SAP S/4 Hana and ECC – Differences

Introduction to the new S/4 HANA

• Fourth version of SAP Business Suite, a future-ready digital platform
• Built to solve complex queries and manager larger amount of data
• Introduced a universal journal – ACDOCA combining reports and tables within a single dB
• OLTP and OLAP functionalities within the same system, thereby enabling near real-time reporting and predictive analysis
  • OLTP helps with fast processing as OLTP dB are updated frequently.
  • OLAP relates to response time for complex queries to fetch a large amount of aggregated data from the dB for analytics or any related purposes.
  • [A good information can be gathered for OLTP and OLAP from this URL: https://www.stitchdata.com/resources/oltp-vs-olap%5D
• Data retrieval is from HANA dB (in-memory) directly
• New, enhanced and improved UI for touch-screens and mobile devices with UI5 applications
• UI5 based Data Migration Workbench/Cockpit
• Introduction of interactive reports using Fiori applications

Below is the table containing some points of comparison between S/4 HANA and ECC systems.

ECC	S/4 H
Legacy UI as primary interface	Feature-rich UI
Any 3rd party dB can be used such as Oracle, IBM DB2. Data is traversed using row-based approach.	Improved performance planning, execution, report generation and analysis by using HANA dB as primary dB. The S4H uses column-based approach to traverse the data, thereby improving the performance of the data overall.
Legacy Warehouse management or third-party WMS integration	Extended Warehouse Management or EWM support for enhanced WM capabilities
Less tight integration with third-party apps, thereby increasing total cost of ownership for complete landscape	Reduced total cost of ownership and data footprint with simplification of IT landscape
No concept of real-time inventory visibility	Real-time insights
Third-party omnichannel order management systems required to be used	Availability of omni-channel for delivering value
Different customer and vendor master data	Business Partner has been made primary for customer and vendor
LSMW tool used primarily for data migration	LTMC is the new user-friendly data migration cockpit
No mandate of using material ledger	Material Ledger has been made mandatory with the introduction of Universal Journal
Multiple tables for storing different inventory management data	Inventory management reduced to a single good table – MATDOC
Article/Material character length limited to 18 characters	Article/Material length can be up to 40 characters
Header-level and item-level tables	New line-item only tables
SAP Retail Store for in-store apps	Fiori-based MIM apps for store operations
Legacy merchandise and assortment planning	SAP Merchandise planning and Assortment planning based on CAR
SAP AFS as a different solution overall	SAP AFS and its applications are integrated within S4H system
No provision of using OLAP within the system	Enables use of OLAP within same system, thereby enabling real-time reporting and predictive analysis
No concept of universal journal	ACDOCA –  a universal journal introduced to store data from multiple tables, thereby reducing dependency on multiple tables
Company code currency has local currency as one end up to 2 parallel currencies only	Concept of Parallel Currencies allow eight freely define able currencies in the universal journal table in addition to fixed (local as company code currency and global as controlling area currency)
GL accounts are map to controlling elements separately	The GL accounts and cost of elements are residing in this single Field of universal journal – ACDOCA
Traditional costing-based CO-PA required reconciliations between CO-PA and GL	Account based CO-PA is the default option while costing based CO-PA is now available as an option

A summarised table of ECC and S/4H comparison

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You may refer the official SAP document related to ‘Upgrading SAP S/4HANA: Why, How, and Best Practices’ here: https://assets.cdn.sap.com/sapcom/docs/2020/06/94ca0995-9d7d-0010-87a3-c30de2ffd8ff.pdf

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