We are hearing a lot about S/4 HANA now-a–days and the interest it evoked lead me to collate and evaluate information available on S/$ HANA. During this course, I made following notes about the comparison between ECC and S/4 HANA which will give a snap shot about the simplification and the functionality in procurement process. I hope this will be useful for some enthusiasts of SAP S/4 HANA.

Functionality/Element ECC S/4
Material Master
  • Material Number length is 18 characters
  • Service Master is used for Services.
  • Material Number length 040 characters
  • MRP fields – Quota arr. Usage, SLoc MRP indicator, spec. proc. type SLoc , reorder qty and replenishment qty are not required to be switched on.
  • A new Material type ‘SERV” for service material. However, service material type “DIEN’ is also available.
Vendor Master
  • Master data is maintained separately for Vendor and Customer.
  • Only one single address
  • No integrated classification data
  • No time – dependency
  • Supplier evaluation is only on hard facts only and supplier evaluation for soft-facts using questionnaire is not available but only in SAP Supplier Life cycle management.
  • No integration to Dun &Bradstreet Information Services

 
  • Business partner concept is used as a replacement for Vendor and Customer Master.
  • The roles available are “000000” – Business Partner (Gen), “FLVN00” – FI Vendor and “FLVN01” – Supplier.
  • Multiple addresses are possible.
  • Multiple roles
  • Time dependency object attributes and relationships
  • Purchasing Category: Suppliers can be managed according to specific categories of goods and services.
  • Classification: Assign important characteristics to suppliers. A score card for each supplier to monitor supplier’s social responsibility compliance
  • Own questionnaire can be defined directly and evaluation requests can be created and distributed directly to appraisers.
  • Support of Dun &Bradstreet Information Services  data

 

 
Purchase Requisition
  • If no source of supply is assigned automatically by the system, Buyer needs to do this manually.
  • System proposes automatically a set of available sources of supply to facilitate and accelerate assignment of source of supply.
  • Grouping, filtering and downloading capabilities of open purchase requisitions.
Purchase Order processing
  • Search for existing POs is time –consuming, no provisioning of existing documents.
  • No prefilling of other fields based on supplier.
  • No pre-filtering of value help search results.
  • Only at the end get a list of errors that need to be corrected.
  • Dynamic prefilling and provisioning of fields based on selected supplier or material type.
  • Restricted list of available value help fields to avoid subsequent errors in purchase order.
  • Draft purchase order is created automatically when session is lost or retrieved automatically upon returning.
Output Management
  • The output management configuration is based in NAST.
  • The configuration is based on BRF+ (Business Rule Framework Plus) based on Adobe server and Adobe Forms. But NAST configuration is still supported for New documents.

 
Contract Management
  • Only one-time search for contract documents is possible.
  • No action can be done directly in the contract list
  • Approval information is missing
  • Notes are missing
  • All activities can be executed in one screen
  • Contract target value or target quantity update
  • Approval details, notes, business card for supplier are provided
Invoice processing
  • Inflexible search functionalities
  • Confusing visualization of Supplier invoice to detect issues
  • Administrator has to resolve business issues in case of faulty supplier invoice
  • Flexible and dynamic search capabilities
  • Defect issues in one glance
  • Directly resolve issues finish the process

Hope this information is useful for a quick grasp of the simplification features in procurement area.

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