SAP S/4HANA Reviews

I used S/4HANA as a classical ERP system, so I used it to manage the data feeds of enterprise companies. One of them was an IT services company and the other was in the pharmaceutical business. They were two different businesses, but S/4HANA has so many modules and adjustments that you can generally adjust it to any kind of a business. 

S/4HANA can be cloud-based or deployed on-premises, but in both of my implementations, it was on-prem. 

One of the most valuable features, which we used the most, was the FI module, for finance. It involved controlling, account receivables, account payables, and complete financial steering. 

S/4HANA could be improved with better integration. At the moment, a main issue I see is that there's so much growth in the functionality, complementary modules, and cloud solutions which were acquired by SAP and which extend the functionality of the SAP ERP suite. It looks to me that they tend to acquire more and more functionality from acquisitions, but they don't invest enough effort into making them integrated with S/4HANA or ERP. I would say that the functionality is great, but integration is something which still needs more attention. Instead of focusing on acquisitions, they should invest, integrate, and better the existing portfolio of products in SAP. It would help us, as implementors, to have a more complex or compact solution. 

I used S/4HANA for about half a year, for two projects that I was running. 

I would say that S/4HANA is more of a stable product than a top-performing product, but that's because I don't have the same use cases with similar tools to compare it to. It's not fair to judge the performance if I don't have a like-to-like comparison with anything else. 

This solution is scalable. 

The technical support of SAP really depends on where your ticket is resolved. Sometimes you are lucky and you get an expert on the first trial, directly from Europe, and you get good advice very quickly and can continue with your progress. However, sometimes your tickets get stuck and maybe sent to India or sent to less experienced consultants, and you need to chase it to get your ticket resolved. It's hard to make a judgment on this because I've experienced both circumstances, either getting great support in a short amount of time or having to escalate the ticket for a couple of weeks because it's hard to reach the right expert. It's hard to compare because it depends, case by case. 

I'd say their technical support falls in the middle of the scale: it could be better, but it could be worse. At the moment, it's satisfactory, but unfortunately, this isn't always the case. 

Implementation is definitely not straightforward. It's straightforward if you have a proper expert in your sub-base team, but it's not installing Windows or Microsoft Excel. It's a corporate enterprise management system, so there are a lot of parameters you need to set up. The installation itself is the easy part, but the configuration for the business use case is complex. Typically, the installation took about one week. For the configuration, making it compliant with the business use cases, and setting up all the security and users, it took months—typically three to six months, depending on the size of the company. 

The team needed for deployment and maintenance depends on the size and complexity of the customer's business processes. It also depends on how far they would like to go with customizations because almost nobody is purchasing such an enterprise solution to use it as a standard. Almost every customer has some specific features they need to get configured, adjusted, or developed in the solution. From that point of view, it will decide the size of your team. 

If you have a small- to mid-size company—one hundred employees, compact business processes—then you can do it in a couple of months with five people. If you have an enterprise company with thousands of employees around the globe, then it takes almost an indefinite number of consultants because it depends on the complexity of your setup. So the minimum team of five could set it up in a couple of months for a small- to mid-sized company, but it could be a team of twenty to fifty people if you have a complex environment. 

I have implemented this solution for two customers. 

This is not the cheapest solution on the market, so you need to invest seriously in it. As a solid product, it has a solid price. It's definitely one of the more expensive tools on the market, but it's also one of the best products on the market. 

You need to pay for licensing. There are multiple models, but typically, it's a yearly subscription. Usually, when you implement it from scratch, you don't just purchase it for the first year, but for three or five years. 

Compared to similar products, I rate SAP S/4HANA an eight out of ten, because it can always be better. 

