What needs improvement with SAP Data Services?

The interface of SAP Data Services is still easy to use, but it is also dated as things are evolving.Regarding metadata management, SAP Data Services used independently does have its limitations. It is only when you use it with other supporting tools that you can experience a broader scope on master data management.SAP Data Services does handle integration with third-party systems. There are different database connectors, and with some vendors utilizing APIs, I can set up the API into the services to pull data that way as well. However, from a platform perspective, there might be improvements in connectivity to different platforms.

For new product implementations, there is a super high level of customization required, especially where data ingestion and SLA requirements are very demanding, which is where we see the need for improvement in SAP Data Services. The challenge with customization in SAP Data Services is that every business is unique, so they cannot simply adjust their workflow and automation. Some traditional businesses require a high level of customization.

The documentation is not up to the mark. Regarding reporting, I do not think there are any other downsides.

Regarding the pricing for SAP Data Services, I think it's on the higher side. Now, they are coming up with many pricing options, which is tricky; they offer one thing for free, but charge for nine others.

The solution should improve connectivity with more source systems and target systems.

Address validation in SAP Data Services is chargeable and should be made free.

An area for improvement in SAP Data Services could involve making the product more accessible to non-technical end-users. They could provide a simpler way to understand the ongoing business process. Additionally, they should include data catalogs in the next release.

We encounter challenges while exporting implemented rules, such as those applied to objects like the material master, into a format like Excel for documentation and further analysis. There could be feasibility in creating a rule book or documentation of rules applied during the data integration processes.

With SAP Data Services, the problem arises when I try to connect to Azure Databricks. I don't know how to fix the issue related to the tool's ability to connect with Azure Databricks. I have been looking into Informatica and some other tools to see how they connect with Azure DB. The aforementioned area can be considered for improvement in the product. In the future, my company should be able to extract data from SAP ECC to Azure Databricks and load it into Azure Databricks.

The cleansing feature is not as efficient as Syniti. The reporting is good because we have followed one standard template for years. Many customers are fine with the reporting mechanism, but it is time-consuming. We have to do the report manually, but Syniti can generate the reports. The price could be lower, and technical support could be more responsive.

The solution shows a lack of cloud support data services.

The only thing is that it's a very specific product. It works well only for our SAP clients. That is its limitation. There is a lot of competition in that regard. It will work fine only in an SAP environment. It could be said that the integration with other vendors could be better. It is built specifically for the SAP environment and follows best practices for SAP. When we want to work in a different environment, it becomes a bit more complex. On adding additional functionality to improve artificial intelligence, machine learning, and integration, I think most of it is already considered in the roadmap.

In the future, Data Services should offer a cloud version.

There is some room for improvement across the product, however, for the most part, we are happy with it. We have had some language issues. There needs to be multi-language support, however, my understanding is they are working on multi-language now. It is expensive.

The solution could improve the overall features. There is a lot that can be done in the solution, therefor there are areas where it can improve. Additionally, there is a need to make it easier for one to create connections to other non-SAP systems. The flexibility to connect to other non-SAP systems is needed.

Some of the jobs that are built within Data Services require local files, and during initial deployment, those local files cannot be transported between machines simply because of security issues. There are no issues from a technical point of view, and the issues are from a security point of view. In this scenario, we need to be sure that we have all of the files in the same centralized environment in order to get one big server to fulfill several or many developers.

We would like the different tools offered within this solution to be available as standalone entities, rather than having to purchase the entire package when we only require a few features.

I want some more business intelligence applications. People need to know more and more about data, including the transformation rules, etc. Informatica is a better product for data cataloging. SAP should update the data catalog.

Data Services SAP is lacking in sources and target databases compared to Informatica. SAP Data Services should have more connectivity.

There is always room for improvement when it comes to the sources being dynamic, however, it is not something that can be done easily. These changes, take years to come into the picture, and it's usually the patch upgrade that comes in. Those are very less at the functional level. At the integration level, there could be a certain set of improvements to connect to various other systems. There are still a lot of glitches with SAP Data Services as of now. I'd like for them to make scheduling much more dynamic when we create jobs. The dependencies to other systems, when we are running a job, we have certain problems, some optimization schemes, if it can be implemented for the data flows when we run it. If we had multiple data loaders and if we could use that at the same time while ensuring the backend data system doesn't get affected, it would be ideal.

