SAP S/4 HANA Interview Questions and Answers

SAP S/4HANA is the next-generation go-to Business Suite tool for SAP (Short form SAP Business suite 4 SAP HANA). It is available on SAP HANA database; SAP It covers the majority of the functionality that was previously available within SAP ECC. The concept behind S/4HANA is to produce a simplified Business Suite that runs on HANA with an SAP Fiori front-end and real-time analytics. The underlying table structure has been re-written to provide a simplified data model to increase performance, simplify reporting and reduce the overall size of the system.

Inventory and warehouse management solutions from SAP enable companies to holistically control goods movements and warehouse operations, from inbound activities to fulfilment, in real time. By integrating real-time data from manufacturing planning, plant maintenance, inventory, and other enterprise resource planning processes, companies can efficiently manage procurement and order processing.

Lean manufacturing includes a set of principles that firms use to achieve improvements in productivity, profitability, quality, and lead-time without sacrificing productivity by eliminating waste through kaizen.

There are two current versions within S/4HANA with a different scope:

SAP S/4HANA Finance: It is based on the core ECC solution. The Finance modules, tables and processes have been simplified whilst the remaining areas have been untouched. Additional new functionality has been released within the Finance space.

SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management: It has a wider scope, with Materials Management and Operations simplified as well as Finance. A number of new functionalities have been released and many traditional modules have been removed.

Rebate processing is used to process special discounts that are paid retroactively to a customer. These discounts are based on specific terms and conditions that are defined in rebate agreements. The goal of rebates is to build long-term customer relationships

Data stored is generally categorized as: Master data and Transactional data- Master data is the important data that is used as a base for all transaction in the database. For any kind of activity such as creating, storing, producing, transferring, purchasing, which involves data requires certain master data. Transactional data are based on daily activities performed.

Production Planning and Detailed Scheduling (PPDS) on SAP S/4HANA is the product running on SAP S/4HANA. Production planning and detailed scheduling is a tool in APO (Advanced Planning and Optimization) which takes care of planning and scheduling considering the capacities of various resources. It includes the data like planning procedure, horizon, plan explosion etc.

SAP S/4HANA has been created to enable your business to transform. Processes run Quicker, real-time analytics allow for more accurate decision-making, and there is an Improved user experience for your teams.

• Business transformation: SAP S/4HANA is designed to provide business transformation for your organisation.
• Simplified data model
• Improved user experience
• SAP Fiori is available within S/4HANA to improve your users’ experience. Fiori reducesthe volume of key strokes that are required to perform a transaction.
• Real-time analytics: Embedded analytics provides a world of opportunities for organisations.
• SAP HANA

There are 3 different types of Deployment options

On-premise solution: In this model, the customer purchases software and hardware; the operations are managed by the customer itself.

Cloud solution: In this model, the hardware and software is provided by the cloud solution provider and it is rented to the customer.

Hybrid solutions: In this model, some part of the software is run by the client on-premise server owned by the client, and additional solution is provided by the client provider.

Real-time analytics as supported by SAP HANA have numerous potential use cases including:

• Profitability reporting and forecasting,
• Retail merchandizing and supply-chain optimization,
• Security and fraud detection,
• Energy use monitoring and optimization, and,
• Telecommunications network monitoring and optimization.

Multi tenancy: S/4 HANA takes advantages of HANA’s multi tenancy feature, with this option we can run ECC and CRM or any other satellite system on one box. A typical ECC – CRM data transfer accounts for 60% of overall system load, with this multi tenancy option this data transfer load will go away.

Simplified Data models: SAP removed the redundant tables required for aggregates and indices. This leads us to fewer table to work upon, that means less table locks, less data to manipulate and better performance.

Guided procedures results in faster rollout and reduced learning curve for end users.

Agile implementation:  With S/4 HANA SAP gave us the option to easily integrate with cloud applications like Ariba, SuccessFactor, Big Data and even IoT(internet of things). This leads us to faster and simplified integration.

Real time insight: With S/4 HANA we got access to real time data insights which help us in decision making, less efforts in planning, simulation, execution and prediction.

Less time to market: New customers can take advantage of prebuilt functionality and with minimal customization a new product or a business line can be plugged into the system.

