SAP BW4HANA Other Advice

Csaba Grünblatt - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Data, Data warehouse and BI/Analytics Architect at Techwave.

SAP BW4HANA improved data reporting processes significantly. Performance on HANA database is good. Well-built data models ensure consistent and fast reporting. Reusable models enhance efficiency, even for SaaS services.

In-memory computing, especially since HANA, has greatly improved performance in data analysis tasks. It eliminates the need for complex optimizations like creating indexes or aggregates. Queries that once took minutes now run in seconds, enabling real-time reporting, especially for SAP ECC on HANA.

SAP BW4HANA's integration capabilities are streamlined with a simplified architecture and more virtual layers. You can directly load data into optimized layers, reducing the need for extra storage. The introduction of Open ODS Views allows for additional logic and master data inclusion, making integration faster and simpler.

The learning curve for SAP BW4HANA is much faster now compared to ten years ago, thanks to abundant free resources like documentation, videos, blogs, and learning journeys provided by SAP. It is simpler to learn with these resources available compared to the past when you had to attend courses and rely on books.

I would recommend SAP BW4HANA to users looking to implement it, especially if they want to keep their systems on-premise and already have SAP systems. Those with BW on HANA have two choices: BW4HANA or DataSphere, depending on their cloud strategy. If they are advanced in their cloud strategy and want to migrate off-premise, DataSphere is a good choice. However, for a robust solution on-premise or in a private cloud, BW4HANA is an excellent option.

Overall, I would rate BW4HANA as a nine out of ten. It performs all necessary data warehouse tasks and offers additional functionalities. We use it traditionally, with complex transformations and models but with less emphasis on real-time processing and third-party sources.

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Joyee Sen - PeerSpot reviewer
SAP Service Delivery Manager at SoftwareONE

Its integration capabilities are good.

I would suggest those planning to use it evaluate the features and decide for your specific use cases to deduce whether this is something you really need. Some applications offer the same features, which can meet similar requirements. So compare and evaluate to see if this is exactly the solution that you need. If it integrates easily with your existing landscape and workloads, then choose it for yourself. I rate the overall solution a seven out of ten.

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Srivatsav Andra - PeerSpot reviewer
SAP BW/4HANA Specialist at a government with 10,001+ employees

On a rating scale of one to ten, I would give this solution a nine, acknowledging that it is a robust data warehousing solution. However, in the current landscape of digital transformation, there are certain features that seem to be lacking. With various complex systems, multi-stack architecture, and multi-cloud hyperscalers involved, it is essential for organizations to have a comprehensive data warehousing solution that can aid them in making informed business decisions and drive success. SAP has room for improvement in this regard to make their product a more holistic data warehousing solution.

It's important to have a well-informed and experienced team when rolling out this kind of application. For a Greenfield implementation, you will need skilled business analysts, architects, and functional solution specialists who can translate functional requirements into detailed designs. Additionally, a seasoned technical specialist will be necessary to design and roll out the solution.

When undergoing a migration, it's imperative to consider additional factors beyond technical challenges. These may include converting third-party legacy artifacts, connectors, and data. Furthermore, aspects such as change management, data migration, governance, and security must also be taken into account when implementing an enterprise data warehouse solution.

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Buyer's Guide
SAP BW4HANA
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about SAP BW4HANA. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
770,292 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Anandha Krishna - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Architect at iQM

Overall, I would rate it a seven out of ten. It's a robust product. But there are  downsides, like the cost being one. It's resource-intensive. Also, integration with non-SAP enterprise components could be improved.

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Hanif Shaikh - PeerSpot reviewer
Co-founder & Partner at idiligence Solution

The product has improved data analysis and reporting processes because it helps with the analysis and forecasting of reports. The product keeps the company's tool and landscape in place as it does not mix the organization's transaction data with analytical data. In our company, SAP BW4HANA caters to our requirements if we want to do anything with our reports by adding any key characteristics or figures to our data sources. The product can drill down to a deep level, ranging from company code-wise angle to G/L account number and cost element. With SAP BW4HANA, it is possible to get everything by drilling down at a deep level, and it helps my company come up with real-time business analysis and forecasting for the required decision-making area in our organization. The product also provides BO reports for dashboard development for some of the product's customers who want to see the dashboard area included in the reports. With the help of SAP and SAP SAC, some standard templates can be easily made available, as per the system requirements, which are good features for data visualization and reports since it makes it easy for the customer to identify what exactly is their business. The product provides details about sales, production, and what should be the focus of the business in the upcoming quarters of a year. In general, the tool makes it easy for customers to do planning and indulge in forecasting for the future of businesses.

