How to Maximize Your Investment in SAP S/4HANA with JAMS

Within the enterprise resource planning (ERP) landscape of SAP, there has been a steady drumbeat of organizations migrating from earlier versions of SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) and SAP R/3 to the latest generation of SAP S/4HANA.

According to the SAP News Center, more than 50 percent of the Fortune 500 are ‘well advanced in their deployment of SAP S/4HANA,’ with at least one go-live of S/4HANA every business hour since 2020. With maintenance support for SAP ECC set to sunset in 2027, SAP customers are now under more pressure than ever to make the move and migrate to S/4HANA.

What Is SAP S/4HANA?

In 2015, SAP rebuilt the SAP ECC system entirely to create the fourth version of the SAP Business Suite called SAP S/4HANA. This intelligent, next-generation ERP is designed to run on the SAP HANA database exclusively and can manage greater amounts of data to provide real-time insights for users.

How Can You Enhance SAP S/4HANA with Workload Automation?

As many organizations make the shift from older versions of SAP ERP systems to SAP S/4HANA, IT teams are recognizing that in some cases, their legacy automation tools may be limited to just their SAP applications or may be incompatible with their investment in SAP S/4HANA. That’s because native SAP scheduling tools have limited ability to connect SAP processes to other applications, and often require inefficient workarounds like pillow-based scheduling in order to execute a series of jobs.

To enhance how you manage automated processes within SAP S/4HANA, many organizations are looking to external workload automation (WLA) solutions like JAMS. As a centralized WLA solution, JAMS runs, monitors, and manages jobs, process chains, and workflows that support critical business operations. And when integrated with S/4HANA, JAMS provides powerful job scheduling for greater efficiency and productivity, consolidates SAP process automation with other business processes in a single console, and adds cross-platform dependencies to reduce overhead.

JAMS tackles the biggest SAP automation challenges for S/4HANA and seamlessly integrates with this latest SAP ERP to increase the reliability of workload automation. Using JAMS for SAP, organizations have reduced operational costs by as much as 60 percent, increased visibility into workflows across the business, and centralized job scheduling capabilities across applications, platforms, and their SAP environment.

How Can You Enable Processes and Schedule Jobs in SAP S/4HANA with JAMS?

As your organization makes the transition to S/4HANA, finding a WLA solution that works with both legacy SAP solutions and the next-generation ERP is critical in how you prepare to schedule jobs. JAMS can help you move beyond inefficient SAP processing and help you leverage your new investment in S/4HANA to create comprehensive workload automation across your business.

JAMS allows for the automation of processes like Advanced Business Application Programs (ABAP), the SAP programming language, along with other external programs, and process chains. It can also directly import SAP processes into the scheduler. JAMS also monitors, manages, and triggers dependencies between SAP S/4HANA and external processes, providing a complete audit trail that documents the entire workflow. You can even link SAP S/4HANA events to JAMS events to create an event-based job processing strategy.

JAMS also ensures flexible and extensive calendar options for scheduling your jobs. For example, a job that is created on SAP S/4HANA provides limited start conditions, allowing you to only run a job on a specific day, like the last day of the month. But JAMS uses natural language specifications in combination with custom calendars to empower you to schedule tasks on or around dates specific in the calendars. You even have the ability to add multiple schedules with multiple exceptions to any job or process—ensuring your task will run exactly when you want it to. Best of all, it’s easy to see the real-time status of your SAP S/4HANA processes in relation to external processes through the use of the centralized monitoring console.

JAMS also has options for dependencies on jobs, where the dependency has to be satisfied before a job can run. With dependencies and triggers together, you can schedule a job to run at a specific time and also make sure that the job will wait until the file is available before it goes on to the next task. JAMS also has the ability to intercept jobs in case a job is kicked-off directly in SAP S/4HANA that shouldn’t be. This means if a certain process is followed and a job is inadvertently started in the SAP ERP, JAMS can catch it, stop the job, and log it in the audit trail.

Start Getting the Most from Your SAP S/4HANA Investment

The examples provided here are just the beginning of how JAMS can make your transition to S/4HANA seamless—taking your new ERP to the next level. The right workload automation tool is essential in making the most of your investment in SAP S/4HANA. Integrating JAMS with SAP means your jobs can now be part of larger business process workflows from a single console—empowering you to increase efficiencies and boost productivity across your entire enterprise.