SAP has released the second “Feature Pack Stack” (FPS), SAP S/4HANA 2021 FPS02 on May 25, 2022. This is the second in a sequence of FPS’s that will be delivered twice a year and introduce new optional capabilities. And once again, it comes up with a new set of capabilities bringing simplification, innovation, automation, analytics, and user experience to customers. In total, we delivered more than 30 innovations and enhancements in this FPS02! See What's New Viewer here.
In this blog, I will give you an expert view, from product experts to product experts, of some selected highlights of SAP’s second shipment of this year for SAP S/4HANA 2021, and its highlights across lines of business, cross components, and industries.
All these innovations will also be available for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition.
The picture below provides an overview of the key innovations that were shipped with SAP S/4HANA 2021 FPS02, and in the following, I will go into details for Lines of Business (LoB), Industries and Cross-Topics.
Picture 1: The highlights at a glance.
With FPS02, SAP S/4HANA 2021 has reached the stable stack for the 2021 release. This means that no bigger functional or technological changes – especially of incompatible nature – are expected anymore in SAP S/4HANA 2021. Future SPs of SAP S/4HANA 2021 will mostly contain maintenance and legal changes. The release to customers for the next SAP S/4HANA release is the starting point of the maintenance-only phase. New innovations will be delivered in future releases of SAP S/4HANA. After the end of mainstream maintenance, the release usually enters customer-specific maintenance.
At the same time, in Q4 2022 we celebrate five years since SAP released the third version of our new generation ERP solution – SAP S/4HANA (version 1709).
It means that if an SAP S/4HANA 1709 customer wants to keep the system under mainstream maintenance, it must be upgraded to a higher release before 2023 accordingly. Note, that if the SAP S/4HANA starting release is already in customer-specific maintenance, a two-step or multistep upgrade may be required; for more information on this scenario, see the Product Availability Matrix (PAM).
Picture 2: Overview of Release and Maintenance Strategy for SAP S/4HANA.
SAP Geographical Framework for SAP S/4HANA Maintenance Management enables you to gain more insights from your business data.
Before SAP S/4HANA 2021 FPS02, there is no standard way to Extend Geographical Enablement Framework and add new features or customize existing functionality. It was only possible by copying the existing code and deploying a new application.
You can now extend the Spatial Explorer app to add custom actions by creating an adaptation project. To add custom functions, you can create a new adaptation project. You can edit the project and add your custom logic to create your own views and controller files.
For more information related to Extending the Spatial Explorer App to Add Custom Actions, see here.
You can now allow maintenance orders to inherit spatial data from a technical object, maintenance notification, or a maintenance item.
Additional Details
When you create a maintenance order from a technical object, the maintenance order inherits the spatial data from the technical object.
When you create a maintenance order from a maintenance notification (that was created from a technical object or directly), the maintenance order inherits the spatial data from the maintenance notification.
When you create a maintenance item from a technical object, and then, create a maintenance notification and maintenance order, the maintenance order inherits the spatial data from the maintenance notification. The maintenance notification inherits spatial data from the maintenance item.
International Trade Compliance supports you in the following areas:
Legal Control
Embargo
With SAP S/4HANA 2021 FPS02, it is possible to perform a legal control check, an embargo check, and a watch list screening check for 'purchase requisitions'.
In International Trade, it is now possible to perform the following checks for purchase requisitions:
This synchronous inbound service enables you to read the master data for Project Claim by exposing the remote API view through OData.
This service is published on the SAP API Business Hub. For more information about APIs, see APIs on SAP API Business Hub.
This is an OData version 4 service. This version aims to improve the processing time and resource consumption of clients and servers and to reflect the complexity of the underlying business model. This includes a lightweight JSON format that reduces the size of every response. Business data can be retrieved in the exact amount, at the right time, and inappropriate mode by using new synchronization mechanisms. Calculations are made and data is aggregated by using the tiers best suited for this task. Sophisticated metadata artifacts enable the true-to-life modeling of business models.
The work breakdown structure (WBS) is a model of the project that organizes project tasks into a hierarchy.