The solution supports our organization's big data and real-time analytics in the area of decision-making. My company operates as a service provider, and we have seen that for each and every organization where we provide services, the tool has made available leverages for planning and forecasting, which helps in the area of quick decision-making. In the initial system, businesses have to extract data, after which they need to be involved in the planning and forecasting stages using a database view, SAP data with Qlik or Qlik Sense to make reports and then upload the reports by using flat files through the required databases consisting of Excel-based maintenance of such reports so that businesses can get help to decide on the outcomes on the basis of which reports were getting generated. The amount of reports generated by the product on a weekly or monthly basis has reduced a lot since it allows generating reports with a click, ensuring that the decision-making process is made faster for businesses. If you develop a report today, the decision-making process can be carried out tomorrow, after a week, or maybe after a few days.

To run any kind of analytical report, SAP BW4HANA with SAP SAC serves as a good product in terms of scalability and stability. The product also helps with the areas of planning and forecasting. The tool will offer its customers a good ROI if the product's costs are reduced.

With SAP Data Services and SAP Datasphere, you can have intelligent integrations and establish some connections that SAP BW4HANA provides to users. SAP has added various integration layers. The tool helps with real-time integrations.

I rate the tool a nine to nine and a half out of ten.

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JH
Contractor at MISA

It's been 10-12 years since SAP BW4HANA evolved from its older versions, but the product hasn't improved much. Unlike competitors such as Microsoft and Snowflake, who continuously evolve their products, SAP BW4HANA lacks seamless integration with third-party connectors. This absence of support for good integration tools suggests a monopolistic approach. Simple integrations take excessive time, leading to low business efficiency. SAP's core applications are highly customizable and purpose-built, with continuous release cycles that align with market trends.

The maintenance of the solution is challenging due to its complex architecture. However, its dynamic design and comprehensive features make it unique. Even a minor with database knowledge can significantly improve the schema creation process.

I don't recommend the solution. It's not fair to compare bananas to oranges. There's no comparison. SAP doesn't fall anywhere close to other vendors.

If you are a static organization with basic SAP applications in the underlying architecture, SAP BW4HANA will be a better choice. However, with the evolution of data and the increasing amount of data being collected, along with emerging applications, it's not advisable to use it. It will complicate your life, leading to disappointment for your business and SAP's overall strategy for the organization.

Overall, I rate the solution a five out of ten.

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Sivaiah Pa - PeerSpot reviewer
Specialist BI at a logistics company with 10,001+ employees

I rate the product an eight out of ten. 

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SK
FTTP Engineer at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

The product is not relevant anymore. Other modern tools are better than SAP BW/4HANA. I will not recommend the solution to others. Overall, I rate the solution a six out of ten.

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Santosh Pallai - PeerSpot reviewer
SAP BPC Consultant at Tech Mahindra

I rate SAP BW/4HANA seven out of 10. It's user-friendly, so it's easy to get started on it.

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Kiran Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Director Sales at Rialtes

In terms of data warehousing and real-time analytics, the tool has been doing pretty well for our company, and as a matter of fact, it has also been working out well for some of the customers for whom we had helped with the implementation part of the solution. The customers who use SAP BW4HANA are happy with the tool.

The in-memory compute feature impacted the data processing speed since my company presently sees a thirty to forty percent improvement.

In terms of structuring the data that is going to come in, and especially in terms of the overall setup of the tool, the APIs to be set up, and other such areas, are some of the key roles of the people who use the product.

If customers are looking at SAP BW4HANA, I would say that it is definitely a stable solution, but it all depends on your landscape. If your landscape consists of seventy percent non-SAP, then SAP BW4HANA is not meant for you. If you have your core ERP and everything else on SAP, then SAP BW4HANA is a good solution.

The real-time analytics capabilities benefit our organization by allowing employees to make the process of decision-making faster because we have seen reports getting pushed with the in-memory computing capabilities of the tool in a very fast manner. The product has definitely helped the customers make decisions faster.

I rate the overall satisfaction with the product in terms of scalability and future readiness as seven out of ten. Overall, the product is stable. I feel that the support could be better. From the perspective of the people in the market, if you look at the resources offered by SAP BW4HANA, you can find many people who are trained in the product. Getting qualified resources for SAP BW4HANA is very easy.

I rate the tool a seven out of ten.

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RAUL PAHUARA - PeerSpot reviewer
Deputy IT Project Manager at Volcan Compania Minera SAA

I may consider contacting a consultant next month.

It's not a friendly solution. So, it is a complex tool.

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

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LV
Co-Founder at AVIC Software & Service

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten. 

