SAP BW4HANA Reviews

I'm a data analytics lead.

The Strategic Enterprise Management Business Consolidation System is the most valuable and critical feature of this solution. It also has a great analytics engine with all the capabilities I'm looking for. There are a lot of master and transitional data relationships where BW has very good features.

I love this product and have been working on SAP products for many years but the solution needs to be more user-friendly with an improved UI, particularly if you compare it to what Snowflake is offering. 

I've been using this solution for three years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable, we have around 200 users.

Technical support from SAP is good and very structured. They are trying to improve day by day. They've got a good repository in terms of their knowledge base.

The initial setup is not complex because we use HANA Studio. For anyone not in the SAP domain, it will be more complicated. We have two admins. 

When comparing SAP to Snowflake, the difference is that Snowflake has a better UI and it's very quick to scale compared to SAP. 

It's important that SAP does not destroy the core value of what makes BW a great solution. They shouldn't abandon the star schema modeling so that anybody who wants to do 16 dimensions can keep their own shell, and can enhance user information on top of that. 

I rate this product eight out of 10. 

We are using HANA for dashboarding. HANA is like a database for the system where we create dashboards using business planning and consolidation on AE4 and EPM. Five or six people are on the business warehouse team managing BW/4HANA, and I'm the architect, so I help them.

The UI is completely new, beautiful, and user-friendly. There are some other helpful features like global filters and advanced tools. We can perform custom calculations easily

From a technical perspective, the performance has been enhanced and optimized for a limited number of flows. The content settings are more advanced, and there are so many other features that I can't name them all.

BW/4HANA could improve query optimization. For example, there could be an error message that pops up when you hover over it if any query fails. That would make it easier to find out what went gone wrong. Guided SAP help tools would make it easier for us to go forward. 

I have been using BW4HANA for almost six or seven months now.

BW/4HANA is quite stable unless we come up with different service sites.

There are some old systems that have been discontinued, and it'll be challenging if you migrate completely to a new system. I'm not sure whether every organization wants to do that, but so I cannot speak to the scalability. 

SAP BW/4HANA is easy to set up. It's a little tricky when it fails, but I did not find it challenging. You need to have all the help files installed before starting the setup. The deployment is fast.

I can't comment on the cost because it keeps changing based on the plan and company requirements. There are different procedures and corporate discounts.

I rate SAP BW/4HANA seven out of 10. It's user-friendly, so it's easy to get started on it.

We are a consulting company, we use the solution for our client's organizations who have a basic requirement for KPI information.

Our customers require KPIs to analyze their management. We use BW/4HANA to extract data and provide business intelligence for our customers that are using S/4HANA ERP.

SAP BW/4HANA can be used more generally as a data warehouse. Prior to BW/4HANA, BW classic could only work with SAP products, but S/4HANA can be used for any enterprise data warehouse and is no longer limited to SAP, but can also be used for legacy data or big data. The solution is more flexible than before.

We benefited from BW/4HANA's ability to utilize predefined content. We didn't need to start from scratch.

The solution is not easy to implement. It requires a lot of learning at the beginning. I would like to see the features be simplified.

I have been using SAP BW/4HANA for five years. 

The solution is stable.

SAP BW/4HANA is not a cloud version, it does not have auto-scaling functionality. It is scalable, but it is not automatic.

In the past, for data warehousing, we used Oracle, Google BigQuery and AWS. For business intelligence, we used BusinessObjects as a solution.

BW/4HANA is not easy to implement, it is complex. It requires four or five people to implement.

Before, in BW classic, there is BW Workbench. Inside Workbench, we could do almost anything without needing to go to the database level. Now, the architecture has changed. We need to use Eclipse to model the data, making it more technical than before. It is difficult to train our customers.

If an upgrade is needed, it takes about five months to implement, depending on what the client currently has. If we are implementing a new BW/4HANA from the beginning, it will take more time to analyze the requirements.

SAP BW/4HANA is expensive.

SAP BW/4HANA did not require us to start from scratch as it utilizes predefined content inside.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I use the solution for reports and dashboards.

At this moment, it was started as a business intelligence strategy. So, I used it for a new project.

The feature I found valuable is that the solution had only one dashboard and no more.

I need a more efficient tool. I need more competitive tools, like Microsoft Power BI. The tool is not easy to use for an end user.

I need more analytics tools, especially optimizing the AfO tool for data analytics, since it is a critical point for us.

I have been using SAP BW4HANA for about six months.

It is a stable solution.

I plan to increase the use of the solution from next month.

For support, I have a local partner.

The initial setup was easy.

It's a little expensive compared to Microsoft Azure.