As of SAP S/4HANA 2021 FPS02, WBS Element triggers the following events:
Business events are published on the SAP API Business Hub. For more information about business events, see Business Events on SAP API Business Hub.
You can provide short and long texts for PS objects in several languages using multilanguage support, and you can use standard text keys to create texts that can be used across multiple projects. In this way, you can ensure that your company uses standardized terminology.
As of SAP S/4HANA 2021 FPS02, you can use the following features:
You can now launch a Web Dynpro application from the financial plan header, to do the following:
With this release, you can integrate SAP Subscription Billing with SAP S/4HANA Sales to facilitate the billing of subscriptions and trigger subsequent financial processes.
Additional Details
SAP Subscription Billing is an application on the SAP Business Technology Platform that requires a separate license. You can use it to manage the entire subscription life cycle. It provides pre-billing data based on subscription data, corresponding rate plan information, and real usage data in pay-per-use models.
Upstream systems (for example, SAP Commerce Cloud) can create subscriptions in SAP Subscription Billing by calling a dedicated REST API. SAP Subscription Billing can then collect usage records and perform an automated rating of usage, recurring, and one-time charges before passing the resulting data to SAP S/4HANA using a dedicated SOAP API. In SAP S/4HANA, the received subscription billing data is persisted in the form of subscription billing document requests (billing document request type SBDR).
Billing clerks can process these subscription billing document requests to create customer invoices that bill customers for the subscriptions they have purchased.
With this feature, you can assign SEPA mandates in service contracts. The system forwards the SEPA mandate that you have assigned to the service contract to the follow-on billing document.
Additional Details
To be able to assign a SEPA mandate, the service transaction being processed must be SEPA-relevant. The system uses the payment method, which you have entered manually at the header level or item level, to determine whether the transaction is SEPA-relevant. The system can also determine the payment method automatically from the terms of payment defined in the customer master data. If this is the case, the terms of payment must be connected to a SEPA-relevant payment method.
The transaction currency is Euro (ISO code).
For more information about the SEPA area, see Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA)
With this app, you can use a flexible combination of dimensions to analyze service contracts including their billing plan and invoice details. For example, for your key customers or for your key contracts, you can analyze the billing value of the billing-relevant service contract items that haven't been invoiced yet. You can then drill down into the data to identify the settlement periods for which billing is due and process them with high priority.
You can use this app to do the following:
Video: Watch the video to learn more about the general functions offered by this app.
With this app, you can initiate renegotiations on the prices for items in existing central purchase contracts. You can revisit prevalent central purchase contracts for chosen items and renegotiate the pricing conditions, to gain value from changed market conditions.
The following new business add-in (BAdI) is available with this app:
A business partner can have multiple standard addresses and multiple delivery addresses. One standard address is valid at any one time. In Transportation Management (TM), one business partner can now have multiple locations. For every relevant address of a business partner, you can now create a respective location. The address number of the location is the same as the address number of the business partner.
For more information concerning the multiple address handling of business partners in SAP TM with SAP S/4HANA 2021 FPS02, see the post blog from Michael Haase here.
You can create custom situations based on a specific business object, such as a contract, a service order, an invoice, or material. A wide range of configuration options helps you tailor your custom situations to your business requirements. For example, you can model your own situation objects, specify events that trigger situations, or configure a situation page including actions that help the end-user solve situations.
Picture 3: Model your own business objects that enable situation handling.
Now with the new SAP S/4HANA 2021 FPS02 release, you can:
Define your own business situations with the Manage Situation Types - Extended app
With this feature you can use the Manage Situation Types - Extended app to create custom situation templates and situation types for object-based situations, based on the extended framework of Situation Handling.
Explore how to use custom situations with the Situation Handling Demo app
With this feature, you can use the Situation Handling Demo app to test the extended framework of Situation Handling, based on a fictional booking portal scenario. With the demo app, three pre-defined situation demo templates are available.
Model Situation Scenarios and relate to Situation Objects In Manage Situation Scenarios app
With this feature, you can use the Manage Situation Scenarios app to create situation scenarios which are the technical basis for custom situation templates.
