SAP S/4HANA Reviews

I have two major clients for SAP S/4HANA. The first is in the UAE, using real estate modules, and the second is US-based, CVS or Century Business Solutions. In the US, the solution handles all customer-related activities like sales orders, accounts receivable, accounts payable, and refunds, integrated with both mobile and web apps. For the UAE client, it manages real estate information, allowing customers to place orders and receive offers online via mobile and web apps. After customer confirmation, it facilitates contract agreements and integrates finance and accounts-related information. 

Clients share their requirements via emails, and if I have any confusion, I directly communicate with them through video or audio meetings using Google Meet or other resources. As a technical consultant, I handle both technical and functional aspects. We primarily use FSR forms, which clients deliver via email. We read and verify these requirements from the customers and strive to use standard functionalities to the fullest and implement the required functionalities directly using the standard system.

Regarding migration from previous system to SAP S/4HANA, it had no negative impact on business productivity as data was smoothly transferred using tools like BDCs and LSMWs. Data is crucial, and SAP S/4HANA easily integrates with previous systems, ensuring no errors or hurdles for clients.

SAP S/4HANA delivers all essential possibilities to customers for various sections. In the current modern age, we use SAP for graphical outputs, reports, and smartphone accessibility. If users want to see financial outputs via diagrams, we use SAP by Design. For specific confirmations via mobile app or web app, we use few other applications. If users want only source forms and not hard copies, we use AR forms.

The most advanced functionality in S/4HANA is the OData service. It's crucial because everyone wants to integrate third-party applications with SAP S/4HANA. SAP HANA uses advanced OData services, integrating with Azure HANA. We also use SQL services and Java security, allowing every language to interface with SAP, choosing tools specific for our requirements.

In my opinion, there's room for improvement in SAP S/4HANA based on customer requirements. The solution already includes advanced technologies like AI functionalities, but improvements can be made in areas like UI and pricing. For example, making the UI more user-friendly or reducing the cost could enhance the overall experience for clients and customers. The goal is to provide everything customers need with just one click, ensuring convenience and efficiency in accessing information and performing tasks.

In terms of stability, I have a good impression because when we meet all customer requirements, they are satisfied and find it reliable.

I would rate the scalability of SAP S/4HANA as good, around eight out of ten. Our clients vary in size, ranging from small to medium to large enterprises, covering different levels of businesses.

My experience with the technical support, is about a ten to twenty percent involvement on my end since I primarily handle technical aspects.

My experience with the initial setup of SAP S/4HANA is quite easy, as I've been working with SAP for around nine to ten years. Regarding deployment time, it depends on the complexity of the requirements, ranging from a few days to a maximum of one month.

As for pricing, it depends on the business size and flow. If it's a medium-sized business, it might seem affordable, but for larger businesses with complex processes, it could be considered expensive.

If a client faced challenges with their previous system, I would directly communicate with them, understand the issue, and demonstrate how SAP S/4HANA can address specific reports or modules, ensuring around a ninety-nine percent success rate in resolving issues.

I would rate SAP S/4HANA a ten out of ten because of its seamless integration with third-party software and ease of use.

SAP S/4HANA is primarily employed for data analysis and analytics. It involves engaging with data within the platform to perform analytics and generate insights, focusing on optimizing data collection and analysis at the database level.

The ability to optimize performance by allowing both data transactions and analytics on a single platform is particularly valuable. This dual capability enhances the efficiency of data handling and analysis, making it a crucial feature for effective data management.

The platform could improve by simplifying the analytics processes, which currently require significant preparatory work outside the platform. This aspect can be cumbersome and detract from the otherwise streamlined experience.

I would like to see the inclusion of more integrated tools that allow for direct analytics and calculations within the platform itself. This would reduce the need for extensive data preprocessing, which is currently a necessity.

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

SAP S/4HANA is highly scalable, particularly due to its model-driven development approach, which allows for efficient data integration and analysis as our needs grow.

