SAP S/4HANA Cloud Reviews

We have some interim back-end systems that we want to protect. We plan to bring in an API management system to take care of all the traffic and everything. This way, the consumers will not have direct access to the back-end system. We are evaluating what makes the most sense because, in our organization, there are multiple technologies. However, our principle is to keep the API gateway closest to the back-end gateway.

Currently, our organization is using SAP S/4HANA Cloud extensively for core back-end processes, and we have plans to increase its usage in other areas as well. Looking at the trends, it is processing more than ten million transactions per month or per day. So, the probability is it may go up to ten times.

Our organization's core back-end is on-prem SAP, and we are on a journey of transformation. Since SAP S/4HANA Cloud is a SaaS application, it is already providing a lot of standard out-of-the-box features, which is interesting. We don't have to build in a lot of bolt-on customizations.

I'm just discovering SAP S/4HANA Cloud right now. Although, in the next release, I would like to see a feature where it allows integration with more platforms.

I have you been using it for one year. I am using the latest version, which is 2.28.

The on-prem solution is very stable because we have used it for the last two decades. The public cloud version is something that we are currently evaluating for transformation. However, with the pilot implementation, it is stable. There are around 1000+ users in my organization using this solution.

Scalability is pretty good. It runs on AWS again. So it has auto scalers. Therefore, scalability-wise, there are no issues.

Customer support is very quick.

The setup is straightforward. Since it is a SaaS application, it is fully managed by SAP. However, the customer also has some shared responsibilities, but a careful guide would be provided to make it user-friendly.

If those who are still on the on-prem version of it, then I recommend they start looking towards transforming into the cloud-based version. Because the on-prem version will be out of support by 2030, it's the right time to start looking at the validity stuff and try to move to the cloud-based version.

Overall, I would rate it a nine out of ten.

Its use cases are related to financial management, asset management, ERP, logistics, and sales.

It's a unified platform for finance and all the other fields, so it allows the finance team to control the other operations a lot better. It helps with real-time analysis of all the information of the company in one location.

Finance aspects of it and transportation management, asset management, and inventory management are valuable.

The pricing is way over any of the other ERPs, and the bank integrations are not perfect. There are a lot of costs for other implementations and integrations with Salesforce and other systems. Rather than being a fully-fledged system on its own like most of the other ERPs, it relies too much on developed integrations by the implementation partner.

In terms of additional features, the parent portal is a major miss out. There are no HR systems. I don't think any ERP is complete without an HRMS offering, but that's a separate system in SAP. It's missing in the public edition, and only in the private edition, it's available as an optional add-on. It's a huge limitation in the ERP system, and it was almost a deal-breaker for us.

I have been looking at the evaluation of it for about six months, and we just finished implementing it.

The platform itself is quite decent. It's relatively stable, but because it relies a lot on customizations, a lot of the customizations are sometimes not very stable.

It's very scalable. We have around 40 users working with this solution.

We haven't contacted them yet. We were working with an implementation partner, and they also had an implementation team from SAP directly, so many of our queries would be answered by them directly. We've just now entered the post-handover phase where we would have to reach out to technical support.

We had Tally and Zoho. We switched because Tally was just not a full ERP. It was just a basic ledger similar to an Excel sheet. Zoho was suitable for the manufacturing or trading industry. It was not suitable for a large organization or any complex organizational structure. It definitely was not suitable for all the things that we needed or anything beyond what a very small shop would have.

It was extremely complex and painful. We had to work with partners who had consultants in each of the modules being implemented, such as asset management, finance, and operations. There were over eight different consultants, even on the smallest project, and it was extremely painful compared to any other ERP system and platform.

It took us around three months. We initially contacted a partner who helped us with our requirements. We spent a couple of weeks just looking at our requirements before we signed the contract. After we signed the contract, we had two to three weeks for document review and evaluation of the current solution for the migration. It took us another month or so just to implement these modules. After that, it probably took us two weeks to migrate all our data over to the system, and then the changes required took another week or so. We had to make changes or do customizations where it just wasn't working for us, and then it took us another month just for the go-live of the final solution with full features.

In terms of maintenance, there is no real maintenance to be done because it's a SaaS product, but we have to maintain our integrations with banks and other things, which, in general, are quite difficult to maintain. Because a lot of the product relies on customizations, it's very difficult to maintain those integrations and customizations across platforms. In general, it's no different than Office 365, where they do updates themselves and maintain the software updates, but it's still a pain for us to maintain the customizations.

There were eight consultants. We had one consultant for each of the modules, and they were all on the payroll of the implementation partner. There were also resources involved from our company side. It took up way too much of our finance and executive team's time. IT was involved, but way too much of the finance and executive team was used. It was to an extent that it almost didn't let them complete their own job well, and they were spending way too much time with just the ERP consultant.

