SAP BW4HANA Reviews

SAP BW/4HANA is the same as the old SAP BW system, except that it's being hosted on HANA. Nowadays, SAP HANA is coming out with all the data warehouse features. You don't have to have SAP BW on HANA, HANA itself can offer that. SAP as 4HANA itself is taking over because it supports both OLTP and OLAP transactions at the same time.

One thing is that it costs more because you have to acquire that license for the product, which itself is a waste. If you can do that without the product, that's one thing. And then the performance. Performance is never so good with the old model, BW model that SAP developed because you need to extract the data, you have to load it, you have to put it into cubes, and you have to build your own warehouse, then it's ready for reporting, which is a very convoluted process. It's a long journey and a tedious job every day, every week, but that's how the world was working for several years.

If anything, they should only make it faster. You cannot blame the product completely because it depends on how well you built your cubes, as well as the database objects inside the data warehouse, and how efficient your SQL is.

I've been using this solution for about three years.

The system has always been stable. 

The scalability is fine. The limitation is not the product, but limitation is the hardware for HANA because HANA hardware is very expensive. Everyone has to be very cognizant about how much data is really required and what data needs to be pushed. Otherwise the hardware costs for HANA database is going to be very, very expensive.

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.

The primary use case of this solution is for our ERP purposes.

From an ERP point of view and a functionality point of view, it works very well. The benefits are in that of financial costing and material management.

The only component that is not fully known is the HCM (Human Capital Management), but we have gone with SuccessFactors.

The HCM needs improvement, but as a company, they have stopped any development on this.

In the next release, I would like to see their BI component introduced with a mobile version, as it is not currently present.

I have been using this solution for just over three months and we have just gone into production.

So far, we have not had any issues. This solution is stable.

We have not had the opportunity to test the scalability, as we are retail at the moment and using it as a storage system.

At this point, we have only three users.

It is being used daily, but we plan to use it more extensively in the future.

We have only contacted technical support once and they were helpful. Their response time was also good.

The initial setup was straightforward and similar to other ERP deployments.

It took three months to deploy this solution.

We had the help of a system integrator.

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.

I was a developer.

We use this solution for sales reporting and financial reporting.

I like that it's quite quick.

I would like more integration.

Cost is a factor. It could be improved.

The installation could be simplified.

I have been using SAP BW4HANA for seven years.

The version that I dealt with was 7.4, and the company I am in now is using the latest version.

I am just starting to use that now.

SAP BW4HANA is very stable.

It's a scalable solution. I don't have any issues with the scalability of this product.

We have 200 to 300 users in our organization who use it.

I have contacted technical support, they are generally very good.

I used standard reporting, which didn't meet our needs and we had to go through a data warehouse.

The initial setup is quite complex.

We are a worldwide team, we need quite a few people to manage this solution. We have a team of eight to manage this solution in Europe and close to the same to manage it in Asia. 

We have a team of 14 or 15 to manage this solution worldwide.

In general, it's quite expensive.

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.

We are a service provider and we provide SAP services to our clients. I am a consultant and I offer SAP BW4HANA as a data warehouse, used for retail business.

The reports being generated by this product are used by the business to clarify profit and loss on the orders that they have placed.

If you have a large set of orders, it is very difficult to track and manage them. This product helps you to distinguish the processes and provides visibility such as checking where products are in the process at any given time.

It provides information about billing, delivery, and all of the aspects related to an order. You can generate monthly reports or yearly reports, including charts, as needed.

The most valuable feature is that we can transform a huge amount of data and apply business logic as per the requirements.

The speed of operations could be a little faster.

We have been working with SAP BW4HANA for approximately seven years.

This is a very stable solution and we use it on a daily basis.

SAP BW4HANA is scalable. We have approximately 5,000 users.

The technical support is good.

I was not using another similar product prior to this one.

With a deployment plan, it takes approximately a year and a half to complete. The complexity of the initial setup is such that we need help from SAP.

The number of people required for deployment and maintenance depends on how big the project is. It takes between 30 and 40 people initially if it's a small to medium-sized project. For maintenance, 10 people would be enough.

We required help from SAP for the implementation.

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.

We are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients.

The most valuable features are the speed of reporting and the HANA database.

I find the migration from an existing BW platform to be quite difficult. It is quite cumbersome for our customers to migrate to BW 4HANA.

The impact that it has on the ECC/ERP system is a problem because they are relying solely on the ODP tool to perform the extract.

It takes too long to escalate problems from the first level of support.

I have been using this solution for a bit less than two years, from around the time that it came out.

Stability is something that needs to be improved. There are too many SAP nodes to implement on a regular basis to get everything working.

It is a scalable solution but it depends on the hardware. Our clients vary in size from small to very large organizations, although for this product, most of them are at least of medium size.

The technical support is okay, although it can be improved because sometimes it takes too long to get the correct expert to deal with the issue. Essentially, the wait at the first level of support causes us to lose time.

The initial setup is rather complex. It can be up and running in two or three days but it takes a week to have it perfectly implemented.

We implement both on-premises and cloud-based deployments for SAP BW 4HANA.

Our in-house team does the implementation and deployment for our customers.

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.

We are a solution provider and this is one of the solutions that we implement for our customers.

