SAP S/4HANA Reviews

Based on my knowledge and experience during the transformation phase with the tool, I think the product provides things in a very planned manner in terms of the data, migration with different phases and testing, and servers to move to, making it a very easy process and very comfortable to move to it from another solution.

The product's high cost is an area of concern where improvements are required.

I have been using SAP S/4HANA for a few days. I am not a user of the tool, but I work as a support in my company to help integrate the solution with some other software products. I look into the secondary sales systems. I am not the core user of the product.

My company's technical team and IT team may have had the need to contact the solution's technical support team.

My company switched over to SAP S/4HANA from SAP ECC, which was a legacy system and did not operate in real-time while there was need for some customizations leading to different challenges. Globally, every organization has moved to tSAP S/4HANA for improved processes and real-time analytics. I think the core objectives of the founder of the organization stems from the aforementioned details.

The solution can be deployed and implemented in a year because my organization has a very huge infrastructure of SAP. My company has bought different modules and data from SAP, so going through the documentation and everything takes time during the implementation phase.

Whether the product is expensive or not is something that may vary from company to company. If I consider my organization, I feel that the product is a bit expensive. Myorganization is not currently using big modules like S/4HANA and the other different modules. Though National Food Limited is a global organization, I think the tool is costly. National Food Limited wants to grow up with the technology since the founder states that they have a certain benchmark in the world. The product is worth the money.

My background is in providing support for software tools our company uses for order booking and for secondary sales software, which consists of mobile booking for markets and stores. For analytical dashboards, my company uses Power BI, which is connected to the software tools we use in the company. For integrations with SAP S/4HANA, my company has connected a few databases with inbound and outbound APIs.

My company is very satisfied with the tool and I believe that it is going to be a very good transformation for our organization. Before my company used to work on SAP ECC, and now we are migrating to SAP S/4HANA. Everyone in our company has very good experience with SAP. Now, my company is going to go live in a week or two.

My company uses the tool to make end-to-end processes easier, and we have a consultant named Reynold from PwC. My company uses the consultancy service offered by PwC to manage National Foods Limited and SAP.

My company plans to use the tool for real-time analytics or decision-making. I think the founder of my organization admires the fact that with SAP's technology, we are able to use real-time information and it is a good improvement in the strategic area and the directions. SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP) Forecasting Algorithms can definitely be helpful.

I am not able to comment much about the solution since my company is still in the transformation stage.

The user interface of SAP S/4HANA is user-friendly. In different modules, like financial and production ones, I have experienced the use of the tool with different people who have mentioned that it is a very helpful product for them.

I have worked with Fiori UI/UX and also with SAP IBP and SAP SAC. In SAP, the dashboard can be managed in real-time.

The product helps increase the data processing speed, especially in areas like workflow. When it comes to the financial aspect, the tool provides very strong financial and credit limits, which is a very good feature of the tool, as it can help the organization move to a certain level.

I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

The POD applications are very useful to us. There are a few POD apps which we are using for the different business scenarios. They are quite interesting.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. The documentation is very good.

The solution can scale well.

The solution is stable.

It's been just one year that we started using this product, due to the fact that we need to have different integrations as well to other systems. With S/4HANA, when SAP started, everything worked in a single SAP system. Slowly then it's been delegated or divided into multiple SAP systems. That's why we have around 25 different SAP products running in our landscape. Yet, at the same time, S/4HANA is the core. It's the core component.

Going forward, I believe more systems could be consolidated into S/4HANA. We need to reduce the number of SAP systems running in our landscape. S/4HANA has the capacity to host many other SAP products, therefore we can discontinue some of the SAP products. Currently, we have now the Global Services, the Governance, Risk, and Compliance, and Enterprise Portal, BW, Supply Chain Management, Warehouse Management, et cetera. If SAP could consolidate many of the systems so that we can reduce the number of systems, that would be ideal.

The solution can be a bit expensive.

We would like to see more DevOps capabilities in the future.