If someone wants to implement BW4HANA, it's important to do a training course first and think about the strategy they would like to use to leverage the data for their business.

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JJ
SAP ABAP Consultant at SNP Group

I give SAP BW4HANA a nine out of ten.

We have plans to increase the usage of SAP BW4HANA in the future.

I recommend SAP BW4HANA for organizations with an IP platform. Similar products, such as Qlik Replicate, are more expensive.

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Wonjae BAE - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Managing Director at dfocus

SAP BW/4HANA did not require us to start from scratch as it utilizes predefined content inside.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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Sunishta Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Professor at Furtwangen University

To ensure smooth deployment, businesses must clearly understand their specific business processes before opting for any solution. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.


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AK
Project Manager - Analytics at Mindsprint

I would advise you to go ahead with SAP BW4HANA with minimal options to look into other solutions.

We found that SAP BW4HANA has better performance than NetWeaver Business Warehouse. Also, SAP BW4HANA has a simplified structure, advance DSOs, and a composite provider. These were not possible with NetWeaver Business Warehouse. This is because of the HANA database at the back end. Because of this, we have shifted 60% to BW4HANA and have 40% remaining on NetWeaver Business Warehouse. We have less than 5000 people using this solution.

Overall, I would rate SAP BW4HANA at nine out of ten.

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Arijit_Sarkar - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Analytics Lead at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It's important that SAP does not destroy the core value of what makes BW a great solution. They shouldn't abandon the star schema modeling so that anybody who wants to do 16 dimensions can keep their own shell, and can enhance user information on top of that. 

I rate this product eight out of 10. 

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PN
BI Manager at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would advise, that if you have SA, as in ERP systems, the BW is fine. If you do not have SAP ERP, for example, if you have a non-SAP system from where you want to load the data, then SAP BW is not a good solution. It will increase the turnaround time.

I'd rate the solution three out of ten.

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RM
SAP Technical Director at Key Performance Consulting

I would rate this solution as seven out of ten.

Overall, it's hard to compare with other products on the market, but I think it has improved quite significantly.

For those who are interested in using this solution, my advice is to do a trial of the solution because it's a good way to get started and will make implementation faster.

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VC
Technical Manager at Vupico

I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

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AJ
ERP Application Manager at a energy/utilities company with 501-1,000 employees

I'm a customer and end-user. 

We have the SAP S/4HANA on-prem version, however, we are using the Azure servers to host them.

We are using SAP S/4HANA, BW/4HANA, and SAP Analytics Cloud products.

We have invested heavily in our training and end-user environment. We have got some tools and a team dedicated to that. After learning from the earlier initiatives of SAP implementation, it was rather easy this time around as we knew what needed to be done and implemented those standards early.

I'd recommend the solution to others and also recommend that new users go towards a cloud version. Being on the cloud cuts out a lot of middleware and integration issues. 

Overall, it's a really good product. Right now, I'd rate it eight out of ten. 

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HW
Head of Enterprise Reporting & Analytics at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

It makes sense for all enterprise companies that currently have BW in place to move over because BW4HANA has more reasonable performance, and it helps you in getting reporting. An enterprise can manage the reporting on this one product. In my previous company, I had to do and review reporting for end-users at the aggregated management level, not only at the transactional level. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. It is definitely an eight for reporting low and high at the management level as compared to others, but it is also dependent on the design. I had to provide and I still need to provide a lot of things knowing how my former colleagues have approached those things. From my point of view, it is never always the product, it is the experience we have in the design and context. BW4HANA is definitely much better than BW. It is also much better than HANA Native. It is definitely the right tool in terms of reporting and security on top of the SAP companies. Most of the companies are SAP companies. If you need an additional reporting tool on top, this is a solution.

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it_user1202082 - PeerSpot reviewer
Deputy Manager with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would recommend SAP BW/4HANA.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. Not a ten because it's expensive and its ecosystem is not very open.

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PN
BI Manager at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It's a good solution if you're integrating data from SAP software like ERP and looking out for the day-to-day reporting from the operational users at the lower level. If someone is looking for the quick, graphical reports and mobile availability then this is not the right solution for that. 

From an analytical perspective, I would rate it a two out of ten but from the business warehouse perspective, I would rate it a five.

From an analytical perspective, I would rate it two because it's not competent in the current scenario of the market. The reports take a huge amount of time because it just uses its basic features called Microsoft Analysis Office which is like Excel reporting and no one wants to see data in Excel reports.

Businesses want to see the data in terms of the graphs, which can be easily readable compared to the numbers. If I'm giving the data in numbers or charts, the charts should be easily understood. Whereas BW provides data in Excel, so someone has to sit and create their own reports on top of it, which takes a lot of time.