I would definitely recommend S/4HANA to those considering implementation. The greatest and biggest enterprises use SAP solutions. If you have a really serious business and you're looking for a rock solid solution with all the modules and functionalities you may need, then SAP is definitely one of the best options. On the other hand, you need to have a business which is profitable because this solution is not cheap, and implementation projects are neither cheap nor fast. You need to invest seriously in such a solution, but it pays off because there are no risks of malfunctions. You have enough contractors on the market who can help you with the solution, so you can always get support. 

We are consultants who help supervise our customers' implementation projects. Two of our customers use S4HANA. The older ones are on the ECC platform.

We found that the implementing partners themselves are struggling with S4HANA's features. It's not an exact translation of the older ECC, so SAP has taken a new route to do things with S4HANA. Maybe it's a good product, but the implementing partners also like to have an in-depth understanding of the full feature set the product offers. There are areas where even the implementer has to go back to set, which takes time, so that's one of our major concerns.

The older implementations were cloud-based, but one is happening now in one of the larger utilities, which sells services to around 4 million consumers. That's an ongoing project that hasn't gone live yet. This will be the real test. In a year, we'll know, and we can give more feedback.

Another complaint I have is that the screen source is disjointed. When I say this, I'm speaking from a user experience perspective. I don't know the S4HANA database, so I can't say if it's good or bad. I am sure that S4HANA would have certain limitations compared to Oracle, which is the gold standard for databases. Maybe there are some challenges in the backend, but I don't dwell on those because I'm not a technician. But the graphical interface requires improvement, and its flow should be very smooth. 

Also, the Fiori app is very basic. They need to become richer because people tend to use Fiori to access the S4HANA application to save on license costs. Fiori gives you access because it's a web client, and they market it as an app. It's not really a full-fledged app, but the roadmap has to be cleared from SAP. And when its capabilities improve, it gives a native app experience when people use Fiori.

I haven't been using S4HANA for long. It's been two years now.

S4HANA is relatively stable, but it's not as stable as ECC was. ECC had a long time to mature, so S4HANA still has a few years to go before it can achieve the level of stability that we've come to expect from SAP.

We've primarily relied on the local implementers for support, and there are challenges whenever they need to refer back to SAP's own technical support. It usually takes longer than expected in many cases. Sometimes they're pretty fast, but they're usually not, which is a serious concern.

We've worked with three of the biggest products in the ERP segment: S4HANA, Oracle EBS, and Microsoft Dynamics AX. Microsoft Dynamics is pretty straightforward. It's not as complex and offers a good user experience, whereas SAP through Fiori gives a certain level of user experience, but that's not as good as what Microsoft offers. But the rich line where you go through the desktop license — that user interface is still cumbersome. It's not as user-friendly I must say. On the other hand, Oracle is the middle of the two. I won't say that it's as good as Microsoft's user experience. However, while it is a bit more complex than Microsoft, it's not as complex as SAP. 

I would currently rate S4HANA seven out of 10. We tell our clients that SAP's roadmap shows us that S4HANA will mature in time. It won't happen tomorrow. They have to make an informed decision whether they want to live with certain delays in getting certain fixes or go with another solution. SAP is such a big name, so half the time, people are willing to live with those delays with the expectation that things will get better in a year or two. SAP is a trusted name, and I'm sure they must be doing something now to get S4HANA up to speed. I hope they understand that.

We are in the progress right now in achieving the maximum utilization of the SAP HANA. We are exploring most of the available features.

I find the Production Planning Cockpit (PPC) and Material Requirements Planning (MRP) most valuable modules.

In a feature release, they could improve by adding budgetary features.

I have used SAP S4HANA for approximately three years.

SAP S4HANA is stable.

As for our requirements, SAP S4HANA has been scalable. We can extend our requirement to the system. We are using the new enhanced feature and there are many features that are available for the system allowing scalability.

We are receiving technical support from a local team here from India.

The price of SAP S4HANA is reasonable.

I would advise others when implementing to work very closely with the SAP team. When we are migrating from a legacy system to any newer system or SAP, we need to work on the mass uploading requirements, such as the master data, or open items, such as assets. We need to make another clean system before uploading all the data to the system.