The solution would benefit from offering more serverless features in the sense that when you deploy SAP, it's a pretty big deployment and you have a lot of dependencies or you are closely tied up or you have a dependency with the hardware vendor and the hardware providers and the certified hardware and items like that. At the same time, all these deployed components and these files are possible to deploy without a server as well. Slowly SAP is providing some of the features so that you can deploy this in containers and so you don't have any dependency on the running hardware. That way, you can restart the systems without any downtime or the end-users will not feel the difference. Aspects like that need to be improved. 

We do have here monthly maintenance due to the fact that sometimes we need to recharge the system and we have seen from the end-users there will be certain downtime as well. If there is no dependency with the hardware and if it goes serverless, then we can have zero-downtime maintenance.

We've been using the solution for the past year or so. It hasn't been that long.

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's very reliable. 

The solution is scalable. At the same time, it depends on where you deploy your systems. If you deploy your systems in Azure, then it would be using the scalability of Azure. If you deploy in AWS, it uses the scalability of AWS. If you deploy in a virtual private environment, then it depends on where you deployed the system. At the same time, it depends on being compatible with all these different hyper-scalers. For the most part, it goes pretty well with the different platforms.

We are deploying the solution in different countries. Currently, we have close to 10,000 users working in SAP. Yearly, we do the deployment in multiple countries. In two months, we deploy in one more country. There will be another 200, 300 more users will be coming. By the end of this year, there will be 2,000 more users. Currently, around 10,000 users are using this application.

The SAP S/4HANA technical support is mainly with the service provider. When you deploy SAP, you have different support teams. Most of the time, you will have a service provider or a supplier that you would be associating with. You will have a kind of application management or infrastructure management support with that vendor. For example, IBM, Capgemini, Accenture, DXC. They are the different vendors. However, then you get the OEM support via the SAP Support Portal for product-related issues. That support has got different priority levels based on the importance. Generally, we know how the SAP support works and it's acceptable. We're satisfied with the level of support provided overall.

The initial setup isn't too difficult. It's pretty straightforward for the most part. SAP has got some good documentation and there are different migration scenarios and implementation scenarios you can work with. With the help of documentation, things are pretty straightforward. 

Most of the time, you do the SAP deployment or the migration with a partner. SAP has got certified partners to help with the implementation.

SAP has got different license mechanisms. It depends on how many SAP products you run and then how do you negotiate with the SAP teams and what kind of offer you get. At the same time, generally, everyone says SAP products are a bit costly. 

Some of the SAP systems are licensed based on the number of CPUs that are being deployed, and some of the SAP products are licensed based on the number of primary users, and some of the SAP systems are based on the database footprint. Different SAP products have different license mechanisms, so there should be a person who is knowledgeable about SAP that can understand and then review the licensing agreement and get the right SAP product - and perhaps help negotiate the price.

We are customers and end-users.

We have around 25 different SAP products. We are using SAP S/4HANA in our company.

The production and the test systems are deployed in the virtual private cloud on-premise, and we have sandbox development and quality systems are deployed in the Azure public cloud.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

I manage an SAP Central competence, and we are working on multiple S/4HANA implementations. Our Webex begins with leading teams. We've done major and complex implementations in the network.

SAP InGen is not just for HANA. The most likely features are that it is scalable. You don't have to worry too much about volumes of data, even if your transaction volumes go up. 

It is easier to accommodate due to standardized features. It is easier to maintain and even find the workforce to maintain it because an SAP standard feature is globally the same. So it's not dependent on individual people having expertise, unlike custom apps where you'll have that dependency on particular developers or a consultant. 

Additionally, there is a rich, diverse workforce available. Many innovations are coming up individually from the ecosystem as well. These are prime features. If you go module by module in MM, SD, and other individual modules, there are many features not offered by any other ERPs. 

You can build S/4HANA in S/4HANA, and you can build SAP as your end-to-end SAP, which covers everything you need. SAP Analytics, when coupled with an active SAP SSP system, allows you to see material movement or your sales order history end-to-end. 