Model Situation Objects and relate to application artifacts in Manage Situation Objects app
With this feature, you can use the Manage Situation Objects app to model business objects that can be used in the extended Situation Handling framework for custom situations.
You can use this function to check, whether creating a weighing record in the confirmation cockpit is permitted or not permitted.
At the route, it is possible to define whether a weighing may be done only on waste disposal order header level and/or on waste disposal order item level. In the weighing transaction, it can be checked whether the weighing is allowed and whether only a warning message or an error message should be displayed.
In addition to the weighing transaction, the check is now also available for order confirmation. If a weighing record is created and saved in the conformation transaction at waste disposal order header level and/or waste disposal order item level, it is checked whether this is allowed according to the settings on the route and whether a warning message or an error message should be displayed
Picture 4: Increase transparency for employees by providing additional settings and checks in Route maintenance and Order confirmation.
Use the enhanced functionality in the waste disposal order confirmation to check the route maintenance when creating weighing records. Avoid errors in creating weighing records due to route maintenance for example for collection routes and container service routes.
A new configuration setting to ignore the route configuration ensures downward compatibility for customers.
With this feature, you can now enable the system to lock fashion contracts (requirement relevant contracts) at the item level during the creation of release orders (call-offs) or mass processing (backorder processing (BOP), season redetermination, VAS redetermination) of release orders.
Contract locking makes release order creation and mass processing much more seamless for customers with large volumes of data. Since the simultaneous call and locking from different processes of the contracts during the update can also be done with the same contract documents that are called at the same time, an exclusive lock is now created on the item level. Therefore, the errors that occur due to locks are now drastically reduced
Thanks for reading this blog post. Stay tuned!
If you are also interested in the innovations delivered with SAP S/4HANA 2021, I would like to draw your attention to my link collection blog – The Link Collection
If you want to learn more and actively engage with SAP subject matter experts on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, join our SAP S/4HANA Cloud Customer Community. This platform which is available to SAP S/4HANA Cloud customers and partners has a clear mission: to deliver an interactive community to engage with one another about best practices and product solutions.
For more information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA 2021, check out the following links:
Follow us via @Sap and #S4HANA, or myself via @VoglerChrist and LinkedIn
In this blog, I will give you an expert view, from product experts to product experts, of some selected highlights of SAP’s second shipment of this year for SAP S/4HANA 2021, and its highlights across lines of business, cross components, and industries.
All these innovations will also be available for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition.
The picture below provides an overview of the key innovations that were shipped with SAP S/4HANA 2021 FPS02, and in the following, I will go into details for Lines of Business (LoB), Industries and Cross-Topics.
Picture 1: The highlights at a glance.
Remark 1
With FPS02, SAP S/4HANA 2021 has reached the stable stack for the 2021 release. This means that no bigger functional or technological changes – especially of incompatible nature – are expected anymore in SAP S/4HANA 2021. Future SPs of SAP S/4HANA 2021 will mostly contain maintenance and legal changes. The release to customers for the next SAP S/4HANA release is the starting point of the maintenance-only phase. New innovations will be delivered in future releases of SAP S/4HANA. After the end of mainstream maintenance, the release usually enters customer-specific maintenance.
Remark 2
At the same time, in Q4 2022 we celebrate five years since SAP released the third version of our new generation ERP solution – SAP S/4HANA (version 1709).
It means that if an SAP S/4HANA 1709 customer wants to keep the system under mainstream maintenance, it must be upgraded to a higher release before 2023 accordingly. Note, that if the SAP S/4HANA starting release is already in customer-specific maintenance, a two-step or multistep upgrade may be required; for more information on this scenario, see the Product Availability Matrix (PAM).
Picture 2: Overview of Release and Maintenance Strategy for SAP S/4HANA.
Remark 3
- On February 4, 2020, SAP announced a maintenance commitment for SAP S/4HANA until the end of 2040. See related press release and SAP Note 2900388.
