The Complete Guide to SAP S/4HANA Training

Updated September 8, 2023

In today's fast-paced and interconnected world, having a robust Enterprise Resource Planning suite is more important than ever. As businesses face increasing competition and rapidly changing market conditions, a well-implemented ERP suite serves as the backbone that helps them innovate and thrive. SAP S/4HANA is a next-generation ERP suite that comes with advanced features, including machine learning and AI capabilities. It offers a centralized platform to manage all business processes in real time, providing greater insights and efficiency.

ERP Software has been the core of SAP for more than four decades, and S/4HANA is the 4th ERP suite developed by SAP that focuses on providing end users with active decision support real-time. By reducing your data footprint, SAP S/4HANA will simplify your IT landscape and reduce ownership costs (TCO). In one system, working with larger data sets saves hardware costs, operational costs, and time. Deployment choice: cloud, on-premise, or hybrid to drive time-to-value quickly. SAP S/4HANA is becoming the most successful SAP ERP system all over the world and is now poised as a BIG winner in the ERP market. In today’s digital economy, organizations cannot afford to take actions based on stale insights, and thus there is a need for a real in-memory data platform that can support real-time processing for transactions and analytics. If you enroll in a SAP training course, you'll get an overview of SAP S/4HANA and learn the basics that are required before continuing a learning path to specific areas of interest. Courses cover a broad range of topics focusing on SAP S/4HANA solution capabilities and business process aspects.

What is SAP S/4HANA?

SAP S/4HANA was released in February 2015 and has become one of SAP’s flagship products for customers who want to migrate from SAP Business ERP suite. It is an intelligent ERP that makes use of the complete power of SAP HANA’s in-memory database and is available in the cloud, hybrid and on-premise deployment models, with SAP pushing its customers to migrate towards the cloud option for better business benefits. 

The benefits of SAP S/4HANA are extensive. They include:

Streamlined Finances: Financial management is at the core of any business, and SAP Finance within SAP S/4HANA offers unparalleled tools for managing finances. Real-time analytics, forecasting, and streamlined workflows help in better control and visibility over financial operations.

Simplified Transition: For those already using SAP's products, the transition to SAP S/4HANA is made smoother with SAP S4HANA migration. Tools and support are provided to ensure that migration is not just feasible, but beneficial, leveraging existing data and functionalities.

Comprehensive Transformation: The RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition is a unique offering that supports businesses through their entire digital transformation journey. It includes tools, services, and insights to redesign processes and drive continuous innovation.

What does SAP S/4HANA stand for?

SAP S/4: Indicates this is the fourth generation of the SAP Business Suite. 

HANA: Stands for High-performance Analytic Appliance (although it is a noun not an acronym in this instance).

How does SAP S/4HANA differ from SAP HANA? 

Some confusion exists between SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA among many legacy SAP ERP customers.  SAP HANA is an in-memory database while S/4HANA is a revolutionary application that uses ERP apps in the front-end, that is developed to run on the in-memory database SAP HANA. If SAP HANA is the hub for all SAP’s product strategy, then you can think of SAP S/4HANA as the cornerstone for all SAP technologies.

With SAP HANA it was possible to process huge volumes of transactional and operational business data in real-time. SAP launched the Business Suite on HANA in 2013 that included various modules for SCM, CRM, SRM, and PLM. This business suite basically had the ERP apps in the front-end with the HANA in-memory database running in the back-end. In contrast, S/4HANA is written completely in HANA  by re-writing the 400 million lines of code instead of running on top of it. This makes SAP S/4HANA easy to use and understand and also makes it more agile for developers. 

SAP S/4HANA offers great decisive advantages over HANA:

1. There is no longer a need for meta tables or duplicate tables, and thus S/4HANA has no more redundancies like meta tables or duplicate tables because everything is stored in the main memory.
2. Backups, Development, and Operations have become a lot simpler and easier than before.
3. S/4HANA has slimmed down the back-end to a great extent.

Organizations can reinvent their business models and generate greater revenue using S/4HANA capabilities and making the most of IoT and Big Data by connecting devices, business networks, and people. S/4HANA has opened up new and faster decision-making opportunities for businesses. For example, if simulation in production planning requires only a couple of minutes and not half a day then the logistic processes can easily be rescheduled in a few minutes versus once in 24 hours.  This way a company can provide an individual pricing quotation to a customer when they are ordering and also consider the buying history at that point in time to offer relevant discounts.

