SAP S/4HANA Reviews

I used S/4HANA as a classical ERP system, so I used it to manage the data feeds of enterprise companies. One of them was an IT services company and the other was in the pharmaceutical business. They were two different businesses, but S/4HANA has so many modules and adjustments that you can generally adjust it to any kind of a business. 

S/4HANA can be cloud-based or deployed on-premises, but in both of my implementations, it was on-prem. 

One of the most valuable features, which we used the most, was the FI module, for finance. It involved controlling, account receivables, account payables, and complete financial steering. 

S/4HANA could be improved with better integration. At the moment, a main issue I see is that there's so much growth in the functionality, complementary modules, and cloud solutions which were acquired by SAP and which extend the functionality of the SAP ERP suite. It looks to me that they tend to acquire more and more functionality from acquisitions, but they don't invest enough effort into making them integrated with S/4HANA or ERP. I would say that the functionality is great, but integration is something which still needs more attention. Instead of focusing on acquisitions, they should invest, integrate, and better the existing portfolio of products in SAP. It would help us, as implementors, to have a more complex or compact solution. 

I used S/4HANA for about half a year, for two projects that I was running. 

I would say that S/4HANA is more of a stable product than a top-performing product, but that's because I don't have the same use cases with similar tools to compare it to. It's not fair to judge the performance if I don't have a like-to-like comparison with anything else. 

This solution is scalable. 

The technical support of SAP really depends on where your ticket is resolved. Sometimes you are lucky and you get an expert on the first trial, directly from Europe, and you get good advice very quickly and can continue with your progress. However, sometimes your tickets get stuck and maybe sent to India or sent to less experienced consultants, and you need to chase it to get your ticket resolved. It's hard to make a judgment on this because I've experienced both circumstances, either getting great support in a short amount of time or having to escalate the ticket for a couple of weeks because it's hard to reach the right expert. It's hard to compare because it depends, case by case. 

I'd say their technical support falls in the middle of the scale: it could be better, but it could be worse. At the moment, it's satisfactory, but unfortunately, this isn't always the case. 

Implementation is definitely not straightforward. It's straightforward if you have a proper expert in your sub-base team, but it's not installing Windows or Microsoft Excel. It's a corporate enterprise management system, so there are a lot of parameters you need to set up. The installation itself is the easy part, but the configuration for the business use case is complex. Typically, the installation took about one week. For the configuration, making it compliant with the business use cases, and setting up all the security and users, it took months—typically three to six months, depending on the size of the company. 

The team needed for deployment and maintenance depends on the size and complexity of the customer's business processes. It also depends on how far they would like to go with customizations because almost nobody is purchasing such an enterprise solution to use it as a standard. Almost every customer has some specific features they need to get configured, adjusted, or developed in the solution. From that point of view, it will decide the size of your team. 

If you have a small- to mid-size company—one hundred employees, compact business processes—then you can do it in a couple of months with five people. If you have an enterprise company with thousands of employees around the globe, then it takes almost an indefinite number of consultants because it depends on the complexity of your setup. So the minimum team of five could set it up in a couple of months for a small- to mid-sized company, but it could be a team of twenty to fifty people if you have a complex environment. 

I have implemented this solution for two customers. 

This is not the cheapest solution on the market, so you need to invest seriously in it. As a solid product, it has a solid price. It's definitely one of the more expensive tools on the market, but it's also one of the best products on the market. 

You need to pay for licensing. There are multiple models, but typically, it's a yearly subscription. Usually, when you implement it from scratch, you don't just purchase it for the first year, but for three or five years. 

Compared to similar products, I rate SAP S/4HANA an eight out of ten, because it can always be better. 

I would definitely recommend S/4HANA to those considering implementation. The greatest and biggest enterprises use SAP solutions. If you have a really serious business and you're looking for a rock solid solution with all the modules and functionalities you may need, then SAP is definitely one of the best options. On the other hand, you need to have a business which is profitable because this solution is not cheap, and implementation projects are neither cheap nor fast. You need to invest seriously in such a solution, but it pays off because there are no risks of malfunctions. You have enough contractors on the market who can help you with the solution, so you can always get support. 

We are in the progress right now in achieving the maximum utilization of the SAP HANA. We are exploring most of the available features.

I find the Production Planning Cockpit (PPC) and Material Requirements Planning (MRP) most valuable modules.

