SAP S/4HANA Cloud Reviews

I have been using it to manage the business of my company.

We are a well-established enterprise with a century-long history, and we recently transitioned from an older version to the current support system. This move has allowed us to fully leverage the advantages of the new system, facilitating efficient management of our business processes, including those related to manufacturing and other aspects of our operations.

I'd like to share my experience during the migration from SAP ERP to SAP S/4HANA in the cloud. My primary challenge in this migration was the requirement to open a ticket for every request during the project phase, not during operational or post go-live phases. Despite this, I must acknowledge that overall, SAP has proven to be very reliable.

To clarify the issue, after migrating to SAP S/4HANA, I opted to host my SAP solution on the private cloud by converting the license to SAP Cloud. The drawback I encountered during the project phase was the insistence on opening a ticket or service request for any issue or query I had within the project's activities. Looking ahead, I hope that SAP streamlines and simplifies this process for future customers, making it more user-friendly and efficient than my experience.

I have been using SAP S/4HANA Cloud for 3 years.

It is highly scalable and I would rate it 9 out of 10. 

I haven't worked with products from other vendors.

I'm not directly involved in the pricing discussions; it's more of a concern for the finance team.

On a scale from one to ten, where ten is the best, I would rate it around eight or nine.

Managing the server and taking advantage of the services provided by SAP itself is the most valuable feature. They take care of everything.

There is room for improvement, especially in the financial and costing parts. In a specific scenario, it becomes complicated when you have different valuation types for materials, and you try to create a costing model. It's a bit challenging to cover all the aspects.

In future releases, there are two scenarios I would like to see addressed: handling different materials and the pricing model. 

Another area of improvement is the support provided by this solution. It takes a long time to receive support on certain issues.

I have been using this solution for one year. We use the latest version.

I would rate the stability of this solution a nine out of ten. 

We haven't encountered any scalability challenges. So, I would rate the scalability of this solution an eight out of ten for now, with the possibility of it being higher.

Around 300 users are currently working with this solution in our organization. Over time, we plan to increase the usage of this solution. We need to add more features and incorporate more cloud-based solutions like Aruba for retirement. We are planning improvements in the overall technology sector.

Customer service and support's response time is really long. The ticketing system and the support cycle are very long. It takes a while to get a customer response and they often forward lots of articles and links to read. There isn't a clear, direct support contact.

Neutral

The initial setup is okay. In the implementation phase, a very clear standard of methodology by SAP is activated. It's working very nicely. The whole thing is just for your team or for the users to validate such a high-tech solution.

It was completely deployed with SAP. It's a fully managed cloud solution provided by SAP.

The deployment model we chose is RISE with SAP. It's a comprehensive cloud solution managed by SAP itself.

The pricing model can be complicated in certain scenarios. 

The pricing depends. It depends. For small to medium-sized businesses, it can be expensive. However, for larger organizations like ours, it is acceptable and working well. For small businesses, it might be more challenging due to cost limitations.

The pricing calculations are based on various factors, and for businesses with larger volumes and more complex requirements, the costs can be higher compared to smaller businesses.

I have used other solutions as well. As an example, I used SAP ECC. I've been using it since 2005, so I have experience with an older version.

I would advise them to ensure they have a well-prepared and capable team to handle the system and its overall utilization. It's important to understand the requirements and risks involved in implementing SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Especially when it comes to financial investment and resource allocation. Proper preparation is crucial.

Overall, I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

S/4HANA is an ERP solution that is distributed in various modules. We have modules for financial business processes and a controlling module that manages costs. The materials management module handles purchasing and inventory management, while the production planning module addresses manufacturing business processes. 

There is a whole sea of modules for HANA, but I am an expert in only the materials management module. On the technical side, we have two kinds of consultants. One takes care of the cloud and on-premise infrastructure. We also have ABAP consultants who are programmers who define the logic. In S/4HANA, we have the technical side, which I'm unaware of, and the functional side. I am on the functional side. 

I'm the solution architect here, so I deal with the solutions proposed by the consultants. I am utilizing the S/4HANA, but my role is different. I'm not designing the solutions. I am managing the solutions the consultants propose and ensuring the quality of the solution.

I come from a functional consultancy background, and S/4HANA provides excellent procurement solutions for inventory management. One of S/4HANA's best features in the manufacturing module is the ability to calculate product costs.

SAP has substantially improved the analytics component of S/4HANA to provide business intelligence. S/4HANA is increasingly recognized globally as the best analytical tool available. You can connect S/4HANA analytics with cloud solutions like Ariba and SuccessFactors, so you can integrate S/4HANA upstream and downstream.

The user experience has some room for improvement. S/4HANA covers various scenarios based on the best business practices, but users complain about its user experience. It is not a user-friendly ERP solution. I rate the current UX seven out of 10.

I started my career as a functional consultant.

I rate S/4HANA eight out of 10 for stability. S/4HANa becomes increasingly stable over time if you properly define your SOPs and hire the right IT staff experts to stabilize. It takes time, but you can make it stable with the right infrastructure and talent. 