We primarily use this solution for data warehousing and reporting.

This product is user-friendly.

Out of the box, this solution has a lot of standard features.

The product is quite optimized, having simple processes for change management and different security features. It offers a lot of flexibility.

Things are going more agile nowadays and you want to use a solution like BW/4HANA. It is more agile and more open to other sources. It integrates well with visualization tools like BusinessObjects.

This solution is very costly compared to competitors on the market, which stops some people from implementing it.

SAP has to be more customer-centric. They are aware of the standard business use cases but if changes are made then they are not aware of them, which makes the product more difficult to support.

You receive a standard product, which is fine, but it needs to be made more customizable.

Connecting multiple sources is a challenge because you have to go through a lot of different setups. For example, if you want to use FreeSQL then BW4/HANA lacks the support.

Some of the options that exist are very complex, which makes it tough to integrate.

I have been using SAP BW/4HANA for the past six years.

As this is an on-premises solution, scalability can be a challenge. SAP claim that it is scalable, but I don't think so because it will add to your cost. I think that it should be more cloud-oriented. Basically, it can be scaled but it has its limitations.

We have perhaps 200 to 300 users in our company and it is being used on a daily basis.

This is quite a stable tool.

The support for this solution is good. The availability is good and the responses for more information are quick. However, it can sometimes take a long time to get a solution. Sometimes, it is so long that I can find the solution faster myself.

There is one problem for which I have not received a resolution. They have taken a lot of input from us, yet have been unable to pinpoint the problem. This is a challenge that I still face.

I have tried Snowflake and it is also quite a flexible tool. It is more open in that you can bring in data from multiple sources by just installing some DLLs and parameter files.

The length of time for deployment, to get everything up and ready to work, depends on several factors. For example, if depends on the number of objects and the number of reports that are needed. When we implement this solution for somebody, we do our estimation based on those two.

One of the projects that I worked on took approximately one year to go from the initial stage up until the point where it could be used for reporting purposes.

This is an expensive solution and there are costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

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.

The processes are the most valuable aspect of this solution. You can try to change the way you do business with the customer while we tell the customer that we have Suite 4HANA that they need to adopt because we have at this moment and for that, we have a methodology that is SAP Activate. We use this methodology to discover what your business requirements are. You can get a glimpse of what it is in the ERP, because it's an ERP, and then you can discover which way you to do the business process with the new tools, instead of using the old ones.

You need to adopt the business processes that are supported by this new tool, Suite 4HANA because otherwise, you will have the same issues that you had before in ERP in the compromised world when you had a lot of customization because you need to adopt the tool to your business process. We try to push for the cloud version because then you can leverage many other things that are not available in the on-premise version.

In the on-premise world, you have releases every six months or every year depending on what is required but in the cloud, you have new releases depending on what part of the ERP needs to be enhanced. This happens frequently. Depending on the module, you have sometimes weekly updates. Usually monthly but depending on what is being developed because the people that didn't use the cloud version are very keen on adopting new ways to do business processes. In that regard, everything that is in the cloud should be dynamic. They should keep up the pace because you will get the best version of this tool that gathers all the knowledge that is coming from many sources or many customers. It is continuously improving. 

I would like to see easier connectivity with other tools. No matter what, everything is in the cloud. All this stuff is in the tool but the communication between the tool is not so clear. Everything can be done, but you need to do several steps in order to get these things done. My recommendation is to improve connectivity. It should have a common kind of data model that the data is mapping to connecting applications.

The stability is good. 

Scalability depends on the number of users you can have and depends on the load that is distributed horizontally and then you can support as many customers in an automatic way. The scalability is done by the rules that you deploy within. You may need to deploy more servers if you reach a certain number of users at the same time. 

Their technical support is good. If I need something I just need to write down a note and that'll be the case. There are tools that are monitoring the environment so I don't need to take care of that but if I see something that really is not good then I write down a note and then they answer me because there is an SLA. Depending on the contract you have, they offer an SLA. They answer in two to six hours or up to one day.

The initial setup depends on what you need to do because if you requested a managed service, you don't need to do anything. SAP takes care of that and you only pay a subscription and they do whatever you need. You need to set up some modules but they will do it for you, you don't need to take care of that. You don't need to do much. You don't need to take care of that anymore, you just need to focus on your business.

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.

The solution is used for the reporting on various dashboards for analytical purposes.

HANA is based on a column store, and it is very effective for reading the data. 

BW has a major advantage because most of the activities on the BW system are reading data rather than writing data. 

The product, overall, is very good.

The solution is easier to maintain than traditional SAP products.

All of the information that is provided by the solution for managing the HANA database is excellent.

I can't think of anything the solution needs in terms of features to make it stronger. It's a great overall solution.

The solution does occasionally get a few bugs, but this is typical for any product.

We've been using the solution for the past two years.

We have found the solution to be quite stable. It doesn't crash. It's been great.

If a company needs to expand the solution, they can definitely scale up. It's quite easy to do so.

We've reached out to technical support in the past. We reach out when there are some bugs or some specific issues on the product. They are very good. We've been satisfied with the level of support.

I wasn't a part of the initial setup, so I can't speak to the implementation.

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.