In a feature release, they could improve by adding budgetary features.

I have used SAP S4HANA for approximately three years.

SAP S4HANA is stable.

As for our requirements, SAP S4HANA has been scalable. We can extend our requirement to the system. We are using the new enhanced feature and there are many features that are available for the system allowing scalability.

We are receiving technical support from a local team here from India.

The price of SAP S4HANA is reasonable.

I would advise others when implementing to work very closely with the SAP team. When we are migrating from a legacy system to any newer system or SAP, we need to work on the mass uploading requirements, such as the master data, or open items, such as assets. We need to make another clean system before uploading all the data to the system.

I rate SAP S4HANA a seven out of ten.

Because I'm a procure-to-pay consultant, I mostly look at that angle, and I have a bit of experience with sales and distribution. I also like the integration between S/4HANA and other ERPs because S/4HANA is a suite. For example, the integration between S/4HANA and EWM Transportation Management, and Ariba.

The procure-to-pay solution in the Contract Management angle could be better. If you look at it on Ariba, the Contract Management Life Cycle for Ariba is more robust. You can create documentation, SLAs, and NDAs. Apart from the procurement aspect of the contract, you have the legal side, but Ariba cannot do that.

From what I've seen, the features of the procure-to-pay model in S/4HANA and their Contract Life Cycle Management side primarily focus on the procurement side. I believe it would be good if this solution could handle a part of the legal side.

They will incorporate Extended Warehouse Management and Transportation Management into the S/4HANA cloud. Most big companies that use a solution like S/4HANA have a legal department within the organization. Suppose they can incorporate that to be in S/4HANA suites; I think it'll be good. It will be just like what we have with Transportation Management and Extended Warehouse Management.

The user interface could be better. They have too much information on the interface, and our customers still keep complaining that it looks complex. Even though many things have changed, they still complain that the interface or the screen they see is a bit complex. It's only when they see the Fiori interface that their mind becomes a bit calm.

I've been using SAP S4HANA since 2018.

SAP S4HANA is a stable product.

SAP S4HANA is scalable. That's one of the main benefits of using SAP solutions. Most SAP solutions are scalable.

In Nigeria, we have to consider currency conversion rates with the Euro and Dollar that impact the final cost. But I believe that it'll be cheaper in the cloud where SAP has to do the maintenance of the server and more in the long run. 

I would tell potential users that S/4HANA is suitable for big companies. It comes with best practices and handles most processes, be it simple or complex. SAP also has almost 50 years of experience in the supply chain and financial industry. They should go for it, but they should stick to the best practices and not do much customization.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give SAP S4HANA an eight.

the primary use case is to support business processes, ensure the operation of the company and compliance with regulatory and tax requirements. Provide management information in real time to improve decision making

we have improved the visibility of the information between the different areas, implemented tools that allow us to improve logistics processes and even reduce the immobilized stock, speed up the closing of accounting processes

The in-memory processing capability and real time information is most valuable. 

The migration form previous versions to SAP S/4HANA is a challenge both for customers and clients. 

there should be simpler ways to incorporate the new tools into a process framework. Many customers are still using the same tools but running in SAP S/4HANA

for more than 18 years.

It is very stable.

It is scalable. We have more than 1,000 users. 

Their support is very good. 

Positive

We were using SAP Business Suite 6.0 

we wanted to incorporate improvements of the new functionalities, keep ourselves updated in the latest version

For a customer, the complexity, in general, is related to representing their business processes with this solution. It isn't related to S/4HANA.

We implement through our partner Softtek. 

It is important to understand the licensing model and ensure that the sizing of the platform is correct for the number of users and the volume of information to be processed.

Some components may require additional licensing.

The concept of digital or indirect access should be eliminated

No

We have more than 25 S/4HANA implementations on Azure. We have at least three SAP S/4HANA implementations on AWS, and we have one S/4HANA on GCP.

Its implementation challenges are related to finding the best way to adapt the business processes as per the standard or best practices of SAP. The key is to adapt the best practices as much as you can so that in the future, it's easier for you to update to newer versions.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

We are using SAP S4HANA for supply chain management, production planning, and material management. We have connected systems that have intelligent optimization for production planning outside of SAP S4HANA.

I have found the most valuable features are the interface, which is very good for all users, and the database performance is good. Additionally, we have more service APIs to communicate with third-party solutions or systems, such as cloud systems or other participants, than in our last ERP system.

