Ever since S/4 HANA was announced there was mention about Simple Finance and Simple Logistics. After Simple Finance release by SAP there is fair amount of documentation around key data model simplification and thereby leading to performance optimisation, but hardly any details on Simple Logistics is available in public domain. At the same time from business standpoint Finance and Logistics go hand in hand and surely consultants / partners / customers are waiting to understand how Logistics will be “Simplified”. Drawing parallel from Simple Finance the expectation was to have key data model simplification and some key functional improvements in Logistics area. To compound the problem Logistics in core ERP is quite a broad functional area covering MM, PP, SD modules and lot of sub modules. In reality there is lot of expectation with the mention of “Simple Logistics”.

In continuation of learning and riding ahead in S/4 HANA journey, I have been exploring on Simple Logistics for past couple of months. Even though my background is in Supply Chain Planning (APO in particular) in recent times there has been some concern on what will happen to SAP APO and how it fits in future S/4 HANA journey. This blog is a summary of my understanding on Simple Logistics and expectation from it based on public domain information available so far. The exploration and research is based primarily on recent openSAP MOOC on S/4 HANA Deep Dive, SAP product roadmaps recently updated / added in Service Market Place and digging into Simple Finance related documentation to understand fundamentally how the “simplification” is being architected. For sake of simplicity my focus is on S/4 HANA On Premise although I understand that same codeline is being used for Public Cloud and Managed Cloud offering.