With the launch of GROW with SAP, we deliver cloud ERP that you can adopt with speed and predictability, while benefiting from continuous innovation. With the latest major update of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, we are delivering new modern experiences, foundational capabilities, built-in intelligence, and core ERP innovations to improve organizational and employee productivity.
Modern and Intelligent Experience
We deliver a built-in intelligent, modern experience across all our business processes, and are delivering several enhancements to make the SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition user experience more modern, productive, and collaborative for end users and IT. Some highlights include:
- The existing Create Sales Orders - Automated Extraction app has been enhanced with AI and now enables Auto-completion of Sales Order data. Follow-up processes (e.g., delivery of the sales order) may be blocked if certain information is missing when a sales order is created. The incompletion log now warns the user whenever a configurable set of fields is incomplete, ensuring missing data is manually filled in. The user is assisted by receiving recommendations of the most probable values for these fields, based on historic data. This solution is planned for delivery later this year.
- You can access your work through spaces and pages in My Home on any device. With the 2308 release, you can now personalize the space menu bar to your needs, by adding, removing, or adapting the sort order of spaces displayed.
Figure 1: Personalize space menu for My Home
- The Share as Tab feature is now generally available. You can accelerate decision-making and improve collaboration by sharing business data from SAP Fiori apps through tabs in Microsoft Teams channels, groups, and chats.
Figure 2: Share as Tab in Microsoft Teams
- SAP Start is SAP’s new central entry point for all SAP cloud business solutions. It provides intuitive and easy access to the most relevant business information from all integrated SAP cloud solutions in one central place. This is now available for all SAP customers with a RISE or GROW contract, or an SAP Build Work Zone Standard subscription and will be available to all customers soon.
Figure 3: New central entry point: SAP Start
- Your IT users can now use the System News in My Home to get an overview of relevant system news. No additional tools or information sources are required. This reduces efforts to identify which information is relevant for your system and reduces the risk to miss critical system information.
Figure 4: System News in My Home
- Your IT users can also define a color-coding for different system types, such as development or test. A color-coded system info bar in the header of the SAP Fiori Launchpad indicates the system role and system name.
Figure 5: Color-coding for different system types
Core ERP Innovations
With seamless and modern project management, billing and planning experiences, organizations can run their service business and financial processes effectively. Here are some highlights for finance and service-centric industries:
- Buying360 Self-Service Procurement empowers your casual users to shop via catalogs and marketplaces with full transparency on their requests. They get tailored recommendations and are guided through the procurement process, while the system ensures compliance incl. approval processes. The processes are highly automated and require only in exceptional cases the attention of the operational purchasers. This allows buyers to focus on higher-value activities and increases user satisfaction.
Figure 6: Create Purchase Request
- The credit checks for solution orders enable you to use credit management in sales items, service order items, and service contract items so that the solution can be provided without financial risk. This avoids revenue loss by checking the creditability of your customers before starting the delivery and service fulfillment.
Figure 7: Credit checks for solution orders
- We facilitate the financial close process for accountants by providing automated supervision of closing tasks with account balance validation. We have added the new Fiori apps Manage Balance Validation Rules and Groups and View Balance Validation Results to enable maintenance and execution of validation rules. These apps are seamlessly integrated with SAP S/4HANA Cloud for advanced financial closing.
Figure 8: Automated supervision of closing tasks with account balance validation
- The new version of Manage Journal Entries offers significantly enhanced usability based on user research, including direct access to more related apps and functions, greater detail in the list of journal entries, and clearer navigation between journal entries and line items.
Figure 9: Manage Journal Entries
We are committed to continuously expanding our set of ready-to-use capabilities needed to run your business processes. Here are some of the 2308 highlights for product and manufacturing-centric industries:
- By using wave management to control warehouse activities, you can increase efficiency by grouping warehouse request items into waves and releasing them together as packages.
- Transportation demand and capacities are frequently measured by floor space in trucks and containers. You can now use loading meter or pallet space consistently in the entire process from demand generation, planning, subcontracting to charge calculation and settlement.
- With the Logistics Tracking app for milestone-based supply chain monitoring of materials and pro-active handling of risks, we enable reporting with analytical capabilities across the field logistics supply chain for all logistics items throughout forward and return processes.
SaaS Foundation
Our SaaS foundation ensures that businesses can streamline their operations, reduce manual efforts, and focus on their core activities while staying compliant with local regulations. In addition to localization, we heavily invested in other foundational topics, such as an improved E2E onboarding experience to make it easier for you to get up and running:
- We now offer 4 new local version for Israel, Peru, Serbia (subsidiary only) and Ukraine (subsidiary only).
- Multiple scope items for the existing standard 40 local versions were released to increase business scope across the countries.
- 3 new countries (India, Mexico, South Korea) for SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management have been developed.
- We accelerated the business configuration by 50% with mass upload from Excel templates for 1200+ configuration objects in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, by using the Business Technology Platform (BTP). This allows you to save time and effort when setting up your business configurations.
- The extension of the baseline implementation for professional services results in a 70% reduction in time to value for your initial implementations thanks to predefined We accelerate your implementation to under 37 days, by offering templates and automation for configuration, data migration and testing.
More Information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition:
- For more details around what is being delivered for 2308, see Bert Schulze’s release blog on the SAP Community
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, release info here
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, community here
- Latest SAP S/4HANA Cloud Release Blog Posts here and previous release highlights here
- Product videos on our SAP S/4HANA Cloud YouTube playlist
- Early Release Webinar Series here
- Best practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud here
- Feature Scope Description here
- What’s New here
- Help Portal Product Page here
- Explore SAP S/4HANA Cloud Extensibility options by leveraging the sample scenarios from SAP in the Extensibility Explorer.
- SAP Managed Tags:
