S/4HANA Release 2208 - Highlights & Outlook

The new SAP S/4HANA Cloud Release 2208 brings, in addition to innovations in the user experience and optimizations in business processes, the "Developer Extensibility". You can find the details and which advantages result from this in this blog post.

User Experience

In the area of user experience, there are three innovations in Release 2208:
1. new "Horizon" theme for the user interface
The new interface looks more modern and offers a consistent user experience on all end devices. It will be available in both the S/4HANA Cloud web version and the SAP Mobile Start app. Already now, the new theme is available for other selected Fiori apps.

2. new "My Start Page"
In the course of the new user interface, the personalized start page of SAP Launchpad will also be expanded. On the new start page, users will see directly, open tasks and situation, frequently used apps as well as pinned cards with graphics and information from selected apps. The prerequisite for this innovation is the activation of the "Areas and Pages" function in the Launchpad.

Quelle: SAP

Quelle: SAP

3. integration with Microsoft Teams
Users can share content and pages in SAP S/4HANA Cloud from Launchpad directly via Microsoft Teams. The link leads to the relevant content. This feature is available as of Release 2208 as part of the "Early Adopter Care" program.

A selection of the changed processes

  • Finance
  • Supply chain
  • Service
  • Corporate portfolio and project management
  • Professional Services
  • Side-by-side view
  • Sourcing and procurement
  • SAP Product Footprint Management on BTP
Finance: In-House Banking for SAP S/4HANA Cloud

The function allows all companies in a group to manage internal bank accounts with the same functions of external accounts. In this way, the payments of the entire group are centralized and the effort to integrate many external accounts is reduced.

Supply chain: business process scheduling

Business processes and documents can also be linked to flexible time frames with the new release, independently of concrete schedules. Thus, instead of fixed times, only time spans are assigned to the individual processes, allowing flexible planning.

Service: Triggering the return process within the workshop repair

Customer advisors now have the option to trigger a customer return within the workshop repair by selecting the "Customer return" tile. This automatically triggers the logistic process and offers the possibility to monitor the complete process.

Corporate portfolio and project management: individual project backlog capitalized for sales projects

With the new release, the function of directly scheduling stocks for projects or triggering their procurement is also available for sales projects. Materials can be assigned directly to the project stock, even if they are not consumed directly. Thus, costs are not incurred directly, but only at the time of consumption. In addition to efficient cost controlling, project stocks allocated in this way are not consumed by other projects.

Professional Services: Approval workflow for project billing request

A new approval workflow for invoicing requests for projects has been introduced. This is dependent, for example, on contract type, items to be invoiced and written off, or items that have been postponed to the next invoicing cycle. This ensures accurate and correct invoicing within projects.

Side-by-side view of uploaded documents for automatic creation of sales orders from unstructured data

The function for automatically reading unstructured data from PDF files and transferring it to an order or purchase order has already been available since the 2011 release. A new feature is a view that allows the data read out to be compared side by side with the uploaded PDF file. This is aided by highlighted areas in the PDF file that reference the field that was read out. This makes it much easier to check whether data has been read out correctly.

Sourcing and procurement: situation processing

Already implemented are notifications about certain situations like the expiration of a purchase contract. New in this release is the possibility to create your own situation scenarios. Existing scenarios can be reused and tailored to the user's own needs.

SAP Product Footprint Management on BTP

As part of the application running on SAP BTP, SAP Product Footprint Management is now able to calculate the emissions of in-house manufactured products. This also includes emissions related to internally sourced materials. The calculation of the footprint is automated by using results from product cost planning and also supports retrieval via an OData API.

Finance
Finance: In-House Banking for SAP S/4HANA Cloud

The function allows all companies in a group to manage internal bank accounts with the same functions of external accounts. In this way, the payments of the entire group are centralized and the effort to integrate many external accounts is reduced.

Supply chain
Supply chain: business process scheduling

Business processes and documents can also be linked to flexible time frames with the new release, independently of concrete schedules. Thus, instead of fixed times, only time spans are assigned to the individual processes, allowing flexible planning.

Service
Service: Triggering the return process within the workshop repair

Customer advisors now have the option to trigger a customer return within the workshop repair by selecting the "Customer return" tile. This automatically triggers the logistic process and offers the possibility to monitor the complete process.

Corporate portfolio and project management
Corporate portfolio and project management: individual project backlog capitalized for sales projects

With the new release, the function of directly scheduling stocks for projects or triggering their procurement is also available for sales projects. Materials can be assigned directly to the project stock, even if they are not consumed directly. Thus, costs are not incurred directly, but only at the time of consumption. In addition to efficient cost controlling, project stocks allocated in this way are not consumed by other projects.

Professional Services
Professional Services: Approval workflow for project billing request

A new approval workflow for invoicing requests for projects has been introduced. This is dependent, for example, on contract type, items to be invoiced and written off, or items that have been postponed to the next invoicing cycle. This ensures accurate and correct invoicing within projects.

Side-by-side view
Side-by-side view of uploaded documents for automatic creation of sales orders from unstructured data

The function for automatically reading unstructured data from PDF files and transferring it to an order or purchase order has already been available since the 2011 release. A new feature is a view that allows the data read out to be compared side by side with the uploaded PDF file. This is aided by highlighted areas in the PDF file that reference the field that was read out. This makes it much easier to check whether data has been read out correctly.

Sourcing and procurement
Sourcing and procurement: situation processing

Already implemented are notifications about certain situations like the expiration of a purchase contract. New in this release is the possibility to create your own situation scenarios. Existing scenarios can be reused and tailored to the user's own needs.

SAP Product Footprint Management on BTP
SAP Product Footprint Management on BTP

As part of the application running on SAP BTP, SAP Product Footprint Management is now able to calculate the emissions of in-house manufactured products. This also includes emissions related to internally sourced materials. The calculation of the footprint is automated by using results from product cost planning and also supports retrieval via an OData API.

Outlook: Developer Extensibility & 3SL

Another highlight is in the area of extensibility. Currently still in the test phase and not available to all customers, the so-called "Developer Extensibility" is about to be released. With this function, SAP is providing an additional option for extending the SAP S/4HANA Cloud in addition to the key user and side-by-side extensions via the SAP Business Technology Platform-

The new development option is available within SAP S/4HANA Cloud and allows the development of custom ABAP code. This option can be used for tightly coupled, complex extensions and custom apps. Cloud BAdIs and custom CDS views are also supported.

Because development takes place directly in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, no remote access or data replication is required. Standard objects and defined extension points of the standard solution are used, as well as a version of the ABAP programming language specially adapted for the cloud. This means that all developments are lifecycle-stable and the typical advantages of a SaaS solution are retained.

A prerequisite for the use of "Developer Extensibility" is a 3-system landscape, which will be available for SAP S/4HANA Cloud in the near future. This will replace the previous 2-system landscape for all new implementations of the cloud solution.

In addition, the new variant will include a development system that relies on two separate clients for development and customizing activities. Changes made here will be transported to the subsequent test and production systems as usual.

Conclusion:

With the new SAP S/4HANA Cloud Release 2208, the range of functions moves another step closer to the familiar S/4HANA on-premise option. Some established options are supplemented and expanded in detail in the cloud variant.

However, the big innovation of this release is not in the details of the adapted process flows, but in the 3-system landscape and the "Developer Extensibility" available with it. One of the biggest points of criticism, the limited extensibility in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, is thus a thing of the past. The "Clean Core" principle remains in place, so that nothing stands in the way of your company's ability to innovate in the future.

How you can successfully use the new functions? Find out in a joint workshop with us!