Why Boomi Is the Best Solution for SAP S/4HANA Integration
SAP S/4HANA delivers tremendous value as an intelligent, real-time ERP platform. However, businesses often underestimate the complexity of integrating legacy systems. This is where Boomi comes in.
As the market-leading iPaaS provider, with more 20,000 customers globally, Boomi provides a faster, lower-risk path to S/4 value realization through:
- Pre-built SAP connectors and proven migration blueprints
- Powerful process automation and data synchronization
- B2B document exchange capabilities
- API-led connectivity and data management
- Low-code application development
- Cloud-native scalability and speed
Specifically, Boomi Integration streamlines building data pipelines between S/4HANA and other core systems to achieve a unified environment. B2B/EDI Management ensures continuity for supplier and partner integrations. API Management delivers insights by federating data. And Flow enables quickly extending S/4 with new cloud apps.
Underpinned by the Boomi Enterprise Platform’s easy-to-use, scalable architecture with built-in resilience and security, these capabilities can slash migration and ownership costs while accelerating time-to-value.
Learn more about how you can modernize your SAP integration strategy to make your ecosystems more agile.