SAP Data Services Reviews

It is a very widely used tool. We mostly use it for integration purposes between various systems and for data migration. One of the recent use cases is about the AWS database that we are trying to establish. We need the data from various on-premise systems, and SAP is one of them, which is majorly used. We want to put that data into our data lake.

We are not using the cataloging and metadata features much. We have a separate data cataloging tool.

Its integration capabilities and the data migration capabilities are the most valuable. It is very good for SAP and non-SAP tools. It has very good integration with SAP, but it also has the capabilities to connect to other systems. We find it very helpful and stable.

The skillset of data engineers matters a bit to use all the functionality of this solution. Otherwise, the delivery speed won't be faster. 

I have been using this solution for eight to ten years.

It is a very stable solution.

It is scalable.

We are getting responses from them. There were one or two issues that were very critical, and we got the needed attention from them. 

We also have other ETL tools, such as Informatica, that are being used in other teams, but SAP Data Services is the main solution that we are using. I have not heard any complaints about it.

We, fortunately, have a very good team in our organization, which makes it easy for us to implement.

It is a part of an enterprise agreement. There is another department that handles its maintenance.

Its pricing is as per the enterprise agreement and not a concern for us.

Overall, we have good experience and feedback. We have very skilled engineers in our team, and I haven't heard any kind of negative feedback about this solution.

I would rate SAP Data Services an eight out of ten.

The solution has very good dashboards. They have a good refresh rate - after every 300 articles.

The reporting on the data, even from third-party software, is very good.

The solution should offer more machine learning and automation.

The solution should add more cognitive analytics, particularly on the RPA. It should allow for data to be picked up in Outlook and processed in SAP, then communicated via any third-party software. This will help with decision making and retrieve the data per the requirements of the user.

The existing ERP doesn't have any capabilities. The features of RPA need to be built into ERP. It's lagging in not just this solution, but almost all software.

I primarily use the solution for building data cubes from existing third party software at SAP and consolidating different stages on queries.

The solution is stable.

We do plan to increase usage in the future.

We interact with technical support regularly and often reach out about two times a week. Their support office is very close to ours in Bangalore. We've been very satisfied with their level of service.

We did previously use a different solution. We switched because Data Service has a lot of upcoming technology and there's a good market for their services currently.

The solution is straightforward to set up. A lot of research needs to go into the work, however. A standard deployment takes a few months.

We had our own consultants assist with the implementation. They have a lot of knowledge about SAP and SAP environments for building a gateway.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

SAP Data Services predominantly works for event tracking or training environments. However, if you're talking about social media, where there needs to be a lot of understanding about the data, you could build this solution into that area as well. You will just need a lot of research and development.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. If they build in cognitive capabilities and went beyond just reporting on the dashboard, I'd rate it higher.

I’m not an SAP consultant but I have quite a long experience with SAP projects. I've been working in IT for 20 years (HP Services / DXC) and I have a lot of contacts with SAP customers so my opinion is based rather on my experience of real SAP implementations not based on a deep knowledge of SAP technology abilities. I’m a business consultant technology agnostic and very often my customers asking me for advice in the scope of a transformation of their IT environment.

Most of our customers are dealing with a huge amount of data so we usually apply the solution to enterprise companies that have SAP technology and they are usually SAP customers. It's not separate analytics that can be applied to another ERP system. 

Usually, between five and 10% of employees in a particular company will be using the solution, it will be slightly higher when the solution is applied in the retail sector. It really depends on the company. Some are based on IT technology and others provide a more operational or production base. In these companies, there is a utilization of analytics. It strongly depends on the company's activities. 

The HANA database, which is very fast, is a valuable feature. I think it's very useful and gives the customer a lot of options. I like the dashboard, it's very convenient. 

Integration with other products could be improved. Often we need to apply analytics for the data coming directly from production. The product could be improved by providing employees with a more simplified ability to build reports.

SAP is a very powerful system and definitely first class for big companies. Its wide scope of functionality and models adjusted to different business activities give SAP a leading position within extended ERP systems. From the other side, such a wide range of modules and functionality generates difficulties in implementation and real full utilization of all system possibilities. An example of this is with my last customer that I discussed with two weeks ago – one of the biggest logistics and retail companies in Poland. They implemented SAP seven years ago. They bought a wide scope of modules with some logistic extensions and up to now, they pay very expensive maintenance for licenses. In reality, they didn’t implement SAP in the scope of owned licenses because they finally find the system too inflexible to adopt applications to their business processes. As a result, they utilize core ERP, HR, BW and a small portion of APO while the rest of the modules that are not implemented are exchanged with Z programs. A very strong point is BW but for quick reporting and report personalization (BI) they bought other technology due to more flexible and chipper reporting. They integrated SAP with TMS, WMS, and core operating systems for their special business and have a big problem with maintaining a lot of interfaces (they didn’t implement SAP PI).

Now the customer is thinking about migration to Dynamics and evaluating this scenario in different aspects. An upgrade of the old SAP version means total reimplementation of the SAP to S4. Now SAP offers a very wide range of retail and logistic functionality especially in S4 but to buy all retail and logistic modules, customers evaluate as very expensive and are afraid about the ability to implement.

This is not the only example. A very similar situation was with another customer with an older SAP version. Especially for production companies, SAP is evaluated as a system that is very difficult to implement within the production environment. Implementation with MES generates lot of analytical effort (technical part is not a problem but way of data enquiry by SAP).

From my experience in SAP implementation, I am often irritated by very selective knowledge of SAP implementation consultants and it’s not only from my company but generally taking into consideration SAP services market. Usually, a consultant knows one module, sometimes 2 or 3 but to cover business area eg. retail and logistic you need a few of them and this is the reason that very often customers implement system functions (within every module) not implement process flow (cross modules view).