Reduced TCO because of smaller IT landscape footprint, Simplified data models, faster rollouts, reduced learning curve and more productivity because of faster systems and guided procedures.

S-innovations were the internal project name for our development program and will not be used anymore.

In any scenario, the move to SAP S/4HANA is a great opportunity to validate the existing modifications and simplify your solution. It has not been unusual for customers to realize that 50% of the modifications that hamper fast release cycles and require long test cycles were no longer necessary to run the business, but were leftovers from older projects while the remaining modifications could have been built in a less intrusive manner. When moving to SAP S/4HANA, public cloud edition, customers will move their modifications to SAP HANA Cloud Platform as an extension.

Also, customers that make the choice of the SAP S/4HANA, managed cloud edition, the recommended approach is to use SAP HANA Cloud Platform extensions to provision enhancements. In fact, standard field extensions can directly be done within the SAP Fiori UX while SAP HANA Cloud Platform can be leveraged for more significant developments. SAP S/4HANA, on-premise edition, provides maximum customization opportunities: on premise as traditionally done in the past or through SAP HANA Cloud Platform. SAP has several references of SAP Business Suite customers using SAP HANA Cloud Platform extensions for on-premise systems.

In general, the SAP HANA extension framework of SAP HANA Cloud Platform uses SAP HANA as the common platform for SAP S/4HANA and offers additional choices such as the integration of open source solutions. The extension framework has the advantage to isolate modifications from the core and drive agility for the on-premise deployment and safeguard agility for cloud deployments. This means that rather than modifying the core code, enhancements are put in a “safe” environment so that innovation packages can be easily applied. The core SAP S/4HANA system remains “clean” and can be quickly and easily updated when new innovations are added – in just the same way that consumer mobile apps are updated on a regular basis.

SAP S/4HANA is next-generation business suite built on the most advanced in-memory platform. Logistics is used to handle Material Requirement Planning, Inventory Management, Material Valuation, and Capacity Planning, Stock keeping, Reordering, Order Management and Billing, Procurement to help businesses.

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. 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.

SAP S/4HANA shall also be made available with public cloud and managed cloud editions. However, SAP S/4HANA will not replace our existing portfolio of line-of-business cloud solutions; it will integrate with and expand it. Our comprehensive offering is planned to allow SAP S/4HANA customers to build hybrid scenarios between SAP S/4HANA and cloud solutions from SAP, including those from SuccessFactors and Ariba as well as integration with SAP hybris Marketing.

This way customers can leverage the cloud at their own pace, based on their needs, while keeping all the integration and business benefits of their existing SAP solutions. In addition, SAP S/4HANA is designed to easily connect with global business networks such as,for example, the Ariba Network and Concur.

SAP HANA is not a platform for loading, processing, and analyzing huge volumes – petabytes or more – of unstructured data, commonly referred to as big data. Therefore, HANA is not suited for social networking and social media data analytics. For such uses cases, enterprises are better off looking to open-source big-data approaches such as Apache Hadoop or LexisNexis HPCC Systems, or even MPP-based next generation data warehousing appliances like EMC Greenplum Datanbase  or Teradata AsterData.

While SAP has promised a slew of new HANA-optimized applications, currently only a handful are on the market. It is incumbent upon SAP to follow through on its commitment with practical applications that address real-world business problems. Also, SAP HANA is not pre-optimized to support non-SAP applications, which requires significant application re-engineering on the part of enterprise IT groups.

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.

The development approach of SAP S/4HANA is to eliminate 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 only provided fast access to sums and data. On the downside, these created interconnections in the application and complexity in how to lock the system to avoid conflicting updates in aggregates.

Moreover, significant code had to be developed for lengthy ETL (extract-transformload) scenarios incurring data preparation and exception management routines caused by latency. This portion of the code did not carry business semantic in itself, but served as “performance proliferation” in business processes. With SAP S/4 HANA, these different types of workaround on restrictions based on technical limitations are no longer necessary, as the latest information and the time travel from the columnar store can be accessed instantaneously across all inserts and updates and therefore eliminates the need for any overhead of the index and aggregates.