SAP S/4HANA Reviews

SAP is very strong in finance and incorporates a lot of emerging technology. I like how SAP integrates a lot of new technologies, such as in-memory databases and HANA. SAP S/4HANA can be mapped as per business requirements, and you can name any industry, and SAP can be used, whether in manufacturing, retail, pharma, real estate, or any other industry.

The integration is quick to implement and very user-friendly. 

SAP S/4HANA is particularly user-friendly and quick to deploy.

SAP invests a lot of money in R&D. Every three months, I receive a patch, which is an upgrade within the SAP systems. SAP is good, however, SAP users should have the knowledge to tackle SAP effectively. I recommend training from a systematic approach.

I have been in the SAP industry for 11 years.

SAP is stable and a leader in the ERP space.

SAP S/4HANA itself is a scalable product. You can integrate any third-party solution with SAP.

I find the support to be quite good, with an offshore center in Hyderabad. However, you need to communicate with the right system integrator.

Neutral

The initial setup is very easy, involving configuring and implementing apps for business requirements.

15 members including myself worked on one project, which is 15 times more advanced.

The setup cost is expensive. I would compare it to the difference between a Ferrari and a Rolls Royce. That's the level of distinction.

I always provide battle cards to my clients for SAP, Microsoft, and Oracle. However, SAP remains number one.

I strongly recommend SAP S/4HANA for any industry with companies having more than one hundred employees. I think the business should go with SAP. 

I am the founder of Accent and Consulting.  

Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

I work in the stack, and I'm on the technical side. My customers span about 20 different industries, including public sector federal government, manufacturing, service vehicles, agriculture, and mining. I don't really have a specific area. In terms of the use case of the product, HCC is now legacy, and S/4HANA is the future product for those customers running ECC, whether they want to run it on-premises, in the cloud, or in the public cloud. There are obviously a few differences there. I don't get involved in the sales side since I'm on the technical side.

It's replacing the ECC due to all the finance modules, such as ST, MM, PP. I deal with all the modules at the stack level, so I don't really focus much on the functional side. S/4HANA is integrated with the SAP interface products, like SaaS, products in the cloud, software as a service, and things like SuccessFactors. SAP sells these products, and they are integrated in the cloud, offering flexibility and scalability. The use of a memory-based database makes it more efficient. You might not think it's revolutionary, however, it's adopting new technologies and infrastructures.

Comparatively, this is a bit of a subjective question. The models are very different in the cloud, where it's all about monthly subscriptions, similar to Netflix. The pros and cons of software in the cloud are standard. Previously, models involved buying software to run on infrastructure with licensing and perpetual maintenance. Now the license model has shifted to subscriptions, with customers paying a monthly fee. This reflects the detailed terms of what products are used, their usage, and pricing. Although this transformation is not necessarily cheaper, it brings changes. Organizations face challenges like adapting to new technologies rapidly, and whether customers are early or late adopters influences their experience.

I have used the solution for 30 years or so.

The solution is very complex, and stability is based on maturity. Newer versions and features tend to be less stable. Overall, the products serve well. I don't judge businesses that run the world.

Support is a challenge. The effectiveness of the SAP support paradigm depends on particular skills. I wouldn't comment positively or negatively on the support itself. It has been a cloud scale.

Positive

It depends on the cartridges, the size of the cost, and whether it's a brownsfield or greenfield implementation. It is certainly in the millions of dollars. Training and resource support are essential.

Hacking SAP is favorable for me instead of nine and ten. It is very good for the time. Pearce rates it as a ten. At C-suite level, decision-makers, such as CFOs and CIOs, need to have an open mind and change their mindset. Prioritizing the right team is essential. 

The overall product rating is ten out of ten.

There are some main use cases for SAP S/4HANA because mainly we work with manufacturing customers.

I have mostly manufacturing customers.

The most useful features in this product are the real-time reporting and the complete integration between various functions.

The in-app integration works across all functions.

