SAP S/4HANA Reviews

SAP is very strong in finance and incorporates a lot of emerging technology. I like how SAP integrates a lot of new technologies, such as in-memory databases and HANA. SAP S/4HANA can be mapped as per business requirements, and you can name any industry, and SAP can be used, whether in manufacturing, retail, pharma, real estate, or any other industry.

The integration is quick to implement and very user-friendly. 

SAP S/4HANA is particularly user-friendly and quick to deploy.

SAP invests a lot of money in R&D. Every three months, I receive a patch, which is an upgrade within the SAP systems. SAP is good, however, SAP users should have the knowledge to tackle SAP effectively. I recommend training from a systematic approach.

I have been in the SAP industry for 11 years.

SAP is stable and a leader in the ERP space.

SAP S/4HANA itself is a scalable product. You can integrate any third-party solution with SAP.

I find the support to be quite good, with an offshore center in Hyderabad. However, you need to communicate with the right system integrator.

Neutral

The initial setup is very easy, involving configuring and implementing apps for business requirements.

15 members including myself worked on one project, which is 15 times more advanced.

The setup cost is expensive. I would compare it to the difference between a Ferrari and a Rolls Royce. That's the level of distinction.

I always provide battle cards to my clients for SAP, Microsoft, and Oracle. However, SAP remains number one.

I strongly recommend SAP S/4HANA for any industry with companies having more than one hundred employees. I think the business should go with SAP. 

I am the founder of Accent and Consulting.  

Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

I mainly use it for finance activities like FICO, SD, etc.

Compared to other systems, it is more customer-friendly and time-efficient. It is easy to operate and understand. The reports and solutions provided by SAP HANA are excellent. I have worked with different software, but SAP HANA stands out due to its quality and functionality. It also offers extensive customization options for reports, making it user-friendly for partners, customers, and stakeholders at all levels.

As a finance professional, I appreciate the user-friendly interface and time-saving features. We can easily access reports and other information. So, it reduces the need for manual work. 

If I input data correctly, everything is available in the system, which allows me to generate reports effortlessly and present them to management. This saves a lot of time.

As an end-user, I find that working in SAP is efficient and resolves issues. We can easily access reports and information, reducing manual work. This is a major change in SAP.

SAP S/4HANA's Fiori UI: 

I've been working with Fiori for years. We have thousands of users at the front-end level, including stores and distribution points. Many of these people lack technical knowledge or experience with SAP. Introducing Fiori with its tiles made their lives easier and simplified SAP for many. With Fiori tiles, there's no need to memorize key codes or complex procedures.

Since employees keep changing in any company, especially front-end. So, SAP made it easier for new employees to learn and be trained quickly. There's no rocket science in Fiori; everything is user-friendly. With minimal training, we can teach them what's available in Fiori. Everything is accessible through tiles. Fiori is especially beneficial for front-end and average-level employees due to its ease of access. Just one day for training, and they could work with it.

There are areas for improvement. SAP needs to consider both global and regional requirements. For example, India has unique tax implications and regulations. They shouldn't have to rely on extensive customization for basic things because the standard features don't align with India's needs. 

More standardized features tailored to India or Indian customers and partners would be helpful, especially concerning tax regulations.

For example, India has different income tax rules [GST], but many things are not standardized in SAP. SAP broadly focuses on the global requirements of the top ten countries and may not prioritize India's specific rules and regulations. If they consider these and include them as standard features, it would be easier for customers in India to implement SAP quickly.

So SAP should consider tax parameters for India.

I have around seven years of experience with this product. 

I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. 

Currently, we rely on two or three tools to get things done. By moving to S/4HANA, we plan to consolidate these into one tool, that will increase efficiency and eliminate the need to depend on multiple tools. This is a major improvement we see in SAP. 

So, the management made the decision to switch to SAP. This was a brilliant move for the system, finance, and all departments. It will resolve at least 50% of our current technical issues.

Personal experience: 

I personally have experience with Oracle Financials and Microsoft Navision. I have almost 18 years of experience working in different software areas, primarily with SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft.

I worked with an initial version of SAP in 2008. It was less user-friendly than the current version. S/4HANA has many customizations and new features that make it easier for front-end users.

I would rate my experience with the initial setup an eight out of ten, with ten being easy. 

Deloitte is the partner integrating SAP in the current company. The process is ongoing. It is yet to go live in the production environment. 

The deployment is a lengthy process. It normally takes a week.

There is a ROI. 

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

My recommendation: Consider the size of the organization, its requirements, and future plans before deciding to use SAP S/4HANA.

