INTERVIEW QUESTIONS FOR S4HANA

1. What is SAP S/4 HANA?

SAP S/4HANA, short for SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA, is SAPs next-generation
business suite. It is a new product fully built on the most advanced in-memory
platform todaySAP HANAand modern design principles with the SAP Fiori user
experience (UX). SAP S/4HANA delivers massive simplifications (customer
adoption, data model, user experience, decision making, business processes, and
models) and innovations (Internet of Things, Big Data, business networks, and
mobile-first) to help businesses run simple in a digital and networked economy.

2. What does the name of SAP S/4HANA stand for?

SAP S/4HANA is the short form for SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA. It brings the
next big wave of SAP innovation to our customers, similar to the transition from SAP
R/2 to SAP R/3. SAP S/4HANA is a new product with a new code line.

3. What are the deployment options offered?

SAP currently plans to offer on-premise, cloud (public and managed), and hybrid
deployments to give real choice to customers. SAP S/4HANA also gives customers
the option to fully leverage the new HANA multi-tenancy functionality as provided
by the SAP HANA platform (currently support package 9) for the cloud.

4. How does SAP S/4HANA relate to SAP Simple Finance powered by SAP HANA?
The SAP Simple Finance solution marked the first step in our SAP S/4 HANA road
map for customers. The solution has demonstrated the value of simplification (for
example, no indexes, no aggregates, and no redundancies) and instant insight in
Finance. SAP S/4HANA, on-premise edition leverages the full scope of SAP
Accounting powered by SAP HANA included in SAP Simple Finance. SAP S/4HANA,
managed cloud edition is intended to leverage the same scope. SAP S/4HANA, public
cloud edition is planned to focus on a selected scope of SAP Simple Finance in
alignment with the key requirements in finance.

5. What is the benefit to the data model for using an in-memory platform?
SAP S/4HANA delivers high-volume transaction processing (OLTP) and high volume
real-time analytical processes (OLAP) based on a unified data model without the
redundant data layers typically required by traditional RDBMS based systems. This
reduces TCO while providing new opportunities to increase business value from
existing investments. Examples for redundant data layers are custom-built layers
based on database tuning efforts such as secondary indexes, or application built-in
performance accelerators such as aggregate tables or multiple general ledger
versions for different managerial reporting needs.
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The massive simplifications of the data model and the data processing layers enable
business and technological innovations on a broad scale across all lines-of-business
and industry solutions. The new application architecture simplifies system
landscape architectures and accelerates cloud deployments on an economical scale.

6. Do SAP S/4HANA and SAP Business Suite share the same data semantic?
With SAP S/4HANA, SAP has developed a new product that leverages basic data
structures and elements of the SAP Business Suite for maximum compatibility, non-
disruptive migration and hybrid scenarios.
However, SAP S/4HANA provides new business functionality on top of these data
structures natively built on the SAP HANA platform and designed with the SAP Fiori
UX principles. SAP Business Suite on-premise customers on the latest enhancement
package can easily move to this new product simply by migrating to the SAP HANA
database and applying the exchange innovation (new code)to their current SAP
Business Suite environment.

7. In simple finance, can I have a new field based on business need which can link with
logistics? For example, a team field which will drive from sales Oder which will flow
to GL posting?
You can add a field to the universal journal easily but you will have to create
derivation logic of some kind to fill it and as with any derivation the more complex
you make the logic to fill it, the more youll impact performance during posting.

8. What is a system-driven implementation?

We want to radically simplify the implementation of SAP S/4HANA so that
customers enjoy rapid success and payback. This is particularly relevant in the
cloud, of course, where customers expect to deploy a pre-configured system. SAP
therefore provides ready-to-run business processes based on best practices that can
be activated. During the activation, the system configures itself. The SAP S/4HANA
Guided Configuration facilitates customers to personalize the processes delivered
by SAP. Within the app Manage your solution easy SAP Fiori UIs can be used to
maintain e.g. the organizational structure, approval thresholds or other individual
settings.

