SAP S4HANA on AWS Reviews

The main interest of my customers is in service formulations and telephone centers right now. I think most of the things are very common. The application of customer assistance is a major thing as is registration automation. Apart from that, there are a lot of restrictions based on destinations. A lot of customers have to be removed from the cloud because of the basic restrictions and standards. This is because if you are going on to SAP S/4HANA on the cloud, you are not allowed to serve all the destinations because of restrictions.  

Being customers who have been using the product for some time, my clients have a lot of customizations. Now they have to follow some regulations and they need to either remove customizations or bring them current with the new product and the cloud environment.  

If you look at this product in comparison with other products in this category, it has more features than really almost any of my customers' needs. But it is specifically much better in financial ability in the way it controls costs and transactions. It is much better than most of the other products and they can not match it in these features or performance.  

One thing which is really killing a lot of people using this product is because they have been using it for twenty or twenty-five years and a lot of the customers' customizations are not working anymore.  

A second thing that is a problem for the product is the cost — particularly on the hardware side it is too high. If you have to procure your server for S/4HANA the cost is a problem. I mean hardware cost is killing a lot of people and the costs are complicating matters for those who want to stay with the product.  

For HANA the biggest issue which will need to change is the GUI interface. It is still the age-old GUI and this needs to be changed. All the other competitors are moving to a new phase in development of user experience and they are moving to new interfaces like AngularJS and other technologies that are new. Which things or trends become most popular still remains to be known. But the front-end needs a lot of thought.  

I currently have two clients for whom I am doing work with this product off-and-on over a period of time.  

In my experience, the product does not have any glitches or stability issues. But I do not think I am able to comment on that because I still hear feedback from people who are talking about providing solutions for issues they are having with the product. From what I hear from some people is that the product implementation still needs at least a couple of years to get real stability in the database. It is the response I am getting from the customers who have implemented it, but I have actually not actually seen it myself. It is not possible for me to say whether it is the product that has issues or if it is what the clients are doing with the product that creates the issues.  

I don't think it would be right for me to comment on that package regarding the scalability. I don't think it should be a problem, but as far as having the experience with the product to be sure, I am not at that point. It is too new and I am just helping clients who are implementing it right now.  

The maintenance of this product requires a different number of staff members depending on the deployment model. I think a customer will need to make their own decisions about this. Accountability on an outside service will be very different than in house. In house, you will be dealing with a team of three to five people. These will be some kind of functional experts who will be performing in different capacities. The size of the team will depend on what the company is planning on using and what they need to deploy and maintain. So for some clients, they may need a bare minimum of 4 to 5 people and then, in addition, they may need other support services.  

If there is really ever an issue we probably need to contact support. If something is going wrong and we contact them, the response generally good. I do not have any problems with technical support.  

But the other thing I do know regarding the technical support is that they need more time to build their database for this version of the product. Right now the product is somewhat new and very few people are available who have a lot of experience with the product completely. The community is still pretty small.  

So it will take another one or two years to really compile expertise and a strong background in working with S/4HANA and finding those people who have that expertise is going to be difficult. The real problems that the user base will face might only be reported once every 5 days over a period of six months. It will take some time to build out the knowledge and for the user base to grow.  

I did not really change to S/4HANA, I was working with it for some time in other versions of the product. Some clients felt like they had invested a lot in the product, so they moved up to the new product. In a sense, I had no choice but to switch to it.  

The initial setup is really fairly simple. If you have a basic understanding of databases and SAP the setup is not something that is complicated. It is pretty simple. The deployment process takes about 20 days or a little more than two weeks because you need to reconfigure everything. There are other things that will take more time.  

The deployment of S/4HANA takes maybe two or three people. You will need one who is a DBA setting up the back-end database configuration and the one who is an application specialist. They will be doing all the configurations.  

We are doing the implementation ourselves, absolutely. 

The licensing cost for the product is not so high, but the cost for the hardware you need for it on-premises is very high. I can not verify the degrees in comparison to other products, but I know that the hardware cost is too high because. There would not be much of a change to reduce it down so that the cost could more in line with competitors.  

The advice I would give to someone who is looking into implementing this product is to wait for a year basically so the product will mature and stabilize. The company and the users will learn what the issues are that have been discovered by other people and then maybe it is OK to take on S/4HANA as a project. The project itself is going to take eight to nine months to get completely on HANA. If this part of your business is the backbone of your industry, you can not afford to make this kind of risk.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate the product overall as between a five and a six. Closer to a five at this point. The problems are that the GUI should be updated and the time needed for real user issues that will come up, be identified, and be rectified. Probably after that, you will start seeing the results with the product moving in the market and raising awareness and popularity. It is more of a wait-and-watch as of now in my estimation.  

