SAP BW4HANA Reviews

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.

I'm a reseller and implementer.

There are about 20 consultants using this solution on a daily basis.

The solution is useful for connecting with external systems.

From a technical perspective, it could be even more related to legacy systems. The connectivity requirement is quite high and requires systems that are up-to-date.

There's a lot of competition. If a customer isn't already using SAP, they should also consider other tools.

I have used this solution for three years.

The stability has improved a lot. It's becoming a more mature product.

We haven't had any issues with the scalability. It has also improved significantly.

SAP's technical support is okay as long as you follow the process. I would rate technical support as three out of five.

I would rate the setup as four out of five. The documentation has improved, so it's not that difficult.

The cost and licensing depends on how the customer is going to use the solution.

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.

We use the product to report to HANA systems. 

The solution is not scalable. It does not have a data streaming feature as well. 

The product is stable. 

The solution's technical support is good. 

The product's setup is easy. 

I would rate the 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. 

Its direct approach is the most valuable. You get more real time and capabilities than BW. 

They have taken out a few BW functionalities when they redesigned this. The way of multi-dimensional thinking and star schema got a little bit lost. It may be because of the cost, but certain functionalities that were previously implemented from the BW side should come back again in the whole product. It is a young product. It is version 2.0. In time, I'm pretty sure they will come back again because otherwise, it limits the potential of the product, and I have to do a lot of modeling towards that direction. For me, the analytics focus is too much. It is not cube-oriented in that way, so its functionality is limited. It is not really technically limited in the back end; it is more limited in the front end. It has a data-mining mindset for SQL developers. The navigational attributes should be easy.

It needs to be built in models. I see the data mark cube or understanding that the composite provider needs to be models in a cube coming back. The multi-dimensional star schema approach and the reporting need to be done as well as possible to leverage the star scheme below. This is definitely not understood by many consultants and even composite providers for star schema. They always think in terms of flat tables, which is limiting. You need to build the right dimensions, objects, and so on. If you can build this in BW4HANA, then you have this understanding that BW4HANA is not forcing you in this direction, but it should force you a bit better in this direction. Maybe a few elements which were in use in BW should come back again. It would help the community to determine the direction to build on the cube. You can have maybe 50 elements, and then you can expand it to what you need by leveraging navigation. So far, this functionality is a little bit limited in the tool, and it is not thought through, but I think it will come. They should also be adding more capabilities for the transformation between different objects. In BW, this is currently limited, especially towards composite providers.

It is a bit complex basically in the building. You have to have a lot of knowledge as well as know how to do it better because it is a bit different from BW. There is not too much expertise currently in the consulting markets. Many are trying to build something, but it may be based on their knowledge of what they have from the BW and HANA side. You have to find the right mix from both of them at this time. We also have HANA Native. These are our two different sync sources basically, and we have approaches to connect nicely, but it is hard to manage your team because a lot of coaching is required.

SAP BW4HANA is a relatively new product from the SAP side, but we have been running almost a two years project now and moving from BW to BW4HANA. So, it is a completely new build of the entire environment. We just completed that in November last year.

We have used BW and HANA Native. BW4HANA is definitely much better than BW. It is also much better than HANA Native.

It depends on your experience, the approach, and so on. I took over the project when it was already started. It had been running for two or three months. I would have approached it differently if I was there during the kickoff. It is challenging when you are too much focused on old products, and you don't have a good model in place or a good understanding of the business model. For me, it was not so difficult. I did it a lot in my former positions and during many years of experience in multidimensional data modeling, but for most of my colleagues and my team members, it was quite challenging because they had more experience in reporting subs, SQL subs, and so on and not so much experience in data modelings and so on. 

In general, you need to acquire experience in this. There are not so many in the market. I also had a bad experience with consulting companies. I had to correct them and technically detail the process for how to do this.

It is simply the mindset. When we approach it with the mindset of how it was done in BW or HANA, you get a process that is not really efficient. When object-oriented approaches are not taken into consideration, everything gets built a hundred times, and instead of being more object-oriented, it gets quite complex. It always requires good modeling and an understanding of the business requirements, which can be quite challenging.

We started as early birds from the SAP side. We got this entire suite for free. I cannot really talk about the price because we didn't have to pay anything.

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.

1.We use it to generate operational analysis for our internal operations, for example, HR analysis, financial analysis, etc. 

2.We use SAP BW4HANA to calculate data and feed to Tableau / SAP BO to visualize data.

1. SAP BW4HANA's memory computing help us calculate into much more detail data  such as accouting document level. And it's very fast.

2. We have capabliity to realize requirements related to big data, real-time anlysis.

1.It can calculate big data. One year ago, SAP BW took us a lot of time around four hours to finish our process chains, but now it's better. 

2.It can calculate data in detail. Before we could not calculate financial documents and accountant documents in detail, we could not do it at a document level but now we can. This is the most important feature. It also has predictive analysis funationlity.