9. What are the requirements for moving to SAP S/4HANA?

The initial path is to move to SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA and then to
implement packages that contain the simplifications. Currently, these come in the
INTERVIEW QUESTIONS FOR S4HANA

form of SAP Simple Finance, though SAP Simple Logistics is slated for release soon
and further simplifications will follow in 2015.

10. Is SAP S/4HANA, cloud edition a public cloud offering?

Yes. The SAP S/4HANA, cloud edition has all the qualities of a public cloud offering.
Please note that the SAP S/4HANA, cloud enterprise edition provides additional
services for customers that require broader extensions and configuration
capabilities.

11. How does SAP S/4HANA relate to SAP BW?

SAP BW will continue to represent the preferred solution for strategic enterprise
data warehousing to help customers consolidate data from different sources
(including SAP and nonSAP data sources) and get a consistent view across the
enterprise. SAP BW has also been optimized to run on the SAP HANA platform: SAP
BW powered by SAP HANA. SAP S/4HANA delivers built-in real-time operational
reporting capabilities covering all typical analytics use-cases in the context of the
suite. Therefore, SAP BW will continue to act as our central enterprise data
warehouse solution.

12. How much experience do potential integration partners have?

Our integration partners are of course working with the rapid-deployment solutions
to some extent. And our service partners already have broad experience of
implementing SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA for our customers. In fact, over 60%
of implementations are performed by partners and integration partners, not by SAP.
We operate roll out programs to inform and educate our partners about all of our
new solutions. And our Global Partner Organization (GPO) holds regular
enablement sessions at which it brings partners up to speed on the new
technologies and explains to them in detail how SAP S/4HANA will impact their
work.

13. Which skill sets are required?

In most cases, its the implementation partner that handles the project, so customers
dont really need to get bogged down in the details. However, more information is
available at SCN, SAPs Community Network. Both, partners and customers can refer
to.

14. Is it possible to migrate company-specific customizations?

In principle, yes. When we developed our solutions, we took particular care to

ensure that they would be backwards-compatible. In other words, the customer
can keep customizations and continue to use them after the migration. However,
this does not always apply to modifications. Take the analogy of a house and
INTERVIEW QUESTIONS FOR S4HANA

imagine that the customer has not only added a balcony but has also modified the
building too. In this case, the function of the house may be affected, whereas the
balconies will be fine.

15. How does SAP S/4HANA relate to SAP Business By Design and SAP Business One?

SAP Business ByDesign remains a dedicated end-to-end cloud ERP application for
midsize companies that want to run their entire business on single cloud
application. SAP Business One remains a dedicated ERP option for small businesses
in all industries.

16. How does SAP HANA Cloud Platform relate to SAP S/4HANA?

In the context of SAP S/4HANA, SAP HANA Cloud Platform serves as an extension
platform and agility layer. It is possible to build specific capabilities extending the
scope of SAP S/4HANA by either integrating non-SAP functions or building your
own capabilities. The cloud platform not only serves as the development platform
but also as the runtime foundation for the developed solutions. The extensions built
on the cloud platform can run against both cloud and on-premise deployments of
SAP S/4HANA.

17. How does the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud service relate to SAP S/4HANA?

For SAP S/4HANA, managed cloud edition, we are leveraging the same
infrastructure as a service (IaaS), data centers, and security qualities, though the
lifecycle management is different. Innovation updates for the cloud editions are
planned on a quarterly basis, to be consumed by the customer, and managed by SAP

18. SAP Fiori is mentioned a great deal, but we do not hear much about SAP Screen
Personas in the context of SAP S/4HANA. Why is that?

SAP Screen Personas is a critical part of the SAP S/4HANA user experience
strategy. It is the ideal solution for scenarios not yet covered by Fiori applications or
for an organizations custom transactions. Customers can use SAP Screen Personas
to simplify their existing SAP GUI screens or WebDynpro ABAP applications to meet
their unique needs and increase productivity. SAP is providing design guides and
SAP Fiori-inspired sample content for SAP Screen Personas.