Since it's real-time, the reporting is fully integrated, and the people taking the reports don't need to reconcile between different functions because it is real-time with mission and completely integrated; that is the main reason why people go for SAP S/4HANA.

SAP S/4HANA is real-time and fully integrated, and SAP is always proactive in providing solutions for new scenarios or new business processes. It's scalable, so if an organization is small today and is working in one industry, tomorrow it can move to multiple geographies or industries and the size grows; it's completely scalable to a very large extent.

The cost is definitely high, so SAP does have a growth solution, which is slightly cheaper compared to other offerings with SAP.

A lot more customers would adopt it if they reduced the price by around twenty to twenty-five percent.

I'm working with a partner, and I've been working with SAP S/4HANA for the last eight to nine years.

I have faced no issues with stability or upgrades.

SAP S/4HANA is easy to scale in my opinion.

I would rate the scalability a ten.

The support that SAP provides is very good.

I would rate the support a ten because there are a lot of knowledge-based articles published, and most of them are available online.

Positive

I don't have much experience with SAP Business One solution or SAP Sales Cloud, only SAP S/4HANA.

It is easy to set up SAP S/4HANA now.

I would rate the setup a nine.

I'm expected to leave this for her, so I don't have expertise in any other tools such as data mining solutions, business intelligence, or other ERP tools. I would rate SAP S/4HANA a fit in.

SAP S/4HANA provides a standard setup process. Several third-party tools are available to integrate with the SAP ecosystem. Some customers of our organization find SAP S/4HANA very easy to use, and some are adopting the solution due to prior familiarity with the SAP ecosystem. The licensing changes implemented in Oracle JD Edwards have also made a few customers of our organization adopt SAP S/4HANA. 

The Order-to-Cash feature is indispensable and irreplaceable in SAP S/4HANA. Almost every customer I have worked with in my organization finds the Order-to-Cash feature extremely valuable. 

For Order-to-Cash using SAP S/4HANA, a company needs to consider the local regulations at one point. SAP can help with all such local regulations. I wouldn't recommend SAP S/4HANA for a small or medium-sized company.

The integration capabilities of SAP S/4HANA are as good as those of its competitor products. A reliable middleware product will be needed in SAP S/4HANA especially if discrete ERP, MES and CRM are present in the project. The integration of SAP S/4HANA will also be dependent on the strategies and vision laid out by the enterprise architect. Integrations for the solution can be done in both ELT and ETL, and both has its pros and cons.

The analytics part of SAP S/4HANA needs to be improved. The analytics feature provides decent warehousing and reporting capability, but the AI/ML components of analytics need improvement. Almost all current versions of different SAP family products either lack AI capabilities or are rudimentary. A plethora of third-party tools exist that can bring AI/ML capabilities to SAP S/4HANA, but such capabilities should be natively provided in the product. 

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

The stability of SAP S/4HANA is better understood by considering the whole SAP ecosystem. For instance, if I carry out a brownfield implementation, there can be a situation where a customer doesn't identify any improvements in their business process after deploying the solution; in such cases, they might prefer to revert back to the older process, such changes will be inherent to almost every system, so the stability of SAP S/4HANA varies from customer to customer and the complexity around the product. 

The solution is highly scalable. Our organization was catering SAP S/4HANA across 47 countries, with an average of 60 to 70 users per country. A severely large team of at least 50 to 60 professionals is required for the deployment and maintenance of SAP S/4HANA. A company usually adopts SAP S/4HANA when there is a dire need for such a solution and not when competitors have been identified to make a transition. 

At our company, we are satisfied with the tech support. I believe service providers like SAP are always willing to help anyone out with product issues. If users are able to articulate the problem well enough, it becomes easier for the tech team to comprehend the situation and provide an ideal solution.

If a user is unable to articulate the product's issues, then there is too much back and forth through tickets, and it takes a lot of time to resolve the issues. A good enough articulation of the problem in a conversation with the vendor's support team will resolve the issues 90% of the time. 

