SAP announced a series of innovations to SAP S/4HANA to make it easier to add artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, and to customize apps. This will help companies improve business results, automate business processes and make accurate predictions for better decisions.

With more than 100 out-of-the-box AI and robotic process automation–powered capabilities, the 1905 release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud solidifies its position as the most intelligent ERP on the market today. The new additions, being released in May 2019, cement our goal announced in 2018 to automate 50 percent of manual tasks in the ERP system over the following three years. Examples of new AI capabilities include:

• Intelligent accruals management: Allows closing books faster with automated conversion of purchase order data into posted accruals
• Defect code proposal: Speeds up quality checks and increases data quality simultaneously with automated categorization of defects based on free-text entry
• Financial journal entry with intelligent robotic process automation: Automates the collection, extraction and validation of financial journal data from e-mails, and mass uploads the data into SAP S/4HANA

With support available in 40 countries and in 22 languages, customers can now reimagine their global businesses and utilize AI to drive:

• New business models: Accurately simulate new commercial offers based on subscription and usage pricing, and be able to roll those out 40 percent faster; introduce sophisticated revenue-sharing models with partners
• Intelligent product design and faster go-to-market time: Incorporate ideas learned from customer feedback and experiences faster into product design processes; reduce time to market by cutting in half the time required to optimize pricing, resulting in increased sales
• Personalized products and services: Reduce time needed to define, produce and go to market with individualized product variants by 10 to 20 percent; trace, monitor and maintain personalized products throughout the entire product life cycle

To make it even easier for customers to make the right decisions and steer operations in real time, a further improved integration of the SAP Analytics Cloud solution and SAP S/4HANA has been launched, bringing planning, analysis and execution together.

“In today’s experience economy, companies are searching for new ways to serve and delight their customers,” said Jan Gilg, senior vice president and head of SAP S/4HANA. “SAP’s goal is to help companies get there by becoming intelligent enterprises. With our 40 years of experience running the world’s most critical business processes — and combining that with our knowledge of over 25 industries — we are their most trusted partner in achieving true business impact with the best use of intelligence and data.”

Full Support for Move to the Cloud with Complete, Consistent Choice

SAP S/4HANA is the market-leading intelligent ERP with deep, end-to-end process coverage in eight lines of business for 25 industries. It is the only cloud ERP that supports integrated, hybrid scenarios including cloud, private cloud and on-premise landscapes.

For greater flexibility, companies can move to SAP S/4HANA Cloud at their own pace, enabling journeys to the cloud that are aligned to individual business priorities. Companies can selectively apply advanced process chains, group reporting, advanced financial close and central procurement in the cloud, while keeping other SAP S/4HANA ERP capabilities in existing environments. This enables businesses to take an incremental approach, resulting in faster time to value.

To further increase the speed of innovation, SAP plans to offer monthly releases of SAP S/4HANA Cloud in 2020, which will provide greater control over the activation of new functions. With a strong track record of reliability, SAP is planning to increase its SAP S/4HANA Cloud service-level agreement to 99.9 percent uptime in 2019, helping ensure the highest performance levels so companies can achieve unparalleled business agility.

For greater choice, SAP plans for SAP S/4HANA Cloud to run on Google Cloud Platform in the third quarter of 2019, and in the fourth quarter, we plan to extend its global reach to China and run on Alibaba Cloud, China’s largest public cloud services provider. This will be followed by Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, both planned for 2020.

Unique and Differentiated Value Through the SAP Cloud SDK

Developers building extensions for SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA will benefit from the new SAP Cloud SDK, which allows companies to further customize their business processes and connect their apps and services to create unique value. The software development kit (SDK) offers extensibility options for additional SAP offerings including SAP SuccessFactors and SAP C/4HANA solutions and SAP Leonardo Artificial Intelligence capabilities with customer-specific requirements.

The new SDK is now available for Java and JavaScript and provides unmatched developer productivity by managing the handling of application programming interfaces (APIs) and messages when communicating with SAP solutions.