As global markets become more competitive and customer expectations rise, companies are under pressure to find new ways to surpass their competition while traversing an increasingly complex marketplace.
November release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1811 continues to deliver on the intelligent promise for customers
Companies need an intelligent ERP solution that empowers them with AI-enabled automation and next-generation business processes. This will help them view their organization and interact with customers and partners in real time.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud is the most intelligent ERP solution in the market today. We were recently named leader in the Nucleus Research 2018 ERP Value Matrix, reflecting the great strides we’ve made in delivering intelligent capabilities to SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

Building on our promise to help customers become intelligent enterprises, especially within the manufacturing and professional services industries, SAP S/4HANA Cloud is taking an even bigger step forward with the November 1811 release. Below are two prime examples of how SAP S/4HANA Cloud is helping customers stay ahead of their competition:

Manufacturing Scenario Leveraging New Warehouse and Transportation Capabilities

Imagine
A toy manufacturer discovers it has the hottest toy of the upcoming holiday season. The manufacturer is by no means a new company – it’s been ironing out processes for a while now – but has a few manual connections within their core processes, including managing a suddenly-high volume warehouse.

What’s possible
With warehouse and transportation capabilities in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, the manufacturer can gain complete visibility into an important piece of its supply chain. From inbound/receiving processes to outbound/delivery — and everything in between — the manufacturer is aware in real time how much inventory is available and where. As sales orders come in, a freight unit can be automatically created and sent to a transportation management solution, such as SAP S/4HANA or a third party, for planning. With the resulting plan completed, a delivery confirmation is generated.

Impact
Incredible transparency — mixed with automation along a fully connected supply chain — results in better supply/demand matching, increased order fulfilment and accuracy, more efficient operations, and ultimately higher profit.
Professional Services Scenario Leveraging New Resource Management Capabilities

Imagine
A professional services firm is poised to perform a highly profitable engagement for a client once available staff with the right skills are identified quickly. The plan is to get the project started before year-end. However, like too many organizations, the formally maintained staff-skills catalog is not up to date.

What’s possible
With resource management built into SAP S/4HANA Cloud, the firm can now consider previous project experience when creating a staffing plan. Using a combination of maintained skills and past experience, the firm can identify resources that have the experience necessary, as well as the availability, to work on the project.

Impact
Happy customers – thanks to the enhanced speed and accuracy at which the professional services firm can deliver results. Meanwhile, the firm is able to take on a highly-profitable engagement with its staff fully utilized.
In addition to the above, the 1811 release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud further enables next-generation business processes with the following:

Better Insight — Increased visibility into complex operations so that businesses know what they are doing and where they need to go, enabled by functionality such as:

• Supplier performance prediction: Enables purchasers to more accurately predict the delivery lead time at time-of-purchase, and project the arrival time of raw material shipments. This allows for intelligent production planning, such as reduced production downtime and lower inventory levels.
• Actual cost analysis: Identifies the costliest maintenance activities, allows users to compare preventative and corrective maintenance spend and analyses critical costs from different perspectives.
• Finance and professional services content for SAP Analytics Cloud: Provides transparency across these business domains.

Greater Connectedness — Companies can react to market changes more quickly based on insights gained through the following:

• Warehouse management: Provides support for inbound and outbound processes, as well as storage management and internal processes.
• Transportation: Connects SAP S/4HANA Cloud with a transportation management solution for order-based transportation planning.
• Integration of SAP S/4HANA Cloud with SAP Ariba Guided Buying: Increases people productivity through self-requisitioning using a simple guided buying experience within SAP Ariba.

To help customers gain easier access to additional microvertical innovation, we recently launched a partner innovation program. This encourages the robust SAP partner ecosystem to build and go to market with new applications that extend the capabilities of SAP S/4HANA Cloud within priority industries, such as manufacturing and professional services.

We also recently announced the SAP Cloud ALM solution, a cloud-based application lifecycle management (ALM) tool that helps track and manage the needs of customers of cloud solutions from SAP — starting with an implementation portal to ease and speed up the activation and implementation of SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

Don’t Get Left Behind in a Dynamic Marketplace
The pressure to support modern business needs for better insight and greater connectedness increases every day. Companies must keep up in order to remain profitable. The SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1811 release work hand-in-hand, enabling companies to be more responsive and better equipped to operate in today’s complex, rapidly shifting world.

SAP Study Finds Overwhelming Interest in Industry Digital Transformation Efforts
SAP announced findings of its “Emerging Opportunities to Deploy Industry Processes in the Cloud” study, conducted by Forrester Consulting.

The survey polled decision-makers in five industries to evaluate their interest in industry cloud solutions. Some 95 percent of the respondents believe moving business processes to industry cloud would notably improve their abilities to digitally transform their operations.

Innovative Organizations Are Industry Cloud Trailblazers
Companies that rate themselves highly for innovation, strategy, technology, people, process and culture appear ahead of the curve on recognizing the value of industry cloud solutions and cloud platforms. Some 91 percent of these organizations believe that intelligent technologies in the cloud will drive strategic business and IT benefits, compared to 71 percent of organizations that don’t qualify as digital leaders.

“Innovative organizations seek scalable and secure cloud solutions that natively embed new intelligent technologies and are tailored to specific industries,” said Peter Maier, co-president of SAP Industries. “This study revealed that traditional cloud solutions are being implemented by three out of four companies (76 percent), and moving to industry cloud can help enterprises add value by improving the areas of standards and consistency. This allows enterprises to meet rising customer expectations by digitally transforming their organizations and their ecosystem of suppliers, customers and partners.”

Industry-Specific Sentiment Around Industry Cloud
The five industries surveyed in this study have high interest in adopting industry cloud solutions for end-to-end digital transformation priorities. These priorities vary based on industry and are outlined below:

• Banking and insurance: Value seen in industry cloud to help with data management and insights (87 percent)
• Consumer products: Most interested in leveraging industry cloud to support supply chain business processes (92 percent)
• Discrete manufacturing: Interested in adopting industry cloud to improve digital supply networks (88 percent)
• Public sector: Interested in industry cloud for tax and revenue operations (86 percent)
• Retail: Interested in processes such as risk management (95 percent) and procurement (91 percent)

Organizations are looking for a robust set of capabilities that enable data-driven decisions in real time across their business. As noted in the Forrester study, “Industry cloud can add value in driving standards and consistency in markets, supply chain transparency, cost savings for commodity processes, and fast customizations to improve customer experience. But the main benefit is the ability to deliver end-to-end processes and next-generation innovations in the cloud.”