What needs improvement with SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud?

I cannot say anything about what areas of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud could be improved or enhanced because so far, we are happy with this implementation. We are not facing any problem, or I cannot say that this can be improved. Although SAP keeps improving themselves day by day, we cannot say that SAP needs to improve anything. One thing which we face, not as a problem, is the pricing. SAP pricing is a bit higher day by day. Before, it was not too much higher, but I don't know why they are increasing their price. They should see this thing, so other customers, such as SMBs customers or small and mid-sized customers, can also avail this thing. Otherwise, we don't have any problem. First, there is the limitation. If you are a SAP user, you don't feel any problem with the limitation because if you know how to use the product, you can easily implement this thing. Otherwise, if you don't know the business process or how to integrate and implement, it could be a problem. We have a limitation, but we developed some add-ons for this. So we fulfilled these requirements.

SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud is powerful but has areas needing refinement. Cost optimization, smoother scalability options and more flexible integration with third party tools are key improvement points. Many enterprises seek better automation and simplified migration paths. From an enterprise software development services perspective, streamlined DevOps support and enhanced monitoring would add significant value. At CONTUS Tech, we see these as critical for evolving enterprise cloud ecosystems.

When discussing migration projects with SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, one issue they face concerns the satellite systems - systems that have connections with their SAP. However, this has improved as SAP now has numerous APIs that can easily connect with different systems. The licensing model for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud has changed, and it is not entirely clear for final customers. Instead of named users, they now have to calculate FUEs. This change in the billing model is somewhat confusing to explain to customers. The pricing of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud has not changed significantly, as SAP customers are accustomed to their pricing levels. However, the billing model related to FUEs could be clearer. SAP could improve their communications with customers, as partners currently have to communicate everything to the final customer without having access to easy SAP documentation to explain these changes.

SAP should adopt more rapid changes in market processes and customer needs to deliver solutions that meet new industry requirements swiftly. SAP finance needs to be more advanced to keep up with current market trends, and overall data management aspects need continuous improvement to handle evolving data scenarios effectively.

The main thing is that SAP needs to give better response times for support tickets. As a development organization, we expect a faster response whenever we raise a ticket. Ideally, it should be as early as possible with SAP. Previously, when our servers were on-premise in the primary data center, our basis team could look up everything themselves. Now, it takes longer because after raising a ticket, they have to verify if it's an SAP application problem, a network problem, or something else. This verification process takes extra time that could be reduced. First of all, we want proper support in time for the organization. And secondly, proper training is also required from SAP side.

The product must provide more details of the errors. Sometimes, we cannot understand the error when we run the query.

Customization is an area of concern in SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, where improvements are required. SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud needs to be made a little bit more user-friendly. Maybe integrations with some AI tools should be made possible in the future. It would be great if users could use some AI tools in SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. From an improvement perspective, the product's prices can be improved. With the tool, you see that it has some compatibility problems, which I experienced when trying to use it with a database on a Linux OS. The aforementioned area can be considered for improvement.

It’s a common challenge with applications like Microsoft and SAP that they tend to rely on engineers rather than human resources personnel for knowledge and implementation. This can be a drain on resources and expertise, leading to inefficiencies. It's clear that there is a need to prioritize user-friendliness, making it easier for non-technical users to operate the systems effectively. Training and education for users are crucial to ensure that the tools are accessible to everyone and can be utilized for different processes. By improving user training, SAP can encourage broader user adoption and enhance the tool's overall usability. This, in turn, can lead to increased productivity and more diversified reporting capabilities.

There are areas of improvement because managing the environment is quite complex. There have been issues with operational monitoring, infrastructure management, and overall holistic control of operations. Additionally, the change request process is time-consuming, which is a significant disadvantage in an environment with numerous business processes, extensive landscape projects, and multiple enterprise operations. Lengthy change requests hinder business agility. Furthermore, scalability is a concern since it operates on Amodo, which is not designed for micro-scale operations. This makes scaling the environment challenging and sometimes leads to difficulties in managing rollouts and system server resource usage. Another drawback is the availability of the right resources for the job. Sometimes, when an issue arises, the necessary expertise and resources are not immediately accessible, resulting in prolonged resolution times. In some instances, inexperienced individuals are assigned tasks, which can be problematic as they may not fully comprehend the requirements. It is crucial to have experienced professionals who understand the intricacies and complexities of the system. They need to align themselves with the business goals because downtime can be categorized into technical downtime and system functionality downtime. Functionality downtime refers to instances where the system's performance is insufficient to meet the business's expectations, resulting in reduced efficiency in business transactions.