The solution's deployment is still in the development phase, and we have yet to go live. Therefore, I have yet to have the opportunity to require or evaluate customer service or support.

Before adopting S/4HANA, I used SAP ECC and Tableau. The switch was driven by the need for more advanced features and the discontinuation of support for the older system.

The deployment is still in the development phase. 

 The solution might be expensive. 

The solution might be expensive, an important consideration for any organization looking to adopt it.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine 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.

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.

The solution's use cases depend on the market in which clients use it. I usually work with manufacturing companies. They used the tool for manufacturing, using whatever they needed to implement SAP independently. Warehousing users use the solution to manage inventory. Both retail and manufacturing markets use warehousing, and that's another big area where the tool is used.

The main focus of moving from an old ERP to the solution is that the HANA database runs in memory and quickly answers questions. Since it's already in memory, reports need not be created after the data is loaded in the transactional tables.

The solution's most valuable feature is integration. You're still talking about modules, procurement, and business partners. All of these are different modules in SAP S/4HANA. Everything is connected easily because of the integration of the same database in the memory. It's already connected there. You don't need to change the view.

You can change the view from one perspective to another, but it's mostly the same thing. You are not jumping between modules in such a way that you are seeing the same data differently. Since you see the same database, you are not making mistakes when seeing the customer in procurement or inventory. You see exactly the same data because it comes from the same view.

Everything is integrated in that way. There are no more mistakes in the data not being updated. Every time you access something, it is already updated in real-time. From a business point of view, you see the same figure no matter how you access it.

SAP S/4HANA is an expensive solution.

I have been using SAP S/4HANA for 10 to 12 years.

If there are no customizations, SAP S/4HANA is a very stable product.

You can add more transactions, materials, customers, and vendors. Scaling the solution is not a problem because you are in a private cloud. You need more servers, but the system is prepared to work that way. The solution is more suited for medium to enterprise businesses. Some small customers want to have this kind of ERP, but the problem is that it is expensive.

Without any changes, the solution's initial setup is easy. The process is very, very easy to implement. If there are changes, we need to recommend that SAP incorporate those modifications because they may be standard.

That is a long shot because SAP filters everything, as there are many customer requests. They filter them and implement only the ones they think are useful to everybody. Those modifications are taken into account for the next release. It's a problem for the customer if they need something that is not standard for SAP S/4HANA. If it is a standard for SAP S/4HANA, it's easy to implement.

I rate the solution’s initial setup ten out of ten.

Some customers needing this kind of software don't consider the costs. They think about the profitability they can achieve with the solution's implementation. People concerned about the costs need to evaluate whether implementing this system is profitable.

It depends on the perspective. You need to consider whether this investment is enough to get you to what you are looking for. It's basically a market evaluation of what you are doing.

With the solution's real-time analytic options, you don't need to use anything else. You already have the data in memory, and you can build any query to extract something that was hard to extract earlier.

The business process works fine because there are not too many steps now. Since everything is in memory, the processes are simpler than before. The business processes are cleaner because you don't need to go through too many steps to get the results done. You now have a 360-degree view of a customer.

Whether you are accessing the customer by invoicing or by a business partner, you get the view of these customers all around, and you don't need to jump between modules. Everything is now more easily integrated.

The first approach was to have this ERP implemented on-premises. Now, the solution is going to the cloud. The idea is to deploy the tool depending on the requirements of the customer or the client. The products are already built, and you don't need to do anything else.

You are accessing the solution in a way that is already customized for the customer. You don't need to do anything additionally. The ERP is already ready to be used. Then, you have hybrid implementations, partly in the cloud and partly on-premises.

Also, you can have everything on-premises but in a private network. So, it depends on the client's requirements. Everything can be done depending on the client's requirements, but the solution can be deployed everywhere.

Customers are currently looking to migrate from ECC into S/4HANA. The improvements or benefits will come from implementing S/4HANA. These customers are not so worried about how it is going to work because they want to do the initial migration. A lot of customers are doing that at this time, and it is a potential market for us as implementers on which we can rely for a long time.

