What is our primary use case?
We are a consulting company and SAP ERP is one of the products that we implement for our customers. Our primary role is to advise them on tools and strategy, including business use cases that they want to transform.
With ERP, we are working with customers who are looking for S/4HANA transformation, mainly from a greenfield approach. For RPA, we want to add some value in the business case because the business case of the S/4HANA transformation is not so easy to find. So we use some techniques like RPA to find more money around this transformation.
Right now we try to automate some functionality, which is not yet really good, within ERP. We really want to connect via API to the RFP tool to S/4HANA in fact.
We do business consulting or IT consulting, and do not provide support. We do advise them on tools and strategy, including business cases that they have to transform. We work with them up to this point and do not do the implementation.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable features are the claim management. We also find the automation for the process within the "purchase to pay" can be valuable as well. We know that SAP already has an RPA solution to automate the reconciliation between the invoice and the orders, so we don't think that we can find a lot there. We would like to have some use cases with logistics and so on, but we don't have much right now.
We have a "purchase to pay" process, which is in SAP Ariba but mainly within the ERP. We would like to have more around purchasing because with purchasing we have a lot of money to gain and it could be very good for the business case.
What needs improvement?
There are a lot of manual tasks that are used by a lot of people, so it is a very good candidate for RPA. SAP says that if you want to extend the solutions, you need to use some solution outside of SAP for RPA, on a platform as a service or whatever. So, if SAP could have some option, but this not the tool or the best platform that is in the market. So we try to find some solutions to better convince our customers.
For how long have I used the solution?
I began working with SAP in 1992, about 28 years ago.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We have experienced no problems with stability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Scalability has not been an issue for our customers. Our smaller clients have between 2,000 and 3,000 users, whereas a large company has between 10,000 and 20,000 users.
How was the initial setup?
Normally our customers are in retail, the chemical industry, and energy companies. The setup is usually quite complex. When we want them to transform to S/4HANA it has been mainly customized. There are a lot of specifics because their processes are generally not straightforward.
The deployment will take perhaps two months, on average.
What other advice do I have?
When it comes to financing or accounting, SAP is quite enormous. When a company has to produce on every quarter, the numbers that would be in the SAP report, it is quite good. It has very long, long, long life behind it. Logistics, it's still okay. But for the rest, we just started G-Cloud first with a software as a service application. For HR, you have Workday, for instance.
For key purchasing, maybe go to SAP Ariba. If you are looking for Salesforce automation, for instance CRM, maybe you will go to Salesforce. It really depends on which process you want to clone and you want to target, but for the core finance, S/4HANA is a good solution.
I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Partner