SAP BW4HANA Reviews

We are consultants and distributors for BW4HANA.

SAP wants to transition all of their customers to the cloud, so they have announced a lot of policies that will support the on-premise product until 2024 or 2025. That's a good opportunity for us to transition our customers to the cloud.

The solution is based on SAP ERP, so there's some business content already included. For customers who use SAP ERP, SAP BW4HANA is a good choice for their DW implementation.

It's complicated to use. You need to spend a lot of time learning about it. The interface could be improved. It's not intuitive to build a data model and use their ETL tools.

The product is complex, so I think it could be simplified.

I have used this solution for five years.

It's stable.

The on-premise product isn't very easy to scale up, but implementing it in the cloud is much easier.

Technical support is pretty good. SAP doesn't respond immediately, but they deal with the most critical issues.

Initial setup was easy.

We don't refuse any kind of opportunity that our customers want to implement, so we are trying to learn about analytics solutions from Microsoft and Google.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten. 

If someone wants to implement BW4HANA, it's important to do a training course first and think about the strategy they would like to use to leverage the data for their business.

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 processes are the most valuable aspect of this solution. You can try to change the way you do business with the customer while we tell the customer that we have Suite 4HANA that they need to adopt because we have at this moment and for that, we have a methodology that is SAP Activate. We use this methodology to discover what your business requirements are. You can get a glimpse of what it is in the ERP, because it's an ERP, and then you can discover which way you to do the business process with the new tools, instead of using the old ones.

You need to adopt the business processes that are supported by this new tool, Suite 4HANA because otherwise, you will have the same issues that you had before in ERP in the compromised world when you had a lot of customization because you need to adopt the tool to your business process. We try to push for the cloud version because then you can leverage many other things that are not available in the on-premise version.

In the on-premise world, you have releases every six months or every year depending on what is required but in the cloud, you have new releases depending on what part of the ERP needs to be enhanced. This happens frequently. Depending on the module, you have sometimes weekly updates. Usually monthly but depending on what is being developed because the people that didn't use the cloud version are very keen on adopting new ways to do business processes. In that regard, everything that is in the cloud should be dynamic. They should keep up the pace because you will get the best version of this tool that gathers all the knowledge that is coming from many sources or many customers. It is continuously improving. 

I would like to see easier connectivity with other tools. No matter what, everything is in the cloud. All this stuff is in the tool but the communication between the tool is not so clear. Everything can be done, but you need to do several steps in order to get these things done. My recommendation is to improve connectivity. It should have a common kind of data model that the data is mapping to connecting applications.

The stability is good. 

Scalability depends on the number of users you can have and depends on the load that is distributed horizontally and then you can support as many customers in an automatic way. The scalability is done by the rules that you deploy within. You may need to deploy more servers if you reach a certain number of users at the same time. 

Their technical support is good. If I need something I just need to write down a note and that'll be the case. There are tools that are monitoring the environment so I don't need to take care of that but if I see something that really is not good then I write down a note and then they answer me because there is an SLA. Depending on the contract you have, they offer an SLA. They answer in two to six hours or up to one day.

The initial setup depends on what you need to do because if you requested a managed service, you don't need to do anything. SAP takes care of that and you only pay a subscription and they do whatever you need. You need to set up some modules but they will do it for you, you don't need to take care of that. You don't need to do much. You don't need to take care of that anymore, you just need to focus on your business.

Thinking of the business people, independent of the tool, it could be state-of-the-art, it depends on the business people. Business people think that in order to run a business as usual, then they don't care about what you need to do in order to get them right. You could have a very fancy application but if the data is wrong, it doesn't have the right data quality, the right quality shape then no matter what, it won't work. Take the business people onboard and second, run data quality workshops just to be sure that everything that is put into the tool is clean.

I would rate it an eight and a half out of ten because nothing is perfect, everything can be improved.

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

The most valuable features are the speed of reporting and the HANA database.

I find the migration from an existing BW platform to be quite difficult. It is quite cumbersome for our customers to migrate to BW 4HANA.

The impact that it has on the ECC/ERP system is a problem because they are relying solely on the ODP tool to perform the extract.

