SAP BW4HANA Reviews

We are a service provider and we provide SAP services to our clients. I am a consultant and I offer SAP BW4HANA as a data warehouse, used for retail business.

The reports being generated by this product are used by the business to clarify profit and loss on the orders that they have placed.

If you have a large set of orders, it is very difficult to track and manage them. This product helps you to distinguish the processes and provides visibility such as checking where products are in the process at any given time.

It provides information about billing, delivery, and all of the aspects related to an order. You can generate monthly reports or yearly reports, including charts, as needed.

The most valuable feature is that we can transform a huge amount of data and apply business logic as per the requirements.

The speed of operations could be a little faster.

We have been working with SAP BW4HANA for approximately seven years.

This is a very stable solution and we use it on a daily basis.

SAP BW4HANA is scalable. We have approximately 5,000 users.

The technical support is good.

I was not using another similar product prior to this one.

With a deployment plan, it takes approximately a year and a half to complete. The complexity of the initial setup is such that we need help from SAP.

The number of people required for deployment and maintenance depends on how big the project is. It takes between 30 and 40 people initially if it's a small to medium-sized project. For maintenance, 10 people would be enough.

We required help from SAP for the implementation.

We use this product in conjunction with the new solution, SAP Analytics Cloud.

My advice for anybody who is considering SAP BW4HANA is that it's a very stable product, and if you are looking at a huge volume of data that you want to process daily or any similar kind of task, then this is definitely a good solution.

At this point, I can't think of any additional features that I would like to see in the next release.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I was a developer.

We use this solution for sales reporting and financial reporting.

I like that it's quite quick.

I would like more integration.

Cost is a factor. It could be improved.

The installation could be simplified.

I have been using SAP BW4HANA for seven years.

The version that I dealt with was 7.4, and the company I am in now is using the latest version.

I am just starting to use that now.

SAP BW4HANA is very stable.

It's a scalable solution. I don't have any issues with the scalability of this product.

We have 200 to 300 users in our organization who use it.

I have contacted technical support, they are generally very good.

I used standard reporting, which didn't meet our needs and we had to go through a data warehouse.

The initial setup is quite complex.

We are a worldwide team, we need quite a few people to manage this solution. We have a team of eight to manage this solution in Europe and close to the same to manage it in Asia. 

We have a team of 14 or 15 to manage this solution worldwide.

In general, it's quite expensive.

I would recommend this solution in certain circumstances, but for others, probably not. It all depends on what the use case was.

I would rate SAP BW4HANA a seven out of ten.

Its direct approach is the most valuable. You get more real time and capabilities than BW. 

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.

SAP BW4HANA is a relatively new product from the SAP side, but we have been running almost a two years project now and moving from BW to BW4HANA. So, it is a completely new build of the entire environment. We just completed that in November last year.

We have used BW and HANA Native. BW4HANA is definitely much better than BW. It is also much better than HANA Native.

It depends on your experience, the approach, and so on. I took over the project when it was already started. It had been running for two or three months. I would have approached it differently if I was there during the kickoff. It is challenging when you are too much focused on old products, and you don't have a good model in place or a good understanding of the business model. For me, it was not so difficult. I did it a lot in my former positions and during many years of experience in multidimensional data modeling, but for most of my colleagues and my team members, it was quite challenging because they had more experience in reporting subs, SQL subs, and so on and not so much experience in data modelings and so on. 

In general, you need to acquire experience in this. There are not so many in the market. I also had a bad experience with consulting companies. I had to correct them and technically detail the process for how to do this.

It is simply the mindset. When we approach it with the mindset of how it was done in BW or HANA, you get a process that is not really efficient. When object-oriented approaches are not taken into consideration, everything gets built a hundred times, and instead of being more object-oriented, it gets quite complex. It always requires good modeling and an understanding of the business requirements, which can be quite challenging.

We started as early birds from the SAP side. We got this entire suite for free. I cannot really talk about the price because we didn't have to pay anything.

It makes sense for all enterprise companies that currently have BW in place to move over because BW4HANA has more reasonable performance, and it helps you in getting reporting. An enterprise can manage the reporting on this one product. In my previous company, I had to do and review reporting for end-users at the aggregated management level, not only at the transactional level. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. It is definitely an eight for reporting low and high at the management level as compared to others, but it is also dependent on the design. I had to provide and I still need to provide a lot of things knowing how my former colleagues have approached those things. From my point of view, it is never always the product, it is the experience we have in the design and context. BW4HANA is definitely much better than BW. It is also much better than HANA Native. It is definitely the right tool in terms of reporting and security on top of the SAP companies. Most of the companies are SAP companies. If you need an additional reporting tool on top, this is a solution.

We use the solution in a data warehouse.

Some of the main features of this solution are that it uses HANA and it has good performance.

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

I have been using the solution for approximately five years.

The solution is stable.

There are no issues with scalability with this solution.

The installation is complex.

We used the SAP team to do the installation for us. We have a vendor who takes care of the maintenance of the server. 

As an investment, the solution is very expensive. We pay 72% every year to SAP. Additionally, we pay for support for the solution and a vendor to do maintenance.

I have evaluated Talend, Azure Cloud, and Google Cloud which have better features.

I would not recommend the solution because they have not upgraded their technology.

I rate SAP BW4HANA a seven out of ten.

We are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients.

The most valuable features are the speed of reporting and the HANA database.

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.