I may consider contacting a consultant next month.

It's not a friendly solution. So, it is a complex tool.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for analyzing all the enterprise data and pushing it out on a corporate dashboard for the leadership team to have a tab of production, revenues, manufacturing, et cetera.

It has got wonderful features in terms of analyzing your production data, and it gives you real-time insight into productive maintenance. You can plan your budget, and you can map them against actuals. It gives you good insights on overall performance and processes.

The solution is stable and reliable.

It's quite scalable. 

There are certain areas, for example, HR or project systems, where the BW native adapters are still not fully enabled for you to have the standard offerings.

Support could be more reliable. 

It's quite agile. 

It is an expensive product.

We first ordered the product last year. Altogether we have about a year and a half of experience with it, end to end.

SAP is an extremely stable product. I'd rate it nine out of ten. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution is very scalable. Compared to traditional data warehousing it is very, very agile. It's very scalable. I'd rate the general scalability nine out of ten. 

We have close to 120 users. 

Support varies. On a good day, even the critical ticket gets through, and on a bad day, the simplest one will have you bump across the globe trying to get help. So it's a bit of a mixed experience.

Neutral

We previously used Power BI-based dashboards. That solution, however, was based on flat files and static data. We were looking for a single source of truth and to have real-time inputs, which is why we adopted SAP. 

I would rate the ease of implementation somewhere around six or seven. We still have some teething issues, which hopefully we can resolve.

The deployment took seven months.

We engaged SAP for the initial explorer phase. And based on that, we sized our setup, and we put our requirements in place. The process was to look at the business, polish and design, and then implement.

There were six people involved in the implementation process. They were developers, functional specialists, subject-matter experts, and, of course, admins.

In terms of ROI, we just went live a few months back, so ROI was not a focus. For this year, the focus is the adoption of users and the intangible benefits out of it, how much your end users are buying into the product and how much it motivates them to get insight from the system. We have internal KPIs. However, these are not related to value for money. Real ROI will be looked at on a broader three to five-year zone.

The solution is extremely expensive. I'd rate them three out of ten in terms of affordability. 

I'm a customer and end-user. 

We have the SAP S/4HANA on-prem version, however, we are using the Azure servers to host them.

We are using SAP S/4HANA, BW/4HANA, and SAP Analytics Cloud products.

We have invested heavily in our training and end-user environment. We have got some tools and a team dedicated to that. After learning from the earlier initiatives of SAP implementation, it was rather easy this time around as we knew what needed to be done and implemented those standards early.

I'd recommend the solution to others and also recommend that new users go towards a cloud version. Being on the cloud cuts out a lot of middleware and integration issues. 

Overall, it's a really good product. Right now, I'd rate it eight out of ten. 

We are a service provider and we provide SAP services to our clients. I am a consultant and I offer SAP BW4HANA as a data warehouse, used for retail business.

The reports being generated by this product are used by the business to clarify profit and loss on the orders that they have placed.

If you have a large set of orders, it is very difficult to track and manage them. This product helps you to distinguish the processes and provides visibility such as checking where products are in the process at any given time.

It provides information about billing, delivery, and all of the aspects related to an order. You can generate monthly reports or yearly reports, including charts, as needed.

The most valuable feature is that we can transform a huge amount of data and apply business logic as per the requirements.

The speed of operations could be a little faster.

We have been working with SAP BW4HANA for approximately seven years.

This is a very stable solution and we use it on a daily basis.

SAP BW4HANA is scalable. We have approximately 5,000 users.

The technical support is good.

I was not using another similar product prior to this one.

With a deployment plan, it takes approximately a year and a half to complete. The complexity of the initial setup is such that we need help from SAP.

The number of people required for deployment and maintenance depends on how big the project is. It takes between 30 and 40 people initially if it's a small to medium-sized project. For maintenance, 10 people would be enough.

We required help from SAP for the implementation.

We use this product in conjunction with the new solution, SAP Analytics Cloud.

My advice for anybody who is considering SAP BW4HANA is that it's a very stable product, and if you are looking at a huge volume of data that you want to process daily or any similar kind of task, then this is definitely a good solution.

At this point, I can't think of any additional features that I would like to see in the next release.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use SAP BW4HANA to extract data from SAP ECC and load it into another system, such as Snowflake.

SAP BW4HANA can be deployed in both the cloud and on-prem.

SAP BW4HANA enables us to extract information from different repositories and create reports that are shared with managers.

The ability to instantly pull data is the most valuable feature.

SAP BW4HANA is a new package with a steep learning curve. I am currently taking courses to familiarize myself with the features so that I can manage them smoothly.