I rate SAP S4HANA a seven out of ten.

Because I'm a procure-to-pay consultant, I mostly look at that angle, and I have a bit of experience with sales and distribution. I also like the integration between S/4HANA and other ERPs because S/4HANA is a suite. For example, the integration between S/4HANA and EWM Transportation Management, and Ariba.

The procure-to-pay solution in the Contract Management angle could be better. If you look at it on Ariba, the Contract Management Life Cycle for Ariba is more robust. You can create documentation, SLAs, and NDAs. Apart from the procurement aspect of the contract, you have the legal side, but Ariba cannot do that.

From what I've seen, the features of the procure-to-pay model in S/4HANA and their Contract Life Cycle Management side primarily focus on the procurement side. I believe it would be good if this solution could handle a part of the legal side.

They will incorporate Extended Warehouse Management and Transportation Management into the S/4HANA cloud. Most big companies that use a solution like S/4HANA have a legal department within the organization. Suppose they can incorporate that to be in S/4HANA suites; I think it'll be good. It will be just like what we have with Transportation Management and Extended Warehouse Management.

The user interface could be better. They have too much information on the interface, and our customers still keep complaining that it looks complex. Even though many things have changed, they still complain that the interface or the screen they see is a bit complex. It's only when they see the Fiori interface that their mind becomes a bit calm.

I've been using SAP S4HANA since 2018.

SAP S4HANA is a stable product.

SAP S4HANA is scalable. That's one of the main benefits of using SAP solutions. Most SAP solutions are scalable.

In Nigeria, we have to consider currency conversion rates with the Euro and Dollar that impact the final cost. But I believe that it'll be cheaper in the cloud where SAP has to do the maintenance of the server and more in the long run. 

I would tell potential users that S/4HANA is suitable for big companies. It comes with best practices and handles most processes, be it simple or complex. SAP also has almost 50 years of experience in the supply chain and financial industry. They should go for it, but they should stick to the best practices and not do much customization.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give SAP S4HANA an eight.

We use SAP S4HANA in a distribution business. We have the main site which purchases all material for management and then it goes through the main warehouses to the distribution sites. Finance controls, sales, and distribution are already there with the treasury added on top of the project.

The solution could improve by making customization easier. The on-premise version is a lot more flexible.

I have been using SAP S4HANA for approximately two years.

SAP S4HANA version 1909 is stable. We have not gone live with 2020 yet.

SAP S4HANA is scalable in terms of infrastructure scaling. The solution does not cover all aspects of the business. For example, there is no final solution from SAP for point of sale. They have no specific point of sales solution, you have to build something to cover this area.

Our project is at a large company with 8,000 employees.

We had an issue with localization, there is some sort of localization for S/4HANA for a specific country. We did not face a lot of trouble with the support. The response was good, but overall it seems the process itself takes too much time. You have to go through specific steps waiting for a reply and then the escalation takes more time. The support could improve their speed.

The SAP cloud itself was not easy to implement any project because it is very hard to do any customization for the business requirements.

SAP S4HANA is expensive and for smaller businesses, it is very difficult for them to have the budget.

My advice to those wanting to implement SAP S4HANA is to make sure they have their blueprint and design. People have specific imaginations but things can turn out differently. Align very well with the business and identify your scope correctly to be sure you are following a solid plan along with the project lifecycle.

I rate SAP S4HANA an eight out of ten.

We use it for our financials and ERP.

It has got all our data more scalable, and it made it more workable for us. So, we're able to make things run faster, especially when our developer team was doing data modeling.

We're able to get all our processes flowing together. We're able to make all of our business processes talk to each other.

It should have more support. Documentation and support for mobile apps can be improved.

I have been using this solution for six months.

So far, it has been good. We had some problems with our customizations, but everything seems to be running fine.

Its scalability is fine. We plan to increase its usage and use it extensively.