- For more information about SAP Release and Maintenance Strategy, see SAP Support here
Asset Management
Extensibility in Spatial Explorer App
SAP Geographical Framework for SAP S/4HANA Maintenance Management enables you to gain more insights from your business data.
Before SAP S/4HANA 2021 FPS02, there is no standard way to Extend Geographical Enablement Framework and add new features or customize existing functionality. It was only possible by copying the existing code and deploying a new application.
You can now extend the Spatial Explorer app to add custom actions by creating an adaptation project. To add custom functions, you can create a new adaptation project. You can edit the project and add your custom logic to create your own views and controller files.
For more information related to Extending the Spatial Explorer App to Add Custom Actions, see here.
Inheritance of Spatial Data by Maintenance Orders
You can now allow maintenance orders to inherit spatial data from a technical object, maintenance notification, or a maintenance item.
Additional Details
When you create a maintenance order from a technical object, the maintenance order inherits the spatial data from the technical object.
When you create a maintenance order from a maintenance notification (that was created from a technical object or directly), the maintenance order inherits the spatial data from the maintenance notification.
When you create a maintenance item from a technical object, and then, create a maintenance notification and maintenance order, the maintenance order inherits the spatial data from the maintenance notification. The maintenance notification inherits spatial data from the maintenance item.
Governance, Risk, and Compliance for Finance
Trade compliance checks for purchase requisitions
International Trade Compliance supports you in the following areas:
Legal Control
- Control of legal regulations for import and export.
- Managing licenses in accordance with legal control for import and export processes.
- Managing and release of blocked legal control documents.
- Managing countries/regions under embargo.
Embargo
- Manage countries under embargo
- Manage documents
- Release of blocked documents
With SAP S/4HANA 2021 FPS02, it is possible to perform a legal control check, an embargo check, and a watch list screening check for 'purchase requisitions'.
In International Trade, it is now possible to perform the following checks for purchase requisitions:
- Legal control checks for trade compliance with purchase requisitions
- Screening checks for purchase requisitions
- Trade compliance embargo checks for purchase requisitions
- Legal control checks for the export from the supplying plant to the business partner of the receiving plant in case of stock transport orders with purchase requisitions
R&D/ Engineering – Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management
Reading Project Claim using an API
This synchronous inbound service enables you to read the master data for Project Claim by exposing the remote API view through OData.
This service is published on the SAP API Business Hub. For more information about APIs, see APIs on SAP API Business Hub.
This is an OData version 4 service. This version aims to improve the processing time and resource consumption of clients and servers and to reflect the complexity of the underlying business model. This includes a lightweight JSON format that reduces the size of every response. Business data can be retrieved in the exact amount, at the right time, and inappropriate mode by using new synchronization mechanisms. Calculations are made and data is aggregated by using the tiers best suited for this task. Sophisticated metadata artifacts enable the true-to-life modeling of business models.
Business events for WBS elements
The work breakdown structure (WBS) is a model of the project that organizes project tasks into a hierarchy.
- It is the functional basis for further planning steps in a project, for example, for process planning, cost planning, scheduling, capacity planning or costing, as well as project control.
- It gives you a clear picture of the project and facilitates the coordination and implementation of the project from a management standpoint.
- It shows the work involved in a project.
As of SAP S/4HANA 2021 FPS02, WBS Element triggers the following events:
- WBSElementCreated
- WBSElementChanged
- WBSElementDeleted
- WBSElmntPosChanged
- WBSElmntStsChangedTechnical
Business events are published on the SAP API Business Hub. For more information about business events, see Business Events on SAP API Business Hub.
Enhanced Multilanguage Support for Short Text
You can provide short and long texts for PS objects in several languages using multilanguage support, and you can use standard text keys to create texts that can be used across multiple projects. In this way, you can ensure that your company uses standardized terminology.
