Hey friends,

I was fortunate to attend SAPInsider’s 2015 conference in Nice where the weather was beautiful, the cuisine delicious, and the conference content bountiful.  One of the more interesting topics that I learned about was SAP’s support for S/4 HANA and SAP HCM platforms.  Based on customer feedback since the original plans were unveiled at SAPPHIRENOW, changes to the support of SAP’s productized integration was necessary. Here’s the skinny:

There are 5 basic scenarios. (I am sure there are others based on customers’ own deployments, but let’s stick with these for now):

If using SAP ERP HCM:

1) Keep SAP ERP HCM in its own instance on premise, and deploy S/4 HANA on premise

2) Deploy S/4 HANA and SAP ERP HCM in the same instance on premise

3) Keep SAP ERP HCM on premise, and deploy S/4 HANA in the cloud

If using Employee Central:

4) Deploy S/4 HANA on premise, and integrate with SuccessFactors Employee Central

5) Deploy S/4 HANA in the cloud, and integrate with SuccessFactors Employee Central

In all scenarios above, SAP has or will have productized integrations to support these scenarios to the year 20xx, where xx is something we need to hear from SAP on. I was able to grab some time with David Ludlow, Group Vice President at SAP, who really understands the customer landscape out there.  He presented this slide which captures the options pretty well.

So what does this all mean? Well, the answer is still to be determined, but for SAP HCM customers who are looking to use Simple Finance and other aspects of S/4 HANA, it simply means more options.   This has always been a bit of a double sword for SAP, but in my opinion, it’s something that SAP had to do in order to accommodate its vast customer base.