You can view your inventory and supplier ecosystem, enabling you to see multiple factors with all the data in a single data model. If you have multiple different systems, matching different patterns can be confusing, however, it is easier to draw connections and identify patterns in this setup. This is the biggest advantage.

A lot of people would say the pricing. SAP is seen as quite expensive even now. It doesn't work for smaller or medium optimizations. 

The licensing and pricing could be looked at. In Brownfield migration, the trade-off between greenfield and brownfield means you either keep it clean or match the business requirements. Sometimes, it's not possible to do both. 

While ValixAPI provides significant support in making those decisions and the SAP consultant is very useful, we are still dependent on past history and how it was originally set up. I wouldn't call that a real disadvantage, yet more accessible consulting would be beneficial. 

Incorporating all other cloud products, like APO or IPP, into the S/4 house might also help.

I have used the solution for the last five years.

In comparison to ECC, definitely, because of some of the simplification and eliminating some moving parts, it is better. But performance and stability also largely depend on the infrastructure. 

Whether it's on-premises, how well it is maintained on the server side and resources, or if it is right with SAP, there is some standardization. It depends on what type of infrastructure we have and what model we have. The operating model is more than the functional side. But comparing only the functional side or the application side, I would say it is better. It is easier to manage.

Scalability is a key strength of SAP, especially for HANA, compared to all the other ERPs.

The Mac support and options depend on the plan we have taken. The support is high quality but also very expensive. A traditional challenge with SAP support is that SAP teams only support the standard functions, which are part of the product. The custom support is left to the level two teams. This is strategic from SAP's perspective, yet as an end user or customer, I would prefer equally good support for custom success rates. This is happening through the partner ecosystem, but it can vary in terms of quality, depending on the partner and many other factors.

Positive

We work in a competitive world with simple Microsoft versions and Oracle for certain functions, but not in the same business area. I have also worked with Becca, however, that was more on the CRM side, not on the RDP per se. Compared to Oracle and PeopleSoft, SAP is quite ahead.

The complexity is more because of the business process and organization rather than the product itself. The product can be simple if your process is simple. 

However, someone with a straightforward process may not want to invest in SAP in the first place. So you'll always have complex processes, or at least they need to be at a certain volume threshold to warrant an investment like SAP.

For deployment, splitting it into preparation, functional readiness, technical deployment, and migration should involve a minimum of 30 to 40 people. However, if you only look at the migration and setup, the technical part alone should involve around 15 to 20 people.

I would say it's above-average ROI. It's not the best, primarily since the significant investments and the timeline it takes to recover those investments, but it's better than many alternatives.

We are working with SAP colleagues and some partners. There are multiple parallel implementations and migrations going on. We are working on both S/4HANA migration as well as SAP upgrades. 

The overall product rating is nine out of ten.

I use this solution because it provides immediate insights into financial affairs without waiting for month-end reports.

The ability to access real-time data analytics is crucial, as it supports events or calls that require immediate attention and decision-making. Utilizing Virtual NGINX has been quite effective for this purpose.

The user interface is less friendly than that of View ID, however, it is more robust overall. I can perform a lot of data manipulation directly on SAP using S-One, without having to resort to Excel, unlike with View ID.

I have used the solution for another SAP for a total of three years.

During my time with Angleton, we relied on a private cloud, and accessibility became literally impossible whenever the cloud service provider experienced downtime.

I highly recommend this solution. It is very easy to scale within businesses, especially when a new business falls within the range.

I absolutely would recommend the customer service.

Positive

This was my first encounter with ERP, and I have not used any other ERP solutions.

I joined the company when the migration was completed, so I am not aware of any setup challenges.

This was my first encounter with ERP, and I have not used any other ERP solutions.

Previously, using a private cloud meant that management could not always access data due to possible downtimes from the cloud service provider. It is crucial that management does not simply have to wait for month-end averages to understand the financial affairs of the business. Real-time data analytics with Virtual NGINX has been very helpful, and scaling within businesses when there is a new business under the range is also straightforward. 

I would rate the overall solution nine out of ten.