The deployment time depends upon the complexity of the environment in which the solution is being used, the business environment, the number of divisions in the company, and harmonization needs. Theoretically, a greenfield implementation of SAP S/4HANA can be carried out in four months, especially if SAP RISE is used. 

The deployment process of SAP S/4HANA involves business processing, data architecture, fit-gaps, and the selection between on-prem/cloud and one model rollout at a time. The aforementioned deployment process is the most relevant one because it reduces business risk.  The models or business entities are rolled out one at a time due to the risk conceptions of customers, so either the finance, manufacturing, or another division is shifted to the new system one at a time. 

SAP S/4HANA is definitely a valuable product. For the majority of the customer implementation of the product through our organization, I have rarely used the greenfield path. Our company once took the greenfield approach for a customer who was using multiple ERP solutions, including JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and EBS.

The aforementioned company had the requirement to harmonize and that's why a greenfield approach was followed for SAP S/4HANA implementation. Any company using SAP S/4HANA won't find trouble in gaining value from the product.

A company will only struggle with ROI or obtaining value from the solution when SAP S/4HANA is not a good fit for them. For instance, if a small company with a single location presence and around 1000 users adopts SAP S/4HANA, it's very likely that they won't find a suitable ROI. 

I don't think any company would find the product expensive. For a cloud version, there is always the factor of how much data transfer is required, and the cost will escalate very quickly as for each data transfer the hyperscaler will charge it. The size of the company, the complexity of data transfer, and the sensitivity of the operational run rate are factors that will influence the cost of SAP S/4HANA. 

Most of the customers of our organization who are adopting SAP S/4HANA already have an SAP product in their ecosystem and SAP S/4HANA provides an upgradation path to them. The majority of companies who implement such aforementioned upgrades don't always use a brownfield implementation, which translates the whole business process into the new system. Implementors are choosing a feedback and target process utilization path for SAP S/4HANA, a bluefield process.

There is also another greenfield approach for SAP S/4HANA implementation that involves beginning the implementation process from scratch. I have used all the aforementioned field processes, but mostly the brownfield path because most of our organization's customers prefer it for migrating from older processes. 

One of our customer's SAP S/4HANA migration process began in 2017 and it's still ongoing. For the aforementioned customer, the SAP S/4HANA deployment process will take six or seven years because of the geographies the customer operates in and their own unique business processes. I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

I wouldn't advise businesses without a multi-geographical presence to adopt the solution. One of the prime advantages of SAP solutions is the wide knowledge of diverse geographies over several years. SAP has been successful in building numerous out-of-the-box business processes over the years. Customers looking for a solution like SAP S/4HANA always have a choice if they want to use the out-of-the-box process or if they want to build their own, but SAP is able to provide a unique process for each country, whether it's China, India, or Germany.  

We use it for the internal SAP database, for the information, multiple portfolios of products of SAP. It addresses the issue of managing extensive data resources.

Its analytics capabilities are valuable as they enhance data analysis and insights.

It could be improved by focusing on user-related challenges, as end users might face certain difficulties.

I worked with SAP S4HANA for two years.

The stability can be rated as eight out of ten.

The scalability is also rated at eight out of ten, indicating good scalability.

The quality of technical support from SAP can be rated as eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup was difficult, presenting challenges for users.

The implementation was handled by a third party, and we did not perform it in-house.

We have observed a good return on investment, with calculations based on a five-year ROI plan. Most cases have shown positive returns.

The pricing of SAP S4HANA is high, however, it's higher compared to similar peer solutions.

I would recommend SAP S4HANA because it is a known solution that is stable and widely used by customers, thus making it reliable.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

Overall, it's being used mostly for analytics. It's basically the movement of goods between various warehouses. That is also pretty much used.

