What needs improvement with SAP BW4HANA?

The interface could be more user-friendly, as we often need to do low-level coding to get things done.

I would like to see more modern functionalities, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning components. Integratiing BW/4HANA with AI tools is more like exporting data rather than true integration. Integration means seamless integration, where data is stored in BW/4HANA and can be sent to other AI/ML tools. I consider it exporting data to a separate system, not true integration. True integration involves a seamless workflow from one system to another system, where changes in one system impact the other positively. BW/4HANA stores data and sends it to AI/ML systems, but this isn't integration.

There should be a direct pipeline from Azure to SAP. Users must be able to deploy the pipeline and pull the tables directly.

There are few areas of improvement: * There's the complexity in migration from BW to BW/4HANA, especially with data migration. * Also, the cost of ownership is higher. It's resource-intensive, and naturally, that increases costs. * Additionally, BW/4HANA is SAP-specific, a vendor lock-in. It makes sense for customers in an SAP environment, but if they run an Oracle suite, for example, they might need to consider if BW/4HANA aligns with their organizational standards. * Finally, finding skilled BW/4HANA specialists can be a challenge, as it requires not only BW knowledge but development expertise as well.

SAP BW4HANA has issues with its integration capabilities, specifically when it comes to non-SAP products, since you have to use middleware tools in such scenarios. The integration capabilities of the product with other non-SAP tools should be improved. I want to see improvements in the support offered by SAP. I don't see SAP actively supporting the solution now, and I believe that it is because of its new stack of solutions. SAP is not actively supporting SAP BW4HANA, but a better support from SAP would be appreciated.

One thing that could be enhanced in SAP BW4HANA is the user interface for process chains. Currently, it can be viewed in both the old and new interfaces, but making the new interface more developer-friendly would streamline the experience and eliminate the need for both interfaces.

SAP BW4HANA is a standard product that works as a very applicable system for our company. SAP BW4HANA aims to reduce all the problems and issues related to SAP BW. SAP BW4HANA is helpful in areas where my company sees any issues with the product, like the transaction data, SAP SAC, integration-related areas, or non-SAP aspects. The product is a stable and scalable tool. The cost of the product might be an area that might introduce some restrictions or limitations to customers, making it one of the aspects where improvements are required.

We tried integrating SAP BW4HANA with several platforms, but none worked properly. It lacks customization options. It's neither flexible nor elastic, making simple job creation difficult. There's no support for developing data cards or similar functionalities. Its data management and endpoint data governance features are lacking. We cannot integrate with third-party tools like Python or advanced integration options. You can't fine-tune tables within BW or generate specific views or reports. The product roadmap and features of SAP BW4HANA are ugly and need improvement.

The product needs to improve with more performance and fewer data layers.

The tool is not cloud-compatible. It is an on-premise tool. SAP is bringing other tools into its place.

I need a more efficient tool. I need more competitive tools, like Microsoft Power BI. The tool is not easy to use for an end user. I need more analytics tools, especially optimizing the AfO tool for data analytics, since it is a critical point for us.

The solution is not scalable. It does not have a data streaming feature as well.

SAP BW4HANA is a new package with a steep learning curve. I am currently taking courses to familiarize myself with the features so that I can manage them smoothly. I would like to be able to design new reports in a future release. The price has room for improvement.

The licensing cost could be made better.

There are certain areas, for example, HR or project systems, where the BW native adapters are still not fully enabled for you to have the standard offerings. Support could be more reliable. It's quite agile. It is an expensive product.

I love this product and have been working on SAP products for many years but the solution needs to be more user-friendly with an improved UI, particularly if you compare it to what Snowflake is offering.

From a technical perspective, it could be even more related to legacy systems. The connectivity requirement is quite high and requires systems that are up-to-date. There's a lot of competition. If a customer isn't already using SAP, they should also consider other tools.

It's complicated to use. You need to spend a lot of time learning about it. The interface could be improved. It's not intuitive to build a data model and use their ETL tools. The product is complex, so I think it could be simplified.

It has a lot of problems in terms of technical architecture. If I change something in BW, a lot of development becomes inactive. The development time for any developer is quite huge compared to other products. The setup is a bit complex. If I want to have good reporting, then I have to buy a separate license. I have to pay for separate things. That's quite irritating.

There's one area where other data warehousing vendors have an upper edge, i.e., data lake and big data analytics. SAP 's own data lake solution, SAP IQ is still trying to match the market leaders in this area, still all long way to go before it can compete with the other vendors. Majority of customers according to Gartner peer review insights are preferring established SaaS based platforms, i.e. AWS, Databricks, Microsoft Azure Data Lake, or other providers. These vendors have been making rapid strides compared to SAP, it is trying hard to bridge the gap with other vendors in this area. The ever evolving information technology landscape within organizations across the world is becoming vendor, and technology agnostic and cloud first. SAP needs to embrace an open environment, by opening up its crown jewel in EDW, SAP BW/4 solution to third party applications like Azure Synapse Analytics, AWS Redshift, or Google Big Query, and other cloud connectors, open-source APIs to connect natively, this will surely enable it to become the next generation enterprise warehouse solution. Many customers are currently relying on third party integration solutions to integrate data from disparate data sources with SAP BW/4 solution.

