SAP S/4HANA Cloud Reviews

We're a manufacturing company that uses S/4HANA for managing finances and other business processes. 

I like S/4HANA's automated features, readymade processes, and user interface. It supports various processes required by large international companies, like logistics, procurement, payments, sales, etc. All of these features were available in previous SAP solutions, but HANA has an updated user interface and improved integration with other systems. The readymade processes make HANA a good option if you're adopting a greenfield approach.

S/4HANA isn't ideal for managing contracts and subscriptions. There isn't a feature to notify us when a contract for a service we need is approaching its end or a product is no longer supported. You need a separate solution for that.

I have used S/4HANA for the last eighteen months.

S/4HANA is stable, but it needs resources. 

S/4HANA is scalable. 

I have contacted SAP support in Germany and Spain many times and also SAP partners. SAP support is excellent, but the support from partners varies depending on who you get. Some are more experienced than others. 

I have used other SAP ERP solutions that were more appropriate for small and medium-sized companies, like logistics warehouses. They didn't have good enough support. S/4HANA is easier to use and suitable for large, complex organizations. 

You need to prepare before deploying S/4HANA. You need to do a feasibility study and have a team analyze the current processes. It involves several groups of employees, like testing, configuration, and interface teams. Before implementing, you need to know what resources are needed. It's easier if you are adopting a greenfield approach. It can take two years or more for a large company to deploy S/4HANA company fully. It's at least one year.

The system requires ongoing maintenance. You need people who can code and understand SAP logic. It's hard to maintain if you have to change something.

The license for S/4HANA is expensive, and the licensing structure is hard to understand. The admin license is something like 500 euros per user. Other ERP solutions allowed you to pick only the modules you need. The SAP ECC version requires you to take all the modules even if you are not using them.

You take the whole system and pay your monthly fees. S/4HANA can define licenses based on roles, series, etc., but there are so many kinds of licenses and fees. It's more complicated than the licensing for Microsoft Dynamics or other SaaS ERP tools.

I rate SAP S/4HANA eight out of 10. Before implementing an ERP tool, you should understand your needs, processes, and business requirements. 

SAP S/4HANA Cloud can be integrated with other non-SAP applications. Our company wants to elevate the core user experience and wants users to use the SAP favourite mobile applications.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud has improved our data management and user and stakeholder experiences. It has also enhanced our business partners, supplier and customer experiences.

In regards to storage, one of the other drivers that led us to implement SAP S/4HANA is that other SAP storage offerings, such as RISE with SAP and SAP BTP, do not offer the same user and customer experience or proper data management. As a result, it's difficult to find available competencies.

I like the SAP offerings and the standard best practices included in the SAP S/4HANA Cloud version.

Another valuable feature is the private cloud. If you are on a private cloud, the SAP S/4HANA allows you to use a desktop PC and customize the workings to your business needs. In addition, with SAP S/4HANA, you also have the choice to select your own Hyperscaler.

A challenge with SAP S/4HANA is that the proposition by SAP does not match the value realization. For example, SAP proposes more value for the cloud offering with RISE with SAP. This same approach should also be realized to the fullest extent for SAP S/4HANA.

We started the implementation of SAP S/4HANA in November 2021. 

The product is stable. It's not challenging, especially with extensive testing and multiple iterations. However, there is always a possibility of issues or surprises, but the product is stable immediately.

In terms of storage scalability, if it is in the cloud, SAP S/4HANA Cloud appears to offer some direct phasing, down phasing, and scalability. But, I have yet to come across a scalability situation on the customer side.

We have a great contract with SAP, so we have no challenges getting technical support. We know that SAP technical support works per their policy and whatever has been defined in the cloud agreement. So, we can connect with an expert and usually have an answer within 48 hours.

Positive

The initial setup of SAP S/4HANA Cloud was complex and wore me and my colleagues out. Value realizations are complex, and it was difficult finding out the actual value realization.

The licensing process for SAP S/4HANA Cloud has worked well and is usually completed before I decide on a project. Also, licensing is confidential between the supplier and the customers.

Regarding setup processes, I believe that a company should be clear about its vision and goals. A company should ensure that the technology they want to implement aligns with the vision they want to achieve in the next two or three years. If these things align, they should adopt this technology and see how many competencies they possess. So, for example, if the company doesn't have the technical competency in-house, it may be better to offload these tasks by leveraging completely managed services via the cloud or SAP.

I would rate this solution an eight. I would have rated it a 10 had I successfully gotten a value realization in a simpler way.

Our company wants the data to be collected from SAP S/4 SSP, and then we want to send the data to the data lake. We want to bring to the world analytics on the data collected from SAP. This includes the structured and non-structured data collected from SAP and data from social media.

We are into little segments and we are using SAP's little option. We are using five models in that S4HANA, and this is just the backend. On the front-end side, we are using both applications and both are integrated together.

The primary and secondary line views are very helpful.

The solution is reliable.

The scalability is very good.

The integration is very stable. We have 18 years of SAP experience and we simply have migrated to S4HANA. We are using SAP Best Practices within our business requirements and it works very well for using this approach.