S4HANA can be used for multiple functions throughout industry from material management to finance and production planning. I'm an SAP technical consultant.

The solution provides good performance and SAP is constantly releasing new features. 

The AI aspect of SAP S4HANA can be improved upon. 

We've been using this product for 17 years. 

Stability has definitely improved over the years. Many customers are migrating to this solution but it requires a change in how business is done, which is too difficult for some companies. Moving involves a lot of digitization, a different GUI. 

The solution is scalable. 

Support for SAP is not that simple but AWS provides good service. Complex problems can take some time to solve, but they usually have a quick response time. 

This is a complex application so the initial setup is not straightforward and requires planning and expertise. Migration time depends on the size of the landscape and the database. It can take a couple of years in an enterprise environment. The main work is around configuring the solution. Deployment usually requires a team of six to eight people. Managed services or maintenance depends on the size. Our in-house consultants are multi-skilled in both SAP and the cloud.

It's important to plan, prepare, and choose a service partner with adequate experience. 

I rate this solution eight out of 10.

SAP S4HANA on AWS is used mostly for SAP. Amazon AWS is one of the biggest installed bases for SAP solutions is why we selected Amazon AWS mostly for our clients.

The most valuable features of SAP S4HANA on AWS are that it's simplified and the analytical capabilities are good.

SAP S4HANA on AWS could improve by having more data centers because there are limited data centers in the region I am in. Amazon AWS has announced a few more data centers to be added, but they're still not 100 percent operational for SAP solutions.

I have been using SAP S4HANA on AWS for approximately two years.

SAP S4HANA on AWS is highly stable. I have not found any performance issues.

I rate the stability of SAP S4HANA on AWS a four out of five.

The scalability of SAP S4HANA on AWS is very good.

I rate the scalability of SAP S4HANA on AWS a five out of five.

The support was good. We only interacted once or twice with them, but not on a continuous day-to-day basis. Wherever we interacted with them it was good.

I rate the support from SAP S4HANA on AWS an eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup of SAP S4HANA on AWS is easy. The full implementation of the solution could take between 15 to 20 days. If it is only one system and it is a straight version with no upgrades and other things, then it will be only maximum of five to 10 days.

We use different teams for the deployment of SAP S4HANA on AWS, and currently, we are using two people.

We have approximately three to four people supporting this solution for maintenance.

My advice to others is this solution is straightforward and the deployment is very easy. I would suggest choosing Amazon AWS for SAP S4HANA if you have a nearshore data center to avoid any latency issues if we are in a different time zone.

I rate SAP S4HANA on AWS an eight out of ten.

There could be many use cases for this product. The use cases will be different depending on the industry where it is employed. It could range from the manufacturing industry to the retail industry. The actual use case could be anything.  

The solution is deployed with two possible methods. One is the on-premises deployment (with AWS) and the second one is the cloud deployment. You follow the software development life cycle for deploying the solution. First, you do the project preparation followed by the solution design. This is followed by the actual realization of the design plan. In the final testing, you engage in three go-live activities. When this is successful, you follow it with an actual live deployment. With the go-live successful, there would be PGLS (Post Go-Live Support), which is nothing but the support aspect. So implementation typically follows the normal software deployment life cycle. The approach could be anything, like support could be a waterfall approach (project activities into linear sequential phases) or it could be a more aggressive approach.  

Because SAP is a part of ERP the features range from finance functions to manufacturing functions to quality control functions to procurement functions — anything you might need in development planning. So you can have tight integration between all the functions in which a manufacturing industry operates to develop market and distribute its products. The S/4HAHA platform provides insight into the processes which can become part of robotic process automation. S/4HANA as a platform is enabled for artificial intelligence and machine learning. So you can use it to help simplify your workload with automation.  

This is the latest offering by the SAP company. Of course, there are the pros and cons to on-premises deployment versus cloud deployment — especially as far as the infrastructure maintenance is concerned. There is not so much difference as far as activities are concerned. But having said that the cloud deployment is on AWS (Amazon Web Service). It is always the latest offering and the cloud is indeed today's emerging market.  

