S4: The super-equipped high-capacity ERP from SAP.

- Grupo
Sothis
Francisco Hernandis

In my conversations with managers from a variety of different business sectors, they

frequently remind me of their experiences with phrases such as I remember the year
2005, when we achieved record national sales and our X range of products was a
success. Behind that phrase there are inevitably an accumulation of experiences which
are particular to each client. And those who are capable of analysing these experiences
and understanding them will most likely feel that in the following economic cycle similar
situations might occur. After all, we all know how much truth there is in the phrase
history is repeating itself

I would like to ask these people whether, at this point in their business trajectory, they
would like to be able to remember each sale that they have made, per client and per
product, and when the sale was made, with the same precise level of detail as if they had
made these sales a mere matter of minutes ago. And which competitive advantages this
information would grant to them, with respect to their skills and clients, in enabling them
to reach the market earlier and with better products.

One would obviously imagine that if we were capable of genetically modifying ourselves
and thus gaining a super-memory, we would be both super-equipped and highly
experienced, with the combination of both attributes creating an extremely high level of
potential, of the kind that great gures such as Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Einstein
must certainly have had

But leaving daydreams aside for a moment, my clients are faced with the tough reality of
lacking these capacities yet longing to have them, both for themselves and for their
employees and their company. Yet this picture is not entirely accurate. Perhaps we are a
long way from super-equipping ourselves on a genetic level, or perhaps not who
knows? I am not an expert on genetics. However, we are indeed capable of investigation,
and we have technological tools at our disposal by which I mean hardware and
software and these allow us to get closer to this super-equipment and high capacity.

Do we have access to technology that enables us to make our business resources super-
equipped and high-capacity?
The answer is a resounding YES. And when we ask ourselves how? and with what
technology? the answer is with SAP and with its S4 ERP.
SAP is a business software company which bases its positioning and growth strategy on
its market share in innovative products. Its leading product is ERP (Enterprise Resource
Planning) which is currently known as S4, though it was previously known as R3, and
before that R2 This software has been in existence for 45 years and has been a leader in
its market segment for at least the last two decades in which it has been linked to a
server. And going from memory alone, and thinking about technology companies with
leading, as opposed to niche, software which have been successful over a long period of
time, Microsoft, with its Windows and Ofce, and Oracle, with its database, immediately
spring to mind.

The SAP R3 ERP has the experience that comes with being the leader in 25 industries and
in more than 50 geographic locations. And what does SAP do to transform this into an
S4? It makes it super-equipped and super-capable: of integrating and storing information
and of organising and interpreting this information in real time in connection with
information from the past, all of which provides us with a solution to the limited memory
that we, as humans, possess.

This technology business super-equipment is known by SAP as HANA. It equips its

S4 ERP with:

1. Real-time memory, which provides immediate access to current and historic

information which can be processed to yield immediate calculations.
2. A connection to different data sources, which ensures the integration of every
process.
3. Direct integration with other software products and business services from other
suppliers.
4. Graphic representation, with images of information.
SAPs focus on innovation goes hand-in-hand with its focus on collaboration with any
software that can relate to the ERP on a business level, with the added simplicity which
the client needs in order to obtain information. The result is, to give two examples, the
ability to develop applications through the Apple development platform, or the ability to
develop the SAP ERP as a cloud service, in the Amazon or Google cloud.

With this technology we can, for example, proceed from storing the history of product
sales to predicting the sales model of a new product, based on the sales of the new
product and the historical sales data of the previous products.

And this is a classic example of what can be done. Now, I invite you to reflect on whether
you are Siri users and how the integration of Siri with the business processes of your
company could improve the latter. But relax: SAP and Apple enable integration between
Siri and S4 in order to facilitate these improvements. Or on the contrary, be nervous:
because your competition may already be taking advantage of all this

Furthermore, SAP distributes S4 using cloud services, provided by itself or other

providers, such as Amazon and Microsoft. This frees the internal resources of the
company from complex installation and conguration tasks. And it frees the company
from the costly acquisition and maintenance of services within company facilities, as
these can soon become obsolete when a project begins to become a reality.

This new ERP is undoubtedly the answer to the business concerns of SAP leaders: those
of Hasson Plattner, the founder of SAP and visionary and creator of SAP HANA, who had
the 20th-century aim of integrating the data of companies and the 21st-century aim of
making them intelligent (this merits a separate, future reflection upon the remarkable SAP
Leonardo). And those of Bill McDermott, the current CEO of SAP and staunch defender of
the importance of orienting clients based on empathy and their own satisfaction. This
translates into the transformation of SAP from a company creating software products for
a company, to a company which offers cloud-based services that enable companies to
optimise their business processes.

In the words of Bill McDermott, the aim of S4 for our clients is to connect the supply
chain with the demand chain in any channel and any device and provide a technology
which enables this connection to happen more quickly and simply than with other SW
creators

Speed and simplicity in managing clients, employees, suppliers, assets and internal
business management services: this is what SAP aims to achieve with S4.

S4 is the Digital Core which enables you to:

 Manage client experiences, marketing, and sales force automation using SAP Hybris
B2B&B2C
Manage employees: rstly as people and then as business assets, using SAP
SuccessFactor and SAP FieldGlass
Manage demand via suppliers with SAP Ariba
Manage cost control processes using SAP ConCur@Solutions
And, lastly, there is SAP Leonardo: for the management of internal assets through the
IoT and machine learning, and for the development of new business models.

SAPs Digital Core enables the rapid generation and development of applications. SAP is
aware of this fact and creates these applications and makes them available to clients,
with one example being the SAP Digital Boardroom or comprehensive control panel,
which provides a continuously updated real-time analysis of the main business ratios.

Welcome to super-equipment and high business capacity with SAP!! Stop imagining and
start reacting: if you dont, your competitors will!!!