We already had a lot of cubes built-in based on SAP BW.  We hope these BW cubes can support real-time anlysis without migration to SAP HANA modeling.

I have been using this solution for more than one year. 

We can draw down to the document level for a document. The problem is that when that document records are bigger than the platform, it causes the platform to slow down. 

I have opened tickets with technical support. They've been good. Sometimes they take a while to respond. 

The initial setup was complex.

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.

We are currently using the on-premise deployment model. We have just started implementation for normal usage.

The most valuable feature is that it's robust. 

The performance for the reporting is very poor, there is no graphical report. The price to performance ratio is less. It's also very complex, for example, if I want to make a simple change I have to spend a huge amount of effort.

I cannot integrate it with my other tools. It's not possible to do something in the predictive analysis. Mobile reporting and automated reports are also not available. 

I am interested in seeing more graphical reports. SAP Cloud Analytics is an immature product on the market. They have started something to showcase to the customer that SAP also can do the graphical reporting, but still they need a lot of time. They should have similar features to Tableau and Qlik.

It is stable. 

It is scalable. We don't have many users, but with my previous experience, there is no limit. I can increase my hardware and I can use it for as many users as I want. We do have plans to increase the usage.

We require ten staff members for the deployment and maintenance. 

Their technical support is good. 

I previously used many solutions. I used Tableau, SAS, Oracle, Power BI, and SQL.

The initial setup is complex in terms of implementing the basic objects.

In terms of how much time it took us to implement, for the standard features which are provided by SAP then it doesn't take that much time. It can be done quickly, but if you customize it takes longer. It depends upon the complexity of the business scenario. It's time-consuming if I compare the data to other products available on the market. If I compare it with Tableau then it is tremendously time-consuming. 

Tableau belongs to a totally different league but SAP BW is still not that good. It needs a lot of improvement.

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.

I'm part of our company's IT department. We implemented the SAP BW/4HANA solution, and we recommend it to our customers.

SAP BW/4HANA is an analytics solution. You can use it for reporting. It's an advanced data warehousing solution, so it supports real-time analytics, data warehousing, and consolidation. Advanced analytics and data exploration are other use cases.

One significant advantage of SAP BW/4HANA is the direct integration with the SAP HANA database, providing seamless access to real-time analytics. 

Additionally, it enables real-time data integration. We don't need to rely on historical data alone; we can provide reporting and features based on real-time information. 

Also, it integrates well with SAP S/4HANA. The data governance and security features that come with SAP HANA are another significant benefit.

It enables real-time data analytics. Before SAP BW/4HANA or traditional BW systems, data loads would happen nightly. With SAP BW/4HANA, you can directly access the HANA database, providing real-time data and analytics. So, the integration with SAP HANA impacted data processing speeds.

Moreover, the modernized data modeling capabilities helped with analytics. From a data modeling perspective, you have better options to present data to customers or C-level managers. This helps them make better decisions.

The transition from a traditional data warehouse to SAP BW/4HANA improves data governance practices. The transition to real-time, in-memory analytics helps shift how business is conducted. In traditional BW, you had fewer options for data stores. BW/4HANA lets you connect with various source models, both SAP and non-SAP, giving greater visibility.

Valuable features depend on the customer's specific requirements. The benefits will vary based on their needs.

There are few areas of improvement:

• There's the complexity in migration from BW to BW/4HANA, especially with data migration. 

• Also, the cost of ownership is higher. It's resource-intensive, and naturally, that increases costs. 

• Additionally, BW/4HANA is SAP-specific, a vendor lock-in. It makes sense for customers in an SAP environment, but if they run an Oracle suite, for example, they might need to consider if BW/4HANA aligns with their organizational standards. 
• Finally, finding skilled BW/4HANA specialists can be a challenge, as it requires not only BW knowledge but development expertise as well.

I have been using it for eight years now. 

From an overall perspective, SAP BW/4HANA offers businesses what they need. It provides flexibility in data presentation and integration options. It's a good product.

We need to consider both competitors and the customer's environment. If the customer is already using SAP and considering HANA, I'd certainly recommend it. 

However, there are advanced options where you don't even need BW/4HANA. You can get reporting capabilities directly from a HANA database using SAP Analytics Cloud. It's important to understand the customer's specific use case.

The customer service and support are good, but it depends on our contract with SAP. A strong contract agreement will ensure good support.

Having worked with the SAP ecosystem for a long time, SAP supports more than the product; they support the customer as well. Customers need to negotiate their contract terms carefully. 

With the right contract, you'll get good support. However, like any software vendor, SAP has ticket priorities. If it's not a high priority, they'll address it within their SLA. This might not always align with customers' expectations.

Neutral

I worked with traditional BW, which is similar but uses a relational database instead of HANA.

Pricing is always a consideration with SAP. You need to navigate the contracts and agreements carefully. But, with the right terms in place, it can be a cost-effective solution.

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.