From what I understand, SAP is already at work focusing on improving the CE (Customer Experience) and the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) as far as S/4HANA is concerned. They are working with having better robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities, which can work with this ERP. So there are already new concepts on the way. They are making a lot of use of Python technology, and they are making heavy investments to make it much more user-friendly and customer-friendly. Automation is at the center of their development focus.  

We have had an S/4HANA implementation for some time.  

The stability of the solution is fine. We have no issues with that.  

For scalability, the skill set required is very specific. You need someone who has a functional and business knowledge along with technical knowledge. A candidate or the consultant who has experience in the difference between the data technological concerns and the business trends can easily go through the entire deployment very easily. Having industry experience is very much required for deployment and scaling.  

As a consultancy, we provide some of the technical support for SAP. The support we provide is very much function specific. I am from a finance background. For finance-related support, I could be the key person in our company. For materials management, it would be someone else. Materials and quality management can be handled by a production management expert. One team member may be the marketing, distribution and logistics expert. Each subject matter expert will be deployed on the support of a particular ERP based on their areas of expertise. It is not a one-man show. One person can not run the entire support services as an expert in every area. It is very much specific to the role the candidate needs to play in addressing the subject matter as an expert in that particular function.  

As far as the deployment on AWS is concerned, it is the cloud deployment. It is a little complex. But once it is deployed, the post maintenance and the support services are very easy because the upgrades and maintenance are not handled manually. It is just like on smartphones where the patches get auto-upgraded. In the same way, the patches or the upgrades are automatically pushed to the ERP on cloud. So there is no manual maintenance required going forward. There is no downtime required. For these reasons, clients are attracted to going with cloud deployments. But others are still going with on-premises deployments for various reasons.  

There are a lot of competitors coming into the market. The main organizations as far as IT or information technology companies are involved already. We have Infosys, there is Oracle, there is Siemens, there is Accenture, there is Cognizant — all of these are from the IT organizations' perspective. From consulting companies, we have got the Lloyd Group, KPMG International (Klynveld Peat Marwick Goerdeler), PricewaterhouseCoopers, and others who are all into this. There are other up and coming competitors and consultants like BDO Mauritius (Binder Dijker Otte). All these various kinds of organizations are good at deployment and the support of SAP solutions. The main difference is in their approaches to providing solutions that are on-premises or on the cloud.  

The advice that I would give to people who want to use S/4HANA on AWS is that a specific study needs to be involved in the implementation process. It is what we call a discovery session. The idea is to discover all the independent needs for the use of the product. This includes things like the size of the organization, the size of the industry, the number of users expected, the revenue, et cetera. It should also include projections into the future aspects of organic and inorganic growth. The budget may be the main issue for many organizations. The deployment plan should be created based on keeping all these discovered factors in mind. This can affect the deployment model or choices as to whether to go for SAP S/4HANA on the cloud, on-premises or if another ERP may be a better choice. But in any case, all the factors need to be taken into consideration. It is not a black and white decision.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate SAP S/4HANA as very near to a ten. Maybe nine because there is no competitor like SAP in the market right now to compare the product to and maybe there is room for improvement. I think that Oracle and Microsoft are looking to close the gap. But, looking at the current market share of SAP, it is at the top so it is near to a ten.  

We've used the solution for HR and their salary processes, including the salary payments. That is still on the SAP, however, the database they have changed to a HANA database.

The solution is quite stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

The initial setup could be easier. It's complex. 

The solution is very stable. It's reliable. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. Previously, there was an Oracle database, and, with HANA, they had much fewer problems with the database.

It's more of a stable landscape and the organization has to make a decision for the next generation.

The product is scalable. It works well with large organizations. It was a very big implementation. In the Netherlands, we had around 160,000 workers for the central government, and all the HR processes and the salary payments were performed with SAP. 

We do not have plans to increase this number of users, as the Dutch government is growing, however, not that much.

Technical support is fine, however, the organization I'm with isn't going very fast. Yeah. They need help and I'm an IT consultant and I've helped them for more than a year.

The company still has SAP on-premises, however, they are considering moving to the cloud. They want to change the whole landscape and move to the next step with their SAP implementation within the Dutch government.

The initial setup was a complex landscape with many problems which have to be solved initially.

The company had a much older implementation. It's not a full SAP and that makes the whole landscape very complex.

With the HANA database, the company has been busy with it for two or three years, as it's taken much time. Last year, things went better and they migrated to HANA.