The SAP Fiori UX strategy aims to transform the transactional operational model to
a role-oriented one. Since our focus is on delivering the SAP Fiori UX, we do not
highlight the underlying technologies that provide this capability to the users.
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19. Which SAP S/4HANA applications are available right now? Is it just SAP Simple
Finance? Whats the difference between the cloud and on-premise offerings?

If I implement SAP S/4HANA on premise, Im technically implementing SAP

Business Suite on SAP HANA and deploying the exchange innovation for SAP
Simple Finance. But thats just the first step.

SAP will continue to deliver additional exchange innovations that replace the
existing SAP Business Suite code with the new SAP S/4HANA code. At the moment,
the customer receives the code for the new accounting solution. We plan to ship the
code for SAP Simple Logistics at the end of the year and further new code in
subsequent years. By the time we reach the end of this journey, we will have
incrementally switched the customers entire system without subjecting it to the
upheaval of a big-bang migration.

The situation is different if the customer opts to deploy SAP S/4HANA in the cloud.
In this case, the customer gets the entire solution at one go. We plan to release a
public cloud version at the end of the first quarter of 2015 and a version for
managed cloud in the second quarter.

20. Can customers run different sap s/4hana editions in parallel in their enterprise
architecture?

Yes.sap s/4 hana editions are integrated and run mostly on the same data semantic.

21. Benefits of sap s/4hana?

sap s/4hana delivers high volume transaction processing(OLTP) and high volume
real time analytical processes(OLAP) based on unified data model without the
redundant data layers

22. What is the fundamental difference between old sap business suite code line and
the new sap s/4 hana product code line?

The development approach of SAP S/4HANA is to enable customers for the digital
economy and deliver a new architecture, designed for real-time, Live Business. The
SAP applications built on SAP HANA benefit from market-leading in-memory
computing technology.

The SAP HANA in-memory database stores data in rows and columns. It is this
combination of both storage approaches that produces the speed, flexibility, and
performance of the SAP HANA database.

SAP S/4HANA combines standard SAP ERP functionality and industry features in
one modern software stack including required data model adoptions such as the
INTERVIEW QUESTIONS FOR S4HANA

field length extension of material number and amount fields to support modern
business process requirements.

The SAP HANA database technology also allows for the elimination of all artefacts
that have been introduced as performance workarounds for classical row-based
RDBMS. These are aggregates and programmed indexes that contained no semantic
value and provided only fast access to sums and data. These workarounds created
interconnections in the application and complexity in how to lock the system to
avoid conflicting updates to the aggregates.

With SAP S/4HANA, these different types of workarounds, based on technical

limitations of traditional databases, are not necessary.

23. Whats the roadmap? Which releases will appear next?

SAP S/4HANA is available today for on-premise customers. The current offering,
SAP Simple Finance, gives customer a simplified finance system. The next major
group of simplifications were addressing and planning to deliver is in logistics.
These include simpler inventory management and valuation, along with
simplifications in supply chain management, notably demand planning. Logistics
involves some of the most complicated ERP processes of all, but this is the area in
which customer demand is strongest. One of the benefits theyre looking for is
higher throughput.

24. What is sap FIORI launch pad?

SAP Fiori Launch pad is a real-time, contextual, role

based and personalized aggregation point for business applications planned to be
deployed on multiple platforms ABAP (available today), SAP Portal, Cloud Portal
and HANA. It runs on multiple device types and provides a single point of access for
business applications such as transactional, analytical, factsheet, smart business
applications and others.

25. What are sap FIORI launch pad key values?

Simple intuitive, easy and coherent user experience

Role based simplified role based navigation and business function access
Contextual real time, contextual and personalized access
Responsive consumption a cross devices, versions and channels with a
single user experience
Multi-platform planned to be running on multiple platforms ABAP
(available today), SAP Portal, SAP HANA Cloud Portal and HANA