Enterprise Cloud's reporting could be more automated to improve content accountability, especially regarding BI reports.

They should include more SaaS-based features in the solution. Also, it needs improvement in terms of stability and performance.

The SAP products are complicated to deploy anywhere. I keep getting customer queries for an ECC to HANA or cloud conversion.

Customers need to be better educated about using the solution's cloud for digital transformation. SAP as a legacy system is missing that flavor. The solution is not a traditional ERP software so should be used as a digital transformation tool. That is the story to project to customers, partners, and sales teams. This will help the solution grow faster than GCP, AWS, or Azure. In fact, Google Cloud Platform is now collaborating with SAP for digital transformation. The solution should offer affordable modules that are customized to startups with 50 to 500 employees. Most people think of SAP as being only for big enterprises but it could be very useful for smaller companies. There are 40,000 to 50,000 startups in APAC each year and that is a large volume. Many of the solution's modules could be used by those startups. Google is targeting this market with chat boards and automation tools at a reasonable price or with six months of free usage. SAP should come up with this kind of module and include sandbox so providers can play with a few of the POCs.

The solution needs to embed or integrate with IBP to fully activate the PPT module with efficiency. Currently, customers need an additional license to activate and that is troublesome. More automation is needed to provide better function. For example, a shipment should trigger an automatic confirmation.

Perhaps minor changes to the enterprise structure could be made, but the rest is fine.

The cost could be improved. I think it's higher than the competition.

The only thing that could be improved is the cost. In the next release, I would like to see all integrated solutions embedded in S/4 like SuccessFactors.

Additional features that should be included in the next release are more analytics and intelligent decision making tools, such as a WhatsApp chatbot.

The over product features are good to start with, currently it may not have all the features of the on premise HANA solution and over the period of time , SAP will add additional features as needed.

The customer has a lot of dependencies on SAP which means they don't have much flexibility to go and update the system when or if they need to. They will need to wait for the quarterly updates. It's possible to maybe raise a special request with SAP if it is absolutely necessary. Occasionally, we're not able to provide the services our client wants. SAP should offer some flexibility in terms of configuration modifications. Some activities should be able to be performed by the service provider. There's a concern about the localization of the data centers. For Dubai based customers, there's a lot of concern about the location of them. We need our own local data centers to manage all of the services. These platforms should be flexible enough based on the region. For example, in Europe, there's GDPR, but in the Middle East, this shouldn't apply. SAP charges for third party integrations, and this shouldn't be the case. There should be simpler integrations with third-party platforms.

There are a lot of dependencies on SAP. A customer doesn't have much flexibility to go and update the systems as they wish. SAP dictates this. If a customer needs an update immediately, they won't get it; they'll have to wait for the quarterly update. Sometimes we are not able to provide the other services that a customer wants. SAP needs to offer some kind of flexibility in terms of configurations and modifications from the customer standpoint. Some kinds of activities that SAP monopolizes we should be able to perform, for the customer as a service provider. There's a concern about the localization of the data centers. For a Dubai-base customer, there are a lot of concerns. We need our own local data centers to manage all of the services. Instead, there are various data centers all over the world. The lack of localization is a concern. Our data centers are in Europe and come under GDPR regulations, and this doesn't apply to the Middle East yet. It causes a lot of confusion. The solution charges money when companies integrate other solutions. There should be a simpler, cheaper way to integrate.

There is always room for improvement. SAP manages it much better than many SAP applications but then they do it more like on-premise management. They're trying to improve on that but then they're not fully a cloud tool. Maybe it is also due to the nature of the application. To some extent it is also due to the nature of the application. It can't be exactly similar to other cloud structure providers but it can be improved.

Based on our customer's feedback, we have to see how we can get more from it. The initial setup should be simplified. The stability needs to be improved to be able to handle large amounts of data. I have not yet found full documentation available for implementing the server, the database configurations, and integrating it with Power BI. There is no proper documentation available. It would be useful if there was proper documentation from the vendor.