SAP S/4HANA Cloud Reviews

Speaking about use cases, it is a whole ERP system for a medical tech company.

It is a complicated solution. So it should be easier to use.

At the moment, I'm not using the solution, but as a consultant, I'm looking at or evaluating ERP systems for customers. So, SAP S/4HANA is the last one, which I evaluated for one of our customers. Also, my customers chose the solution. So, I am a consultant for my customers. I provide consultations in a totally neutral manner for all the products.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

In one of the projects I know, there are around 400 to 500 users using the solution.

It's a hybrid solution. So a few things are on-premises like the local data is on-premises, and the rest of the software is in the cloud.

The biggest problem if you are involved in implementing SAP S/4HANA is that you are not working directly with SAP, meaning that you are dependent on implementation partners. The implementation partners receive the incentives only if they are selling cloud solutions. So they are cherry-picking in the market. So this means that the transaction phase will go much longer, and the companies with the most needs and the biggest backlog will be the latest ones in the last ones of the transformation, which will spread some competitive disadvantages.

I would recommend the solution to those who are already working with SAP.

I rate the overall solution a seven 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.

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.

One of the advantages of this product is integration. It has a really fantastic integration. I always have a one-to-one with my integration consultants: doing the success factor integration with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, or doing other types of integrations. We have a lot of methods for integration: standard integration and customized integration with third parties. The integrations work well with no issues.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud vs Oracle: In Oracle, for example, you can easily install even Oracle 19c or the latest version in your laptop. You can test it, get it certified, and even look for the application, but it's really difficult to install Hana. It's really difficult to reach any testing environment. It's difficult to test the version.

I'm struggling to hire in my team. While I was with Oracle for 15 years as a senior manager for their support solution center in Smart Village, I didn't face that much of a struggle in hiring like what I'm facing now in SAP. This is because Oracle (like Microsoft) made their products available for downloading, testing, etc., but for SAP, it's difficult.

I've had sufficient time to evaluate ByD. It is going on the right track in terms of improvement: technical-wise and featurewise. There's nothing you need to improve in this solution's performance. There's nothing major in its essential or core features: in the FI or supply chain or procurement through the cloud. It's doing a great job.

Testing is the main thing I'd like to see improved.

An additional feature I'd like to see on SAP S/4HANA Cloud is the production application or module. For small to medium businesses, there's only a finance module and the standard non-finance module, e.g. supply chain, but there's no production planning. That is a factor. We need to use the smaller version of production planning with the smaller version of quality management. I hope to see this feature in the cloud application.

I've been using this solution for six years.

I see this application as really stable.

They need to improve SAP S/4HANA Cloud's scalability and make it like Oracle's. They need to do more about scalability. This is a major issue and they need to put more effort into it, but I think they are improving.

I don't have complaints about the support. They were able to point out the problem.

I evaluated Oracle.

I don't have much information about AWS, but it's booming. I hear a lot of customers moving to AWS because they say it's stable and has no major issues with it. I have more experience with SAP S/4HANA Cloud though, and it's fantastic. It's going very well. Most of the small to medium companies are now moving to business by design. This is a very great application.

Hana hosting vs AWS: It is the same in Hana, but on cloud. I'm talking about the cloud application, e.g. ByD. This is great.

This solution isn't resource-intensive. It's a low-key solution.

S4 Hana on cloud vs on-premises: It's been years since on-premise deployment has been applied. All should move to the cloud version. You will be forced to move to the cloud version. No more on-premise will be available for this solution.

I've been working in the last five or six years focusing on SAP cloud applications, even the on-premises ones. It ranks number one from my point of view. The other products in the market are also doing fine, but from the integration point of view, especially in the production and manufacturing industries: It's the number one application in manufacturing, so this gives a great advantage to SAP.

I would say to every CEO or to any company that they should start looking into moving their applications and their database. They should move everything to cloud before they are forced to do it because of limited time. They need to be proactive in this direction because there's a lot of benefits from the cloud from a performance perspective. It helps people to focus on data analysis, reports, and maintenance of cloud environments. It requires less effort on the IT people, so we can use them to start focusing on other current digitalization requirements. There's a lot of challenges and they need to sprint all of their work e.g. field work, work related to hardware and networking switches, etc.

I'm giving this solution a score of eight 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.

I primarily use SAP S4HANA Cloud for production planning.

SAP S4HANA Cloud's production planning screens could be improved. In the next release, I would like SAP S4HANA Cloud to include a project team management tool.

I've been using SAP S4HANA Cloud for six months.

SAP S4HANA Cloud is stable, and its computational power and speed have improved in later versions.

SAP's documentation is really good.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I strongly recommend using SAP S4HANA Cloud as it's much better than competing ERP products. Also, if you have in-detail production processes, I would strongly suggest using the PP/DS module. I would give SAP S4HANA Cloud a rating of nine out of ten.

We have some interim back-end systems that we want to protect. We plan to bring in an API management system to take care of all the traffic and everything. This way, the consumers will not have direct access to the back-end system. We are evaluating what makes the most sense because, in our organization, there are multiple technologies. However, our principle is to keep the API gateway closest to the back-end gateway.

Currently, our organization is using SAP S/4HANA Cloud extensively for core back-end processes, and we have plans to increase its usage in other areas as well. Looking at the trends, it is processing more than ten million transactions per month or per day. So, the probability is it may go up to ten times.

Our organization's core back-end is on-prem SAP, and we are on a journey of transformation. Since SAP S/4HANA Cloud is a SaaS application, it is already providing a lot of standard out-of-the-box features, which is interesting. We don't have to build in a lot of bolt-on customizations.

I'm just discovering SAP S/4HANA Cloud right now. Although, in the next release, I would like to see a feature where it allows integration with more platforms.

I have you been using it for one year. I am using the latest version, which is 2.28.

The on-prem solution is very stable because we have used it for the last two decades. The public cloud version is something that we are currently evaluating for transformation. However, with the pilot implementation, it is stable. There are around 1000+ users in my organization using this solution.

Scalability is pretty good. It runs on AWS again. So it has auto scalers. Therefore, scalability-wise, there are no issues.

Customer support is very quick.

The setup is straightforward. Since it is a SaaS application, it is fully managed by SAP. However, the customer also has some shared responsibilities, but a careful guide would be provided to make it user-friendly.

If those who are still on the on-prem version of it, then I recommend they start looking towards transforming into the cloud-based version. Because the on-prem version will be out of support by 2030, it's the right time to start looking at the validity stuff and try to move to the cloud-based version.

Overall, I would rate it a nine out of ten.

The most valuable feature of SAP S/4HANA Cloud is the uptime it provides from being on the cloud. We do not have to manage the solution. All the infrastructure management is done from their side.

The scalability of the solution could improve.

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

The solution has high availability.

I rate the stability of SAP S/4HANA Cloud a seven out of ten.

I rate the scalability of SAP S/4HANA Cloud a seven out of ten.

The support I have received from SAP S/4HANA Cloud has been good.

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

Positive

Those who want to implement this solution need to determine the purpose for which they want to use it. It makes the most sense if they have their entire system based on SAP, they can opt for SAP S/4HANA Cloud. It is a highly advanced application. I would recommend that the team make their decision based on their specific needs and use cases. 

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