Although we currently use version 4.2, there are upgrades very regularly. I work for multiple clients and each client has a different version. It depends on the analytics cloud SAP are distributing to their respective clients. For now, we have 10 clients but the plan is to expand this.
Planning is the most valuable feature of the product because it's integrated and that means we don't need to rely on an independent planning environment. We have all the data available in ACP and fixed cloud and we use the same data for planning.
In terms of improvement, planning can sometimes not work the way we expect it would or should. Most of our customers are from VPC. They want to typically assimilate the scene and reflect what they are using. We sometimes have a hard time assimilating the same information on VPC.
I do understand that each and every product has its limitations. We are able to retrieve the information the customer is looking for, but whatever they are doing in VPC is what they want to be able to do in SAP, so SAP really needs to focus on that area to ensure that whatever they are doing in VPC is also in SAP.
For additional features, I have to say that so far they satisfy the requirements. I haven't worked on the planning models or the predictive models, but when it comes to planning there is a concern about the ability to match the exact requirements of the customer with what the product offers.
I've been using this product for almost two years.
It seems to be a stable product and we haven't had any issues. It works as expected and in the long term, stability will really depend on how they update their system.
The product is scalable.
We have, on occasion, contacted SAP for some of the issues we've had and they then forward it to the technical department who email us and solve the problem. We haven't opened any waiver messages.
The initial setup was complex. If the information is straightforward then it's fine, we're able to retrieve and carry out the basic operations, data actions, data logging, etc. and deal with it ourselves. But when you're trying to aggregate more information, for example, if you have a previous year's data and they want to see it as one column and for the current year they want to see a monthly view, it's possible in VPC but not possible in SAP.
We carry out the implementation ourselves and there is a great variation in the time it takes. It depends on the customers' requirements. With some of our customers, we were able to deploy in three weeks, but there were others that took up to four months. It depends upon the directives we receive from our customers. Not every customer has the same requirements and each customer is unique and we need to plan accordingly.
For now, we are only using the solution on public cloud but we have several customers in the pipeline and we are planning to use private cloud for future clients.
I've worked for many business warehouses over a period of 18 years and I strongly recommend this particular product because whatever I do in multiple tools, in reporting or dashboarding, for example, I carry out a planning process where everything is integrated, so I strongly recommend SAP.
I would rate this product a 10 out of 10 because I'm impressed with its function.