I work in the stack, and I'm on the technical side. My customers span about 20 different industries, including public sector federal government, manufacturing, service vehicles, agriculture, and mining. I don't really have a specific area. In terms of the use case of the product, HCC is now legacy, and S/4HANA is the future product for those customers running ECC, whether they want to run it on-premises, in the cloud, or in the public cloud. There are obviously a few differences there. I don't get involved in the sales side since I'm on the technical side.

It's replacing the ECC due to all the finance modules, such as ST, MM, PP. I deal with all the modules at the stack level, so I don't really focus much on the functional side. S/4HANA is integrated with the SAP interface products, like SaaS, products in the cloud, software as a service, and things like SuccessFactors. SAP sells these products, and they are integrated in the cloud, offering flexibility and scalability. The use of a memory-based database makes it more efficient. You might not think it's revolutionary, however, it's adopting new technologies and infrastructures.

Comparatively, this is a bit of a subjective question. The models are very different in the cloud, where it's all about monthly subscriptions, similar to Netflix. The pros and cons of software in the cloud are standard. Previously, models involved buying software to run on infrastructure with licensing and perpetual maintenance. Now the license model has shifted to subscriptions, with customers paying a monthly fee. This reflects the detailed terms of what products are used, their usage, and pricing. Although this transformation is not necessarily cheaper, it brings changes. Organizations face challenges like adapting to new technologies rapidly, and whether customers are early or late adopters influences their experience.

I have used the solution for 30 years or so.

The solution is very complex, and stability is based on maturity. Newer versions and features tend to be less stable. Overall, the products serve well. I don't judge businesses that run the world.

Support is a challenge. The effectiveness of the SAP support paradigm depends on particular skills. I wouldn't comment positively or negatively on the support itself. It has been a cloud scale.

Positive

It depends on the cartridges, the size of the cost, and whether it's a brownsfield or greenfield implementation. It is certainly in the millions of dollars. Training and resource support are essential.

Hacking SAP is favorable for me instead of nine and ten. It is very good for the time. Pearce rates it as a ten. At C-suite level, decision-makers, such as CFOs and CIOs, need to have an open mind and change their mindset. Prioritizing the right team is essential. 

The overall product rating is ten out of ten.

There are some main use cases for SAP S/4HANA because mainly we work with manufacturing customers.

I have mostly manufacturing customers.

The most useful features in this product are the real-time reporting and the complete integration between various functions.

The in-app integration works across all functions.

Since it's real-time, the reporting is fully integrated, and the people taking the reports don't need to reconcile between different functions because it is real-time with mission and completely integrated; that is the main reason why people go for SAP S/4HANA.

SAP S/4HANA is real-time and fully integrated, and SAP is always proactive in providing solutions for new scenarios or new business processes. It's scalable, so if an organization is small today and is working in one industry, tomorrow it can move to multiple geographies or industries and the size grows; it's completely scalable to a very large extent.

The cost is definitely high, so SAP does have a growth solution, which is slightly cheaper compared to other offerings with SAP.

A lot more customers would adopt it if they reduced the price by around twenty to twenty-five percent.

I'm working with a partner, and I've been working with SAP S/4HANA for the last eight to nine years.

I have faced no issues with stability or upgrades.

SAP S/4HANA is easy to scale in my opinion.

I would rate the scalability a ten.

The support that SAP provides is very good.

I would rate the support a ten because there are a lot of knowledge-based articles published, and most of them are available online.

Positive

I don't have much experience with SAP Business One solution or SAP Sales Cloud, only SAP S/4HANA.

It is easy to set up SAP S/4HANA now.

I would rate the setup a nine.

I'm expected to leave this for her, so I don't have expertise in any other tools such as data mining solutions, business intelligence, or other ERP tools. I would rate SAP S/4HANA a fit in.

SAP S/4HANA provides a standard setup process. Several third-party tools are available to integrate with the SAP ecosystem. Some customers of our organization find SAP S/4HANA very easy to use, and some are adopting the solution due to prior familiarity with the SAP ecosystem. The licensing changes implemented in Oracle JD Edwards have also made a few customers of our organization adopt SAP S/4HANA. 

The Order-to-Cash feature is indispensable and irreplaceable in SAP S/4HANA. Almost every customer I have worked with in my organization finds the Order-to-Cash feature extremely valuable. 

For Order-to-Cash using SAP S/4HANA, a company needs to consider the local regulations at one point. SAP can help with all such local regulations. I wouldn't recommend SAP S/4HANA for a small or medium-sized company.

