SAP S/4HANA Reviews

Our company implements the solution for customers in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. We manage transformational projects that include selection, upgrade, or replacement of systems that require ERP solutions. 

Our biggest implementation was for a chemical company's software hub that was custom-built on an AS/400 mainframe and they wanted to move to an ERP system.  After a six-month package selection process, we chose the solution combined with extensions provided by an implementation partner that added specific functionality and narrowed down customizations. 

Across all of our projects, there are 5,000 users of the solution. 

The finance solution and procurement functionalities are good. 

Items that impact the TCO should be improved because the solution is very complex to integrate and keep running. 

Integration with a portal or front end is needed. For example, the online collaboration part of SAP with vendors lacks functionality. Integrating with sales or service processes with a CRM or cloud for customers uses three different SAP systems. Customers typically choose Salesforce instead because the SAP system is not good.

There is a very large learning curve for different domains from an end user perspective. Some things are easy to understand and other things are complex. Users receive cryptic error messages when they do things that they do not fully understand. 

I have been using the solution for seven years. 

The solution is stable with no complaints from customers. 

On occasion, users get cryptic error messages that they cannot resolve themselves. Someone else has to assist which results in downtime from the IT side and that has a negative impact on business performance. 

Implementation partners handle issues with support staff and response times are very high. Support staff know the product in most cases and are good. 

It might take time for implementation partners to be notified of issues and then reach out to support for assistance. This support chain is expensive because the customer is invoiced based on the number of total support hours needed.

I rate technical support an eight out of ten. 

Positive

The initial setup requires advanced knowledge and can take two to three days. In some cases, setup can take several days before demo mode is available.  

Implementation partners handle setups and our company handles project management and quality assurance from the customer's perspective. 

Customers do not manage the complex environment on their own but rather depend on service providers such as Deloitte or Capgemini. The price of operational support only makes sense or is efficient in instances with two or three FTEs. 

The solution often does not survive our shortlist round because it is very expensive when compared to other products. It is only appropriate or selected for very specific use cases and types of companies. 

In some cases, the solution is ten to twenty-five times more expensive than competitors like Dynamics because it requires licensing, cloud environment costs, and contracts for maintenance and support. 

Our company recommends various ERP systems depending on use case and customer environment. We have worked with Dynamics 365, NetSuite, Unit4, N4, Baan, and Vision. We work on transformation trajectories for customers who use ERP systems and want to replace, upgrade, or do a greenfield approach.

The solution is a good fit for use cases where customizations are required on top to cover sector-specific business needs, as opposed to custom greenfield implementations of Dynamics 365 with much custom development. The solution reduces the amount of customization that needs to be implemented.

Use cases for domains with no vertical solution built on top are not a good fit for the solution. 

The solution is complex to learn and user acceptance of NetSuite is ten times faster.

It is difficult to rate the solution. For some customers, it is a seven and for others it is a one out of ten. It really depends on the sector and fit gap between needs and business processes. 

There are many cases or exceptions where the solution is not a good fit, so I rate it a four out of ten overall. 

This solution is installed in the customer's system, and we perform SAP Basis administration. 

The migration to SAP S/4HANA is hard.

We've been using it for one year. It is deployed on-premises and in the cloud.

At present, it seems very stable because it is in the cloud.

The scalability depends on the tier you have. You may need to pay more as you scale up.

I have 10 administrators and 7 customers using S/4HANA at present. Our objective is to scale, but it's difficult because customers are scared to migrate to S/4HANA.

We used R/3 before S/4HANA. We switched to S/4HANA in order to stay with SAP solutions.

The initial deployment is difficult, and migration is hard when big data is involved. For a medium company, the initial deployment can take six to seven months, or maybe even one year to get it done perfectly.

For maintenance, you would need two or three people for a medium company.

Depending on the client, we have deployed it ourselves or have done so with the help of an integrator.

It is an expensive solution. On a scale from one to five, with five being the most expensive, I would rate the price at four.

I would rate SAP S/4HANA at eight on a scale from one to ten.

We use this solution for ERP in our business. The solution is deployed on-prem. We have a backup on the cloud through Azure.

The most valuable feature is the detail in all of the processes. The solution captures our policies and enables us to implement our policies in SAP. There are different models that address our needs. We have also implemented SuccessFactors for our performance, which is for capital management.

It's a very vast product. It meets almost all our needs.

The Capex and Opex could be improved. It would be nice if they cut back on the cost. Otherwise, it's a very good product.

We moved to S4HANA in 2020. We have used SAP for a long time.

It's very stable. Once you do the right sizing for the infrastructure that is running on the hardware, on the storage, you are good to go. We are running on Hyper Converged. Most of the time, people get the sizing wrong.

If you run out of resources, you may start to experience some slowness. But once you size it right, they're good to go and there aren't any issues.

It's scalable.

For technical support, we recruited a lot of guys who have experience with SAP. We also have support for users. In-house, we're developing our skills so that we can address the needs of some immediate users. 

For needs that we can't address, we escalate to support. Other organizations provide that third-level support. But the second level has addressed needs from our super users and other users within the organization.

With SAP, you need to have total planning. Once you have the total planning, SAP is easy to deploy. When people complain that they failed in their deployment, it's because they didn't go the extra mile in planning and leaving no stone left unturned. If you plan it well, you'll have an enjoyable and successful deployment.

The price could be lower.

I would rate this solution 9 out of 10.

My client is a biomedical company that sells medical devices. I use Tricentis Tosca to automate SAP.