The second thing is the execution time for the reports generation. Even due to the limitation of the analysis of the office I cannot process more than around 10 million records. It takes a lot of time to forget about 100K records. It takes a lot of time to load the data, whereas if I compare this with Tableau, it loads in milliseconds or seconds.

If I'm going to meet some of my customers and then if I decide that I want to check something about what the customer is talking about, for example, I cannot do that. I need to login, I need to connect to my SAP systems, then I need to execute the report and then see what the data is. Mobile availability is not there. While having a discussion with the customers I can include the report on my tab with Tableau. This is lacking in BW.

I had to tell a customer that I had to check the information and get back to him. I had to spend half an hour trying to call someone either from IT or someone in my back office to get the data and provide it to the customer. That was rubbish.

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NS
Sr SAP Cloud Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten because it's not bad. The world has been running with the same product for several years, but now new products and new technologies are coming. They have their own challenges. That doesn't mean that this is bad.

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NM
IT Director at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

I would look at the Cloud option. Although the Cloud is not mature enough at this time, people who are planning to deploy this solution perhaps a year down the road may benefit from it. The Cloud may be something they would want to consider.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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NM
Senior Strategy Manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

I would recommend this solution in certain circumstances, but for others, probably not. It all depends on what the use case was.

I would rate SAP BW4HANA a seven out of ten.

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RD
Technology Analyst at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

We use this product in conjunction with the new solution, SAP Analytics Cloud.

My advice for anybody who is considering SAP BW4HANA is that it's a very stable product, and if you are looking at a huge volume of data that you want to process daily or any similar kind of task, then this is definitely a good solution.

At this point, I can't think of any additional features that I would like to see in the next release.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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RM
SAP Technical Director at Key Performance Consulting

This is a good product and one that I recommend implementing. 

As we look at the information we have for the cloud solution, it would be helpful to have something more clear from the vendor in terms of strategy. More information on the direction of the data warehouse solutions, going forward, would be helpful. Today, there is a market for HANA both on-premises and in the cloud, but the data warehouse cloud solution that is coming up is quite different.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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SA
Lead Consultant at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

SAP is introducing a lot of new features and making this product even more flexible.

The suitability of this solution depends on how big the business is and how much they want to invest in data warehousing. The effectiveness will vary from customer to customer. For example, I don't think that it is a good solution for small or medium-sized businesses because it is very costly. It involves a lot of maintenance costs and a lot of expertise. For a big customer, who is SAP-centric, with lots of SAP data or SAP business processes, this is one of the best data warehousing solutions.

Rating a product involves taking many things into consideration, such as scalability, performance, and security features. It also depends on what industry it is being used in.

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

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FS
Director at Pixel Studio PTY

Thinking of the business people, independent of the tool, it could be state-of-the-art, it depends on the business people. Business people think that in order to run a business as usual, then they don't care about what you need to do in order to get them right. You could have a very fancy application but if the data is wrong, it doesn't have the right data quality, the right quality shape then no matter what, it won't work. Take the business people onboard and second, run data quality workshops just to be sure that everything that is put into the tool is clean.

I would rate it an eight and a half out of ten because nothing is perfect, everything can be improved.

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SP
SAP Enterprise Services Specialist at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

We are SAP partners.

The solution is deployed on a scale-out environment, which involves five nodes of 1TB each. We have four worker nodes and one standby node.

I'm not the consumer of this product. I'm an administrator of it. I'm basically supporting this project but I'm not the actual customer.

I would definitely recommend the solution. It is the way forward if an organization is already in the SAP ecosystem. It's good to adapt to it sooner rather than later. I would definitely advise companies to implement it.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten. 

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SH
Senior Consultant SAP / BW / SAP BOBJ at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

I rate SAP BW4HANA four out of ten. I advise others to keep practicing and learning more about the product.

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TT
Associate Manager at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would not recommend the solution because they have not upgraded their technology.

I rate SAP BW4HANA a seven out of ten.

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LH
Cloud Solutions Architect and Analytics at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

It costs a lot for a company to invest in SAP. It could be hard for a company to invest in it. It should be a little cheaper, it would raise the score to a nine.  

If a customer wants to save costs, they should move their infrastructure from on-premise to public cloud. 

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SH
Senior Consultant SAP / BW / SAP BOBJ at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to first follow the basics. It is possible that you will want some enhancements but you have to start at the beginning and start with the basic practice for modeling.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

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Buyer's Guide
SAP BW4HANA
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about SAP BW4HANA. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
770,292 professionals have used our research since 2012.