On the journey towards becoming an intelligent enterprise, it is essential for businesses to have the flexibility to support new business models. By enabling businesses to easily transition towards selling combinations of physical goods, one-time and recurring services and subscriptions in a single order, Solution Order Management fully supports new business models. In this blog, we’ll look at some of the key new features being delivered with the 2108 release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud to help your enterprise thrive.
You can also check out the below video for a quick summary of the release highlights.
Professional Services Projects Integration
SAP S/4HANA Cloud boasts a comprehensive professional services industry offering, however, previously, it wasn’t possible to combine selling professional services projects alongside other products or services on one order. With the 2108 release, through introducing a primary integration with professional services, solution orders are enhanced with projects capabilities. This is a significant extension of the Solution Order Management footprint, as it supports the sale of customer projects on one order alongside physical goods, one-time and recurring services, and subscriptions. It enables use cases, for example, whereby consultancy projects are sold alongside a physical good.
Project items can now be created in Solution Order Management. Releasing the project item in the application automatically creates the customer project and related follow-up documents. Attributes such as start and end dates, organizational data, project manager details, and net values can all be maintained in the project items directly in Solution Order Management and are handed over into project planning when the item is released. The status of the project can be tracked in Solution Order Progress, where you can see the project item and key project information, and navigate directly to the project itself for further review and planning. Take a look at the demo below to see how this looks in practice.
In addition, with 2108, we have added the new situation template Project Execution Dates Changed, which notifies solution order specialists of any changes made to the project start or end dates.
Service Contract Item Enhancements
Service contract items in solution orders are used to sell long-term service agreements to customers. In previous releases, Solution Order Management was upgraded to support configurable service products when determining service contract recurring prices. With 2108, we introduce further billing enhancements to service contract items in the form of ad-hoc billing and automatic renewal functionality.
Automatic renewal is supported on service contract items (SOSC) and service contract items with price adaption (SOPA). It can be enabled by accessing the service contract details on the UI, and the renewal terms such as renewal period and extension length can be defined as required. Releasing the service contract items in solution order management updates the auto-renewal information in the follow-up service contract.
Ad Hoc billing doesn’t conform to milestone or periodic billing, instead, it enables billing values and dates to be freely defined. A contract start and end date can be defined, alongside an agreed contract value which services are booked against on an ad-hoc basis. Ad-Hoc billing items are then manually defined in the billing plan under price details. Check out the video below to find out more.
Solution Order Profitability
To conclude our 2108 release blog, I’d like to introduce a final highlight, namely our new application Solution Order Profitability Dashboard. Sales managers can use Solution Order Profitability to analyze data and track the performance of solution orders in order to identify key customers, regions, products, and countries amongst other criteria. Using the KPI explorer supports even deeper analysis through adding further dimensions and filters to data, whereas accessing the solution order profitability page provides visualizations of the performance of individual solution orders, helping you identify the most profitable products contained in an order.
Conclusion
The new features introduced in 2108 support new ways of doing business, growing revenue, and making sales. As a final thought, check out the below end to end video to see how our new solution order management features tie in together as part of a process:
I hope this blog has been informative & thank you for reading – keep an eye out for my next update from Solution Order Management in 2111!
For more information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, check out the following links:
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud release info here
- Jan Gilg SAP News Center article here
- Sven Denecken’s SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2108 Release Blog
- Latest SAP S/4HANA Cloud Release Blogs here and previous release highlights here
- Product videos on our SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA YouTube playlist
- SAP S/4HANA PSCC Digital Enablement Wheel here
- Early Release Webinar Series here
- Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast here
- openSAP Microlearning for SAP S/4HANA here
- Best practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud here
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud Community: here
- Feature Scope Description here
- What’s New here
- Help Portal Product Page here
- Implementation Portal here
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