The integration capabilities of SAP S/4HANA are as good as those of its competitor products. A reliable middleware product will be needed in SAP S/4HANA especially if discrete ERP, MES and CRM are present in the project. The integration of SAP S/4HANA will also be dependent on the strategies and vision laid out by the enterprise architect. Integrations for the solution can be done in both ELT and ETL, and both has its pros and cons.

The analytics part of SAP S/4HANA needs to be improved. The analytics feature provides decent warehousing and reporting capability, but the AI/ML components of analytics need improvement. Almost all current versions of different SAP family products either lack AI capabilities or are rudimentary. A plethora of third-party tools exist that can bring AI/ML capabilities to SAP S/4HANA, but such capabilities should be natively provided in the product. 

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

The stability of SAP S/4HANA is better understood by considering the whole SAP ecosystem. For instance, if I carry out a brownfield implementation, there can be a situation where a customer doesn't identify any improvements in their business process after deploying the solution; in such cases, they might prefer to revert back to the older process, such changes will be inherent to almost every system, so the stability of SAP S/4HANA varies from customer to customer and the complexity around the product. 

The solution is highly scalable. Our organization was catering SAP S/4HANA across 47 countries, with an average of 60 to 70 users per country. A severely large team of at least 50 to 60 professionals is required for the deployment and maintenance of SAP S/4HANA. A company usually adopts SAP S/4HANA when there is a dire need for such a solution and not when competitors have been identified to make a transition. 

At our company, we are satisfied with the tech support. I believe service providers like SAP are always willing to help anyone out with product issues. If users are able to articulate the problem well enough, it becomes easier for the tech team to comprehend the situation and provide an ideal solution.

If a user is unable to articulate the product's issues, then there is too much back and forth through tickets, and it takes a lot of time to resolve the issues. A good enough articulation of the problem in a conversation with the vendor's support team will resolve the issues 90% of the time. 

The deployment time depends upon the complexity of the environment in which the solution is being used, the business environment, the number of divisions in the company, and harmonization needs. Theoretically, a greenfield implementation of SAP S/4HANA can be carried out in four months, especially if SAP RISE is used. 

The deployment process of SAP S/4HANA involves business processing, data architecture, fit-gaps, and the selection between on-prem/cloud and one model rollout at a time. The aforementioned deployment process is the most relevant one because it reduces business risk.  The models or business entities are rolled out one at a time due to the risk conceptions of customers, so either the finance, manufacturing, or another division is shifted to the new system one at a time. 

SAP S/4HANA is definitely a valuable product. For the majority of the customer implementation of the product through our organization, I have rarely used the greenfield path. Our company once took the greenfield approach for a customer who was using multiple ERP solutions, including JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and EBS.

The aforementioned company had the requirement to harmonize and that's why a greenfield approach was followed for SAP S/4HANA implementation. Any company using SAP S/4HANA won't find trouble in gaining value from the product.

A company will only struggle with ROI or obtaining value from the solution when SAP S/4HANA is not a good fit for them. For instance, if a small company with a single location presence and around 1000 users adopts SAP S/4HANA, it's very likely that they won't find a suitable ROI. 

I don't think any company would find the product expensive. For a cloud version, there is always the factor of how much data transfer is required, and the cost will escalate very quickly as for each data transfer the hyperscaler will charge it. The size of the company, the complexity of data transfer, and the sensitivity of the operational run rate are factors that will influence the cost of SAP S/4HANA. 

Most of the customers of our organization who are adopting SAP S/4HANA already have an SAP product in their ecosystem and SAP S/4HANA provides an upgradation path to them. The majority of companies who implement such aforementioned upgrades don't always use a brownfield implementation, which translates the whole business process into the new system. Implementors are choosing a feedback and target process utilization path for SAP S/4HANA, a bluefield process.

There is also another greenfield approach for SAP S/4HANA implementation that involves beginning the implementation process from scratch. I have used all the aforementioned field processes, but mostly the brownfield path because most of our organization's customers prefer it for migrating from older processes. 

One of our customer's SAP S/4HANA migration process began in 2017 and it's still ongoing. For the aforementioned customer, the SAP S/4HANA deployment process will take six or seven years because of the geographies the customer operates in and their own unique business processes. I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

I wouldn't advise businesses without a multi-geographical presence to adopt the solution. One of the prime advantages of SAP solutions is the wide knowledge of diverse geographies over several years. SAP has been successful in building numerous out-of-the-box business processes over the years. Customers looking for a solution like SAP S/4HANA always have a choice if they want to use the out-of-the-box process or if they want to build their own, but SAP is able to provide a unique process for each country, whether it's China, India, or Germany.  