I am a system integrator. We recently implemented it for a customer, and they are finding it easy to use.

We implemented the remote version of S/4HANA on Azure, and it is working well for the customer.

My customers use it for all functions, including finance, sales, and Oracle. 

They are using it for all six core functions: 

• Source to pay
• Record to report
• Order to cash
• Procure to pay
• Plan to produce
• Core finance. 

They also use it for other pharma operations.

The cloud-based feature of Microsoft Azure has been very valuable. It is easy to implement and use, saving the customer a lot of effort on infrastructure. The product is also very stable, and the customer is comfortable with it.

The customer has worked with previous products, and this one has brought a lot of comfort in terms of infrastructure handling. The infrastructure is managed by a different team, and the users are also comfortable with the interface. So far, they are happy with the product.

The product is user-friendly. The user interface, now called Fiori, is very stable. The product also has a lot of interfaces available to interact with cloud products, and it supports all kinds of integrations, so the amount of customizations needed from customers is greatly reduced.

The infrastructure resources are also effectively used. It is very optimized; used in a very optimized manner. The maintenance and handling of the infrastructure are very well taken care of with S/4HANA on Azure.

The interface could be improved with more Fiori applications. There are still a few applications in SAP GUI. I think SAP is working on this, but it will take time. 

Additionally, the admin interface could be improved. Since the admin is not directly an end-user, it may not be in focus, but if the customer's team is managing it, it would be helpful. 

Bringing all the admin applications into one place would be very helpful for customers to lock this down and use it internally for management.

In future releases, I would like to see a centralized admin interface. A lot of admin activities need to be done at different places. Apart from that, the pain development and change management for developments could be improved. 

Some features are not yet available in the new interface, so bringing those in would make it easier for customers to manage from the admin side.

I've been working with this solution for the last five to seven years. I work with the 2022 feature pack zero.

Since SAP brings new versions, I would rate the stability nine out of ten as of now.

So far, the performance is fine. No major hiccups or conversations have been reported that would cause the product to fall into any category of material issues. 

All stability and performance-related aspects have been taken care of. We have positive feedback from the customer side in terms of performance and stability.

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. Scalability is quite flexible. With the solution on Azure or other cloud products, scalability options are very flexible. The backend hardware technologies have improved on the cloud side, so many options are available now.

In my last five years of experience, all the customers I've seen are on S/4HANA. I've hardly seen anyone use older versions. New customers are all getting on S/4HANA.  

Our customers are mostly enterprise-level businesses. 

The technical support from SAP is quite mature. It's been five to seven years, so the product is now getting into the maturity phase. The product support team is quite capable of solving issues on time.

Positive

For me, the initial setup is very straightforward. It may not be easy for the customer, but for the integrator, it is.

So, I would rate my experience with the initial setup an eight out of ten, with ten being easy. 

There were some generic issues in development, but the support from SAP was good, and they were resolved. All products will have some issues. The product support is good enough to resolve them on time.

Deployment time:

Implementing it for all the functionalities within the given scope took around one year, including various phases like development, quality assurance, and production. It depends on the scope, but with the current scope, including all planned interfaces and project management, it will be manageable.

We (my company) are system integrators. 

Deployment process:

We start with development, where all customizations are performed. It's then moved to the testing system for various tests like regression, unit, user acceptance, performance, and integration testing. 

Once approved and verified by the customer, it's taken to production for deployment. Then, there's minimal functional and engineering testing, followed by live production testing done by the end users. If everything is clear, we go live.

Since customers are adopting it and finding it valuable, in comparison to others, I can give the pricing a five out of ten, with ten being expensive and one being cheap. It's not too expensive and not too cheap.

Additional costs to the licensing fees include maintenance or integration costs, depending on who manages it for the customer. Maintenance and support costs are general support costs for all products.

The product is mature and implemented in various industries. It's a very well-renowned and established product. They can go ahead and implement it. It depends on how they choose the integrator and the support for this product. 