SAP S/4HANA is a very easy-to-use and user-friendly solution.

The solution’s stability could be improved.

I rate the solution a seven out of ten for stability.

I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.

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

Many look for companies and partners who can help them implement SAP S/4HANA. So, we help in the implementation phase. We provide ongoing support as well.

The new features introduced by SAP S_4HANA are the ones I find to be valuable.

The support and price of the solution need to be improved. The solution should incorporate some new innovations.

I have been using SAP S/4HANA for a decade. My company has a partnership with SAP.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten. We have small, medium, and enterprise-sized clients using the solution.

I rate the technical support an eight out of ten. There are some problems with the support provided for the solution, so it is not quite easy. It takes some time for them to offer us support.

Positive

On a scale of one to ten for initial setup, where one is difficult, and ten is easy, I rate initial setup as ten since it is very easy.

The deployment process took about ten months. We need six people for implementation, which includes one or two system architects to handle the technical field, while the others are mostly business consultants. For maintenance, we have a team of about 20 people to support our customer base.

The solution is worth the money.

I rate the pricing a ten on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is too expensive. It is an expensive tool.

Those planning to use the solution need to fully understand it because it's not quite fit for most customers. Overall, I rate the product a ten out of ten.

We are consultants who help supervise our customers' implementation projects. Two of our customers use S4HANA. The older ones are on the ECC platform.

We found that the implementing partners themselves are struggling with S4HANA's features. It's not an exact translation of the older ECC, so SAP has taken a new route to do things with S4HANA. Maybe it's a good product, but the implementing partners also like to have an in-depth understanding of the full feature set the product offers. There are areas where even the implementer has to go back to set, which takes time, so that's one of our major concerns.

The older implementations were cloud-based, but one is happening now in one of the larger utilities, which sells services to around 4 million consumers. That's an ongoing project that hasn't gone live yet. This will be the real test. In a year, we'll know, and we can give more feedback.

Another complaint I have is that the screen source is disjointed. When I say this, I'm speaking from a user experience perspective. I don't know the S4HANA database, so I can't say if it's good or bad. I am sure that S4HANA would have certain limitations compared to Oracle, which is the gold standard for databases. Maybe there are some challenges in the backend, but I don't dwell on those because I'm not a technician. But the graphical interface requires improvement, and its flow should be very smooth. 

Also, the Fiori app is very basic. They need to become richer because people tend to use Fiori to access the S4HANA application to save on license costs. Fiori gives you access because it's a web client, and they market it as an app. It's not really a full-fledged app, but the roadmap has to be cleared from SAP. And when its capabilities improve, it gives a native app experience when people use Fiori.

I haven't been using S4HANA for long. It's been two years now.

S4HANA is relatively stable, but it's not as stable as ECC was. ECC had a long time to mature, so S4HANA still has a few years to go before it can achieve the level of stability that we've come to expect from SAP.

We've primarily relied on the local implementers for support, and there are challenges whenever they need to refer back to SAP's own technical support. It usually takes longer than expected in many cases. Sometimes they're pretty fast, but they're usually not, which is a serious concern.

We've worked with three of the biggest products in the ERP segment: S4HANA, Oracle EBS, and Microsoft Dynamics AX. Microsoft Dynamics is pretty straightforward. It's not as complex and offers a good user experience, whereas SAP through Fiori gives a certain level of user experience, but that's not as good as what Microsoft offers. But the rich line where you go through the desktop license — that user interface is still cumbersome. It's not as user-friendly I must say. On the other hand, Oracle is the middle of the two. I won't say that it's as good as Microsoft's user experience. However, while it is a bit more complex than Microsoft, it's not as complex as SAP. 

I would currently rate S4HANA seven out of 10. We tell our clients that SAP's roadmap shows us that S4HANA will mature in time. It won't happen tomorrow. They have to make an informed decision whether they want to live with certain delays in getting certain fixes or go with another solution. SAP is such a big name, so half the time, people are willing to live with those delays with the expectation that things will get better in a year or two. SAP is a trusted name, and I'm sure they must be doing something now to get S4HANA up to speed. I hope they understand that.

We are in the food business so the solution helps with our business processes as well as the financial aspect - sales, purchasing, manufacturing - all the core business processes across all these modules. I'm the vice president corporate IT and we are customers of SAP. 

I think primarily it helped us work out our out-of-the-box best practices which was a huge benefit. It meant that we tailored our processes in line with those of the standard out- of-the-box solution. And I think overall it has given us much more visibility on our processes, on the data that is produced as a reservable process.

I think technically it's a very responsive, comprehensive and optimized solution. It's very fast and the S4 version is much more user friendly on the UI side than the previous versions and it basically provides a better experience. Everything is there and it's up to the user to put it to use. 

Every business has some unique requirements which can mean customizations are required. What I'd really like to see is the development of an industry specific solution for the food industry, in particular the supply and demand side that's very critical to us, given that there are issues with products that have a shorter shelf life.

I've been using this solution for two years. 

My key advice would be to get down your processes first before putting any new system in place. It's important to re-engineer the processes and streamline them before implementing IT solutions, whether it's SAP or any other thing. It's the process side that needs to be dealt with first. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

I use the solution in the retail and manufacturing industry.

All the modules available in the product are very useful. We have access to all types of reports in a single solution.

The solution is quite expensive.

I have been using the solution for two years.

The product is stable.

I rate the product’s scalability a ten out of ten.

The initial setup is easy for someone familiar with the solution.

We deployed the solution three years ago in our organization. Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.