All people who are using it are in IT. Some of them are in the finance department.

Their technical support is good. They were pretty knowledgeable.

We're new to that. We didn't use anything.

It was kind of complex because we didn't know the difference between the SAP Business ByDesign and SAP S/4HANA. It wasn't clear. SAP just has too many versions, and it was like, "Oh, give me a break, and tell me what to get."

For its maintenance, we have at least five people. They're in IT with different roles.

We used a consultant. Our experience was good.

We're not sure yet. I think it was six figures a year, over 100,000. It has straight-up licensing fees.

I would rate it an eight out of 10 because it has got great scalability. It has worked so far.

I'm a senior functional consultant and we partner with SAP. 

Previously, when a sales person had to register a deal, it meant logging onto Windows to look at the deals, now it can all be done from a mobile phone. That's a huge benefit for us. 

The best part of this solution is the Fiori design. 

The documentation for this solution can definitely be improved and I'd also like to see more support, more numbers of Android or iPhone apps.

I've been using this solution for three years. 

This solution is stable. 

The solution is highly scalable. We've scaled it more than 75% of what we initially had. We regularly scale and there's no excess consumption of resources or major tweaks required when we're scaling up. We have around 500 end users and we have a team of five or six people responsible for maintenance, including a system administrator. We use this solution extensively and will continue to expand our use of it. 

We had a good experience with technical support. They know what they're doing and the response time was good. 

We previously used SAP ECC. We switched because they discontinued maintenance of ECC and this is a new solution altogether. It didn't make sense for us to continue with SAP ECC.

The initial setup was moderate on the complexity side. Not too complex, but also not so easy. The deployment was done in-house and took several months. 

There are a lot of ERP solutions on the market - Oracle, JD Edwards, and the like, but when it comes to SAP, my experience is that once you implement the solution and you understand how it works, it becomes intuitive to work with. When you upgrade to a new solution or when a whole lot of changes come in, the user experience stays pretty much consistent.

I rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

The POD applications are very useful to us. There are a few POD apps which we are using for the different business scenarios. They are quite interesting.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. The documentation is very good.

The solution can scale well.

The solution is stable.

It's been just one year that we started using this product, due to the fact that we need to have different integrations as well to other systems. With S/4HANA, when SAP started, everything worked in a single SAP system. Slowly then it's been delegated or divided into multiple SAP systems. That's why we have around 25 different SAP products running in our landscape. Yet, at the same time, S/4HANA is the core. It's the core component.

Going forward, I believe more systems could be consolidated into S/4HANA. We need to reduce the number of SAP systems running in our landscape. S/4HANA has the capacity to host many other SAP products, therefore we can discontinue some of the SAP products. Currently, we have now the Global Services, the Governance, Risk, and Compliance, and Enterprise Portal, BW, Supply Chain Management, Warehouse Management, et cetera. If SAP could consolidate many of the systems so that we can reduce the number of systems, that would be ideal.

The solution can be a bit expensive.

We would like to see more DevOps capabilities in the future.

The solution would benefit from offering more serverless features in the sense that when you deploy SAP, it's a pretty big deployment and you have a lot of dependencies or you are closely tied up or you have a dependency with the hardware vendor and the hardware providers and the certified hardware and items like that. At the same time, all these deployed components and these files are possible to deploy without a server as well. Slowly SAP is providing some of the features so that you can deploy this in containers and so you don't have any dependency on the running hardware. That way, you can restart the systems without any downtime or the end-users will not feel the difference. Aspects like that need to be improved. 

We do have here monthly maintenance due to the fact that sometimes we need to recharge the system and we have seen from the end-users there will be certain downtime as well. If there is no dependency with the hardware and if it goes serverless, then we can have zero-downtime maintenance.

We've been using the solution for the past year or so. It hasn't been that long.

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's very reliable. 