Its pricing is way over any of the other ERPs. I'd rate it one out of ten in terms of pricing.

Get a very good implementation partner because the prices of the subscription itself vary depending on the partner, and the price of the implementation, which is more than the price of the subscription for the first two years, would also vary significantly. The implementation partner does a lot of the work of implementing the system and making a lot of customizations, which are implemented automatically in a general ERP but need to be done in SAP. So, if you have a bad partner, it will be painful for you.

I'd rate SAP S/4HANA Cloud a six out of ten.

The most valuable feature of SAP S/4HANA Cloud is the uptime it provides from being on the cloud. We do not have to manage the solution. All the infrastructure management is done from their side.

The scalability of the solution could improve.

I have been using SAP S/4HANA Cloud for approximately two years.

The solution has high availability.

I rate the stability of SAP S/4HANA Cloud a seven out of ten.

I rate the scalability of SAP S/4HANA Cloud a seven out of ten.

The support I have received from SAP S/4HANA Cloud has been good.

I rate the support from SAP S/4HANA Cloud an eight out of ten.

Positive

Those who want to implement this solution need to determine the purpose for which they want to use it. It makes the most sense if they have their entire system based on SAP, they can opt for SAP S/4HANA Cloud. It is a highly advanced application. I would recommend that the team make their decision based on their specific needs and use cases. 

I rate SAP S/4HANA Cloud a seven out of ten.

I primarily use SAP S4HANA Cloud for production planning.

SAP S4HANA Cloud's production planning screens could be improved. In the next release, I would like SAP S4HANA Cloud to include a project team management tool.

I've been using SAP S4HANA Cloud for six months.

SAP S4HANA Cloud is stable, and its computational power and speed have improved in later versions.

SAP's documentation is really good.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I strongly recommend using SAP S4HANA Cloud as it's much better than competing ERP products. Also, if you have in-detail production processes, I would strongly suggest using the PP/DS module. I would give SAP S4HANA Cloud a rating of nine out of ten.

We use this solution to do a lot of mock up applications to mimic the user scenarios for a couple of our current clients. We try to use those scenarios to see how S/4HANA could be used as a system to better authorize the current client's ability.

I'm using version 1909. The cloud provider is AWS.

There are around 20 people using this solution in my organization.

We like the web portal or interface, which is great. The user experience is much better than the current traditional SAP landscape. Lots of business processes are simplified. There's less maintenance and less configuration effort needed. More importantly, the performance is good. Using the S/4HANA database could really dramatically improve the business performance on the database and could even change the business model overnight.

In terms of S/4HANA Cloud itself, we don't like the rate they charge us. It's pretty expensive. Maybe it's because of the individual instance that we paid for. I don't know whether this is also applicable for other commercial S/4HANA Cloud assistants, but for our training system, there are many bugs or things which didn't work in practice.

We didn't know how to figure it out, and if we posted any of those incidents to the SAP community through the SAP portal, usually SAP would ask what kind of license we had. It's not easy to facilitate the solution between us and SAP, so we have had to leave those issues open.

I've been using this solution for almost two years.

It's hard to say because we haven't implemented any S/4HANA solution for our clients, but from the experience of using that demo system, it's pretty stable. We don't have outages.

It's scalable. For a company that doesn't have experience with SAP, there could be more scalability. If they start a project from scratch, I think they could deploy the S/4HANA solution for the whole company. But if the company has the footprint of SAP in a test and it has pretty complicated IT solutions using the old SAP systems, starting with a small scope, like a pilot project, and then gradually enlarging the scale would be the best option.

I would rate this solution 3 out of 5.

I was not involved in the technical setup of S/4HANA, but from what I understand, it's pretty straightforward. It's almost like an out-of-box solution for us, but it also depends on what kind of use case you have for that system. If it's only for training, you probably don't pay that much attention to all the details, but if it's for a production system for the business, then there are a lot more things that you need to consider.

It all depends on what your needs are in regards to complexity of installment.

I would rate setup 4 out of 5, on a scale of extremely complicated to being very easy.

From the SAP documentation and the best practice webinars, the length of deployment depends on the size of the company and the complexity of their current IT landscape, and also how much data and volume that they want to deal with. It could range from half a year to a couple of years.

We only need one person to administrate the user access and give the IP address to everybody so they have access.

We are a consultant, so deployment was done in-house.

I would rate the ROI 3 out of 5.

Through the experience of another cloud demo system, we know that if we wanted to implement any SAP cloud solution to a potential client, like IBP or S/4HANA, that license cost would be really a big burden for many companies, even for a larger sized company. For instance, SAP charges the license cost per company's revenue size. So if you have a higher revenue, you pay a lot more than a medium or small company.

If clients want to have more sophisticated functionalities or add-ons, they pay additional fees.

I would rate the price 2 out of 5. It's very expensive.

