How does SAP S/4HANA differ from SAP HANA?
Some confusion exists between SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA among many legacy SAP ERP customers. SAP HANA is an in-memory database while S/4HANA is a revolutionary application that uses ERP apps in the front-end, that is developed to run on the in-memory database SAP HANA. If SAP HANA is the hub for all SAP’s product strategy, then you can think of SAP S/4HANA as the cornerstone for all SAP technologies.
With SAP HANA it was possible to process huge volumes of transactional and operational business data in real-time. SAP launched the Business Suite on HANA in 2013 that included various modules for SCM, CRM, SRM, and PLM. This business suite basically had the ERP apps in the front-end with the HANA in-memory database running in the back-end. In contrast, S/4HANA is written completely in HANA by re-writing the 400 million lines of code instead of running on top of it. This makes SAP S/4HANA easy to use and understand and also makes it more agile for developers.
SAP S/4HANA offers great decisive advantages over HANA:
- There is no longer a need for meta tables or duplicate tables, and thus S/4HANA has no more redundancies like meta tables or duplicate tables because everything is stored in the main memory.
- Backups, Development, and Operations have become a lot simpler and easier than before.
- S/4HANA has slimmed down the back-end to a great extent.
Organizations can reinvent their business models and generate greater revenue using S/4HANA capabilities and making the most of IoT and Big Data by connecting devices, business networks, and people. S/4HANA has opened up new and faster decision-making opportunities for businesses. For example, if simulation in production planning requires only a couple of minutes and not half a day then the logistic processes can easily be rescheduled in a few minutes versus once in 24 hours. This way a company can provide an individual pricing quotation to a customer when they are ordering and also consider the buying history at that point in time to offer relevant discounts.
S/4HANA has introduced a healthy dose of simplification for administration and management of the IT environment, as it does not require batch processing. With the centralization of network and hardware resources, users can glean insights on data from anywhere in real-time for execution, simulation, planning, and prediction.