SAP S/4HANA Cloud Reviews

SAP S/4HANA Cloud has been used in manufacturing, for niche industries, such as automotive utilities, higher education, and oil and gas.

The most valuable features of SAP S/4HANA Cloud are the detailed solution costing, integration, and built-in analytics.

The integration with third-party vendors could improve.

I have used SAP S/4HANA Cloud within the last 12 years.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud is a stable solution.

The scalability of SAP S/4HANA Cloud is great.

It is difficult to receive the correct answer from the support.

I rate the support from SAP S/4HANA Cloud a four out of ten.

Neutral

Other ERP solutions are significantly easier to implement, but SAP S/4HANA Cloud has its merit.

The length of time it takes to implement the solution depends on the environment. I have done 15 implementations.

I rate the initial setup of SAP S/4HANA Cloud a six out of ten.

The maintenance of the solution can be outsourced, done in-house by a selected team, or a hybrid of the two. Most companies have hybrid maintenance programs.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud is not one of the top solutions when evaluating other solutions on the market. This solution is a bit rigid. 

I rate SAP S/4HANA Cloud an eight 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.

The most valuable feature of SAP S/4HANA Cloud is the new UX design.

The solution’s reporting could be improved.

I have been using SAP S/4HANA Cloud for more than 20 years.

Sometimes, we have performance issues with the solution.

I rate SAP S/4HANA Cloud a five out of ten for stability.

Our clients for SAP S/4HANA Cloud are mostly enterprise businesses.

I rate SAP S/4HANA Cloud an eight out of ten for scalability.

The solution’s initial setup is difficult.

The solution's deployment takes up to 24 months. The solution was deployed on Google and Microsoft Azure cloud.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud is suitable for small and medium-sized businesses, but it's not preferable for enterprise customers.

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

Managing the server and taking advantage of the services provided by SAP itself is the most valuable feature. They take care of everything.

There is room for improvement, especially in the financial and costing parts. In a specific scenario, it becomes complicated when you have different valuation types for materials, and you try to create a costing model. It's a bit challenging to cover all the aspects.

In future releases, there are two scenarios I would like to see addressed: handling different materials and the pricing model. 

Another area of improvement is the support provided by this solution. It takes a long time to receive support on certain issues.

I have been using this solution for one year. We use the latest version.

I would rate the stability of this solution a nine out of ten. 

We haven't encountered any scalability challenges. So, I would rate the scalability of this solution an eight out of ten for now, with the possibility of it being higher.

Around 300 users are currently working with this solution in our organization. Over time, we plan to increase the usage of this solution. We need to add more features and incorporate more cloud-based solutions like Aruba for retirement. We are planning improvements in the overall technology sector.

Customer service and support's response time is really long. The ticketing system and the support cycle are very long. It takes a while to get a customer response and they often forward lots of articles and links to read. There isn't a clear, direct support contact.

Neutral

The initial setup is okay. In the implementation phase, a very clear standard of methodology by SAP is activated. It's working very nicely. The whole thing is just for your team or for the users to validate such a high-tech solution.

It was completely deployed with SAP. It's a fully managed cloud solution provided by SAP.

The deployment model we chose is RISE with SAP. It's a comprehensive cloud solution managed by SAP itself.

The pricing model can be complicated in certain scenarios. 

The pricing depends. It depends. For small to medium-sized businesses, it can be expensive. However, for larger organizations like ours, it is acceptable and working well. For small businesses, it might be more challenging due to cost limitations.

The pricing calculations are based on various factors, and for businesses with larger volumes and more complex requirements, the costs can be higher compared to smaller businesses.

I have used other solutions as well. As an example, I used SAP ECC. I've been using it since 2005, so I have experience with an older version.

I would advise them to ensure they have a well-prepared and capable team to handle the system and its overall utilization. It's important to understand the requirements and risks involved in implementing SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Especially when it comes to financial investment and resource allocation. Proper preparation is crucial.

Overall, I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Speaking about use cases, it is a whole ERP system for a medical tech company.

It is a complicated solution. So it should be easier to use.

At the moment, I'm not using the solution, but as a consultant, I'm looking at or evaluating ERP systems for customers. So, SAP S/4HANA is the last one, which I evaluated for one of our customers. Also, my customers chose the solution. So, I am a consultant for my customers. I provide consultations in a totally neutral manner for all the products.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

In one of the projects I know, there are around 400 to 500 users using the solution.

It's a hybrid solution. So a few things are on-premises like the local data is on-premises, and the rest of the software is in the cloud.

The biggest problem if you are involved in implementing SAP S/4HANA is that you are not working directly with SAP, meaning that you are dependent on implementation partners. The implementation partners receive the incentives only if they are selling cloud solutions. So they are cherry-picking in the market. So this means that the transaction phase will go much longer, and the companies with the most needs and the biggest backlog will be the latest ones in the last ones of the transformation, which will spread some competitive disadvantages.

I would recommend the solution to those who are already working with SAP.

I rate the overall solution a seven 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.

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.

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.