As is usual for SAP, license management was in order.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using.

I'd recommend the solution to other users and organizations. 

I would rate the product eight out of ten.

We use the solution for SQL database.

SAP S4HANA offers advanced analytics management, providing flexibility in handling complex SQL applications and enabling simplified predictive analysis. We are integrating with Amazon Athena, leveraging its cloud-based big data capabilities. By combining our data warehouse, operational data, and ERP solution, we can harness the power of Amazon Athena alongside robust machine learning tools.

Some parts of the solution are complex and take time. That needs improvement, and more experts need to work on that. Setting up applications on AWS servers is difficult. We need to understand how much data we have and utilize it according to the warehouse.

I have been using SAP S4HANA on AWS as a customer and a partner for one year.

The product is stable. We didn't have any issues, but there might be issues that come up because of services.

I rate the solution's stability an eight to nine out of ten.

I rate the solution’s scalability an eight-point five out of ten.

If we have any issues, we can contact Amazon support.

The solution is a little expensive. It is a managed service. Once we install the service, it will be highly scalable. Additionally, it streamlines analytic data.

If your application is bigger, then you definitely need to install the solution.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

S4HANA is an analytics suite. It's a cloud-based solution for managing an enterprise. Each enterprise has different departments, like finance, procurement, sales, quality assurance, planning, etc. The system has the capacity to manage all these departments in a single box and they're all integrated. 

The purpose of the solution actually is to manage all the organization's activities within your organization on a single platform. For example, when you register a transaction from procurement, the finance part of the system deducts it from the balance sheet. The same thing happens with sales, maintenance, or any other department. It helps you visualize your data in real time and make decisions.

SAP S4HANA is the same regardless of whether you host it on AWS or Azure like water is the same whether it's in a black or white bucket. It's the same solution. But within the solution, you have different models. Each of them is equally important depending on the industry.

We first deployed S4HANA for HSDF in 2017. We did OiServe during the lockdown and now we're doing it for NEP.

S4HANA is a highly stable solution because it's on the cloud. The solution is available 24/7.

S4HANA on AWS is scalable. We currently have three clients on it: OiServe, HSDM, and NDEP. The others are using on-premise solutions. So I will count those ones.

The support is okay because there's a support structure for that. You need to have first-level support and second-level support from a partner. SAP provides third-level support. SAP also has a platform where the partner can raise the ticket to SAP when there are issues that the partner cannot resolve.

S4HANA can be complex if your customer makes it complicated. At the same time, it can also be a straightforward solution if you meet a customer who is just willing to use the best practices. It's the same as SuccessFactors. You have standard rapid deployment and tools that SAP provides to deploy S4HANA within a short period. Some clients complicate the entire thing and say, "Well, I want to do this." In those cases, the project can last six months or longer than a year.

Or deployments for HSDF and OSA took six months. We expect to complete MDEP in six months because they have a simple process.

S4HANA is expensive. It costs much more than SuccessFactors. However, depending on the company, you can also get it at a steep discount. In Nigeria, they're trying to reduce the price because of the exchange rate issues. They're working on that, but generally, the solution is fine. It's an excellent tool. 

I rate SAP S4HANA on AWS eight out fo 10. I won't give it a nine because there is still room for improvement. 

My company's clients use SAP S4HANA on AWS to manage some of their daily work.

With SAP S4HANA on AWS, my company's clients find the real-time information system to be interesting.

SAP S4HANA on AWS should be standardized to make its implementation phase easier. The product's implementation phase can be very complex for customers.

I have been using SAP S4HANA on AWS since 2015. My company has a partnership with SAP.

After the implementation phase of the product, it becomes a very stable tool.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a four out of ten.

The capability of the product to integrate with other applications is one of the biggest problems I face when dealing with the implementation process.

Most of my company's clients who use the solution are medium-sized businesses.

The quality of the technical support provided for the product is something that depends on the managed service provider of the solution, which could be good or bad.

I rate the technical support a five out of ten.

Neutral

Based on the opinion of my company's customers, who find the product's initial setup process to be complex, I rate the product's initial setup phase between seven to eight on a one to ten scale, where one is a difficult setup process, and ten is an easy setup process.

The solution is deployed on the cloud and on an on-premises model.

The solution can be deployed in a year and a half to two years.

It takes around four to five years of using the solution to experience a return on investment from the product.

I rate the product price a six on a one to ten scale, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive.

I rate the overall tool a seven out of ten.