BW/4HANA could improve query optimization. For example, there could be an error message that pops up when you hover over it if any query fails. That would make it easier to find out what went gone wrong. Guided SAP help tools would make it easier for us to go forward.

The solution is not easy to implement. It requires a lot of learning at the beginning. I would like to see the features be simplified.

The speed of operations could be a little faster.

I would like more integration. Cost is a factor. It could be improved. The installation could be simplified.

Other competitors provide better solutions that are more up to date with current technology. For example, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

They have taken out a few BW functionalities when they redesigned this. The way of multi-dimensional thinking and star schema got a little bit lost. It may be because of the cost, but certain functionalities that were previously implemented from the BW side should come back again in the whole product. It is a young product. It is version 2.0. In time, I'm pretty sure they will come back again because otherwise, it limits the potential of the product, and I have to do a lot of modeling towards that direction. For me, the analytics focus is too much. It is not cube-oriented in that way, so its functionality is limited. It is not really technically limited in the back end; it is more limited in the front end. It has a data-mining mindset for SQL developers. The navigational attributes should be easy. It needs to be built in models. I see the data mark cube or understanding that the composite provider needs to be models in a cube coming back. The multi-dimensional star schema approach and the reporting need to be done as well as possible to leverage the star scheme below. This is definitely not understood by many consultants and even composite providers for star schema. They always think in terms of flat tables, which is limiting. You need to build the right dimensions, objects, and so on. If you can build this in BW4HANA, then you have this understanding that BW4HANA is not forcing you in this direction, but it should force you a bit better in this direction. Maybe a few elements which were in use in BW should come back again. It would help the community to determine the direction to build on the cube. You can have maybe 50 elements, and then you can expand it to what you need by leveraging navigation. So far, this functionality is a little bit limited in the tool, and it is not thought through, but I think it will come. They should also be adding more capabilities for the transformation between different objects. In BW, this is currently limited, especially towards composite providers. It is a bit complex basically in the building. You have to have a lot of knowledge as well as know how to do it better because it is a bit different from BW. There is not too much expertise currently in the consulting markets. Many are trying to build something, but it may be based on their knowledge of what they have from the BW and HANA side. You have to find the right mix from both of them at this time. We also have HANA Native. These are our two different sync sources basically, and we have approaches to connect nicely, but it is hard to manage your team because a lot of coaching is required.

I find the migration from an existing BW platform to be quite difficult. It is quite cumbersome for our customers to migrate to BW 4HANA. The impact that it has on the ECC/ERP system is a problem because they are relying solely on the ODP tool to perform the extract. It takes too long to escalate problems from the first level of support.

Pricing would be a good improvement. A lot of customers think that it's very expensive and support is especially very expensive.

We already had a lot of cubes built-in based on SAP BW. We hope these BW cubes can support real-time anlysis without migration to SAP HANA modeling.

The dashboard should be simplified and made easier for exploration and decision making. Some customers have said that they would like to use the dashboard to send themselves data in an Excel file directly by email.

I can't think of anything the solution needs in terms of features to make it stronger. It's a great overall solution. The solution does occasionally get a few bugs, but this is typical for any product.

The HCM needs improvement, but as a company, they have stopped any development on this. In the next release, I would like to see their BI component introduced with a mobile version, as it is not currently present.

This solution is very costly compared to competitors on the market, which stops some people from implementing it. SAP has to be more customer-centric. They are aware of the standard business use cases but if changes are made then they are not aware of them, which makes the product more difficult to support. You receive a standard product, which is fine, but it needs to be made more customizable. Connecting multiple sources is a challenge because you have to go through a lot of different setups. For example, if you want to use FreeSQL then BW4/HANA lacks the support. Some of the options that exist are very complex, which makes it tough to integrate.

In the on-premise world, you have releases every six months or every year depending on what is required but in the cloud, you have new releases depending on what part of the ERP needs to be enhanced. This happens frequently. Depending on the module, you have sometimes weekly updates. Usually monthly but depending on what is being developed because the people that didn't use the cloud version are very keen on adopting new ways to do business processes. In that regard, everything that is in the cloud should be dynamic. They should keep up the pace because you will get the best version of this tool that gathers all the knowledge that is coming from many sources or many customers. It is continuously improving. I would like to see easier connectivity with other tools. No matter what, everything is in the cloud. All this stuff is in the tool but the communication between the tool is not so clear. Everything can be done, but you need to do several steps in order to get these things done. My recommendation is to improve connectivity. It should have a common kind of data model that the data is mapping to connecting applications.

The performance for the reporting is very poor, there is no graphical report. The price to performance ratio is less. It's also very complex, for example, if I want to make a simple change I have to spend a huge amount of effort. I cannot integrate it with my other tools. It's not possible to do something in the predictive analysis. Mobile reporting and automated reports are also not available. I am interested in seeing more graphical reports. SAP Cloud Analytics is an immature product on the market. They have started something to showcase to the customer that SAP also can do the graphical reporting, but still they need a lot of time. They should have similar features to Tableau and Qlik.