The solution is scalable. At the same time, it depends on where you deploy your systems. If you deploy your systems in Azure, then it would be using the scalability of Azure. If you deploy in AWS, it uses the scalability of AWS. If you deploy in a virtual private environment, then it depends on where you deployed the system. At the same time, it depends on being compatible with all these different hyper-scalers. For the most part, it goes pretty well with the different platforms.

We are deploying the solution in different countries. Currently, we have close to 10,000 users working in SAP. Yearly, we do the deployment in multiple countries. In two months, we deploy in one more country. There will be another 200, 300 more users will be coming. By the end of this year, there will be 2,000 more users. Currently, around 10,000 users are using this application.

The SAP S/4HANA technical support is mainly with the service provider. When you deploy SAP, you have different support teams. Most of the time, you will have a service provider or a supplier that you would be associating with. You will have a kind of application management or infrastructure management support with that vendor. For example, IBM, Capgemini, Accenture, DXC. They are the different vendors. However, then you get the OEM support via the SAP Support Portal for product-related issues. That support has got different priority levels based on the importance. Generally, we know how the SAP support works and it's acceptable. We're satisfied with the level of support provided overall.

The initial setup isn't too difficult. It's pretty straightforward for the most part. SAP has got some good documentation and there are different migration scenarios and implementation scenarios you can work with. With the help of documentation, things are pretty straightforward. 

Most of the time, you do the SAP deployment or the migration with a partner. SAP has got certified partners to help with the implementation.

SAP has got different license mechanisms. It depends on how many SAP products you run and then how do you negotiate with the SAP teams and what kind of offer you get. At the same time, generally, everyone says SAP products are a bit costly. 

Some of the SAP systems are licensed based on the number of CPUs that are being deployed, and some of the SAP products are licensed based on the number of primary users, and some of the SAP systems are based on the database footprint. Different SAP products have different license mechanisms, so there should be a person who is knowledgeable about SAP that can understand and then review the licensing agreement and get the right SAP product - and perhaps help negotiate the price.

We are customers and end-users.

We have around 25 different SAP products. We are using SAP S/4HANA in our company.

The production and the test systems are deployed in the virtual private cloud on-premise, and we have sandbox development and quality systems are deployed in the Azure public cloud.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

I am a consultant and SAP S4HANA is one of the products that I work with.

From a technology standpoint, the theory and analytics are fascinating.

When it comes to the delivery of features, I would like it presented in a more user-friendly way. Every year, when a new version is released, it comes with a very thick booklet of 300 or 400 pages and it is a little difficult to comprehend. This is something that should be simplified. A simple comparison between the older and newer version would be very helpful for customers and consultants.

The default UI has been the same for a long time and in my last few projects, I've found that it wasn't fast enough. 

I have been working with this product since version 1511 in 2015, about five years ago.

I am comfortable with its stability.

This product is definitely scalable. 

I would say that it is for medium-sized companies. For smaller companies, the scale of the project might be too large, so they may not be able to harness the complete power of S4HANA.

The support from SAP is excellent. It is very good, compared to other products.

The SAP Marketplace is a good source of support.

I have hands-on experience with a few other products that are on the market.

Compared to older versions, prior to S4HANA, it is very easy to deploy. Starting from a development environment, I say it would take about three to four months to deploy for a mid-sized customer.  

For ERP, I do not recommend anything other than SAP 4/HANA. For other applications such as CRM and planning, I may recommend a different product.

I think that the newest version is great and I think the idea should be to quickly push it to cloud completely.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our company analyzes material inventory and then processes the financial accounting which is handled by the system we created using the product.  

The most valuable feature is that the reporting is fast. We can see the results from that in that our commissions come in fast. That is the main advantage.  

This is an integrated system so it is very complex. It is not like Windows or like Microsoft products where you can use Word or you use Excel and it is familiar and easy to use. The interface is something that is very confusing from my point of view. It can and should be simplified. It needs some work on the front end to be more user-friendly and customizable to the user's needs.  

