SAP S/4 HANA Event Management (EM) Deployment Options – stand-alone vs S/4 HANA add-on

Summary

In this decision accelerator, you will know how to decide between S/4 HANA Event Management (EM) to be deployed as stand-alone or as an add-on on SAP S/4HANA in on-premise or private cloud.

Business Requirements

SAP Event Management on SAP S/4HANA is a business application to enable real-time end-to-end business process visibility and status monitoring. It provides a wide range of functions to monitor milestones (called “expected events”), report actual events correlating to the related expected event, and unexpected events. Alerts, notifications, and any kind of automated follow-up activities are triggered by rules evaluating the events upon receiving to automate the detection of deviation and automated reaction to events.

SAP Event Management on SAP S/4HANA provides a consolidated view of the state of your business processes. It integrates with applications in SAP, such as SAP S/4HANA and SAP S/4HANA Transportation Management, and non-SAP systems, as well as internally within your business organization and externally with connected systems of your business partners.

There are two major business scenarios for in SAP Event Management in current AS-IS system landscape:

• SAP EM is configured to support SAP ECC scenarios either as an add-on or stand-alone.
• SAP EM is configured to support SAP TM scenarios either as an add-on or stand-alone.

As the customers are embarking on the journey of SAP S/4HANA transformation in their companies replacing existing SAP ECC or SAP TM systems. It is important to decide their Target Architecture deployment strategy of Event management business area to select between stand-alone or S/4 HANA add-on options.

Key assumption is that the customer has SAP EM 9.2 in their AS-IS landscape, along with other peripheral applications.

Deployment Options

SAP has a new product called “SAP Event Management on SAP S/4HANA”. This product is almost the same code line as EM 9.2. As SAP Event Management is nearing its "End of Mainstream Maintenance", SAP Event Management on SAP S/4 HANA is in line with the support strategy for SAP S/4HANA.

SAP Event Management on SAP S/4HANA 1.0 uses the S/4HANA technology platform (“S/4 Foundation”) to allow “stand-alone” deployment as a dedicated instance as well as deployment as an add-on to SAP S/4HANA. Deployments are restricted to on-premise and private cloud installations only.

In essence, SAP Event Management on SAP S/4HANA supports two deployment options:

1. Stand-alone (on-premise and private cloud)

2. An add-on on SAP S/4HANA (on-premise and private cloud)

Stand-alone (on-premise and private cloud)

For a stand-alone deployment you install SAP Event Management for SAP S/4HANA on a dedicated server. The download includes the software component version SCEMSRV 930 and one of the required product versions of S/4 Foundation. The minimum supported version of S/4 Foundation is 1809. But we recommend using the latest available release of S/4 Foundation that is supported by SAP Event Management for SAP S/4HANA. In a typical system landscape SAP Event Management for SAP S/4HANA can be connected to one or several instances of SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA. If SAP Transportation Management on SAP S/4HANA shall be connected, you must use release 1809 or higher.

An add-on on SAP S/4HANA (on-premise and private cloud)

The alternative deployment option is to have SAP Event Management on SAP S/4HANA On-Premise or in the Private cloud. In that case, SAP S/4HANA release 1809 or higher is required.

Note:

• SAP Event Management on SAP S/4HANA 1.0 is the first release of a new product. It is not a successor product of the former SAP Event Management and hence no upgrade path is available.
• From Conversion /Migration perspective, currently there is no tool available to support the conversion of SAP Event Management to SAP Event Management on SAP S/4HANA. We recommend a new implementation using existing implementations of SAP Event Management as a pattern.
• SAP S/4HANA EM comes with a set of pre-configured tracking scenarios for transportation management. A limited license of SAP S/4HANA EM for use in transportation management scenarios is included in the licenses of SAP Transportation Management and SAP S/4HANA Supply Chain for transportation management.

Criteria to determine the most suitable target solution

Is SAP EM used with multiple SAP and non-SAP applications?

◉ Option # 1 (Stand-alone) is recommended in this case.

Is SAP EM used for overall visibility scenario e.g., Sales Order etc.?

◉ Option # 1 (Stand-alone) is recommended in this case.

Is SAP EM used with SAP TM system only?

◉ Normally Option # 2 (add-on) is recommended in this case unless exceptional high volumes are expected.

Is SAP EM needs to connect to multiple ECC’s, or SAP S/4 HANA instances?

◉ In case multiple ECC’s or S/4 HANA systems needs to be connected for overall visibility, Option # 1 is generally (Stand-alone) is recommended in this case.

◉ However, it is also possible to deploy Option #2 as an add-on on any one of the SAP S/4 HANA or SAP S/4 HANA TM system and connect to other systems. In this case, it will be advised to keep a regular check on the volumes / database growth to avoid any performance problems in the longer run. In case this option is chosen, it will be better to validate with your SAP counterparts before proceeding with implementation.

Do you have high volumes? 

◉ For exceptional high volumes, Option # 1 (Stand-alone) is recommended in this case.

Decision Tree

A simple decision tree to select a deployment option for SAP S/4 HANA Event Management is illustrated below:

Conclusion

If the use case is to use SAP EM with TM, Option #2 (add-on) is suggested, unless exceptional high volumes.

If the use case is to use SAP EM for overall visibility and connecting multiple ECC or S/4HANA instances, option #1 (stand-alone) is suggested, as it offers best future scalability options and does not restrict future ERP integration scenarios.

If the customer is interested in embarking on SaaS products for track and trace, SAP Business Network for Logistics – Global Track and Trace option shall be evaluated together with SAP Event Management application.