Expanding Section: Technical Background Information on S/4HANA

S/4HANA is SAP’s new ERP system, meant to replace SAP ECC, which is the renamed R/3 ERP application. S/4HANA combined many SAP initiatives into one application. These initiatives include the following:

What is S/4HANA Technically?

Although never presented in this light, S/4HANA is a large house cleaning project which includes code removal, code adjustments, and other changes that are typical of when a software vendor dives into its application to change the technical components for improved efficiently, redundancy reduction, etc..

S/4HANA removes and changes come of its functionality, but much of S/4HANA is the same as ECC. SAP has done what it can to obscure this by introducing a new user interface called Fiori and by trumping up S/4HANA’s “innovation” and also through pointing out performance improvements in HANA (the database). Yet, while many of these points are infinitely debatable, the actual functionality of S/4HANA and its similarity to ECC is not.