Technical support has always been insightful and responsive.

There isn't anything I would want to improve on. It's a good solution.

There is a difference between the real-time synchronization of any application or the solution that's provided by the OEM. SAP is providing releases or notes frequently, so it's an ongoing activity. SAP is constantly providing small, small patches to upgrade everything. The release strategy is based on the OEM. It works fine for us, this approach.

The pricing is high.

We have used SAP for the last 17 years, however, recently, last year, we migrated into HANA.

The stability of the product is good. It doesn't crash or freeze. There are no bugs or glitches. The performance is reliable. 

We've never had issues with scalability. It's good. If a company needs to expand, it can do so.

We currently have 40 or more SAP users in our business. While we have over 700 employees, the backend application can only be used by corporate or regional team members.

Technical support has been great. We've used them in the past and have been satisfied with how they have helped us. 

I am also familiar with Oracle and Microsoft Dynamics. This product has a higher cost, however, it is the best option and therefore you get good value for money.

That said, our company is almost 20 years old and we adopted SAP about 18 years ago. We've pretty much always used it. 

The installation or implementation of this product takes around five months. It's about the process implementation. Therefore, whenever you will implement any application, you have to understand how it will fit into your business. You need to consider the business use cases and the user interactions. All of these tasks take time.

While we handled the solution's implementation in-house, we also had an in-house consultant who assisted us in the process. 

If you compare this product with the big players - like Oracle and Microsoft Dynamics - SAP is quite costly. That said, if you are talking about the solution, SAP is the number one option.

You do need to pay for a license. It's an architectural license based on maintenance costs. Every year we have to pay 22% of the purchase costs and maintenance costs. It's not a subscription-based model, it's a perpetual model.

I would recommend the solution to others. We have 18 years or so of experience with SAP and we've always found the solution to be excellent. We deeply understand SAP and SAP culture. We understand the processes and how to leverage everything for the betterment of our business. We're totally aligned with SAP.

I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

Its use cases are related to financial management, asset management, ERP, logistics, and sales.

It's a unified platform for finance and all the other fields, so it allows the finance team to control the other operations a lot better. It helps with real-time analysis of all the information of the company in one location.

Finance aspects of it and transportation management, asset management, and inventory management are valuable.

The pricing is way over any of the other ERPs, and the bank integrations are not perfect. There are a lot of costs for other implementations and integrations with Salesforce and other systems. Rather than being a fully-fledged system on its own like most of the other ERPs, it relies too much on developed integrations by the implementation partner.

In terms of additional features, the parent portal is a major miss out. There are no HR systems. I don't think any ERP is complete without an HRMS offering, but that's a separate system in SAP. It's missing in the public edition, and only in the private edition, it's available as an optional add-on. It's a huge limitation in the ERP system, and it was almost a deal-breaker for us.

I have been looking at the evaluation of it for about six months, and we just finished implementing it.

The platform itself is quite decent. It's relatively stable, but because it relies a lot on customizations, a lot of the customizations are sometimes not very stable.

It's very scalable. We have around 40 users working with this solution.

We haven't contacted them yet. We were working with an implementation partner, and they also had an implementation team from SAP directly, so many of our queries would be answered by them directly. We've just now entered the post-handover phase where we would have to reach out to technical support.

We had Tally and Zoho. We switched because Tally was just not a full ERP. It was just a basic ledger similar to an Excel sheet. Zoho was suitable for the manufacturing or trading industry. It was not suitable for a large organization or any complex organizational structure. It definitely was not suitable for all the things that we needed or anything beyond what a very small shop would have.

It was extremely complex and painful. We had to work with partners who had consultants in each of the modules being implemented, such as asset management, finance, and operations. There were over eight different consultants, even on the smallest project, and it was extremely painful compared to any other ERP system and platform.

It took us around three months. We initially contacted a partner who helped us with our requirements. We spent a couple of weeks just looking at our requirements before we signed the contract. After we signed the contract, we had two to three weeks for document review and evaluation of the current solution for the migration. It took us another month or so just to implement these modules. After that, it probably took us two weeks to migrate all our data over to the system, and then the changes required took another week or so. We had to make changes or do customizations where it just wasn't working for us, and then it took us another month just for the go-live of the final solution with full features.

In terms of maintenance, there is no real maintenance to be done because it's a SaaS product, but we have to maintain our integrations with banks and other things, which, in general, are quite difficult to maintain. Because a lot of the product relies on customizations, it's very difficult to maintain those integrations and customizations across platforms. In general, it's no different than Office 365, where they do updates themselves and maintain the software updates, but it's still a pain for us to maintain the customizations.

There were eight consultants. We had one consultant for each of the modules, and they were all on the payroll of the implementation partner. There were also resources involved from our company side. It took up way too much of our finance and executive team's time. IT was involved, but way too much of the finance and executive team was used. It was to an extent that it almost didn't let them complete their own job well, and they were spending way too much time with just the ERP consultant.

Its pricing is way over any of the other ERPs. I'd rate it one out of ten in terms of pricing.