It takes too long to escalate problems from the first level of support.

I have been using this solution for a bit less than two years, from around the time that it came out.

Stability is something that needs to be improved. There are too many SAP nodes to implement on a regular basis to get everything working.

It is a scalable solution but it depends on the hardware. Our clients vary in size from small to very large organizations, although for this product, most of them are at least of medium size.

The technical support is okay, although it can be improved because sometimes it takes too long to get the correct expert to deal with the issue. Essentially, the wait at the first level of support causes us to lose time.

The initial setup is rather complex. It can be up and running in two or three days but it takes a week to have it perfectly implemented.

We implement both on-premises and cloud-based deployments for SAP BW 4HANA.

Our in-house team does the implementation and deployment for our customers.

This is a good product and one that I recommend implementing. 

As we look at the information we have for the cloud solution, it would be helpful to have something more clear from the vendor in terms of strategy. More information on the direction of the data warehouse solutions, going forward, would be helpful. Today, there is a market for HANA both on-premises and in the cloud, but the data warehouse cloud solution that is coming up is quite different.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use the product to report to HANA systems. 

The solution is not scalable. It does not have a data streaming feature as well. 

The product is stable. 

The solution's technical support is good. 

The product's setup is easy. 

I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

The solution is used for the reporting on various dashboards for analytical purposes.

HANA is based on a column store, and it is very effective for reading the data. 

BW has a major advantage because most of the activities on the BW system are reading data rather than writing data. 

The product, overall, is very good.

The solution is easier to maintain than traditional SAP products.

All of the information that is provided by the solution for managing the HANA database is excellent.

I can't think of anything the solution needs in terms of features to make it stronger. It's a great overall solution.

The solution does occasionally get a few bugs, but this is typical for any product.

We've been using the solution for the past two years.

We have found the solution to be quite stable. It doesn't crash. It's been great.

If a company needs to expand the solution, they can definitely scale up. It's quite easy to do so.

We've reached out to technical support in the past. We reach out when there are some bugs or some specific issues on the product. They are very good. We've been satisfied with the level of support.

I wasn't a part of the initial setup, so I can't speak to the implementation.

We are SAP partners.

The solution is deployed on a scale-out environment, which involves five nodes of 1TB each. We have four worker nodes and one standby node.

I'm not the consumer of this product. I'm an administrator of it. I'm basically supporting this project but I'm not the actual customer.

I would definitely recommend the solution. It is the way forward if an organization is already in the SAP ecosystem. It's good to adapt to it sooner rather than later. I would definitely advise companies to implement it.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten. 

We use the solution in a data warehouse.

Some of the main features of this solution are that it uses HANA and it has good performance.

Other competitors provide better solutions that are more up to date with current technology. For example, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

I have been using the solution for approximately five years.

The solution is stable.

There are no issues with scalability with this solution.

The installation is complex.

We used the SAP team to do the installation for us. We have a vendor who takes care of the maintenance of the server. 

As an investment, the solution is very expensive. We pay 72% every year to SAP. Additionally, we pay for support for the solution and a vendor to do maintenance.

I have evaluated Talend, Azure Cloud, and Google Cloud which have better features.

I would not recommend the solution because they have not upgraded their technology.

I rate SAP BW4HANA a seven out of ten.

We use SAP BW/4HANA for business banking and consolidations.

The product has efficient performance.

SAP BW/4HANA has good availability and valuable features for historical data.

The product could be more efficient and easier to use similar to its previous version. The monitoring for the remodeling feature is very difficult to understand. It doesn’t provide any details about the issues.

We have been using SAP BW4HANA for two years. We use the latest version at present.

It is a stable platform.

It is a scalable platform.

I have contacted SAP BW4HANA’s support team several times. They did not respond to the queries.

The setup process is easy. However, resolving technical issues regarding registration or adding some features after installation is complicated. Once the deployment is complete, we wait for the transport request to set it up in the production environment. It takes six months to complete and requires four executives to carry out the process.

The maintenance is easy, but it is difficult to trace the error due to the lack of details available.

I rate SAP BW4HANA four out of ten. I advise others to keep practicing and learning more about the product.