I rate S/4HANA 10 out of 10 for scalability. Scalability is the best part because you can cover the entire enterprise. 

S/4HANA is expensive, but the return on investment is high. The benefits you derive from S/4HANA are far better than the cost. 

S/4HANA is an enterprise solution that many can't afford. You must invest a lot to get the most out of it. It isn't cheap. I rate the price seven out of 10.

 I rate SAP S/4HANA 10 out of 10. It's a strong product that is globally recognized as the best ERP solution. If you plan to implement S/4HANA, you have to build your SOPs and know your business. I'm coming from a functional consultancy background, and the first thing we do is gather requirements from the business. However, they often don't know their own businesses or what they need. It's clear why S/4HANA fails in organizations like these where change management is an issue.

You need a clear roadmap to understand what you hope to get from S/4HANA. Are you buying it for the brand? The key performance indicators must be well defined and you need the right staff. S/4HANA is like a Mercedes. You must have an expert driver who can actually drive that Mercedes. If you want to drive a Mercedes like a Toyota Corolla, it won't help you.

Speaking about use cases, it is a whole ERP system for a medical tech company.

It is a complicated solution. So it should be easier to use.

At the moment, I'm not using the solution, but as a consultant, I'm looking at or evaluating ERP systems for customers. So, SAP S/4HANA is the last one, which I evaluated for one of our customers. Also, my customers chose the solution. So, I am a consultant for my customers. I provide consultations in a totally neutral manner for all the products.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

In one of the projects I know, there are around 400 to 500 users using the solution.

It's a hybrid solution. So a few things are on-premises like the local data is on-premises, and the rest of the software is in the cloud.

The biggest problem if you are involved in implementing SAP S/4HANA is that you are not working directly with SAP, meaning that you are dependent on implementation partners. The implementation partners receive the incentives only if they are selling cloud solutions. So they are cherry-picking in the market. So this means that the transaction phase will go much longer, and the companies with the most needs and the biggest backlog will be the latest ones in the last ones of the transformation, which will spread some competitive disadvantages.

I would recommend the solution to those who are already working with SAP.

I rate the overall solution a seven out of ten.

We use this solution to do a lot of mock up applications to mimic the user scenarios for a couple of our current clients. We try to use those scenarios to see how S/4HANA could be used as a system to better authorize the current client's ability.

I'm using version 1909. The cloud provider is AWS.

There are around 20 people using this solution in my organization.

We like the web portal or interface, which is great. The user experience is much better than the current traditional SAP landscape. Lots of business processes are simplified. There's less maintenance and less configuration effort needed. More importantly, the performance is good. Using the S/4HANA database could really dramatically improve the business performance on the database and could even change the business model overnight.

In terms of S/4HANA Cloud itself, we don't like the rate they charge us. It's pretty expensive. Maybe it's because of the individual instance that we paid for. I don't know whether this is also applicable for other commercial S/4HANA Cloud assistants, but for our training system, there are many bugs or things which didn't work in practice.

We didn't know how to figure it out, and if we posted any of those incidents to the SAP community through the SAP portal, usually SAP would ask what kind of license we had. It's not easy to facilitate the solution between us and SAP, so we have had to leave those issues open.

I've been using this solution for almost two years.

It's hard to say because we haven't implemented any S/4HANA solution for our clients, but from the experience of using that demo system, it's pretty stable. We don't have outages.

It's scalable. For a company that doesn't have experience with SAP, there could be more scalability. If they start a project from scratch, I think they could deploy the S/4HANA solution for the whole company. But if the company has the footprint of SAP in a test and it has pretty complicated IT solutions using the old SAP systems, starting with a small scope, like a pilot project, and then gradually enlarging the scale would be the best option.

I would rate this solution 3 out of 5.

I was not involved in the technical setup of S/4HANA, but from what I understand, it's pretty straightforward. It's almost like an out-of-box solution for us, but it also depends on what kind of use case you have for that system. If it's only for training, you probably don't pay that much attention to all the details, but if it's for a production system for the business, then there are a lot more things that you need to consider.

It all depends on what your needs are in regards to complexity of installment.

I would rate setup 4 out of 5, on a scale of extremely complicated to being very easy.

From the SAP documentation and the best practice webinars, the length of deployment depends on the size of the company and the complexity of their current IT landscape, and also how much data and volume that they want to deal with. It could range from half a year to a couple of years.

We only need one person to administrate the user access and give the IP address to everybody so they have access.

We are a consultant, so deployment was done in-house.

I would rate the ROI 3 out of 5.

Through the experience of another cloud demo system, we know that if we wanted to implement any SAP cloud solution to a potential client, like IBP or S/4HANA, that license cost would be really a big burden for many companies, even for a larger sized company. For instance, SAP charges the license cost per company's revenue size. So if you have a higher revenue, you pay a lot more than a medium or small company.

If clients want to have more sophisticated functionalities or add-ons, they pay additional fees.

I would rate the price 2 out of 5. It's very expensive.

I would rate this solution 4 out of 10. 

