Implementing SAP S/4HANA with SAP Activate: Best Practices

There’s a tradeoff in SAP implementation that forces users to choose between standardization and customization. SAP S/4HANA focuses on standardization while still trying to support integration from third-party providers. By standardizing the processes within SAP S/4HANA and extending that standardization to third-party add-ons, the software suite makes it easier and faster to adopt cloud innovations as they become available. Experts in the field refer to this thinking as a “cloud mindset.” It’s also colloquially termed “keeping the core clean,” meaning that their interaction with third-party plugins does not taint the core services. SAP Activate was developed to help businesses keep their core clean and create a cloud mindset for their SAP installations. Industry best practices for this process follow, underlining SAP Activate’s approach to keeping the core clean.

Serial Number Management in SAP S/4HANA Cloud

You can use serial number management in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Warehouse Management to identify and track individual products in your warehouse, from goods receipt to goods issue. For products with serial numbers, it is easy to track, even retrospectively, on which date it was delivered from which supplier, who performed the quality inspection, who moved this product, when this was done, and when it was packed and sent to the customer.

A serial number is a series of characters that have been assigned to each product in the warehouse so that it remains separate and are identified in the warehouse system. You can use serial numbers up to a length of 18 characters in an SAP ERP system.

SAP S/4HANA Embedded Analytics: An Overview

In this blog post I will discuss the overview of SAP S/4HANA Embedded Analytics which  is one of the key innovations of S/4. It is a collection of SAP Fiori tiles in SAP S/4HANA that enable real time operational reporting in your transactional system. There is no ETL (Data Extraction, Transformation, and Loading) and batch processing required, compared to traditional reporting landscapes involving ERP and data warehouse systems. Embedded Analytics uses SAP Fiori as the front-end user interface and SAP has delivered standard content known as Fiori analytical apps for various functional areas. Standard content can be leveraged right out of the box as an accelerator for your implementation and can also be personalized and extended based on business requirements.

Why should I use SAP S/4HANA Embedded Analytics?

◉ Business Innovation through Radical Simplification

◉ Agility and Creativity for the Business

◉ Scale and Trust for the Enterprise

RISE with SAP to transform your business

Introduction

In recent years, business transformation has become a hot issue and a trending topic in the SAP community. Let us dive into this blog post to find more sense on the matter.

What is business transformation?

A business may undergo a transformation for a variety of reasons. They could be the result of new technology, market shifts, low profit and turnover, resulting in cost cutting, or a merger and acquisition. These factors are critical for a company’s success, necessitating a change in the business ecosystem.

How to Find Which Structure is Included in Which Structure?

Introduction

In Every Projects you go there will be requirement to enhance the Standard Screen to add some new Custom Fields. The general approach you do use Append Structure and add your Custom Fields. Sometime while analysing it may happen that you have the Append Structure name but you cannot find the Actual Structure it is attached to. You must be thinking Where-used list should help you find out but No it does not.

Solution:

Let us first analyze the issue. Suppose the below structure I am looking to find where is attached.

Maintaining business roles in SAP S/4HANA Cloud

Introduction

This blog post describes applicable for S/4HANA Cloud system administrators scenario: during the system implementation it is necessary to create a new business role by the business key user request. In the same time, business key user request includes name of the app, to which it is necessary to set up access, but not the business role name itself. As an example we will take the app “Display Dunning History”.

Identifying business role name

To identify business role name, we will use Fiori apps library. In there we need to to to “All apps for SAP S/4HANA” -> All apps and enter then in search field name of the target app. In our case it is “Display dunning history”:

Key and unique building blocks of SCC Multi-Tiered Subcon Collaboration Process

In this blog, I want to share my experience and learnings with multi-tiered subcontracting collaboration process using my apparel client’s example. I will attempt to focus on the unique functional aspects that needs attention during any implementation of this process. Let me start with overview of the business case and the process adopted by business. Later, I will deep dive into the key building blocks and its details.

Business Case and Process adopted with SCC

One of my apparel clients in USA is sourcing garments from China’s manufacturer. A special fabric is used in manufacturing of specific silhouettes of garments. This fabric is sourced from Ethiopian (East Africa) supplier. In this case my client, was looking for drop shipment process for special fabric from Ethiopian supplier to Chinese manufacturer to save transportation time and space in their own warehouse. Chinese manufacturer was provided the visibility of the fabric order via manual spreadsheets and e-mails, so that he can plan the production and subsequent shipments accordingly.

Delivery Time Calculation for Summarized JIT Call with “CYCLE”

Solution Overview

As you know SAP KANBAN solution have provided external procurement function which can issue summarized JIT Call document to suppliers for fulfillment. it is definitely containing delivery date and time in the header information on summarized JIT Call documents, and those can be calculated by SAP standard JIT calculation profile configuration also. but during the solution delivery, you will be facing the “CYCLE” issues which was broadly and deeply operated on Japan automotive OEM and their suppliers who running KANBAN in factory.