The product is very stable, and finding integrators and support will not be difficult.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

Most of my clients use it for controlling finances and for BI (purchasing and sales). Depending on the activity, we can also use it for logistics and plan management, like in energy module ISU — it's a specific module for energy, oil and gas distribution.

There's lots of improvement to be made on the user experience level and digital work. Since SAP is a transactional software, you can't use it like Salesforce. It's not easy to create automated reports.

For the user experience, they can try to get out of the strictly industrial point of view because it's an IT solution. It's not always the most fun application the use. It's pretty complicated and if you're not fully trained for it, it isn't easy to understand how it works.

I have been using it for the last four years.

S/4 HANA is the most stable solution provided by SAP.

The scalability is very good. That's the good thing about the S/4 HANA solution.

Support is quite good; they know their solutions. Over the last few years, they changed all the resources that were on the first S/4 HANA program. They're pretty efficient. There's always a contract with them for support. Normally, regular support is done internally, but when it comes to SAP bugs, when we can't solve the problem, we go back to SAP support and can rely on them.

Setup is complex. SAP is the biggest ERP on the market. We like to say it's the Rolls-Royce of ERPs. So it can't be deployed without a minimum of 10 to 20 consultants, plus approximately the same kind of resources on the business level.

Licensing is quite expensive. It works with yearly licenses and it's ugly. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

For maintenance of the solution, the number of people needed depends on how many users you have. Basically, now we use TMAs most of the time, but for smaller conditions, it would be a minimum of 10 people. It depends on the number of modules that you have. For example, with my last clients, we had a regional team of 20% plus an external team of more than 10% and it was really not a big deployment or activity.

For full deployment, the time it takes depends on the complexity of the deployment and the number of processes to review. In a normal situation, basic roll out would be between four to six months and a global project or program can take up to three to five years. It also depends on the number of sites because you have to deploy the solution, and once you have the core model, you need to perform a roll out on every site and do all the necessary training. I've worked on programs before that lasted five or six years with major companies where there were over 700 sites. It's difficult to do more than 50 or 60 sites per year, and even with that, it's complicated. With one of my prior clients, it was a 10-year program.

With regular companies, there are more than five to seven thousand users and with major ones, on my biggest project, we had 30,000 users worldwide.

The solution can be used on all levels.  On the IT level, it's a tool that we deploy to enable the tracking of client processes, but it can be used on every level. It's commonly used for finance control, sales and purchasing because those are the biggest parts when managing client TNLs. Depending on the activity, if you're not a big client, you can go down to MRP level, managing all the logistics and all the productivity. It can be used by everyone.

I use the solution in my company, which is basically a warehouse enterprise. The solution optimized our company's core business processes, considering that it used to be a legacy SAP system, which migrated to a new system. The tool is used for consolidation purposes and for rolling out to multiple countries in Europe.

There are products equivalent to SAP S/4HANA available in the cloud, but simplification is a part that I feel is very important. The product needs to be simplified. SAP S/4HANA is like a monster, while Salesforce is easy to implement and is like a SaaS product. SAP comes in a SaaS model with S/4HANA cloud.

I have been using SAP S/4HANA for around eight months.

It is a stable solution. The problem with the tool is that its complexity is very high. In the tool, the business process complexity is very high, and so either one should accept SAP's best practices or change SAP according to the business, but there will be a lot of support tickets raised after that, which leads to a lot of delay in the process, and you won't be able to do things on time.

During the role of the product across multiple countries, the first one was successful, while the second one led to losses, and the project in the third one was shelved.

There are around 3,000 people in my company who use the product.

The product is regularly used in my company.

The solution's technical support was from a third-party company, and I found that they lacked in the area of knowledge since it is managed by juniors while others were just running the show from the front end, leading to a disaster.

If the tool is deployed on the cloud, it could take a maximum of ten to twelve weeks. On an on-premises model, it takes its own course in terms of the time required for the deployment phase to be completed.

The product's deployment phase was a massive transformation program, so we could not build it on our own in the company, a reason we had to look for third-parties, like Wipro, Wipro, Infosys, TCS, IBM, PwC, or KPMG, who could help us.

