Published on February 22, 2022 – Johannes Strasser, Solutions Consultant SAP S/4HANA Finance & Business Process Intelligence at Westernacher
What about automating certain activities in your company while also increasing the user experience? Welcome to SAP S/4HANA . In our previous post, we encountered 10 aha moments about how SAP Process Discovery can help you unleash your potential to fully benefit from the SAP S/4HANA capabilities. In today’s post, we focus on what your future SAP S/4HANA system could look like, taking an example we derived from our SAP Process Discovery analysis. Let’s go.
The idea behind this post.
ERP systems today must respond to new requirements of users, especially those who are just kicking off their careers (generation Y and Z). Users expect that the systems they are working with will not only look good and operate smoothly, but that they will also positively affect both effectiveness and efficiency. Therefore, SAP introduced the intuitive and super user-friendly SAP Fiori interface in context with SAP S/4HANA. The SAP Fiori interface meets the requirements of the digital economy, allowing responsive access to the ERP system from any device connected to the web, most notably smart devices. The SAP Fiori interface refers to specific tasks and roles in the organization and not to comprehensive functions that meet the requirement of various user groups in one complex transaction. SAP Fiori applications also support typical and repeatable business processes. That’s the intention behind today’s post: illustrating to you how the SAP S/4HANA user interface Fiori can support your business processes while fostering an intuitive and simple user experience.
An example from SAP Process Discovery.
In the previous post, we learned about the Process Automation feature of SAP Process Discovery. We realized that “Accounting and Financial Close” is the process group with the greatest automation potential, since it represents the highest manual efforts as well as highest user relevancy in our case.
This is now the opportunity to have a closer look at how we can automate certain activities within this finance-related process group.
The drilldown shows that for the Accounting and Financial Close solution J58, we have the potential to improve the status quo. Compared to industry benchmarks, the as-is analysis explicitly indicates that our Accounting and Financial Close result is far above industry standard, more specifically four or more times greater than the industry average. A huge opportunity for improvement.
The first recommendation proposes displaying journal entries in T-account view via the related Fiori app. In the figure below you can immediately see how user friendly the app is designed, highlighting the most significant information in a beautiful structure.
The SAP Best Practices Explorer refers to this app too in order to improve Accounting and Financial Close (J58). For our concrete example, we can use this app to choose one or multiple journal entries and display ledger accounts where they were posted, check how journal entry line items affect the debit and credit sides of individual ledger accounts, find matching debit and credit entries in the affected ledger accounts as well as display journal entries in T-account view or table view.
And that’s just one tiny sub-process within finance, considering that there are five other lines of business (LOBs) as well as seven end-to-end processes with similar improvement opportunities derived from SAP Process Discovery.
Wrap-up.
Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg about what’s possible in SAP S/4HANA concerning its user interface Fiori. In the context of Business Process Intelligence (BPI), it is nice to remember that Fiori components are essential parts of improvement recommendations, automation potential as well as best practice scope items.
In our next post, we remain on the SAP S/4HANA topic from a BPI point of view. Spoiler: it might mitigate eventual uncertainties you may have in regard to your SAP S/4HANA migration. Stay tuned.
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