SAP Solution: S/4

SAP S/4 Hana is available both in the cloud and on-prem. Although SAP as a company prefers the cloud, there are many reasons to opt for a local installation, including security. This article compares both options.

Many are familiar with the book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter. The first time I tried to read the English original in 1989, I failed. However, after a lecture by AI pioneer Jürgen Schmidhuber, I purchased the German edition and devoured it from cover to cover.

As the end of maintenance for SAP Business Suite 7 approaches, Volkswagen has decided to transform its systems to S/4 Hana as quickly as possible.

S/4 is only the successor to ECC 6.0, but the SAP Business Technology Platform brings new perspectives, expanding horizons. SAP, however, is losing its unique selling point, and customers are gaining new freedoms.

Software manufacturer xSuite presented the new release of its xSuite Business Solutions.

After SAP failed with its Data Hub and is now trying again with Datasphere, specialized IT companies are already much further ahead. Fivetran has built a universal data platform that aims to impress with its efficiency.

Invoicing is often still manual and thus prone to errors. During a labor shortage, it also deprives companies of valuable capacity for more value-adding activities. AI-based invoicing provides a remedy here.

Users are looking for integrated solutions to optimize master data management in the course of digitalization and the switch to S/4.

Numerous companies around the world handle their business processes using SAP software. With AI-supported process automation, SAP customers can leverage the optimization potential that lies dormant in their processes, tests, migrations, and upgrades, and make a decisive contribution to digital transformation.

SAP is starting the new year 2024 with a dual cloud leadership. The global ERP market leader is focusing on the technical operating concept of cloud computing. At the same time, SAP CEO Christian Klein is trying to boost his employees' morale.

Since SAP presented S/4 in New York in 2015, around 20 percent of SAP customers have completed the conversion to the new ERP generation. Most of them have made an investment within the seven- or eight-figure range.

What’s right is wrong. Sooner or later, SAP CEO Christian Klein will be right with his "cloud-only" postulate.