SAP S/4HANA® is SAP’s next-generation ERP, but here’s a little secret: Transactions in legacy SAP

ERPs—such as SAP ECC—can be just the same in S/4HANA. Does that mean running asset
management with S/4HANA is the same as running it in SAP ECC? Not quite, and the fact that
S/4HANA is optimized to run on the SAP HANA database is a key differentiator.

“I hear comments that S/4HANA asset maintenance is the same as ECC, but SAP HANA is why
certain things are only possible in S/4HANA,” says Karsten Hauschild, Solution Manager at SAP,
who spoke at the SAP-Centric EAM conference this week in Austin, Texas.

The SAP Fiori Impact

Hauschild points to S/4HANA’s user experience, which is driven by SAP Fiori applications such as
Request Maintenance and SAP GEO Framework. The former drives maintenance request
notifications, while the latter taps into SAP ESRI to run SAP plant maintenance transactions via
maps.

“The user experience from a workflow/work order perspective is vastly different from SAP GUI
(SAP’s transaction code-driven user interface),” says Hauschild. “That’s from feedback we’ve gotten
from current customers—that SAP GUI is ugly.”

There’s also a S/4HANA-specific maintenance scheduling application which is meant to replace SAP
Multi Resource Scheduling (MRS) for scheduling individual technicians.

HANA-Driven Intelligence

The case for an improved user experience is about expanding the number of employees that can
access the data in the SAP system, Hauschild adds. SAP GUI screens that aren’t part of Fiori apps
have also been updated to look more like Fiori.

Beyond an interface that is prettier to look at, S/4HANA is also utilizing its in-memory database to
drive embedded analytics and what SAP calls “Enterprise Search”—a keyword-based search
function. The embedded analytics provide visualizations directly on S/4HANA transaction screens,
while also providing automatically calculated KPIS.

Enterprise Search allows users to find transactions and information within the SAP system regarding
a term—rather than looking up by transaction codes or work order numbers.

The Same, But Different

As an example of the similarities between the two ERPs, Hauschild says all plant maintenance
transactions that exist in ECC are in S/4HANA, and have been since its launch. Overall, an SAP
customer moving to S/4HANA from ECC doesn’t have to change business processes, it’s just the
way SAP supports those processes from a user experience and analytics point of view—with Fiori,
embedded analytics and enterprise search—that is different, he explains.

Now, that doesn’t mean that it will be a guaranteed breeze for customers to move old transactions
onto S/4HANA—that process can still be arduous. Fortunately, that’s where Vesta’s EAM Codex
solution comes into play, to speed up that transition to modernized SAP enterprise asset
management.