In an upcoming release, it would be beneficial to have more practical intelligence in the system, such as protective maintenance, or artificial intelligence. This would not be too complicated to provide nowadays. If you have a mission learning or artificial intelligence, you have to have it in the cloud and have cooperation between the ERP and the cloud. It is not as good as it could be.

I have been using this solution for approximately four years.

We have had no problems with the stability of this solution.

The scalability of this solution depends on the hardware and the platform you use. If you have fixed hardware, then you need more effort to have scalability. If it is on the cloud, such as Azure, it is a lot easier to scale. The software itself is very practical and scalable.

The technical support is very good between the service levels. 

The installation is straightforward.

We did the implementation ourselves.

The solution is expensive. There are many discussions surrounding the topic of third-party indirect usage of SAP solutions. If you have a third-party system and you have a connection to the SAP system, should this third-party usage qualify as a cost or not. It is very complicated to handle with the SAP organization.

I would recommend those wanting to implement this solution to make sure their internal IT departments are trained well to be able to educate the teams.

I rate SAP S4HANA an eight out of ten.

We are a pre-sales team and I have been working as a consultant for SAP S4HANA.

Most often, we deal with manufacturing CPG customers. We prefer the complete SAP S4HANA Suite, with all of the functionalities, and the use cases are typically everything that is offered from the processes in that suite.

The key modules that I find most valuable are material management (MM), financial accounting and controlling (FICO), and human resources (HR). I am not exposed to all of the core features, but these are the ones that we generally prefer and propose.

The two things that need to be improved are price and customization. These are two dynamic changes that every customer will want.

I have been working with SAP S4HANA for the past year and a half.

Our customers for this solution are mixed in size. We have small-scale, medium-scale, and large-scale customers. The number of users also varies. It can be hundreds or multiple thousands.

I do not have experience with SAP technical support.

We have enough competency in our company that the initial setup is straightforward and we don't face many issues. There may be some complexity but it depends on the configuration.

The deployment model is a mixture of offerings and this choice is based on customer requirements. Sometimes it is a cloud deployment, whereas others are on-premises, and yet in some cases, it is a hybrid model.

We have an in-house team for deployment.

The price of this product is an issue for some customers.

I highly recommend this product for all SAP customers who want to digitize and have a core business suite of applications.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We have used SAP S4HANA as a complete enterprise resource planning solution for almost every use case you can think of.

One of the most valuable features is the in-memory database.

I have been using this solution for approximately 20 years.

I have found the solution to be stable but it could improve.

The scalability is good.

I rate SAP S4HANA a nine out of ten.

Most of our customer base is particularly interested in the finance area. This aspect of the solution is great. 

The most interesting features from the solution include the look and feel of the user interface. It's very user friendly and easy to navigate.

The performance of the solution is excellent.

The solution isn't lacking any features per se. Clients aren't coming to us and saying "we need this or that."

The cost of the solution is quite high. It needs to be adjusted.

The integration could be better. They have many different kinds of house platforms, and then it becomes complicated to have integration within all of these different systems.

I've been using the solution for five years at this point. It's been a while.

We provide technical support to our clients when they need our assistance.

We have implementation projects that help the customers start from zero all the way up to the latest version that they can use on their own. If they need existing or ongoing help with SAP, we will provide some kind of support model. We support them in case they have any problems or in case they have some version they need to upgrade.

As we are implementing the solution for our clients, the process is pretty straightforward.

Our company typically sets up the product. We implement the solution for our clients on their behalf.

The pricing of the solution is quite high. 

We are not the end customer. We are the implementation providers. We have customers and implement the solution for them and offer support to them while they are using SAP, which is an enterprise solution.

We will support any version from the previous version and also upgrade to the newest version, as per our client's needs. There are all kinds of versions of the solution that we support. We mainly work with the S/4, the core ERP solution, so the core S/4, and also the ECC, the previous version.

A company needs to be aware that it's much more helpful to be knowledgeable in the product before beginning an implementation. If a customer doesn't have experience with SAP, the implementation may be difficult. However, if they have some experience, it is a bit easier to set up everything. A company must also ensure they have in-depth business knowledge when doing a discussion in the booking.

Overall, we've been quite satisfied with the product. I'd rate it nine out of ten. If the solution offered better implementation capabilities and pricing, I'd give it full marks.