I'm an architect. S/4HANA is an intelligent enterprise. When an organization needs an application or software to run its operations, S/4HANA comes into play. SAP is the market leader in ERP. S/4HANA is not a traditional ERP anymore, but an intelligent enterprise. That's the power of S/4HANA.

The integration capabilities of SAP S/4HANA and AWS are excellent.  SAP S/4HANA is an intelligent enterprise. It can harness data and provide the right data at the right time for decision-makers to carry forward the operations. 

For integration, you have SAP BTP, a platform as a solution that can work with S/4HANA. There are also other tools like SAP CPI and SAP Process Orchestration. So, there are a lot of tools available for SAP to integrate with the outside world.

AI capabilities are good with SAP S/4HANA. When WE combine SAP S/4HANA with SAP BTP, there is a use case in the healthcare industry where it can detect yearly symptoms and save lives. This is referred to as SAP Business Technology Platform.

S/4HANA is a very large application. There is no one specific tool I can pick. It depends on the customer, the use case, and what the business needs. Different industries will find different business functions helpful. 

If it is a construction industry, probably something related to the construction function will help you. If it is a logistics industry, if it's a logistics function, it's a separate one. So, depending on the type of industry, you will have a different business function that will come into place.

Most of the Fortune 500 companies use SAP S/4HANA, so I don't think it's unfit for any particular industry. But if a customer has limited requirements, like only sales activity, then they can choose Salesforce. They don't need SAP S/4HANA. It's not a proper comparison because we can do a lot with S/4HANA, like HR, sales, distribution, production planning, quality management, transport management, and more.

In future releases, I would like to see more availability zones and VPCs so customers have more freedom to choose. Also, more training so customers can utilize the training enablement.

I have experience with S/4HANA for around seven or eight years.

AWS is premium. From a cost perspective, AWS might be on the higher side. The users have to check if the required availability zone is available in the customer's region. Sometimes, only Azure is available. I don't see any issues of that sort. It's very mature.

The customer service and support are very good. There are options for SAP called RISE with SAP. You can make a note of it. With RISE with SAP, customers can choose their hyperscaler. It can be SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, AWS, Azure, GCP, or even Alibaba. When it comes to support, you can go with a single contract with the RISE with SAP option, so you get one support contract.

The support comes from SAP, not AWS. The support is the same for AWS or Azure. Some customers will enter into an exclusive contract, while others will go with a generic contract. For the sake of an answer, I can give it an eight out of ten.

Positive

Every implementation has its challenges. Sometimes, the challenges are with the project timeline, sometimes with resource availability, and sometimes with the business process meeting the requirements of the business. 

Especially with a product like SAP, such a big project, there are challenges, and that's when project management comes in to make sure the project is delivered successfully.

We have multiple deployment options. We have S/4HANA on public cloud and S/4HANA on private cloud. Depending on the customer's appetite, we can choose which one they want. 

Even within the private cloud, we have options like greenfield, which means we implement from scratch; brownfield, which means we convert an existing system; or bluefield, which is loosely related to a data migration approach. So, it depends on the customer's appetite.

SAP S/4HANA is a solution, and AWS is just an infrastructure provider. Some customers might prefer S/4HANA on Azure or Google Cloud. It depends on the customer's requirements.

Customers will have access to the latest innovation from SAP and will be updated with the business process libraries. They can stay ahead of their competitors in the market because of the innovations provided by SAP. 

They also have lots of tools or options available to integrate with the outside world.

I would recommend using it. Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

We use it for the internal SAP database, for the information, multiple portfolios of products of SAP. It addresses the issue of managing extensive data resources.

Its analytics capabilities are valuable as they enhance data analysis and insights.

It could be improved by focusing on user-related challenges, as end users might face certain difficulties.

I worked with SAP S4HANA for two years.

The stability can be rated as eight out of ten.

The scalability is also rated at eight out of ten, indicating good scalability.

The quality of technical support from SAP can be rated as eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup was difficult, presenting challenges for users.

The implementation was handled by a third party, and we did not perform it in-house.

We have observed a good return on investment, with calculations based on a five-year ROI plan. Most cases have shown positive returns.

The pricing of SAP S4HANA is high, however, it's higher compared to similar peer solutions.

I would recommend SAP S4HANA because it is a known solution that is stable and widely used by customers, thus making it reliable.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.