In the case of analytics, SAP offers great tools (especially HANA gives very powerful tools) but many customers decide to use SAP BW but chose BI from other technologies taking into consideration ratio functionality, flexibility, and price.

This is my personal opinion, mainly based on my experience with SAP customers and real SAP implementation. SAP is a best in class system but requires a very good implementation team (which is expensive) and a reasonable time frame (time is expensive too), to maximize its potential but in other cases, implementation can be unsuccessful regardless of technological system abilities.

I think the technical support is good enough. 

Initial setup is rather complex. SAP Analytics requires integration with the rest of SAP models. We are the final link in the chain of implementation of SAP technology so some customers could do with external assistance. It really depends on the client's internal culture and skills. It helps to have a consultant and in some cases it's crucial. 

Many customers want to apply additional tools that are connected and integrated with SAP Analytics. It gives them more flexibility in building some reports. In some cases, we would still require an additional appliance, some additional tools to fulfill the needs of our customers.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

Connectivity with SAP and low impact on SAP environments. Also overall stability of the product.

Kellogg (the company I work for) used this product for data migration into the new SAP environment that we have established for North America. We also used the tool during the Pringles acquisition.

Matching Transforms are quite complex.

5 years.

No issues that would impact our timelines.

Data Services is extremely stable and stability information steward is considerably higher in version 4.2 than it was at the initial version 4.0.

Easy to scale horizontally or vertically.

Satisfied.

Needs improvement as far as responsiveness.

No.

I was not directly involved at the initial setup.

I heard Kellogg used a combination of SAP and Accenture for the initial setup.

Data Quality has an indirect ROI and we have not derived a fixed number.

Since I was not involved with the initial setup I am not able to answer a question about the start-up cost. As far as day-to-day cost, it is minimal (1/4 FTE) due to its stability.

Depends on the environment. If you are connecting to SAP environment I would recommend involvement of a 3^rd party vendor with experience.

We use the solution to support data warehousing. 

The solution is easy to use since it's a graphical tool. It also requires only low-level coding. 

The solution shows a lack of cloud support data services. 

I have been using the solution for more than 30 years. 

The solution is a stable and mature tool. It is standardized in such a way that you don't have issues with upgrading.

I would rate the product's scalability a nine-point five out of ten. The tool is intelligent enough to split the workload. 

The support classifies your incidents as low priority, medium priority, and high priority. Usually, I am classified as a medium priority and get an answer in 24 hours. I get the fix in less than a week. Support has people who are very knowledgeable about the product. 

Positive

The product is simple to setup. If you are setting it up on Windows, then it's a matter of a few clicks. 

I would rate the product an eight out of ten. The solution suits medium to enterprise organizations and would be expensive for small companies. The product is very useful for SAP customers. 

The easy integration with SAP Systems and the possibility to create a dataflow which is executed directly in the SAP system source.

With the dataflows created in Dataservices, the customer could load and consolidate data from three different offices (USA, Europe and Argentina) using the same dataflows for every company.

We used a different repository for every consultant and it created problems to maintain the final version of each dataflow in every user. I think there should exist a common repository (as well as in BO reporting suite tools) and give the different accesses via authorization roles.

I used it for 10 months.

The biggest problem was the maintenance of difference repositories.

The stability problems were caused by hardware configuration. My doubt is if Dataservice is difficult to configure or there was a lack of knowledge in the Basis team.

No, we didn't. Actually the dataflows constructed were completely scalable.

No, in that project we only used BO Dataservices.

I think it is easy to use. When we started to use it we had never worked with Dataservices and we could adapt to it easily because the main functions are similar to other tools.

The implementation was with a vendor team. Actually I was the project manager of the vendor and the level of expertise in ETL projects was high but it was our first experience with DataServices.

We only had the net margin of the project construction and it was about 15%.

As the person in charge of the consultancy, we didn’t have costs.

Before working with Dataservices I had worked with other solutions, but in this project we had no choice of another tool. Anyway, I think that Dataservices was a good choice because every source was SAP.

From my point of view, Dataservices is a good ETL choice if there are SAP systems in the sources or the targets (it can help to make BW transformations much easier). In general I would say that it is very important to have a good source and destination definition before implementing anything, as well as in any other ETL tool.

We use this solution for financial reporting.

The most valuable feature is the user interface.

This product could improve the uploading of documents and the amount of time it takes to upload.

The required typing could be minimized by adding Voice recognition.

It takes some time to get familiar with this solution.

Our company has one hundred and twenty thousand people around the world that use many SAP solutions.

We are happy with technical support and we have had no problems with it.

The initial setup is complex. It takes time to get used to.

Pricing is good. We don't have any problems with it. 

I would recommend this product, but nothing is perfect, there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. 

We load data from databases into our data warehouse.

The most valuable feature is the ETL functionality.

Dealing with the REST API is not easy with Data Services.

It is mandatory to have a WADL file and it is difficult to find this file and set it up.

I would like to see a better connection with the API and the use of XML files.

It's an ETL that is very good with relational databases but not as good with files and semi-structured files. 

Also, the support could be better.

I have been working with SAP Data Services for 15 years.

We have a SaaS company doing level one support.

I have not had an exchange with SAP support. I deal with my local support, and when there is a problem, they escalate the issue to SAP technical support. 

I don't deal with SAP support directly.

Previously, I had used another ETL solution.

The initial setup was straightforward and easy to complete.

The price is very reasonable.

I would rate SAP Data Services an eight out of ten.