The output that we get, maybe the analytics part, is even faster compared to what we used to see on the ECC system. It used to take a few days for the analytics reports to come out of the loading, etcetera. It took a lot of time. However, now it's just a matter of a few hours to get the reports generated. That is one of the things.

I don't see any additives as of now. Any of the standard APIs or whatever is available to be integrated is done so easily with the S/4. 

It's been four or five years.

The team regularly checks on the logs, audit logs, et cetera, and they review a few important KPIs as well. So no issues are present as of now since everything has gone through proper testing, et cetera.

There are no issues in terms of onboarding. Probably, in terms of scalability, we have to plan for that.

The initial setup was kind of complicated. It went through with proper planning, et cetera.

We have separate teams handling the introductory part and the application parts or the tech team's parts.

Moving from ECC to S/4 is a kind of transformation program which involves a lot of changes, including organizational change planning. That is very crucial. All these things should be taken care of when planning this transformation. 

I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

At our company, we use SAP S/4HANA to support our two main lines of business, which are crop protection and seed development. The product is used in the central finance of our organization. 

In our organization, we are currently working on a project with a product where traditional ECC systems will be converted to SAP S/4HANA systems. 

SAP S/4HANA showcases great performance as part of the HANA database. The solution provides multiple tools for easy integrations. For instance, if I have to work with a GUI and Fiori, it can be easily carried out with the resources available in SAP S/4HANA as compared to traditional SAP systems. 

In the traditional ECC Oracle systems, when the size is enhanced, it doesn't impact much on the cost, but for SAP S/4HANA, the sizing needs to be checked very frequently as the data grows every year.

The TCO impact is quite high for SAP S/4HANA; for instance, if today I am using a 64GB CPU and 512GB server, in another year, I will probably need to upscale to a 1 TB machine. SAP S/4HANA needs to bring a feature that allows a great quantity of data compression. 

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

In the first year of SAP S/4HANA deployment in our organization, we faced some issues with the solution, and our organization's team learned from it and following that, the solution has proven stable enough. 

The solution is easy to scale. The scalability of SAP S/4HANA depends on the hosting environment, the solution can be effortlessly scaled in a cloud environment but in an on-prem or SAP RISE's environment there are certain limitations, timelines and lead times for which a professional needs to wait before implementing upscaling or other scale changes in the solution. 

The speed and quality of resolving issues from customer support needs to improve. 

The solution was easy to deploy. In our company, we faced challenges with the third-party add-ons and its compatibility with SAP S/4HANA. To overcome the compatibility challenge at our company we had to collaborate with third-party owners of specific add-ons to obtain a certified and functional solution or version of the add-ons. To obtain the aforementioned add-on versions our company had to wait for a prolonged duration which elongated the testing time for us. 

The deployment time of SAP S/4HANA depends on multiple factors. The deployment of the solution in our company's central finance department, as well as for all our vendors, took around 100 professionals, excluding the core users for business validations. The maintenance of the technical aspects of SAP S/4HANA has become easier than before. 

The solution vendor previously used to provide indirect licensing, but now the vendor has a digital licensing facility for SAP S/4HANA. The licensing format is complicated for SAP S/4HANA. 

I have worked with the earlier version of SAP S/4HANA which was called SAP ECC. 

For analytics and business reporting purposes, instead of SAP S/4HANA in our company we use SAP Analytics Cloud. 

The in-memory computing feature of the solution brings agility to reporting or execution processes performed by our company on central finance systems. SAP S/4HANA needs a high-configuration server that has sufficient memory to store all the data that needs to be worked upon. The storage size and data management are two vital aspects of in-memory computing with SAP S/4HANA. The aforementioned aspects can directly impact the cost and performance. 

I would overall rate SAP S/4HANA a seven out of ten. Before deploying SAP S/4HANA, I would advise others to prepare an effective data strategy because data becomes one of the key aspects and they should ensure the compatible versions of the add-ons are being availed. I would recommend any new adopters of SAP S/4HANA to check how the product can blend with the business processes and provide advantages.