For several years, SAP concentrated on creating one of the highest of the class enterprise ERP applications. With the dawn of data focused concepts like Big Data or the Internet of Things (IoT), SAP took forward to invest in creating its own database. SAP realized the bottleneck in existing database architecture for achieving performance and processing unstructured data like text mining. SAP revisited and re-engineered from ground zero by designing a database that will best use the memory, CPU processing power. HANA is a reliable in Memory database that combines both row and column store database architecture with a high level of data compression and parallel processing. SAP S/4 HANA is a next-generation ERP product that redesigns SAP ECC to take advantage of HANA database and introduce design thinking in User Interface, superior performance, automatic failover mechanism, and replication that many enterprises wish to have.
Several companies working with ECC have shifted to SAP HANA as the main database. S/4 HANA has several interpretations especially in terms of functionality across modules and data models. Let us discuss the alterations from a logistics perspective.
Master Data
The basic level of change relays to master data. HANA, SAP can attempt massive processing and also offer better performance.
Customer Master
The main idea of managing vendor and customer master in S/4 HANA is applying business partner approach. Thereby, the customary transactional codes like XD02, XD01, XD03 or VD01, VD03, VD02 are terminated in S/4. It is similar in case of MK01, MK02 and MK03 and XK01, XK02 and XK03. When the enterprise is changing to S/4, they should properly examine and make use of SAP S/4 HANA adaptation pre-checks.
Material Master
The material number area has been prolonged up to 40 characters. It is the major single alteration in Material Master. Other changes in S/4 HANA include:
- Foreign trade fields are not present. GTS (Global Trade Service) is the optional solution.
- Material type SERV is the new introduction for service materials in S/4 HANA.
- It does not support Product Catalog functionality. SAP has suggested using Hybris as the recommended functionality.
Transactional Data
Just like the Master Data, SAP has made some changes at the transaction information. Multiple tables can be removed by SAP in the background.
To conclude, SAP S/4 HANA aims to eliminate indexes and replaces with new dimensional solutions. Fundamental data model interpretation will help enterprises control better and run faster.