Get a very good implementation partner because the prices of the subscription itself vary depending on the partner, and the price of the implementation, which is more than the price of the subscription for the first two years, would also vary significantly. The implementation partner does a lot of the work of implementing the system and making a lot of customizations, which are implemented automatically in a general ERP but need to be done in SAP. So, if you have a bad partner, it will be painful for you.

I'd rate SAP S/4HANA Cloud a six out of ten.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud streamlines my client's business and, with the move to the cloud, it is more flexible and efficient.

The most valuable feature of SAP S/4HANA Cloud is its analytics capability. The ability to access and analyze data in real-time has significantly improved our reporting efficiency.

One thing that could be better in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, especially in the public cloud, is how easily you can make changes. Clients, especially those with a lot of existing processes, feel a bit restricted in adapting the system to their specific needs. 

I have been working with SAP S/4HANA Cloud for five years.

I would rate the stability as an eight out of ten.

The scalability of the product is not at the highest level, but it is certainly above average. The number of users for SAP S/4HANA Cloud varies depending on the project. We have worked with small to big businesses.

I would rate the technical support for SAP S/4HANA Cloud as an eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup is relatively straightforward. As a partner, getting SAP S/4HANA Cloud up and running involves a few steps. We work closely with SAP, and they handle some initial activities before we jump in. The whole process usually takes about three to six weeks, during which we set up the environment and get everything ready to start working.

The return on investment for SAP S/4HANA Cloud usually becomes clear after about five years, depending on the business case. It is not immediate, but over time, the benefits start to show.

I would rate the costliness of the product as a seven out of ten. It is on the expensive side.

Overall, I would rate SAP S/4HANA Cloud as a six out of ten.

We use SAP S/4HANA Cloud for claims portal applications in more than 25 countries. It is used to work on customer complaints after the sale order has been created. Once the customer or distributor raises their complaint, it goes into different levels of approval. Then, based on whether the different levels of approval have been accepted or rejected, an order gets created in the back end of the SAP system, and a cash memo or part exchange is given to the customer. Before the final approval, different approvals and IDs are created in the SAP cloud database instead of the SAP on-premise database to help reduce the number of users.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud can fulfill all the custom applications and can fulfill custom business requirements. SAP S/4HANA Cloud provides easy database access.

The user interface of SAP S/4HANA Cloud needs to be improved because it is not as good as other applications.

We have been using SAP S/4HANA Cloud for two years.

The solution is scalable. Nearly a thousand users are using the system.

The customer support is good.

Positive

The initial setup is neither easy nor difficult. I rate SAP S/4HANA Cloud's initial setup a five out of ten. The deployment of the solution takes two years. Ten people are required for the deployment, which includes two engineers, one system architect, and four developers.

The solution is deployed on a private cloud. People can access the public cloud using all the necessary authentication. So we have both private and public service applications. We are working in parallel with OutSystems, which is far better for SAP.

Overall, I rate SAP S/4HANA Cloud a ten out of ten.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud has been used in manufacturing, for niche industries, such as automotive utilities, higher education, and oil and gas.

The most valuable features of SAP S/4HANA Cloud are the detailed solution costing, integration, and built-in analytics.

The integration with third-party vendors could improve.

I have used SAP S/4HANA Cloud within the last 12 years.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud is a stable solution.

The scalability of SAP S/4HANA Cloud is great.

It is difficult to receive the correct answer from the support.

I rate the support from SAP S/4HANA Cloud a four out of ten.

Neutral

Other ERP solutions are significantly easier to implement, but SAP S/4HANA Cloud has its merit.

The length of time it takes to implement the solution depends on the environment. I have done 15 implementations.

I rate the initial setup of SAP S/4HANA Cloud a six out of ten.

The maintenance of the solution can be outsourced, done in-house by a selected team, or a hybrid of the two. Most companies have hybrid maintenance programs.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud is not one of the top solutions when evaluating other solutions on the market. This solution is a bit rigid. 

I rate SAP S/4HANA Cloud an eight out of ten.

I have been using it to manage the business of my company.

We are a well-established enterprise with a century-long history, and we recently transitioned from an older version to the current support system. This move has allowed us to fully leverage the advantages of the new system, facilitating efficient management of our business processes, including those related to manufacturing and other aspects of our operations.

I'd like to share my experience during the migration from SAP ERP to SAP S/4HANA in the cloud. My primary challenge in this migration was the requirement to open a ticket for every request during the project phase, not during operational or post go-live phases. Despite this, I must acknowledge that overall, SAP has proven to be very reliable.

To clarify the issue, after migrating to SAP S/4HANA, I opted to host my SAP solution on the private cloud by converting the license to SAP Cloud. The drawback I encountered during the project phase was the insistence on opening a ticket or service request for any issue or query I had within the project's activities. Looking ahead, I hope that SAP streamlines and simplifies this process for future customers, making it more user-friendly and efficient than my experience.

I have been using SAP S/4HANA Cloud for 3 years.

It is highly scalable and I would rate it 9 out of 10. 

I haven't worked with products from other vendors.

I'm not directly involved in the pricing discussions; it's more of a concern for the finance team.

On a scale from one to ten, where ten is the best, I would rate it around eight or nine.