I would rate this solution 4 out of 10. 

My advice is to evaluate the business case very carefully before implementing this solution.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud can be integrated with other non-SAP applications. Our company wants to elevate the core user experience and wants users to use the SAP favourite mobile applications.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud has improved our data management and user and stakeholder experiences. It has also enhanced our business partners, supplier and customer experiences.

In regards to storage, one of the other drivers that led us to implement SAP S/4HANA is that other SAP storage offerings, such as RISE with SAP and SAP BTP, do not offer the same user and customer experience or proper data management. As a result, it's difficult to find available competencies.

I like the SAP offerings and the standard best practices included in the SAP S/4HANA Cloud version.

Another valuable feature is the private cloud. If you are on a private cloud, the SAP S/4HANA allows you to use a desktop PC and customize the workings to your business needs. In addition, with SAP S/4HANA, you also have the choice to select your own Hyperscaler.

A challenge with SAP S/4HANA is that the proposition by SAP does not match the value realization. For example, SAP proposes more value for the cloud offering with RISE with SAP. This same approach should also be realized to the fullest extent for SAP S/4HANA.

We started the implementation of SAP S/4HANA in November 2021. 

The product is stable. It's not challenging, especially with extensive testing and multiple iterations. However, there is always a possibility of issues or surprises, but the product is stable immediately.

In terms of storage scalability, if it is in the cloud, SAP S/4HANA Cloud appears to offer some direct phasing, down phasing, and scalability. But, I have yet to come across a scalability situation on the customer side.

We have a great contract with SAP, so we have no challenges getting technical support. We know that SAP technical support works per their policy and whatever has been defined in the cloud agreement. So, we can connect with an expert and usually have an answer within 48 hours.

Positive

The initial setup of SAP S/4HANA Cloud was complex and wore me and my colleagues out. Value realizations are complex, and it was difficult finding out the actual value realization.

The licensing process for SAP S/4HANA Cloud has worked well and is usually completed before I decide on a project. Also, licensing is confidential between the supplier and the customers.

Regarding setup processes, I believe that a company should be clear about its vision and goals. A company should ensure that the technology they want to implement aligns with the vision they want to achieve in the next two or three years. If these things align, they should adopt this technology and see how many competencies they possess. So, for example, if the company doesn't have the technical competency in-house, it may be better to offload these tasks by leveraging completely managed services via the cloud or SAP.

I would rate this solution an eight. I would have rated it a 10 had I successfully gotten a value realization in a simpler way.

Our company wants the data to be collected from SAP S/4 SSP, and then we want to send the data to the data lake. We want to bring to the world analytics on the data collected from SAP. This includes the structured and non-structured data collected from SAP and data from social media.

We are into little segments and we are using SAP's little option. We are using five models in that S4HANA, and this is just the backend. On the front-end side, we are using both applications and both are integrated together.

The primary and secondary line views are very helpful.

The solution is reliable.

The scalability is very good.

The integration is very stable. We have 18 years of SAP experience and we simply have migrated to S4HANA. We are using SAP Best Practices within our business requirements and it works very well for using this approach.

Technical support has always been insightful and responsive.

There isn't anything I would want to improve on. It's a good solution.

There is a difference between the real-time synchronization of any application or the solution that's provided by the OEM. SAP is providing releases or notes frequently, so it's an ongoing activity. SAP is constantly providing small, small patches to upgrade everything. The release strategy is based on the OEM. It works fine for us, this approach.

The pricing is high.

We have used SAP for the last 17 years, however, recently, last year, we migrated into HANA.

The stability of the product is good. It doesn't crash or freeze. There are no bugs or glitches. The performance is reliable. 

We've never had issues with scalability. It's good. If a company needs to expand, it can do so.

We currently have 40 or more SAP users in our business. While we have over 700 employees, the backend application can only be used by corporate or regional team members.

Technical support has been great. We've used them in the past and have been satisfied with how they have helped us. 

I am also familiar with Oracle and Microsoft Dynamics. This product has a higher cost, however, it is the best option and therefore you get good value for money.

That said, our company is almost 20 years old and we adopted SAP about 18 years ago. We've pretty much always used it. 

The installation or implementation of this product takes around five months. It's about the process implementation. Therefore, whenever you will implement any application, you have to understand how it will fit into your business. You need to consider the business use cases and the user interactions. All of these tasks take time.

While we handled the solution's implementation in-house, we also had an in-house consultant who assisted us in the process. 

If you compare this product with the big players - like Oracle and Microsoft Dynamics - SAP is quite costly. That said, if you are talking about the solution, SAP is the number one option.

You do need to pay for a license. It's an architectural license based on maintenance costs. Every year we have to pay 22% of the purchase costs and maintenance costs. It's not a subscription-based model, it's a perpetual model.

