SAP BW4HANA Reviews

1.We use it to generate operational analysis for our internal operations, for example, HR analysis, financial analysis, etc. 

2.We use SAP BW4HANA to calculate data and feed to Tableau / SAP BO to visualize data.

1. SAP BW4HANA's memory computing help us calculate into much more detail data  such as accouting document level. And it's very fast.

2. We have capabliity to realize requirements related to big data, real-time anlysis.

1.It can calculate big data. One year ago, SAP BW took us a lot of time around four hours to finish our process chains, but now it's better. 

2.It can calculate data in detail. Before we could not calculate financial documents and accountant documents in detail, we could not do it at a document level but now we can. This is the most important feature. It also has predictive analysis funationlity.

We already had a lot of cubes built-in based on SAP BW.  We hope these BW cubes can support real-time anlysis without migration to SAP HANA modeling.

I have been using this solution for more than one year. 

We can draw down to the document level for a document. The problem is that when that document records are bigger than the platform, it causes the platform to slow down. 

I have opened tickets with technical support. They've been good. Sometimes they take a while to respond. 

The initial setup was complex.

I would recommend SAP BW/4HANA.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. Not a ten because it's expensive and its ecosystem is not very open.

We are currently using the on-premise deployment model. We have just started implementation for normal usage.

The most valuable feature is that it's robust. 

The performance for the reporting is very poor, there is no graphical report. The price to performance ratio is less. It's also very complex, for example, if I want to make a simple change I have to spend a huge amount of effort.

I cannot integrate it with my other tools. It's not possible to do something in the predictive analysis. Mobile reporting and automated reports are also not available. 

I am interested in seeing more graphical reports. SAP Cloud Analytics is an immature product on the market. They have started something to showcase to the customer that SAP also can do the graphical reporting, but still they need a lot of time. They should have similar features to Tableau and Qlik.

It is stable. 

It is scalable. We don't have many users, but with my previous experience, there is no limit. I can increase my hardware and I can use it for as many users as I want. We do have plans to increase the usage.

We require ten staff members for the deployment and maintenance. 

Their technical support is good. 

I previously used many solutions. I used Tableau, SAS, Oracle, Power BI, and SQL.

The initial setup is complex in terms of implementing the basic objects.

In terms of how much time it took us to implement, for the standard features which are provided by SAP then it doesn't take that much time. It can be done quickly, but if you customize it takes longer. It depends upon the complexity of the business scenario. It's time-consuming if I compare the data to other products available on the market. If I compare it with Tableau then it is tremendously time-consuming. 

Tableau belongs to a totally different league but SAP BW is still not that good. It needs a lot of improvement.

It's a good solution if you're integrating data from SAP software like ERP and looking out for the day-to-day reporting from the operational users at the lower level. If someone is looking for the quick, graphical reports and mobile availability then this is not the right solution for that. 

From an analytical perspective, I would rate it a two out of ten but from the business warehouse perspective, I would rate it a five.

From an analytical perspective, I would rate it two because it's not competent in the current scenario of the market. The reports take a huge amount of time because it just uses its basic features called Microsoft Analysis Office which is like Excel reporting and no one wants to see data in Excel reports.

Businesses want to see the data in terms of the graphs, which can be easily readable compared to the numbers. If I'm giving the data in numbers or charts, the charts should be easily understood. Whereas BW provides data in Excel, so someone has to sit and create their own reports on top of it, which takes a lot of time.

The second thing is the execution time for the reports generation. Even due to the limitation of the analysis of the office I cannot process more than around 10 million records. It takes a lot of time to forget about 100K records. It takes a lot of time to load the data, whereas if I compare this with Tableau, it loads in milliseconds or seconds.

If I'm going to meet some of my customers and then if I decide that I want to check something about what the customer is talking about, for example, I cannot do that. I need to login, I need to connect to my SAP systems, then I need to execute the report and then see what the data is. Mobile availability is not there. While having a discussion with the customers I can include the report on my tab with Tableau. This is lacking in BW.

I had to tell a customer that I had to check the information and get back to him. I had to spend half an hour trying to call someone either from IT or someone in my back office to get the data and provide it to the customer. That was rubbish.