A third party, Infosys, takes care of the team required to manage the maintenance and deployment since it is a massive transformation project.

The product's deployment phase is done with the help of a third-party consulting firm.

The problem with SAP is that it offers two licenses, namely runtime license and enterprise license. If you have a runtime license, then you are doomed since you can't take any data out from the tool. The product's licenses are expensive.

In terms of the impact of the real-time data in SAP on our company's decision-making, I would say that we are heading towards building reporting or analytics solutions, but we haven't started with it yet.

There has not been much difference in the area of workflow efficiency from the use of the tool.

In our company, we are shifting our roadmap from the legacy ERP system to a new ERP, and I would say that it is the only difference, but apart from that, there is not much difference. SAP’s Fiori UI in the tool is quite interesting.

All the processes in our company are the same. For example, the procurement, delivery, and finance stages are all the same, and there is not much difference.

It is a complex solution, and the project for which it was used was shelved. With SAP S/4HANA, the project could go live only in one country. SAP S/4HANA messed up the implementation process in the second country because of which in the first quarter, the company went into a negative revenue. After the implementation of the product in the second country was unsuccessful, my company did not go ahead with the use of the tool in the third country, after which the project was shelved.

If a business is very massive, then I can go with SAP S/4HANA. I don't recommend SAP to businesses that are small to medium.

I rate the tool a one out of ten.

We use the tool  as an ERP transactional system for financials, logistics, human resources, sales, distribution, and billing.

SAP S/4HANA dominates around 70 percent of the ERP market in Chile, and I believe this isn't merely coincidental. I've always maintained that if someone believes SAP S/4HANA lacks a certain functionality, they haven't explored it thoroughly. However, there's a widespread lack of understanding regarding its full potential and how to configure it.

Many businesses in Chile and elsewhere underutilize SAP S/4HANA, limiting its use to basic tasks like document entry or accounting, which is unfortunate considering its capabilities. SAP S/4HANA offers integration, consistency, security, and potential for user-friendliness. Nonetheless, initiatives like Fiori and SAPS/4HANA seem to be moving in the right direction to address this issue.

I can discuss one of our largest clients, a utility company. They specialize in generating and commercializing electricity, primarily for industrial customers. They utilize the tool, encompassing standard ERP features like logistics, human resources, and financials, and integrating their core business processes into the entire system. It adds great value to the company.

For instance, by integrating metering systems online into the ERP system, all billing and operational processes become online. The system connects with the CRM system and incorporates the physical network. Let me provide an example. If there's an outage at your home, contact the utility company, and the tool will identify your location and provide access to relevant client information.

The entire process is seamlessly integrated into the system. When the affected individual is eventually billed, they will receive a discount due to the outage, as per our loss analysis for such situations. It's all integrated, making the experience seamless, efficient, and pleasant for everyone involved, from the call center staff to the customers.

The solution's most valuable feature is integration. Our core data services are very powerful, and they allow a whole new reporting capability that was not present before. Another valuable feature is energy data management, specifically the processing of metering information from utilities, which has benefited our organization the most. It allows us to monitor real-time consumption data.

The use cases I mentioned before all involve customization in terms of parameterization and custom developments. We strive to keep things standard, but there are cases where centralization or more specific development is needed. Through both of these means, we've successfully delivered projects and provided meaningful solutions to our customers.

I think the user interface still needs improvement. While efforts are being made to enhance and make it more user-friendly, there are still shortcomings. Fiori is a great step forward, but work must be done. So, I believe SAP S/4HANA should focus more on improving GUI access. We also had a difficult time migrating the fixed assets. 

I have been working with the product for seven years.

I rate the solution's stability a ten out of ten.

I rate the tool's scalability a ten out of ten. 

The tool's deployment is straightforward. 

The solution is worth its costs. 

I rate the product an eight out of ten. If your business processes are clear, the implementation will be straightforward. If not, it will not. Don't try to accommodate the system to your business process; instead, try to align your business processes with what's defined in the system.