A visit to SAP: Discovery Workshop on the HANA Cloud Platform

SAP has attached great importance to HANA for a number of years now. During  Sapphire, the biggest SAP trade fair, ERP ECC is barely mentioned. Instead, directors and strategists are full of praise for the new HANA platform and the possibilities that it offers.

However, the reality is quite different. 100% of my customers are using ERP ECC; no trace of HANA so far. That is why, for a long time, I had dismissed it as a marketing topic for SAP. It did not play a role for my daily work, especially as it seemed to focus on infrastructure and database, while my work is concerned with maintenance and supply chain. We are interested in business processes and their translation into application logic, i.e. the classic PM, SD, MM. It was always other people who dealt with database and infrastructure.

My attention was not grabbed until I heard about this year’s “S/4 Hana Simple Logistics” application. Could it be that SAP was finally also concerned with innovation in the central business processes? For years, the innovations have been centered in the periphery, whereas the core processes, such as the order entry and maintenance processing, have remained mostly the same for more than twenty years. It seems incredible that the charm of the early 90s is what greets the internet-age user of 2015, when he or she enters a customer or work order in SAPgui!

“The biggest innovation since R/3!” – more than a fast database

But now – S/4 HANA: “our biggest innovation since R/3!”

I was intrigued. Due to our newly established partnership with SAP, we were invited to a partners meeting, and I seized this opportunity to learn more about S/4 HANA.

First of all, we were introduced to the complexity of the technology that is behind the term HANA. The range of functions goes far beyond a new and faster database. With the HANA Cloud Platform (HCP), SAP offers a complete infrastructure and development environment, so that customers and partners can use it to develop and provide their own applications. The platform wows users with numerous state of the art tools and possibilities that go far beyond the standard options of other platforms: geospatial data selection, predictive analysis, real time compaction of huge amounts of data, and many more. Naturally, all of this comes at a price; therefore, it remains to be seen whether the SAP offer will prevail against the less powerful, but free, open source tools (such as Apache, MySQL, Tomcat, etc.). Not every company needs the premium features, of course. However, large businesses will probably buy HCP to be well prepared for the future and provide a homogeneous system landscape for cloud applications.

A completely new application logic

HANA brought a whole new universe with it that I do not completely understand yet. However, I believe that this is not surprising: “Hard facts” are rare, especially when it comes to supply chain and maintenance applications. Also, as far as SAP’s own publications, fora, portals, etc. are concerned, it takes a while to even find the right contact person or URLs.

At least I know by now that you have to distinguish between “On Premise” and “Cloud”. Our existing ERP software written in ABAP will NOT be in the Cloud, as ABAP is not part of the available programming languages. However, in “HANA on premise”, it is. (Interesting fact for developers: There is already an ABAP plugin for the popular development environment Eclipse, which stems from the Java area. Using the “ABAP Development Tools” (ADT) plugin, it is possible to create flawless ABAP development in Eclipse.)

What to do with the old SAP landscape – migration paths into the future

My customers have invested a lot of money in their SAP landscape for decades (first R/3, and then ERP ECC) and have adapted the standard SD, MM, PP, PM, etc. to meet their needs with numerous developments and user exits.
Of course, these customers want to keep their developments and special processes, and continue to benefit from their investments. Which migration path can these customers take with respect to the new SAP developments? What happens if the support for ECC is discontinued in ten years and there is only HANA – what will their system landscapes look like?

Obviously, there is always the “revolutionary” way, i.e. innovation. The old ECC applications are completely replaced with the non-ABAP cloud applications, either taken from the standard component of the S/4 HANA solutions (that will hopefully be published soon) or developed in-house on HCP.

This approach is geared towards users who tend to work with standard technology, or who deliberately want to take an innovative step from the existing, sometimes fossilized system landscape to contemporary, easier to maintain applications with lower costs for hardware and maintenance.

For the many others who do not want to dispense with their tried and true application structure, there is the “evolutionary” way of migrating step by step. The first step to a future introduction of S/4 HANA is a good spring cleaning. Due to the enhanced performance, many ECC help tables are eliminated when migrating to the HANA platform. However, if customer-specific Z developments and user exits try to access these no longer existing tables, there is a total breakdown: the programs are no longer supported on the new platform. Therefore, it is necessary to check and correct all content – a good opportunity to finally analyze and eliminate data that has grown uncontrollably over decades, and thus prepare for the future.

A new SAP vision

As soon as the conventional database has been replaced with a HANA database, the user is in a very comfortable and flexible situation. Step by step, the old ECC functions can be replaced by modern S/4 HANA features in parallel operation. No big bang, no risks, but required gradual optimization. For example, the order entry is already in Fiori, while the disposition remains in the classic ECC. A very comfortable situation offering maximal flexibility.

Missing functions can be added through in-house development. No matter if On Premise or in the Cloud, everything can be freely combined. Through database access (“deep SQL”) using HANA, performance can be enhanced so much that additional tools, such as the BW, become superfluous. This saves server, license and maintenance resources, as shown in this live demo of the TechEd 2015.

What will be decisive is how the new S/4 HANA features actually turn out. I look forward to the first releases, which are supposed to come out by the end of the year, and I am going to test them well before recommending a system-switch to my customers. However, the preparatory steps need time – the clean-up of the content has to be started now to be ready when the nice new HANA world will be introduced in 2016/17. The savings potential is huge and the competition never sleeps!