I would recommend the solution to others. We have 18 years or so of experience with SAP and we've always found the solution to be excellent. We deeply understand SAP and SAP culture. We understand the processes and how to leverage everything for the betterment of our business. We're totally aligned with SAP.

I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

One of the advantages of this product is integration. It has a really fantastic integration. I always have a one-to-one with my integration consultants: doing the success factor integration with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, or doing other types of integrations. We have a lot of methods for integration: standard integration and customized integration with third parties. The integrations work well with no issues.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud vs Oracle: In Oracle, for example, you can easily install even Oracle 19c or the latest version in your laptop. You can test it, get it certified, and even look for the application, but it's really difficult to install Hana. It's really difficult to reach any testing environment. It's difficult to test the version.

I'm struggling to hire in my team. While I was with Oracle for 15 years as a senior manager for their support solution center in Smart Village, I didn't face that much of a struggle in hiring like what I'm facing now in SAP. This is because Oracle (like Microsoft) made their products available for downloading, testing, etc., but for SAP, it's difficult.

I've had sufficient time to evaluate ByD. It is going on the right track in terms of improvement: technical-wise and featurewise. There's nothing you need to improve in this solution's performance. There's nothing major in its essential or core features: in the FI or supply chain or procurement through the cloud. It's doing a great job.

Testing is the main thing I'd like to see improved.

An additional feature I'd like to see on SAP S/4HANA Cloud is the production application or module. For small to medium businesses, there's only a finance module and the standard non-finance module, e.g. supply chain, but there's no production planning. That is a factor. We need to use the smaller version of production planning with the smaller version of quality management. I hope to see this feature in the cloud application.

I've been using this solution for six years.

I see this application as really stable.

They need to improve SAP S/4HANA Cloud's scalability and make it like Oracle's. They need to do more about scalability. This is a major issue and they need to put more effort into it, but I think they are improving.

I don't have complaints about the support. They were able to point out the problem.

I evaluated Oracle.

I don't have much information about AWS, but it's booming. I hear a lot of customers moving to AWS because they say it's stable and has no major issues with it. I have more experience with SAP S/4HANA Cloud though, and it's fantastic. It's going very well. Most of the small to medium companies are now moving to business by design. This is a very great application.

Hana hosting vs AWS: It is the same in Hana, but on cloud. I'm talking about the cloud application, e.g. ByD. This is great.

This solution isn't resource-intensive. It's a low-key solution.

S4 Hana on cloud vs on-premises: It's been years since on-premise deployment has been applied. All should move to the cloud version. You will be forced to move to the cloud version. No more on-premise will be available for this solution.

I've been working in the last five or six years focusing on SAP cloud applications, even the on-premises ones. It ranks number one from my point of view. The other products in the market are also doing fine, but from the integration point of view, especially in the production and manufacturing industries: It's the number one application in manufacturing, so this gives a great advantage to SAP.

I would say to every CEO or to any company that they should start looking into moving their applications and their database. They should move everything to cloud before they are forced to do it because of limited time. They need to be proactive in this direction because there's a lot of benefits from the cloud from a performance perspective. It helps people to focus on data analysis, reports, and maintenance of cloud environments. It requires less effort on the IT people, so we can use them to start focusing on other current digitalization requirements. There's a lot of challenges and they need to sprint all of their work e.g. field work, work related to hardware and networking switches, etc.

I'm giving this solution a score of eight out of ten.

The manufacturing is a good feature. 

Their revolving AI should should be better improved. 

I have experience using SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

The stability depends on the infrastructure. 

The solution is highly scalable. We have a very large company. 

The initial setup is complex. The deployment takes six to eight months. 

The solution is affordable. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

We use SAP S/4HANA Cloud for claims portal applications in more than 25 countries. It is used to work on customer complaints after the sale order has been created. Once the customer or distributor raises their complaint, it goes into different levels of approval. Then, based on whether the different levels of approval have been accepted or rejected, an order gets created in the back end of the SAP system, and a cash memo or part exchange is given to the customer. Before the final approval, different approvals and IDs are created in the SAP cloud database instead of the SAP on-premise database to help reduce the number of users.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud can fulfill all the custom applications and can fulfill custom business requirements. SAP S/4HANA Cloud provides easy database access.

The user interface of SAP S/4HANA Cloud needs to be improved because it is not as good as other applications.

We have been using SAP S/4HANA Cloud for two years.

The solution is scalable. Nearly a thousand users are using the system.

The customer support is good.

Positive

The initial setup is neither easy nor difficult. I rate SAP S/4HANA Cloud's initial setup a five out of ten. The deployment of the solution takes two years. Ten people are required for the deployment, which includes two engineers, one system architect, and four developers.

The solution is deployed on a private cloud. People can access the public cloud using all the necessary authentication. So we have both private and public service applications. We are working in parallel with OutSystems, which is far better for SAP.

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