SAP BW/4HANA is the same as the old SAP BW system, except that it's being hosted on HANA. Nowadays, SAP HANA is coming out with all the data warehouse features. You don't have to have SAP BW on HANA, HANA itself can offer that. SAP as 4HANA itself is taking over because it supports both OLTP and OLAP transactions at the same time.

One thing is that it costs more because you have to acquire that license for the product, which itself is a waste. If you can do that without the product, that's one thing. And then the performance. Performance is never so good with the old model, BW model that SAP developed because you need to extract the data, you have to load it, you have to put it into cubes, and you have to build your own warehouse, then it's ready for reporting, which is a very convoluted process. It's a long journey and a tedious job every day, every week, but that's how the world was working for several years.

If anything, they should only make it faster. You cannot blame the product completely because it depends on how well you built your cubes, as well as the database objects inside the data warehouse, and how efficient your SQL is.

I've been using this solution for about three years.

The system has always been stable. 

The scalability is fine. The limitation is not the product, but limitation is the hardware for HANA because HANA hardware is very expensive. Everyone has to be very cognizant about how much data is really required and what data needs to be pushed. Otherwise the hardware costs for HANA database is going to be very, very expensive.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten because it's not bad. The world has been running with the same product for several years, but now new products and new technologies are coming. They have their own challenges. That doesn't mean that this is bad.

The primary use case of this solution is for our ERP purposes.

From an ERP point of view and a functionality point of view, it works very well. The benefits are in that of financial costing and material management.

The only component that is not fully known is the HCM (Human Capital Management), but we have gone with SuccessFactors.

The HCM needs improvement, but as a company, they have stopped any development on this.

In the next release, I would like to see their BI component introduced with a mobile version, as it is not currently present.

I have been using this solution for just over three months and we have just gone into production.

So far, we have not had any issues. This solution is stable.

We have not had the opportunity to test the scalability, as we are retail at the moment and using it as a storage system.

At this point, we have only three users.

It is being used daily, but we plan to use it more extensively in the future.

We have only contacted technical support once and they were helpful. Their response time was also good.

The initial setup was straightforward and similar to other ERP deployments.

It took three months to deploy this solution.

We had the help of a system integrator.

I would look at the Cloud option. Although the Cloud is not mature enough at this time, people who are planning to deploy this solution perhaps a year down the road may benefit from it. The Cloud may be something they would want to consider.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We are a solution provider and this is one of the solutions that we implement for our customers.

We primarily use this solution for data warehousing and reporting.

This product is user-friendly.

Out of the box, this solution has a lot of standard features.

The product is quite optimized, having simple processes for change management and different security features. It offers a lot of flexibility.

Things are going more agile nowadays and you want to use a solution like BW/4HANA. It is more agile and more open to other sources. It integrates well with visualization tools like BusinessObjects.

This solution is very costly compared to competitors on the market, which stops some people from implementing it.

SAP has to be more customer-centric. They are aware of the standard business use cases but if changes are made then they are not aware of them, which makes the product more difficult to support.

You receive a standard product, which is fine, but it needs to be made more customizable.

Connecting multiple sources is a challenge because you have to go through a lot of different setups. For example, if you want to use FreeSQL then BW4/HANA lacks the support.

Some of the options that exist are very complex, which makes it tough to integrate.

I have been using SAP BW/4HANA for the past six years.

As this is an on-premises solution, scalability can be a challenge. SAP claim that it is scalable, but I don't think so because it will add to your cost. I think that it should be more cloud-oriented. Basically, it can be scaled but it has its limitations.

We have perhaps 200 to 300 users in our company and it is being used on a daily basis.

This is quite a stable tool.

The support for this solution is good. The availability is good and the responses for more information are quick. However, it can sometimes take a long time to get a solution. Sometimes, it is so long that I can find the solution faster myself.

There is one problem for which I have not received a resolution. They have taken a lot of input from us, yet have been unable to pinpoint the problem. This is a challenge that I still face.

I have tried Snowflake and it is also quite a flexible tool. It is more open in that you can bring in data from multiple sources by just installing some DLLs and parameter files.

