SAP BW4HANA Reviews

As a user, I use the solution for BW data modeling, customization, remodeling, process changes, and creating queries, workbooks, and analyses.

SAP BW4HANA aids in managing data from ER to front-end analysis, contributes to ROI, and fosters business growth understanding.

I like that the solution breaks down components to a very granular level, allowing for customization and implementation based on specific requirements. Its structured approach provides flexibility.

Challenges arise with real-time client requirements when clients are accustomed to Microsoft Excel's extensive features for data analysis. They expect similar flexibility and customization in the solution, particularly regarding headers displaying keys and descriptions or just keys. Achieving this level of customization can be challenging, and it's an area that may need improvement.

I have been working with the solution for over eight years.

The solution is stable. I rate it an eight out of ten.

The solution is scalable. I rate it a seven out of ten.

The solution is deployed on-premises and cloud, and the entire process took slightly over a week. I rate the setup as seven out of ten.

The solution is expensive.

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.

We are using HANA for dashboarding. HANA is like a database for the system where we create dashboards using business planning and consolidation on AE4 and EPM. Five or six people are on the business warehouse team managing BW/4HANA, and I'm the architect, so I help them.

The UI is completely new, beautiful, and user-friendly. There are some other helpful features like global filters and advanced tools. We can perform custom calculations easily

From a technical perspective, the performance has been enhanced and optimized for a limited number of flows. The content settings are more advanced, and there are so many other features that I can't name them all.

BW/4HANA could improve query optimization. For example, there could be an error message that pops up when you hover over it if any query fails. That would make it easier to find out what went gone wrong. Guided SAP help tools would make it easier for us to go forward. 

I have been using BW4HANA for almost six or seven months now.

BW/4HANA is quite stable unless we come up with different service sites.

There are some old systems that have been discontinued, and it'll be challenging if you migrate completely to a new system. I'm not sure whether every organization wants to do that, but so I cannot speak to the scalability. 

SAP BW/4HANA is easy to set up. It's a little tricky when it fails, but I did not find it challenging. You need to have all the help files installed before starting the setup. The deployment is fast.

I can't comment on the cost because it keeps changing based on the plan and company requirements. There are different procedures and corporate discounts.

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

We are a consulting company, we use the solution for our client's organizations who have a basic requirement for KPI information.

Our customers require KPIs to analyze their management. We use BW/4HANA to extract data and provide business intelligence for our customers that are using S/4HANA ERP.

SAP BW/4HANA can be used more generally as a data warehouse. Prior to BW/4HANA, BW classic could only work with SAP products, but S/4HANA can be used for any enterprise data warehouse and is no longer limited to SAP, but can also be used for legacy data or big data. The solution is more flexible than before.

We benefited from BW/4HANA's ability to utilize predefined content. We didn't need to start from scratch.

The solution is not easy to implement. It requires a lot of learning at the beginning. I would like to see the features be simplified.

I have been using SAP BW/4HANA for five years. 

The solution is stable.

SAP BW/4HANA is not a cloud version, it does not have auto-scaling functionality. It is scalable, but it is not automatic.

In the past, for data warehousing, we used Oracle, Google BigQuery and AWS. For business intelligence, we used BusinessObjects as a solution.

BW/4HANA is not easy to implement, it is complex. It requires four or five people to implement.

Before, in BW classic, there is BW Workbench. Inside Workbench, we could do almost anything without needing to go to the database level. Now, the architecture has changed. We need to use Eclipse to model the data, making it more technical than before. It is difficult to train our customers.

If an upgrade is needed, it takes about five months to implement, depending on what the client currently has. If we are implementing a new BW/4HANA from the beginning, it will take more time to analyze the requirements.

SAP BW/4HANA is expensive.

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.

Simplified tables, advance DSOs, and composite provider are valuable features.

I've been working with this solution for four years.

It is a stable solution.

The technical support is okay.

The initial setup is easy.

Price wise, this solution is on the higher side.

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.

It is used for analyzing data, finding patterns, and generating reports, especially management-level reports. So, it's an advanced and enhanced form of the traditional SAP BW, which could run on other databases. SAP BW4HANA runs only on SAP HANA, and it has certain additional enhancements and capabilities that are possible because of BW4HANA. There are very few use cases. I haven't seen many customers using SAP BW4HANA or even SAP BW because there are so many BI applications around nowadays.

The solution's performance is really good. Also, it's easy to operate, easy to administer, and relatively simple to install. Also, it integrates very easily with most other known applications, especially widely used applications.

The licensing cost could be made better.

I have been using SAP BW4HANA for three or four years. We are a sales provider organization.

It is a stable product.

It is a scalable solution. Again, it completely depends on the hardware it is running. We only have two customers using the solution.

