SAP ERP Reviews

It's for production planning, logistics, supply chain, and tasks. It is operations oriented with logistics planning and material creation.

Our company has been using the product for over ten years now.

The capacity planning, which is useful to see what has been planned and the time that is needed. It is also easy to shift plans or production planning. It provides one overview.

It needs to incorporate the new features from the SAP S/4HANA release, such as, utilizing data processes, which is quite nice. Also, SAP S/4HANA has a good visualization feature that should be added to this product.

The stability has been quite good. Since I have been working with it, there hasn't been much downtime. Most of the time, there has not been problems.

Check what features you need, which features the solution solves, and look at features are already in the product.

When selecting a vendor, look at the pricing, as well as the support and their knowledge.

We're using it for accounting, materials management, and sales and distribution. We are happy with SAP solutions. We are in the dairy products industry here in Chile, and there are good solutions for SAP in this industry.

The best improvement that we have seen using SAP solutions is that it shortens the cycle when creating financial reports. Before we installed SAP solutions, we had to do about 10 days of work to create the account reports for the managerial board. Now, ita takes about three days of work to do it. We are able to give information to the board in a more agile way.

The most valuable feature is the security. We have a very small IT team in our company, so a lot of the maintenance has to be done by the provider. So SAP gives us the maintenance and software solutions that we need.

They are not making a big effort to make it easy to integrate solutions from other vendors. It's not easy at all. When you have solutions from other vendors, SAP is not doing a good job integrating them.

SAP is giving us the solutions that they provide. They buy companies. They buy solutions. And they expect that we will choose the solutions that they buy. I suppose that's the reason that they are not making a big effort in making it easy to work with solutions from other vendors. I imagine Oracle is the same. 

Integration is what they can do better.

It works well. In our company, we don't have issues with stability. We haven't had any in 10 years, and that's a long time.

We don't have scalability problems. We can go 100 times our volume of transactions and we won't have any problems with it. We are not a very big shop so we don't have any problems, nor do we think that in the future we are going to have trouble with it.

We don't have problems with support. However, it's not as good as it used to be. In the past, they gave better support. I imagine they want you to go to Gold Support, or Platinum, or Titanium Support. We are using Standard Support, and it's good for us. We don't need anything more for the time being.

We were using an ERP that didn't have a big company behind it. The company started to have financial problems, the stock price went from $200 to about 10 cents. So we thought the solution would no longer be supported, and we didn't want to have our financials and materials management in software that didn't have a big company behind it.

So we started looking at ERP solutions in our industry. Here in Chile, the best option was SAP ERP. We spoke with people in the same industry in Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. They had no problems with it, so it was the natural option for us to go with ERP from SAP.

When selecting a vendor the most important factor is the vendor's availability. We don't want to find that our provider has problems with availability. When we have a problem, they have to have a solution. The provider has to have a lot of clients that are similar to us, and it has to have been providing the solution for a long time. That way, if we are going to have problems, somebody has had them before and there will already be solutions for them.

I was involved in the setup and it was not easy. We had to bring a technician from another country, from Brazil. He had to come for three to four weeks to do the installation. So it wasn't easy at all.

But once they did it, they documented it. So today, it's not that hard because we have everything written. Today, we can install another system and do it with internal IT staff. So we learned from the process.

PeopleSoft was on our shortlist at that time, although today it's Oracle. But they made it very hard for us to go with them because they didn't want to do meetings. They didn't respond to our calls. That was the worst kind of vendor you can find when you are looking for a new one.

There was another, Meccano, here in Chile. It wasn't on the same scale as SAP ERP. So we went for the sure bet and went with SAP.

Check and double-check the fine print of the contract. Also, find a hardware provider that can scale to the volume of your business, and have a hardware provider that already has implemented solutions. In our case, IBM made a mistake when sizing the server that we needed and we had three months of performance problems. It wasn't the fault of SAP, it was the fault fo IBM. It was a bad way to start with a new system, but they didn't have enough experience in sizing the server for the solution.

I give the solution an eight out of 10. Everything works well enough, but something that could be better is their ability to work with customer's processes in the way the customer does them. I understand that they propose best practices, but when you have been in your industry for 50 years, you know what the best practices are. So you are not always going to change your process because your ERP provider thinks there are better ways.

We run our entire business from order receipt to invoicing. We also do manufacturing, purchasing, invoice control, billing, and reporting on SAP.

It integrates everything into one process.

There will always be something within our business that it won't fit.

The scalability is good.

They have dealt with our issues well. The technical support is good.

Think of processes as not being linear. Think of them as being three dimensional. You have to consider not just what you want to achieve out of processes, but also if there are secondary consequences.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Whether the product is compatible with SAP.

European migration in the 2000's was the main reason to change. The legacy mainframe bespoke application was difficult to maintain.

We were able to consolidate various obsolete IT systems 15 years ago in the context of merging several companies into a more integrated business.

Finance view across functions has been valuable. The platform has been used to automate transactional processes.

The ergonomics of ECC were poor and unattractive to newcomers, as businesses expect process streamlining.

I use SAP for logistics transactions. I test SAP transactions to make sure they work correctly and train colleagues who are SAP users.

As our Warehouse Management System, SAP efficiently manages our warehouse operations in real-time.

The most valuable features are its worldwide reach.

Although you can use SAP as a Warehouse Management System, and you don’t need any other program for that purpose, it is not enough as a Transportation Management System. You need another program which is integrated with SAP. I think this is an area where SAP should improve. It should be work as a Transportation Management System.

As a manager/team leader and developer with a strong technical background, I work with all aspects of the system in various industries and use cases.

SAP ECC consolidates five to seven back-office systems under one platform in our organization.

The power of ABAP Development Tools is the main valuable feature in the SAP ECC system. Every couple of years SAP upgrades ABAP technology significantly, which facilitates developers' work.

The user interface has room for improvement. SAP is working on it and the improvements are on the way.

I encountered issues due to human error. SAP support solved the problems. Technical support for customers has improved a lot. It includes live chat support so, in some cases, you can get answers to solve your problem immediately.

SAP ECC is not cheap but I consider it the best system for managing an organization's data and processes.

SAP ERP is the best product for managing all back-office processes in a large organization. All data is stored in a single system which includes one database.

We use two modules. Materials Management (MM) handles the procurement-to-payment process, from inventory through final invoice receipt and verification. Master Data Governance (MDG) centrally creates, changes, and distributes or consolidates master data across the complete enterprise system landscape.

It gives us full control over each change, to the level of the individual field in a master record, including certificates.

MDG provides a central location for governance of the creation/updating processes of master data. It allows you to change several fields in the same object. For example, we can change a field on the purchasing view and change another field on an accounting view to the same material at the same time.

The UI could use improvement.

It runs our company. We try to put as much into the system to have data consistency. Heavy integration is available with all types of systems, and we use it.

It gives one answer to questions. That is the beauty of an integrated system. Everybody is using it. 

The new Visual Enterprise functionalities: They give an intuitive approach to data and make communication between engineering and production easy.

Improvements to the UI. The UI is pretty old, but this will change with the upcoming release of S.4.

It needs a more complete guidance with complete processes. Right now, it only has single transactions.