SAP provides a module that facilitates migration from any system, not only ECC, to SAP S/4HANA. The idea here is to provide layouts already built. The customer or client only needs to populate this layout and then push it into the solution, which is easy. However, depending on the client, some things may not completely reflect what the customer or client needs. So, they need to do customizations.

Those customizations need to be done before in SAP S/4HANA, and then this special module for data migration needs to be modified. It could be totally different from what the standard SAP is doing. So, they need to do other programming to get this data loaded into specific modules being modified for that client.

The idea is to get the benefit of what SAP S/4HANA is offering. The idea is not to customize anything. However, we always have something that is not specific for a client and needs to be modified. The module itself is capable of modifying what is required. If you modify the tool too much, the next version will not be implemented quickly.

That's why the recommendation is not to modify anything. The processes already built into the solution are enough for any kind of market. However, if you are doing it, you need to comply with what SAP recommends. If the new version is coming, you can implement it quickly, or you will have issues like in the past. Heavily customized ERP systems are complex to migrate to the new versions.

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

We use it for the FICO {Financial Accounting (FI), Management Accounting (CO)}, SD, and MM modules.

We don't face any problems with the modules, but we have a problem with the web solution. The web access sometimes has difficulties with logging in.

The support should be improved. Every time we submit tickets to SAP, the process takes a long time.

Also, improved performance, reliability, and stability would be beneficial.

In my current company, we migrated to SAP S/4HANA last year in January. It means we started using it in January 2023.

It is not really stable. 

Based on the SAP support we currently use, the users access SAP through the web. In the web interface, we have a lot of connection issues. 

Although SAP claims they are addressing these problems, they have not taken any concrete action. Instead, they try to shift the responsibility back to the customer.

According to our agreement, these tasks should be handled by SAP. However, the support team consistently insists that these issues fall under their scope. This is the challenge we are currently facing.

It is scalable enough. We have over a hundred end users using it. There are around five administrators for this product.

When we want to raise a ticket on the SAP portal, the process takes a longer time, and there are many selections that confuse the user. SAP should simplify the way tickets are submitted. This is what we hope they will improve.

They need to improve the solution and streamline the process. We want to bring the issue in more clearly so we can know which option to select.  

Neutral

The pricing is okay. It is higher. It is expensive. 

We encountered an issue when we implemented SAP S/4HANA. It wasn't properly implemented with disaster recovery. The disaster recovery was an additional feature that required a separate payment to implement a disaster recovery plan.

Overall, I would rate the product an eight out of ten because the support is very bad. 

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.

We use the solution as an ERP system for our retail operations and manufacturing. 

The core accounting model is robust, so we don't have any issues with it. It has industry-specialized modules like retail, hospitality, and manufacturing. Many industrial-specific modules are very helpful. It's a very robust, reliable, and simple-to-use product. In my experience, it's straightforward.

From a benefits perspective, the main advantage that SAP S/4HANA brings to our organization is that we can have one system for everything. It is used for retail, distribution, and manufacturing engineering. Having a single system allows us to meet our total requirements.

I would like to see improvements in the graphical user interface and core modules in SAP S/4HANA. Even after 20 years, there haven't been developments in these areas. The purchase order, sales order, and core modules like CRM have remained unchanged. The financial data and modules have also stayed the same. Fiori is available but hasn't brought many changes to the core modules.

I'd like to see more features in the core ERP module to make it affordable and manageable for small and medium-sized companies. Big companies can handle additional modules like CRM, but smaller businesses struggle to afford and maintain these.

The solution's implementation cost is high.

I have been using the product for two years. 

The solution is easy. 

Our current number of users for the product is 200, but it will increase. We have it implemented across multiple locations and departments. Our environment spans different countries with various currencies and services. For example, we operate in Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, and Kuwait, each with its own SAP instance and currency. The solution is easy to scale. 

We have support from an internal team as well as SAP. Its support is good. 

Positive

The tool's deployment is easy. 

The product's ROI is good. 

I rate the overall product a ten out of ten.