S/4HANA has introduced a healthy dose of simplification for administration and management of the IT environment, as it does not require batch processing. With the centralization of network and hardware resources, users can glean insights on data from anywhere in real-time for execution, simulation, planning, and prediction.

Using SAP Fiori UX with SAP S/4HANA

SAP Fiori is a new user interface for SAP S/4Hana applications with more than 300 role-based applications such as manufacturing, finance, HR, and more. Technically, it is possible to use S/4HANA without SAP Fiori but this will limit the business value users can derive from the S/4HANA solution. Most of the novel business innovations of SAP S/4HANA that bring in digital transformation benefits are delivered through the Fiori UX and not the traditional SAP UI.

Fiori UX has a collection of most frequently used S/4HANA functions which are shown in a simple and consumer-ready tile format to be accessed from different devices including smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops.

Overview of SAP S/4HANA Modules

One of the keys to SAP S/4HANA's flexibility is its modular structure. SAP S4HANA modules cover various aspects of business operations, such as finance, sales, and procurement. These modules can be customized to suit specific business needs.

There are dozens of S/4HANA modules listed under various categories but the most popular one is SAP Finance earlier known as Simple Finance. This module aims to streamline financial processes through real-time financial data analysis. With database integration, this module aligns the financial and non-financial data into a single source of truth. The SAP Finance module allows organizations to automate compliance, risk, international trade, and other activities. S/4 HANA’s finance module makes it easy to protect financial assets, improve financial performance, and optimize business operations by minimizing risk and compliance violations.

Other SAP S/4 HANA modules include:

The Next-Generation Cloud ERP - SAP S/4HANA Cloud

With SAP S4HANA Cloud, organizations can leverage the power of cloud computing. The software offers scalability, flexibility, and cost savings. It ensures that resources are available on demand and provides secure access from anywhere, anytime. Furthermore, it induces faster innovation cycles and decreases the overall total cost of ownership (TCO) and total cost of investment (TCI) providing agility in consumption. As enterprise customers expected SAP to renovate, innovate and re-define its core asset, it led to the innovation of a SaaS deployment of S/4HANA ERP applications in February 2017. SAP S/4HANA Cloud is a next-gen intelligent ERP that makes the best of HANA’s in-memory processing and real-time data accessibility. As part of SAP's cloud strategy, SAP Cloud ERP integrates processes within an organization. It allows real-time data sharing and process alignment between different departments, improving collaboration and decision-making. Likewise,  SAP Fiori simplifies complex tasks and provides a user-friendly interface that enhances efficiency and productivity.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud allows users access to all S/4HANA’s functionalities without having to commit to hardware resources, databases, or IT staff.  S/4HANA cloud has three technologies – Machine Learning, Predictive Analytics, and SAP Co-pilot, a conversational digital assistant which brings intelligence into ERP applications. Organizations can benefit from implementing SAP S/4HANA cloud as it helps them generate faster ROI, reduce TCO and TCI, improve compliance and governance, increase business agility, and improve efficiency with intelligent ERP solutions.

SAP S/4HANA Embedded Analytics

Organizations today depend on analytics to get an in-depth understanding of their processes, products, and customers. Having the right information at hand whenever businesses want to make a decision is critical. SAP S/4HANA’s Embedded Analytics provides a set of analytical features that allow users to perform real-time analysis of transactional data. It provides an integrated analytical and transactional data platform for processing complex analytic queries. Millions of rows and thousands of tables can be processed on the fly using embedded analytics. S/4HANA Embedded Analytics is a part of S/4HANA software and does not require any separate license or installation. Embedded Analytics comes with a set of in-built representations of operational data referred to as Virtual Data Models (VDM) that help users make better decisions from the data available at hand.

Conclusion

In a world where technology is advancing at an unprecedented rate, continuous learning and certification stand out as essential steps for staying relevant and competitive. Investing in SAP S4HANA training and certification is an investment in a future aligned with innovation, efficiency, and excellence.

ExitCertified offers several SAP S/4HANA courses, including training for procurement, logistics, and management accounting. With over 10 years of experience with SAP education, ExitCertified is the perfect partner for those embarking on their SAP journey.