Role of Migration Server/Import Server in Brownfield implementation-RISE with SAP, S/4HANA Cloud,private edition

In this blog I wish to discuss about the basic usage of migration server(VM) / Import Server during a brownfield system migration to SAP S/4HANA Cloud,private edition.

Below are the questions that this blog is targeted in addressing.

1. What is a migration server / Import server in RISE with SAP S/4HANA cloud,private edition?

2. What is the configuration of migration/Import server?

3. Why should the customer subscribe for additional storage while using Migration server?

4. How many migration/import server are needed to complete a 3 system landscape migration to SAP S/4HANA Cloud,private edition?

DMO: BWoH: From SAP Netweaver BI 7.0 to SAP Netweaver 7.5 BI on HANA {Technical preparation and execution}

Summary of what we achieved: We have recently migrated and upgraded the BW/BI system from Netweaver 7.0 to Netweaver 7.5 using the SAP’s robust tool SUM 2.0’s DMO feature for one of our customer. The database size was nearly 3 terabyte and the resultant HANA database was around 250 Gigabyte.

The existing infrastructure was having database as Oracle 11.2.0.2.0 and Operating System HPUX ia64.

So if anyone is going to work on a similar assignment, can refer to this blog post for insight.

Data preview on Intermediate nodes of a CV in HANA cloud/On-premise

Data preview on intermediate nodes of a calculation view is a regular task while using HANA studio as a development tool. it is useful for debugging/troubleshooting data output at each node level of a CV.

But after migrating to HANA XSA(On-Premise) or HANA cloud(Cloud platform) then you will need to use Web IDE for HANA(On-Premise) or Web IDE fullstack(Cloud) as development tools. Usually, Web IDE is connected to Dev instance and Not to Prod. if you try to connect to Prod, there is a risk of unexpected changes deployed in Prod.

In this situation, if you wanted to do the data preview on a graphical CV in Web IDE, it can only happen in Dev instance. For Production, we will have to implement the firefighter access set up and run SQL to generate data preview on the intermediate nodes.

Deploy Machine Learning/Exploratory Data Analysis Models to SAP Business Technology Platform

DISCLAIMER: Please note that the content of this blog post is for demonstration purpose only, it should not be used productively without impact evaluation on production environment.

Introduction:

In this blog, we will implement an end to end solution for Python based web application(Flask) on SAP Business Technology Platform.

◉ We will use a cloud based HANA DB, and will leverage python package hdbcli to fetch the relevant data using SQL statement.

◉ We will be using python data science packages such as pandas,seaborn and matplotlib to display various graphs showing Exploratory Data Analysis.

Some interesting Facts of Compatibility Views in SAP BW/4HANA and SAP S/4HANA

As the name implies, SAP BW/4HANA or SAP S/4HANA are fully integrated with the underlying SAP HANA platform. This also means, that the physical data model changed compared to their predecessor products (for example in FICO area). Some tables are removed, changed or consolidated which makes a lot of sense to leverage the full power of the columnar in-memory concepts of SAP HANA.

In order to facilitate customers´ transformations, SAP has introduced so-called compatibility views to keep some core interfaces running. If a compatibility view is in place for an obsolete table, requests to access that table are redirected to newly introduced table(s) by the help and logic provided in the compatibility view.

Multiclass Classification with APL (Automated Predictive Library)

Common machine learning scenarios such as fraud detection, customer churn, employee flight risk, aim to predict Yes/No outcomes using binary classification models. But sometimes the target to predict has more than just two classes. This is the case of Delivery Timeliness that can have three categories: Early/On-time/Late.

From this article you will learn how to train and apply a multiclass classification model in a Python notebook with HANA ML APL.

The following example was built using HANA ML 2.12.220325 and APL 2209.

Census Income will be our training dataset.

Two simple tips to boost the working efficiency of a Data Science Project

How can we make our daily work more efficient? Is there any straight forward answer? For me, the answer is only one word, experience.

Participating on several Data Science projects the last years, i was really amazed how fast you can confirm the saying “Almost 70-80% of a Data Science project is spent on the Data preparation”. There are two simple tips that will be presented on this blog post regarding the Data preparation process.

The first one is comparing four different ways, that a data scientist in SAP HANA, can create random sample datasets from an initial dataset and which can be their potential usage. The second one is exposing the power of SAP HANA ML on creating and automating a set of new aggregated columns (max(), sum(), avg() for example) from existing columns without the need of writing complex and big SQL queries (feature engineering part).