It is not a very good product from the perspective of ease-of-use. Trying to implement it is like you want to prepare some food. You have raw materials like spices in a pile but there is no recipe as to how to mix them. It is a recipe missing the proportion to mix the spices in.  

In the case of S/4HANA, that recipe depends on how the organization requires it to operate. A better result depends upon the implementation partner's decisions in handling the wide range of choices offered by the product. If these decisions are not good, once the product is already developed, you may come to know after years of using it that it was not implemented optimally. Then you end up making customizations and work-arounds because of this initial implementation. That is bad practice. Customization and work-arounds will only lead to more complexity. It is a very big product that can not be understood in a short span of time and implemented quickly. Meticulous planning is ultimately important.  

A lot depends on the implementation partner and if they understand your needs. An implementation partner who rushes in too quickly with a solution can get it wrong and that can cause major problems in the long run.  

We started the implementation of S/4HANA in 2017.  

Any glitches and problems would all depend very strongly on the implementation, predominately. Our integration is very near perfect, but it needs a highly skilled team taking lots of time to understand and maintain it properly. Because implementation is less customized it is better than in most other industries. When it comes to our own industry and our own investment in our industry with our own company stressors, it has to be customized properly.  

One person will not be able to understand and manage all the processes of the modules. That is not practically possible to have that type of skill set. The product needs to be managed by a well-integrated team that can work together and separately with their own responsibility for maintenance and execution.  

Ultimately one person will need to have an in-depth knowledge of how the parts work together to orchestrate the result. All this has to come together at the time of designing. All of the team will be working with some lack of knowledge about the whole of the system or the in-depth knowledge of some other team member's roles. The integration of the team is as important as the integration of the product. 

The scalability of S/4HANA is as good as it can be. The reason that we moved from our old ERP was a lack of scalability. That is exactly the reason. We moved to S/4HANA because we knew the scalability was good.  

We use it company-wide on a daily basis and across multiple websites now. If we need to it is possible to scale up from there in whatever way we need to.  

Our specialized support team does sometimes work with SAP support. The support is good but it may depend on what you can provide. Sometimes we can trace volumes ourselves and we can get the solutions from that. It can often minimize the time it takes to get a solution. Using SAP to provide the solution takes more time. But sometimes we need them to keep moving ahead.  

We were having trouble with our other ERP solution which is a product that has not been very successful outside of Arab countries. That learning experience is why we are in a good position to implement S/4HANA as a better solution.  

The installation setup requires specific knowledge of the system and how it works. I am not from the technical side myself but I know a lot of configuration is required. It is more-or-less complex depending on the scope of how the product will be modeled for use.  

For the installation, we appointed a separate SAP IT partner. Along with that, our entire company was involved with implementing this project.  

It definitely requires maintenance from SAP support as well as our own specialized teams.  

This is an expensive product.  

My recommendation to people considering S/4HANA as an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) is to invest in it if they can afford it and need it. But, I strongly recommend that the implementation should be considered very carefully. SAP software is a very capable solution but it is only worth it if you approach it knowing that you will be spending three, four, or five years just to be able to understand it fully. It is not just an investment in capital, it is an investment in learning and time.  

It is definitely a good product. It is costly and needs a quality team for maintaining and integrating the product.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would have a hard time making a rating of SAP S/4HANA that is useful for every user. If someone already has some expertise in ERP expertise, it is different than if they have none. The solution itself can be a ten for one aspect of its function and it can be a three or four in other aspects depending on what the user needs and understands. Cost-wise it can be anything from one to ten depending on the value it provides to the organization investing in it.  

Personally, from the functionality point, I think it is one of the best products. The integration is good and the SAP team helps with their continuous support to help users reap the fruit of their investment in the software system. We took the time to have the knowledge of business and how the product could work for us to make adopting this product a success. In our case, I think the solution is around a seven-and-a-half out of ten.