I have several issues with this solution. The first is that the deployment process, the migration of the solution between different environments, is quite complex. Data services doesn't have much in terms of data transformation components so if you want to do something special, it requires custom coding. The embedded features that SAP Data Services offers are not enough for me to implement everything that I want. I've also found that the internet resources SAP provides are really poor despite the good documentation on their site. If I want to have a conversation with other developers or get an opinion from them, there's not much available. I would prefer to use other tools, but because of our current client's requirements, we are using Data Services.

They could make it easier to work with web services. They need to make things like connecting to Google Databases, and so on, easier. They also have a data connection layer. If you could connect to those web-based data mixes with other vendors, web vendors, that should help.

Data Services' UI can be annoying. Searching through long lists of things takes time because of some limitations. Source code control is another headache. When your source code base gets too large, managing the source code becomes cumbersome. Also, it's not possible to generate the code. You have to code everything manually. There's no way they're going to fix this. It would be nice to generate code from another program, but you can't do that. For some tasks you need to do as an ETL developer, it doesn't make sense to code them all one at a time. You want to be able to read the metadata from something and generate the code. But the architecture of the tool doesn't play nicely with that. The ability to generate code would be one feature that would be nice to have. I'd also like to see a smoother code promotion check-in and check-out process for large codebases and fixes to the comparison mechanism. The tool allows you to compare your code against the essential repositories, but the comparison mechanism is buggy. It sometimes reports false positives for what has changed. SAP could maybe improve the performance diagnostics for the production environment. Data Services has some rudimentary performance analysis tools, but they're pretty basic. There's not a dashboard to view where you're doing things well and not well performance-wise. A comprehensive performance dashboard would be nice.

Dealing with the REST API is not easy with Data Services. It is mandatory to have a WADL file and it is difficult to find this file and set it up. I would like to see a better connection with the API and the use of XML files. It's an ETL that is very good with relational databases but not as good with files and semi-structured files. Also, the support could be better.

The skillset of data engineers matters a bit to use all the functionality of this solution. Otherwise, the delivery speed won't be faster.

In terms of data integration or other tools, we have a road map and we send out requests for enhancements through our marketing team who is involved in the process. There should be some kind of enhancement that can be done on the admin side of certain sites where we can assign the roles and responsibilities. We should be able to control who is using the tool and how.

The interface is not quite user-friendly and is in need of improvement. In the next release of this solution, I would like to have a planning tool.

The solution should allow for better integration with other analysis tools. It needs to integrate better specifically with big data and other management solutions. The pricing of the solution should be improved.

The solution should offer more machine learning and automation. The solution should add more cognitive analytics, particularly on the RPA. It should allow for data to be picked up in Outlook and processed in SAP, then communicated via any third-party software. This will help with decision making and retrieve the data per the requirements of the user. The existing ERP doesn't have any capabilities. The features of RPA need to be built into ERP. It's lagging in not just this solution, but almost all software.