As of SAP S/4HANA 2021 FPS02, you can use the following features:
- Multilanguage support for short text is disassociated from the Business Function OPS-PS-CI-1
- Archive multilanguage short texts
- View multilanguage short text in the following Fiori app:
- Project Definition Overview and the Details page
- WBS Element Overview and the Details page
- Network Overview and the Details page
- Network Activity Overview and the Details page
- Milestone Overview and the Details page
- Change WBS Element Status
- Change Network Activity Status
- Confirm Network Activity
- Confirm Project Milestone
- Project Text
- Project Schedule
- Project Network Graph
R&D/ Engineering – Commercial Project Management
Enabling quick financial planning to support fiscal-period breakdown for planning
You can now launch a Web Dynpro application from the financial plan header, to do the following:
- Create and manage financial plans based on a fiscal period breakdown
- Display the entire planning structure and a summary at the level of resource types
- The planning area displays information by planning periods (in the fiscal period breakdown)
Sales
Subscription Management with Sales Billing
With this release, you can integrate SAP Subscription Billing with SAP S/4HANA Sales to facilitate the billing of subscriptions and trigger subsequent financial processes.
Additional Details
SAP Subscription Billing is an application on the SAP Business Technology Platform that requires a separate license. You can use it to manage the entire subscription life cycle. It provides pre-billing data based on subscription data, corresponding rate plan information, and real usage data in pay-per-use models.
Upstream systems (for example, SAP Commerce Cloud) can create subscriptions in SAP Subscription Billing by calling a dedicated REST API. SAP Subscription Billing can then collect usage records and perform an automated rating of usage, recurring, and one-time charges before passing the resulting data to SAP S/4HANA using a dedicated SOAP API. In SAP S/4HANA, the received subscription billing data is persisted in the form of subscription billing document requests (billing document request type SBDR).
Billing clerks can process these subscription billing document requests to create customer invoices that bill customers for the subscriptions they have purchased.
Service
SEPA Mandate in Service Contracts
With this feature, you can assign SEPA mandates in service contracts. The system forwards the SEPA mandate that you have assigned to the service contract to the follow-on billing document.
Additional Details
To be able to assign a SEPA mandate, the service transaction being processed must be SEPA-relevant. The system uses the payment method, which you have entered manually at the header level or item level, to determine whether the transaction is SEPA-relevant. The system can also determine the payment method automatically from the terms of payment defined in the customer master data. If this is the case, the terms of payment must be connected to a SEPA-relevant payment method.
The transaction currency is Euro (ISO code).
For more information about the SEPA area, see Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA)
Service Contracts - Flexible Analysis
With this app, you can use a flexible combination of dimensions to analyze service contracts including their billing plan and invoice details. For example, for your key customers or for your key contracts, you can analyze the billing value of the billing-relevant service contract items that haven't been invoiced yet. You can then drill down into the data to identify the settlement periods for which billing is due and process them with high priority.
Additional Details
You can use this app to do the following:
- Analyze service contract-related key performance indicators in multi-dimensional reports using different measures such as billing value of settlement period
- Filter the items according to various criteria, such as sold-to party, sales organization, and so on
- Sort and display the report data as a table or a chart
- Export the report as an Excel or a PDF
- Navigate to Expiring Service Contracts Analysis and Manage Service Contracts to further analyze the selected service contract data
Working with Analytical Reports
Video: Watch the video to learn more about the general functions offered by this app.
Sourcing and Procurement
Contract price renegotiation
With this app, you can initiate renegotiations on the prices for items in existing central purchase contracts. You can revisit prevalent central purchase contracts for chosen items and renegotiate the pricing conditions, to gain value from changed market conditions.
The following new business add-in (BAdI) is available with this app:
- Change of Purchase Contract Renegotiation Item Pricing
Supply Chain – Transportation Management
Multiple Addresses and Address Validity for Business Partners
A business partner can have multiple standard addresses and multiple delivery addresses. One standard address is valid at any one time. In Transportation Management (TM), one business partner can now have multiple locations. For every relevant address of a business partner, you can now create a respective location. The address number of the location is the same as the address number of the business partner.
Additional information
For more information concerning the multiple address handling of business partners in SAP TM with SAP S/4HANA 2021 FPS02, see the post blog from Michael Haase here.