My advice is to evaluate the business case very carefully before implementing this solution.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud can be integrated with other non-SAP applications. Our company wants to elevate the core user experience and wants users to use the SAP favourite mobile applications.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud has improved our data management and user and stakeholder experiences. It has also enhanced our business partners, supplier and customer experiences.

In regards to storage, one of the other drivers that led us to implement SAP S/4HANA is that other SAP storage offerings, such as RISE with SAP and SAP BTP, do not offer the same user and customer experience or proper data management. As a result, it's difficult to find available competencies.

I like the SAP offerings and the standard best practices included in the SAP S/4HANA Cloud version.

Another valuable feature is the private cloud. If you are on a private cloud, the SAP S/4HANA allows you to use a desktop PC and customize the workings to your business needs. In addition, with SAP S/4HANA, you also have the choice to select your own Hyperscaler.

A challenge with SAP S/4HANA is that the proposition by SAP does not match the value realization. For example, SAP proposes more value for the cloud offering with RISE with SAP. This same approach should also be realized to the fullest extent for SAP S/4HANA.

We started the implementation of SAP S/4HANA in November 2021. 

The product is stable. It's not challenging, especially with extensive testing and multiple iterations. However, there is always a possibility of issues or surprises, but the product is stable immediately.

In terms of storage scalability, if it is in the cloud, SAP S/4HANA Cloud appears to offer some direct phasing, down phasing, and scalability. But, I have yet to come across a scalability situation on the customer side.

We have a great contract with SAP, so we have no challenges getting technical support. We know that SAP technical support works per their policy and whatever has been defined in the cloud agreement. So, we can connect with an expert and usually have an answer within 48 hours.

Positive

The initial setup of SAP S/4HANA Cloud was complex and wore me and my colleagues out. Value realizations are complex, and it was difficult finding out the actual value realization.

The licensing process for SAP S/4HANA Cloud has worked well and is usually completed before I decide on a project. Also, licensing is confidential between the supplier and the customers.

Regarding setup processes, I believe that a company should be clear about its vision and goals. A company should ensure that the technology they want to implement aligns with the vision they want to achieve in the next two or three years. If these things align, they should adopt this technology and see how many competencies they possess. So, for example, if the company doesn't have the technical competency in-house, it may be better to offload these tasks by leveraging completely managed services via the cloud or SAP.

I would rate this solution an eight. I would have rated it a 10 had I successfully gotten a value realization in a simpler way.

Our company wants the data to be collected from SAP S/4 SSP, and then we want to send the data to the data lake. We want to bring to the world analytics on the data collected from SAP. This includes the structured and non-structured data collected from SAP and data from social media.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud streamlines my client's business and, with the move to the cloud, it is more flexible and efficient.

The most valuable feature of SAP S/4HANA Cloud is its analytics capability. The ability to access and analyze data in real-time has significantly improved our reporting efficiency.

One thing that could be better in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, especially in the public cloud, is how easily you can make changes. Clients, especially those with a lot of existing processes, feel a bit restricted in adapting the system to their specific needs. 

I have been working with SAP S/4HANA Cloud for five years.

I would rate the stability as an eight out of ten.

The scalability of the product is not at the highest level, but it is certainly above average. The number of users for SAP S/4HANA Cloud varies depending on the project. We have worked with small to big businesses.

I would rate the technical support for SAP S/4HANA Cloud as an eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup is relatively straightforward. As a partner, getting SAP S/4HANA Cloud up and running involves a few steps. We work closely with SAP, and they handle some initial activities before we jump in. The whole process usually takes about three to six weeks, during which we set up the environment and get everything ready to start working.

The return on investment for SAP S/4HANA Cloud usually becomes clear after about five years, depending on the business case. It is not immediate, but over time, the benefits start to show.

I would rate the costliness of the product as a seven out of ten. It is on the expensive side.

Overall, I would rate SAP S/4HANA Cloud as a six out of ten.

We are using SAP S/4HANA Cloud as a cost ledger and reports.

The most valuable features of SAP S/4HANA Cloud are the ease of use from the cloud, CapEx analysis report, and everything being connected together well.

The solution could improve by adding a planning model, such as BPC. Additionally, if we need to make changes in the profit center it has to be done manually. It is not connected to the cost center.

I have been using SAP S/4HANA Cloud for approximately 10 years.

The solution is stable. However, we have some connectivity issues but this is due to our network and our factory being away from the city.

The scalability of SAP S/4HANA Cloud is good.

We used a contractor for the support in our company. We had some difficulties.

I rate the support from SAP S/4HANA Cloud a seven out of ten.

Neutral

We switched from SAP ERP to SAP S/4HANA Cloud because SAP S/4HANA Cloud has better connections to our models and is newer. Most solutions only last approximately five years and a switch have to change.

The initial setup of SAP S/4HANA Cloud is easy.

I rate the initial setup of SAP S/4HANA Cloud an eight out of ten.

The price of SAP S/4HANA Cloud is expensive. However, the benefits are good. We did not purchase any upgrades.

The solution is very good, I love it. It is a complete feature set.

I rate the price of SAP S/4HANA Cloud a four out of ten.

I rate SAP S/4HANA Cloud a nine out of ten.