EhP F&L for SoH

There is much speculation and talk about an S/4 road map. The Holy Grail is being sought to get from SAP Classic to the promised land of S/4 Hana.

Walldorf is keeping a low profile. There are only a few documents on the service marketplace. Inquiries from DSAG end with generalities.

It seems to be despairing, even after most heartfelt commitment to Hana and payment of a toll of 9000 euros - flat rate for the conversion of all user licenses - the way lies in the dark. And then came enlightening Professor Hasso Plattner!

Hasso Plattner's Sapphire 2016 keynote brought the longed-for redemption for the SAP community: there is a way from SAP Classic with AnyDB to S/4.

The title of Plattner's keynote in Orlando this year was Your Road to S/4 Hana and Beyond. Fast. Simple. Intelligent.

To the audience's surprise, he gave an almost freehand demonstration of this transformation process. The first impression is convincing and solid - yes, maybe it could work like that.

However, with a little more honesty about what S/4 Finance and Logistics really is, Hasso Plattner and his SAP could have saved themselves this Sapphire stage magic. The trick is quick, smart and simple because they are just add-ons!

From an organizational, financial, licensing and business perspective, the S/4 roadmap may be a hell of a trip and end in disaster - but technically, with stable hardware and cleanly implemented Linux, it is a manageable finger exercise for the computer scientist:

Take SAP Business Suite 7 with AnyDB (Oracle, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server or MaxDB).

You start a database conversion to Hana and get SoH, Suite on Hana. Now you only need to customize the two "add-ons" S/4 Finance and S/4 Logistics and, according to SAP, you have the most modern, best and fastest ERP system.

Ultimately, Simple Finance and Simple Logistics are little more than enhancement packages for SoH that need to be tuned and prepared accordingly.

For the experienced SolMan expert, it is just another transport order. This roadmap sounds logical, but is naturally difficult to sell as an "ERP revolution including in-memory computing".

Hana is also an SQL database like Oracle and DB2, so the release upgrade succeeds with any existing SAP software - you first swap SQL database (AnyDB) for SQL database (Hana).

The target is SoH and naturally the first IT-GAU can already happen here, because Hana is still far from being as robust and tested as MaxDB, SQL-Server, DB2 or Oracle.

SAP reference customer John Deere had to learn this the hard way: The database change cost thousands of man hours!

Then you customize S/4 Finance and the experienced existing SAP customer wonders what happens to the Abap modifications and Z-functions. According to Hasso Plattner, these can now be converted almost automatically - but there can be exceptions, the Hana inventor said whimsically during his Sapphire keynote in Orlando.

The fact is that in the add-on area of S/4 Hana, many aggregates and indexes no longer exist. A compatibility firewall is supposed to "fix" it for "old" add-ons, modifications and Z-functions.

The S/4 add-on scenario described should work sufficiently well for Simple Finance. Most experts in the SAP community agree, however, that S/4 Logistics should be given at least another three years to mature - this will give Bill McDermott and Hasso Plattner plenty of material for the upcoming Sapphire keynotes.

With the discontinuation of APO (SAP Advanced Planning and Optimization), the race for a viable "S/4 Logistics" add-on including MRP naturally begins.

And something else to consider: As refined and logical as the EhP concept may be, SAP will not be able to operate an S/4 as an add-on conglomerate forever - at some point there will have to be an ECC 6.0 successor in the form of a reprogrammed, genuine S/4 core.