Cross Components – Manage Situation Scenarios
You can create custom situations based on a specific business object, such as a contract, a service order, an invoice, or material. A wide range of configuration options helps you tailor your custom situations to your business requirements. For example, you can model your own situation objects, specify events that trigger situations, or configure a situation page including actions that help the end-user solve situations.
Picture 3: Model your own business objects that enable situation handling.
Now with the new SAP S/4HANA 2021 FPS02 release, you can:
Define your own business situations with the Manage Situation Types - Extended app
With this feature you can use the Manage Situation Types - Extended app to create custom situation templates and situation types for object-based situations, based on the extended framework of Situation Handling.
Explore how to use custom situations with the Situation Handling Demo app
With this feature, you can use the Situation Handling Demo app to test the extended framework of Situation Handling, based on a fictional booking portal scenario. With the demo app, three pre-defined situation demo templates are available.
Model Situation Scenarios and relate to Situation Objects In Manage Situation Scenarios app
With this feature, you can use the Manage Situation Scenarios app to create situation scenarios which are the technical basis for custom situation templates.
Model Situation Objects and relate to application artifacts in Manage Situation Objects app
With this feature, you can use the Manage Situation Objects app to model business objects that can be used in the extended Situation Handling framework for custom situations.
Energy & Natural Resources -
Checks for creating weighing records in the waste-disposal order cockpit
You can use this function to check, whether creating a weighing record in the confirmation cockpit is permitted or not permitted.
At the route, it is possible to define whether a weighing may be done only on waste disposal order header level and/or on waste disposal order item level. In the weighing transaction, it can be checked whether the weighing is allowed and whether only a warning message or an error message should be displayed.
In addition to the weighing transaction, the check is now also available for order confirmation. If a weighing record is created and saved in the conformation transaction at waste disposal order header level and/or waste disposal order item level, it is checked whether this is allowed according to the settings on the route and whether a warning message or an error message should be displayed
Picture 4: Increase transparency for employees by providing additional settings and checks in Route maintenance and Order confirmation.
Additional Details
Use the enhanced functionality in the waste disposal order confirmation to check the route maintenance when creating weighing records. Avoid errors in creating weighing records due to route maintenance for example for collection routes and container service routes.
A new configuration setting to ignore the route configuration ensures downward compatibility for customers.
Retail and Fashion
Fashion Contract Locking During Release Order Creation and Mass Processing
With this feature, you can now enable the system to lock fashion contracts (requirement relevant contracts) at the item level during the creation of release orders (call-offs) or mass processing (backorder processing (BOP), season redetermination, VAS redetermination) of release orders.
Additional Details
Contract locking makes release order creation and mass processing much more seamless for customers with large volumes of data. Since the simultaneous call and locking from different processes of the contracts during the update can also be done with the same contract documents that are called at the same time, an exclusive lock is now created on the item level. Therefore, the errors that occur due to locks are now drastically reduced
Thanks for reading this blog post. Stay tuned!
If you are also interested in the innovations delivered with SAP S/4HANA 2021, I would like to draw your attention to my link collection blog – The Link Collection
If you want to learn more and actively engage with SAP subject matter experts on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, join our SAP S/4HANA Cloud Customer Community. This platform which is available to SAP S/4HANA Cloud customers and partners has a clear mission: to deliver an interactive community to engage with one another about best practices and product solutions.
For more information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA 2021, check out the following links:
- SAP S/4HANA release info: sap.com/s4hana
- SAP S/4HANA Community here
- SAP S/4HANA PSCC Digital Enablement Wheel here
- Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast here
- Join the SAP S/4HANA Movement
- Best practices for SAP S/4HANA here
- Help Portal Product Page here
- Feature Scope Description here
- What’s New here
- RISE with SAP here
- SAP Fiori Application Library: http://spr.ly/6006Ds0Uw
- SAP S/4HANA Trials: http://spr.ly/6005Ds0Uc
Follow us via @Sap and #S4HANA, or myself via @VoglerChrist and LinkedIn
- SAP Managed Tags:
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