The length of time for deployment, to get everything up and ready to work, depends on several factors. For example, if depends on the number of objects and the number of reports that are needed. When we implement this solution for somebody, we do our estimation based on those two.

One of the projects that I worked on took approximately one year to go from the initial stage up until the point where it could be used for reporting purposes.

This is an expensive solution and there are costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

SAP is introducing a lot of new features and making this product even more flexible.

The suitability of this solution depends on how big the business is and how much they want to invest in data warehousing. The effectiveness will vary from customer to customer. For example, I don't think that it is a good solution for small or medium-sized businesses because it is very costly. It involves a lot of maintenance costs and a lot of expertise. For a big customer, who is SAP-centric, with lots of SAP data or SAP business processes, this is one of the best data warehousing solutions.

Rating a product involves taking many things into consideration, such as scalability, performance, and security features. It also depends on what industry it is being used in.

Overall, I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Simplified tables, advance DSOs, and composite provider are valuable features.

I've been working with this solution for four years.

It is a stable solution.

The technical support is okay.

The initial setup is easy.

Price wise, this solution is on the higher side.

I would advise you to go ahead with SAP BW4HANA with minimal options to look into other solutions.

We found that SAP BW4HANA has better performance than NetWeaver Business Warehouse. Also, SAP BW4HANA has a simplified structure, advance DSOs, and a composite provider. These were not possible with NetWeaver Business Warehouse. This is because of the HANA database at the back end. Because of this, we have shifted 60% to BW4HANA and have 40% remaining on NetWeaver Business Warehouse. We have less than 5000 people using this solution.

Overall, I would rate SAP BW4HANA at nine out of ten.

It's mainly used for finance. We use it for reporting. 

We use SAP standard functionality to get the data from SAP and then just report on it. It's pretty fast.

We like that it is an SAP product, so we can easily connect with the SAP ERP system.

Support is okay.

I've found the product to be scalable. 

The solution is stable.

It has a lot of problems in terms of technical architecture. If I change something in BW, a lot of development becomes inactive.

The development time for any developer is quite huge compared to other products.

The setup is a bit complex.

If I want to have good reporting, then I have to buy a separate license. I have to pay for separate things. That's quite irritating.

I've been working with the solution for 16 years. 

It is stable. It's reliable and doesn't have bugs or glitches. 

We can scale the solution if we need to. 

There are about 150 people on the solution. 

Technical support is okay. The turnaround time is quite high. they are a bit slow. 

Neutral

I've used other solutions as well, such as Qlik and PowerVM. 

They are pretty fast in terms of performance, so the ease of development is extremely good. My turnaround time for the business was less.

The initial setup is not straightforward. SAP is not at all straightforward during implementation.

It is not difficult to maintain. 

We handled the initial setup in-house with the help of a third party.

We have achieved an ROI.

The cost is average. I'd rate it five out of ten in terms of the affordability of the standard license.

I would advise, that if you have SA, as in ERP systems, the BW is fine. If you do not have SAP ERP, for example, if you have a non-SAP system from where you want to load the data, then SAP BW is not a good solution. It will increase the turnaround time.

I'd rate the solution three out of ten.

I'm a reseller and implementer.

There are about 20 consultants using this solution on a daily basis.

The solution is useful for connecting with external systems.

From a technical perspective, it could be even more related to legacy systems. The connectivity requirement is quite high and requires systems that are up-to-date.

There's a lot of competition. If a customer isn't already using SAP, they should also consider other tools.

I have used this solution for three years.

The stability has improved a lot. It's becoming a more mature product.

We haven't had any issues with the scalability. It has also improved significantly.

SAP's technical support is okay as long as you follow the process. I would rate technical support as three out of five.

I would rate the setup as four out of five. The documentation has improved, so it's not that difficult.

The cost and licensing depends on how the customer is going to use the solution.

I would rate this solution as seven out of ten.

Overall, it's hard to compare with other products on the market, but I think it has improved quite significantly.

For those who are interested in using this solution, my advice is to do a trial of the solution because it's a good way to get started and will make implementation faster.