I would like to be able to design new reports in a future release.

The price has room for improvement.

I have been using SAP BW4HANA for three months. 

I give the stability of SAP BW4HANA an eight out of ten.

I give SAP BW4HANA's scalability a five because I am still familiarizing myself with the solution.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We have seen a return on investment.

The price is high and currently only affordable for large organizations.

I give SAP BW4HANA a nine out of ten.

We have plans to increase the usage of SAP BW4HANA in the future.

I recommend SAP BW4HANA for organizations with an IP platform. Similar products, such as Qlik Replicate, are more expensive.

Its direct approach is the most valuable. You get more real time and capabilities than BW. 

They have taken out a few BW functionalities when they redesigned this. The way of multi-dimensional thinking and star schema got a little bit lost. It may be because of the cost, but certain functionalities that were previously implemented from the BW side should come back again in the whole product. It is a young product. It is version 2.0. In time, I'm pretty sure they will come back again because otherwise, it limits the potential of the product, and I have to do a lot of modeling towards that direction. For me, the analytics focus is too much. It is not cube-oriented in that way, so its functionality is limited. It is not really technically limited in the back end; it is more limited in the front end. It has a data-mining mindset for SQL developers. The navigational attributes should be easy.

It needs to be built in models. I see the data mark cube or understanding that the composite provider needs to be models in a cube coming back. The multi-dimensional star schema approach and the reporting need to be done as well as possible to leverage the star scheme below. This is definitely not understood by many consultants and even composite providers for star schema. They always think in terms of flat tables, which is limiting. You need to build the right dimensions, objects, and so on. If you can build this in BW4HANA, then you have this understanding that BW4HANA is not forcing you in this direction, but it should force you a bit better in this direction. Maybe a few elements which were in use in BW should come back again. It would help the community to determine the direction to build on the cube. You can have maybe 50 elements, and then you can expand it to what you need by leveraging navigation. So far, this functionality is a little bit limited in the tool, and it is not thought through, but I think it will come. They should also be adding more capabilities for the transformation between different objects. In BW, this is currently limited, especially towards composite providers.

It is a bit complex basically in the building. You have to have a lot of knowledge as well as know how to do it better because it is a bit different from BW. There is not too much expertise currently in the consulting markets. Many are trying to build something, but it may be based on their knowledge of what they have from the BW and HANA side. You have to find the right mix from both of them at this time. We also have HANA Native. These are our two different sync sources basically, and we have approaches to connect nicely, but it is hard to manage your team because a lot of coaching is required.

SAP BW4HANA is a relatively new product from the SAP side, but we have been running almost a two years project now and moving from BW to BW4HANA. So, it is a completely new build of the entire environment. We just completed that in November last year.

We have used BW and HANA Native. BW4HANA is definitely much better than BW. It is also much better than HANA Native.

It depends on your experience, the approach, and so on. I took over the project when it was already started. It had been running for two or three months. I would have approached it differently if I was there during the kickoff. It is challenging when you are too much focused on old products, and you don't have a good model in place or a good understanding of the business model. For me, it was not so difficult. I did it a lot in my former positions and during many years of experience in multidimensional data modeling, but for most of my colleagues and my team members, it was quite challenging because they had more experience in reporting subs, SQL subs, and so on and not so much experience in data modelings and so on. 

In general, you need to acquire experience in this. There are not so many in the market. I also had a bad experience with consulting companies. I had to correct them and technically detail the process for how to do this.

It is simply the mindset. When we approach it with the mindset of how it was done in BW or HANA, you get a process that is not really efficient. When object-oriented approaches are not taken into consideration, everything gets built a hundred times, and instead of being more object-oriented, it gets quite complex. It always requires good modeling and an understanding of the business requirements, which can be quite challenging.

We started as early birds from the SAP side. We got this entire suite for free. I cannot really talk about the price because we didn't have to pay anything.

It makes sense for all enterprise companies that currently have BW in place to move over because BW4HANA has more reasonable performance, and it helps you in getting reporting. An enterprise can manage the reporting on this one product. In my previous company, I had to do and review reporting for end-users at the aggregated management level, not only at the transactional level. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. It is definitely an eight for reporting low and high at the management level as compared to others, but it is also dependent on the design. I had to provide and I still need to provide a lot of things knowing how my former colleagues have approached those things. From my point of view, it is never always the product, it is the experience we have in the design and context. BW4HANA is definitely much better than BW. It is also much better than HANA Native. It is definitely the right tool in terms of reporting and security on top of the SAP companies. Most of the companies are SAP companies. If you need an additional reporting tool on top, this is a solution.