I have been using this solution for a bit less than two years, from around the time that it came out.

Stability is something that needs to be improved. There are too many SAP nodes to implement on a regular basis to get everything working.

It is a scalable solution but it depends on the hardware. Our clients vary in size from small to very large organizations, although for this product, most of them are at least of medium size.

The technical support is okay, although it can be improved because sometimes it takes too long to get the correct expert to deal with the issue. Essentially, the wait at the first level of support causes us to lose time.

The initial setup is rather complex. It can be up and running in two or three days but it takes a week to have it perfectly implemented.

We implement both on-premises and cloud-based deployments for SAP BW 4HANA.

Our in-house team does the implementation and deployment for our customers.

This is a good product and one that I recommend implementing. 

As we look at the information we have for the cloud solution, it would be helpful to have something more clear from the vendor in terms of strategy. More information on the direction of the data warehouse solutions, going forward, would be helpful. Today, there is a market for HANA both on-premises and in the cloud, but the data warehouse cloud solution that is coming up is quite different.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The most valuable aspect of this solution is that the infrastructure is easy to understand. 

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

I have been using this solution for two to three years. 

Stability and scalability are both good.

The setup requires a specialist but it's not too complex.

We have to pay extra in addition to licensing. Migration to HANA has costs that are higher than expected. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

It costs a lot for a company to invest in SAP. It could be hard for a company to invest in it. It should be a little cheaper, it would raise the score to a nine.  

If a customer wants to save costs, they should move their infrastructure from on-premise to public cloud. 

1.We use it to generate operational analysis for our internal operations, for example, HR analysis, financial analysis, etc. 

2.We use SAP BW4HANA to calculate data and feed to Tableau / SAP BO to visualize data.

1. SAP BW4HANA's memory computing help us calculate into much more detail data  such as accouting document level. And it's very fast.

2. We have capabliity to realize requirements related to big data, real-time anlysis.

1.It can calculate big data. One year ago, SAP BW took us a lot of time around four hours to finish our process chains, but now it's better. 

2.It can calculate data in detail. Before we could not calculate financial documents and accountant documents in detail, we could not do it at a document level but now we can. This is the most important feature. It also has predictive analysis funationlity.

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.

I have been using this solution for more than one year. 

We can draw down to the document level for a document. The problem is that when that document records are bigger than the platform, it causes the platform to slow down. 

I have opened tickets with technical support. They've been good. Sometimes they take a while to respond. 

The initial setup was complex.

I would recommend SAP BW/4HANA.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. Not a ten because it's expensive and its ecosystem is not very open.

I am a consultant and this is one of the solutions that I use for my clients.

In general, my clients use the dashboard and reporting services. They use it for modeling sales and service, material management, and stock management. They have automated reports that are sent daily by email.

The environment depends on the client.

The most valuable feature is the dashboard.

When using BW/4HANA, then is no performance degradation with Big Data.

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 have been working with SAP BW/4HANA for eight years.

BW is a stable solution as long as it is on HANA. Otherwise, some applications with Big Data will result in performance issues.

It is scalable but it depends on the server.

I have dealt with technical support and they have been good.

The installation of this solution is not simple, although configuring it is not a problem. 

It is better to have help from integrators or consultants for the installation.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to first follow the basics. It is possible that you will want some enhancements but you have to start at the beginning and start with the basic practice for modeling.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

The solution is used for the reporting on various dashboards for analytical purposes.

HANA is based on a column store, and it is very effective for reading the data. 

BW has a major advantage because most of the activities on the BW system are reading data rather than writing data. 

The product, overall, is very good.

The solution is easier to maintain than traditional SAP products.

All of the information that is provided by the solution for managing the HANA database is excellent.

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.

We've been using the solution for the past two years.

We have found the solution to be quite stable. It doesn't crash. It's been great.

If a company needs to expand the solution, they can definitely scale up. It's quite easy to do so.

We've reached out to technical support in the past. We reach out when there are some bugs or some specific issues on the product. They are very good. We've been satisfied with the level of support.

I wasn't a part of the initial setup, so I can't speak to the implementation.

We are SAP partners.

The solution is deployed on a scale-out environment, which involves five nodes of 1TB each. We have four worker nodes and one standby node.

I'm not the consumer of this product. I'm an administrator of it. I'm basically supporting this project but I'm not the actual customer.

I would definitely recommend the solution. It is the way forward if an organization is already in the SAP ecosystem. It's good to adapt to it sooner rather than later. I would definitely advise companies to implement it.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten. 

The primary use case of this solution is for our ERP purposes.

From an ERP point of view and a functionality point of view, it works very well. The benefits are in that of financial costing and material management.

The only component that is not fully known is the HCM (Human Capital Management), but we have gone with SuccessFactors.

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.

I have been using this solution for just over three months and we have just gone into production.

So far, we have not had any issues. This solution is stable.

We have not had the opportunity to test the scalability, as we are retail at the moment and using it as a storage system.

At this point, we have only three users.

It is being used daily, but we plan to use it more extensively in the future.

We have only contacted technical support once and they were helpful. Their response time was also good.

The initial setup was straightforward and similar to other ERP deployments.

It took three months to deploy this solution.

We had the help of a system integrator.

I would look at the Cloud option. Although the Cloud is not mature enough at this time, people who are planning to deploy this solution perhaps a year down the road may benefit from it. The Cloud may be something they would want to consider.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.