Integration with other products could be improved. Often we need to apply analytics for the data coming directly from production. The product could be improved by providing employees with a more simplified ability to build reports. SAP is a very powerful system and definitely first class for big companies. Its wide scope of functionality and models adjusted to different business activities give SAP a leading position within extended ERP systems. From the other side, such a wide range of modules and functionality generates difficulties in implementation and real full utilization of all system possibilities. An example of this is with my last customer that I discussed with two weeks ago – one of the biggest logistics and retail companies in Poland. They implemented SAP seven years ago. They bought a wide scope of modules with some logistic extensions and up to now, they pay very expensive maintenance for licenses. In reality, they didn’t implement SAP in the scope of owned licenses because they finally find the system too inflexible to adopt applications to their business processes. As a result, they utilize core ERP, HR, BW and a small portion of APO while the rest of the modules that are not implemented are exchanged with Z programs. A very strong point is BW but for quick reporting and report personalization (BI) they bought other technology due to more flexible and chipper reporting. They integrated SAP with TMS, WMS, and core operating systems for their special business and have a big problem with maintaining a lot of interfaces (they didn’t implement SAP PI). Now the customer is thinking about migration to Dynamics and evaluating this scenario in different aspects. An upgrade of the old SAP version means total reimplementation of the SAP to S4. Now SAP offers a very wide range of retail and logistic functionality especially in S4 but to buy all retail and logistic modules, customers evaluate as very expensive and are afraid about the ability to implement. This is not the only example. A very similar situation was with another customer with an older SAP version. Especially for production companies, SAP is evaluated as a system that is very difficult to implement within the production environment. Implementation with MES generates lot of analytical effort (technical part is not a problem but way of data enquiry by SAP). From my experience in SAP implementation, I am often irritated by very selective knowledge of SAP implementation consultants and it’s not only from my company but generally taking into consideration SAP services market. Usually, a consultant knows one module, sometimes 2 or 3 but to cover business area eg. retail and logistic you need a few of them and this is the reason that very often customers implement system functions (within every module) not implement process flow (cross modules view). In the case of analytics, SAP offers great tools (especially HANA gives very powerful tools) but many customers decide to use SAP BW but chose BI from other technologies taking into consideration ratio functionality, flexibility, and price. This is my personal opinion, mainly based on my experience with SAP customers and real SAP implementation. SAP is a best in class system but requires a very good implementation team (which is expensive) and a reasonable time frame (time is expensive too), to maximize its potential but in other cases, implementation can be unsuccessful regardless of technological system abilities.

An area that seems to need to be improved in this product is that it isn't completely ready to compete as it should in the market. Because of some more recent acquisitions to enhance functionality, the product parts are not one-hundred percent integrated. Because some of the integration is still missing, it seems incomplete. People with the product should be able to use most features, generally. The main differentiation in the past product from where it is now is that the product feels like it was integrated. After the acquisitions, things became more complicated. In SAP, the added products and features lack better integration and that impacts things like the metadata. So that is why I believe it can be improved. It's a GUI issue, mostly. I'm sure this next suggestion is already done to some extent in SAP because SAP is already HANA but it seems SAP — as one of the software giants — is not making the most of their advantage to position data services as a stand-alone product. This is a problem in the market for greater acceptance, but maybe it's the strategy that SAP has chosen. But I believe that it could do better that way and increase the speed of performance. For example, some of the functionality might sit in memory. It would be using the HANA advantage, for example, but without the service to HANA. So maybe we limit certain functionality to HANA. I believe that some of the jobs with higher priority can be done in the memory of the data services which could be differentiating the product from the rest of the market more clearly.

This product could improve the uploading of documents and the amount of time it takes to upload. The required typing could be minimized by adding Voice recognition.

The solution lacks user-friendly features. Compared to other integration tools I've used before, it's less user-friendly and the built-in features just aren't sufficient. The description of error messages isn't extensive, although they do point out the problems. With other solutions, like Talend, I was able to use the debugger to get directly to the problem, but with SAP Data Services the debugger is not working. I'm not sure if it's a problem with the version specifically, but I'm using it in an enterprise environment and I can't do an upgrade. The query feature does not allow a lot of flexibility in building the code. They need to make progress with this feature as well. In future releases, I'd like to see the integration of a big data solution within SAP Data Services. I don't know if they offer that right now. The version I have is quite basic. If I was able to use more data sources with other software, and have the solution be more compliant with more data source types and big data sources, that would be helpful.

There is a new tool that is going to replace this one, which will be more for platform integration data services. This is a close-knit tool that SAP is suggesting for different solutions. There's a lot lacking in it. You cannot do a lot of transformations. We are facing a lot of issues from that. As a whole, Data Services, is good, but not the platform integration of the Data Services aspect. The preview for on-prem data services needs more information. The scheduling is also weak. Scheduling of jobs in the sequence is not available. It's a very tedious process to do that particular task. If there was a tool to schedule in the sequence that would be extremely helpful.

Big data, real-time connectivity without the need to use SAP Replication Server

* Development with web tool (today is with client tool). * Connection to Active Directory to extract user and group. * A PaaS cloud service (today is on-premise). * Better connection to SAP BW.