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.
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.