The technical support is good.

The initial setup is the same as any other SAP product based on NetViewer. The installation can be done in one or two days. The post-processing phase to have the solution on our system may take a week, approximately. The prerequisites for deployment are pretty much standard. The HANA database must be installed, and an application server must be installed. The application server needs to be prepared with the required file system, OS libraries, and specific runtime environments.

For the solution's deployment and maintenance, we have two or three people. So, we have one senior consultant and two mid-level consultants.

It is an expensive product. The licensing strategy is pretty much the same for all SAP products, and I or my team are not exposed to it.

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.

We primarily use the solution for analyzing all the enterprise data and pushing it out on a corporate dashboard for the leadership team to have a tab of production, revenues, manufacturing, et cetera.

It has got wonderful features in terms of analyzing your production data, and it gives you real-time insight into productive maintenance. You can plan your budget, and you can map them against actuals. It gives you good insights on overall performance and processes.

The solution is stable and reliable.

It's quite scalable. 

There are certain areas, for example, HR or project systems, where the BW native adapters are still not fully enabled for you to have the standard offerings.

Support could be more reliable. 

It's quite agile. 

It is an expensive product.

We first ordered the product last year. Altogether we have about a year and a half of experience with it, end to end.

SAP is an extremely stable product. I'd rate it nine out of ten. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution is very scalable. Compared to traditional data warehousing it is very, very agile. It's very scalable. I'd rate the general scalability nine out of ten. 

We have close to 120 users. 

Support varies. On a good day, even the critical ticket gets through, and on a bad day, the simplest one will have you bump across the globe trying to get help. So it's a bit of a mixed experience.

Neutral

We previously used Power BI-based dashboards. That solution, however, was based on flat files and static data. We were looking for a single source of truth and to have real-time inputs, which is why we adopted SAP. 

I would rate the ease of implementation somewhere around six or seven. We still have some teething issues, which hopefully we can resolve.

The deployment took seven months.

We engaged SAP for the initial explorer phase. And based on that, we sized our setup, and we put our requirements in place. The process was to look at the business, polish and design, and then implement.

There were six people involved in the implementation process. They were developers, functional specialists, subject-matter experts, and, of course, admins.

In terms of ROI, we just went live a few months back, so ROI was not a focus. For this year, the focus is the adoption of users and the intangible benefits out of it, how much your end users are buying into the product and how much it motivates them to get insight from the system. We have internal KPIs. However, these are not related to value for money. Real ROI will be looked at on a broader three to five-year zone.

The solution is extremely expensive. I'd rate them three out of ten in terms of affordability. 

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. 

I'm a data analytics lead.

The Strategic Enterprise Management Business Consolidation System is the most valuable and critical feature of this solution. It also has a great analytics engine with all the capabilities I'm looking for. There are a lot of master and transitional data relationships where BW has very good features.

I love this product and have been working on SAP products for many years but the solution needs to be more user-friendly with an improved UI, particularly if you compare it to what Snowflake is offering. 

I've been using this solution for three years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable, we have around 200 users.

Technical support from SAP is good and very structured. They are trying to improve day by day. They've got a good repository in terms of their knowledge base.

The initial setup is not complex because we use HANA Studio. For anyone not in the SAP domain, it will be more complicated. We have two admins. 

When comparing SAP to Snowflake, the difference is that Snowflake has a better UI and it's very quick to scale compared to SAP. 

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. 

It's mainly used for finance. We use it for reporting. 

We use SAP standard functionality to get the data from SAP and then just report on it. It's pretty fast.

We like that it is an SAP product, so we can easily connect with the SAP ERP system.

Support is okay.

I've found the product to be scalable. 

The solution is stable.

It has a lot of problems in terms of technical architecture. If I change something in BW, a lot of development becomes inactive.

The development time for any developer is quite huge compared to other products.

The setup is a bit complex.

If I want to have good reporting, then I have to buy a separate license. I have to pay for separate things. That's quite irritating.

I've been working with the solution for 16 years. 

It is stable. It's reliable and doesn't have bugs or glitches. 

We can scale the solution if we need to. 

There are about 150 people on the solution. 

Technical support is okay. The turnaround time is quite high. they are a bit slow. 

Neutral

I've used other solutions as well, such as Qlik and PowerVM. 

They are pretty fast in terms of performance, so the ease of development is extremely good. My turnaround time for the business was less.

The initial setup is not straightforward. SAP is not at all straightforward during implementation.

It is not difficult to maintain. 

We handled the initial setup in-house with the help of a third party.

We have achieved an ROI.

The cost is average. I'd rate it five out of ten in terms of the affordability of the standard license.

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.