This blog post provides you with the latest innovations that our SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2008 release has in store for you in the area of Hybrid Cloud Deployment.
Subsidiary acting as sales office in two-tier is not new. Standard sales drop-shipment from Headquarters(HQ) to Subsidiary is available and has been implemented by many customers. However, it was an ask from many to have configurable product support between HQ and Subsidiaries. Hence in this release advanced variant capabilities delivered for drop-shipment scenario with the scope item 4R6 which is pre-requisite to run the two-tier business.
This scope item 4R6 have two possible variations:
- Sale from Central Stock Drop Shipment without ASN
- Sale from Central Stock Drop Shipment with ASN
Both the scenario mentioned above are enhanced with advanced variant configuration capabilities.
In this scenario, customer orders for configurable product at the local sales office that creates third party sales order. Follow on documents (purchase requisition and purchase order) will be created and processed at Sales Office. Then purchase order(PO) information is sent to headquarters for sales order(SO) creation with configurable product.
Configuration (AVC) is fully integrated into sales order processing with new item categories enabling combination of third-party and variant configuration. Configuration data is transferred to purchase order automatically.
Sales office provides order confirmation to customer with confirmed dates
Pre-requisite includes
- Customer and material master are in sync between two systems
- VC Characters, object dependencies are in sync between two systems
Step by step demonstration include as below
AVC Configuration
Sales order using configurable product
Sales order created at Headquarters
Central procurement is more relevant with hybrid cloud ERP deployment especially when users want to leverage economies of scale by consolidating purchasing volumes.
That means, SAP S/4HANA central procurement can be used as central system that can be connected to other systems in the landscape and then access their documents which will let organizations to run their standard operational processes in it.
Central Contract Management is used to negotiate a global longer-term agreement between an organization and a supplier regarding the supply of materials or the performance of services within a certain period as per predefined terms and conditions. Purchasers expectation is that it should be easy to maintain large volumes of data . Data operations should also be possible using excel to make it more convenient to use.
During SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2008 release, following mass upload capabilities are added to central contract
- To be able to download into a Microsoft excel file.
- Purchasers/contract administrators can add new header distribution and item distribution records using the excel file.
- System creates new versions of a central purchase contract when version-dependent fields are changed.
Central Mass upload view
Other Capabilities delivered in SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2008 includes
- Ability to define price change reasons for conditions of a central purchase contract item
- Capability to maintain a pricing scale for a central purchase contract item
- Simulation of price for a central purchase contract item
In Hybrid cloud ERP deployment/set-up , purchasers/contract administrators have task of organizing contracts in the manner which are effective from operations point of view. They can choose to create hierarchy of their choice which will be distributed as local contracts in the connected systems. Example could be Headquarters creating one main contract which should be cascaded to other legal units as applicable to each subsidiaries.
Hierarchy Central Contract acts as parent of the subordinate central contracts. Subordinate Central Contracts are subset of the Hierarchy Central Contract and split of subordinate central contract(s) is based upon the company code grouping customization.
Central Contract Hierarchy view
For more information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, check out the following links:
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud release info: http://www.sap.com/s4-cloudrelease
- The Link Collection for Hybrid Cloud here
- Best practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud here
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud User Community: register here
- Feature Scope Description here
- Help Portal Product Page here
