SAP sERP

Well, do not get me wrong but this blog post is about solution from SAP which really doesn’t exists at time of writing. It is rather research project at HPI in Potsdam, Germany. What they actually do in the project is to exploring and testing possibilities of large scale ERP systems running on SAP HANA.

The sERP is continuation of new SAP mantra called “Simple”. This was announced on last year’s conference - SAPPHIRE NOW 2014. There will be a suite of products released called as S-Innovations or sERP where S means - simplicity. What is SAP trying to do with their products is to get them simplified. This is supposed to be simplification in terms of quicker implementation, simple testing, leaner maintenance, integration and upgrades together with having a user friendly GUI/UI. For sure that a lot of things will be changed and while going down the simplification road there will be things which will be lost. These kinds of drawbacks will be there in matter of losing vast value of flexibility which is provided by customization possibilities that is built in SAP. The sERP is considered to be similar as solutions like SAP Business All in One or SAP Business ByDesing. These are ERPs which are leveraging pre-configured best practices scenarios. Other point is that as long as it is cloud based solution there are further advantages such as infrastructure and maintenance.

First product from sERP suite is already live. It is SAP simple Finance or sFIN. It was Hasso Platner's keynote in the above mentioned SAPPHIRE NOW where he shared what led to development of the sFIN. He provided example of ECC’s FI module tables which can be simplified to just few of them: BKPF and BSEG as while FI and CO modules reply on the data form these two tables. The simplification was also driven by fact that running apps on HANA there is no more necessity to have aggregates, indices and even not using of table updates just inserts. Actually some of these types of things are now becoming redundant.

What else may come in future? Well there can be more ECC modules going through simplification. We can see maybe sLOG (Logistics, or sSD, sMM, sPP, sPM), sHR or sHCM, sMfg, sQM (Quality Management) etc. Even more also components of SAP ERP can come like: sCRM, sPLM, sSCM, sSRM.. Purely speculation but ERP and ECC can even morph one day into one system even together with BI (BW) system.