This is not the sexiest of changes. To be fair, a Financial Controller or Director will not care too much around tables and how data is sorted. The CIO or CTO will have an eye on this change as it will reduce the size of the underlying tables. Moving to SAP HANA can be costly, however reducing the size of the database will reduce the costs of SAP HANA for customers. A standard migration to SAP HANA will see a reduction of size of 5:1 (old database size: SAP HANA database size). With SAP Simple Finance, the SAP HANA database can be reduced by a further 40-60%, (the amount will of course vary depending on the Finance modules being used). Apart from the size reduction implications, the removal of aggregation tables will enable processes to be run more efficiently such as cost allocations and the ability to perform analysis within the SAP Business Suite on HANA environment rather than from a data warehouse.
The new user interface, in isolation, could be the real turning point for SAP. The traditional SAP Gui UI is dated to say the least and, in reality, today’s users won’t accept working on the grey screens SAP made famous 20 years ago. Users want a common platform with simple to-use screens. With this initial release, SAP has moved some of the most common Finance SAP transactions and reports making use of SAPUI5 via SAP Fiori apps. The look and feel is totally different and it brings financial processing into the 21st Century. The only downside is that not all of the SAP Finance screens will get a SAP Fiori overhaul and will need to be consumed via the standard SAP Gui.
An output of the new table structure and the emphasis SAP has made around the UX has enabled SAP to create some new fancy Finance based apps. Cash Management, Integrated Planning, and Treasury are areas where new apps have been created. The apps focus on blending data processing and analysis all from a single system. Prior to SAP HANA, users would enter data in an ERP environment and report and analysis via a data warehouse potentially utilising SAP BusinessObjects. SAP has simplified the UX by allowing the end-to-end process to be consumed via a single app which will speed up productivity.