During a recent customer and media event, SAP Africa shared more detail about the recently unveiled SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA (SAP S/4HANA), SAP’s next-generation business suite to help customers run simple.
Launched last month at the New York Stock Exchange by SAP CEO, Bill McDermott, SAP S/4HANA is a new product fully built on SAP’s advanced in-memory platform, SAP HANA. It is designed to exploit the most modern computing principles with in-memory computing and the user-friendly SAP Fiori user experience (UX) for mobile devices.
Talking about the relevance of this innovative and simple technology suite for the African market at the Johannesburg event, Robert Enslin, SAP Executive Board Member and President of Global Customer Operations, commented, “SAP is redefining business computing. Africa is a critical market for SAP and SAP S/4HANA’s unprecedented innovations and simplification, combined with the company’s more than 40 years of experience across industries, presents a tremendous opportunity for forward-looking African businesses. With SAP S/4HANA, we are merging the integration capabilities of ERP with the speed, flexibility and massive innovation of SAP HANA.”
SAP S/4HANA is designed to drive business innovation with simplicity by connecting people, devices and business networks in real time to support the development of new business models. It will also help accelerate the adoption to Internet of Things and Big Data. The simplified data model allows customers to reimagine their IT, helping to drive lower costs and aiming to help deliver IT efficiency.
Pfungwa Serima, SAP Africa CEO added: “Providing our African customers with choice is of paramount importance. SAP S/4HANA will offer cloud, on-premise and hybrid deployment options to provide maximum choice to customers. Many African businesses are looking to extend their reach deeper into the continent and engage with their consumers in all channels. With SAP S/4HANA there is now an innovation platform designed to truly drive their growth.”
SAP S/4HANA extends the value of simplicity to all lines of business and industries. It does this with end-to-end with guided configuration for adoption, a modern user experience for business users of all roles in a company on almost any device, a simplified data model, on-the-fly insight at the highest level of granularity and re-imagined real-time business processes.
The SAP Simple Finance solution, announced in June 2014, is already helping customers transform finance with instant insight and marked the first step in the SAP S/4HANA roadmap.
“SAP HANA has completely changed our view of database management and has greatly simplified tasks, giving our business a cutting-edge advantage and incomparable agility. The benefits which have been manifold include increased visibility, integrity and accuracy in operational reporting with zero system down time since implementation; reduced period closure reporting lead time by 75% – 80%; increased market share from 8% to 11% since Go-Live a mere four months ago. Faster turn-around in order processing due to enhanced real time visibility has also led to increased customer satisfaction. Clearly, SAP HANA was built to keep the business running simpler and better. We could not be happier.” commented Brian Wamwenje, IT lead for Savannah Cement in Kenya.
SAP S/4HANA will also expand the SAP portfolio of cloud solutions such as those from SAP companies Ariba, Fieldglass and SuccessFactors. The comprehensive offering will help allow customers to define their own pace to the cloud based on their needs while keeping all the integration and business benefits of their existing SAP solutions.
SAP has an established partner ecosystem that will resell and provide services for African customers along their journey to run simple with SAP S/4HANA. Partners and SAP are committing to provide an easy path for African customers to move to SAP S/4HANA with pre-defined migration and deployment packages for quick time to value. Read what early adopter partners, including Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Ernst & Young LLP and PwC, have to say: “Partner Quote Sheet: SAP Unveils the Next Generation of Enterprise Software with a New Business Suite, SAP S/4HANA .”
