IFS Cloud vs. SAP BW/4HANA

The IFS Cloud has well suited to keeping track from beginning to end and engages from the internal team to the external team very well. It takes everything with them and helps them to grow at a wide pace. It creates a systematic workflow process which helps in achieving the goal more fast and friendly environment

Incentivized

SAP BW/4HANA is certainly an excellent choice when it comes to setting up a data warehousing platform within a landscape of existing SAP systems ecosystem for realizing quick time to value and ROI over the long term. Many non-SAP analytics tools such as Power BI , Qlik also now offer connectors to leverage SAP BW/4HANA data as additional options to deploy third party visualization tools which make it a more open ended platform of choice. But with the future roadmap of SAP and industry in general being focused towards cloud based offerings (SAC and Datasphere) infused with AI capabilities one has to make a judicious choice among these depending on the use case, capabilities of platforms and existing systems landscape and the overall long term IT strategy. SAP BW/4HANA may not be a good platform of choice if starting a native greenfield data warehousing implementation with cloud first approach which would require data integration across SAP and Non-SAP sources and one should consider other SAP cloud offerings which however still have some time to reach a level of maturity as SAP BW/4HANA has reached over the years.

Incentivized

• Store data from different domains
• Integrates efficiently with other systems
• Easy to migrate data from different systems. Provides good API Documentation.

Incentivized

• With ODP based extraction, SAP BW/4HANA does well to integrate the data from various source systems like S4HANA , S4C.
• With composite providers having the ability to integrate HANA calculation views, we are able to make the best of use of both application layer and data base layer(HANA) for mixed modelling scenarios.
• with data tiering optimization higher data volume are effectively handled as we have the option to control the amount of data that is being stored in HOT , Warm and cold storage. With data volume grows over the year, DTO comes in handy solution to automatically move the delta to appropriate area based on temporature.

Incentivized

• Rich look of user experience of the web-based interface
• Some areas like HR and Payroll are not fully-suited within the solution
• Error and issue handling/debugging is difficult

Incentivized

• Better integration with HANA layer with BW/4HANA application
• Flexibility to provide more secure API's to interact with non-sap Data bases
• Integration with Gsheets as well like Excel(AFO) and introduce better reporting integration with various reporting tools.
• Evolution to provide better data lake , data brick options like in BDC

Incentivized

The overall functionality, the feature set that the IFS Cloud offeres is really good (even though it has some flaws / cons), which reduces the time / administrative effort in managing multiple systems to achieve the same goal / to store the required data.

Incentivized

SAP BW/4HANA requires specialized skillsets around data warehouse modeling and the access to data, however the modeling capabilities are intuitive and have now become accessible to both SAP and non-SAP data warehouse specialists. This new model allows for Interchangeable skillsets and access to a broader pool of experts throughout the industry, as well as easier access to data.

Incentivized

The overall support is perfect and efficient.

Incentivized

SAP Max Attention and general support for SAP BW/4HANA is broadly available. Truth to be told, MaxAttention has a premium cost but brings great engineers. So this being an enterprise capability and extremely critical, we did not consider cost as the main factor since support works well. Just keep that in mind when making your selection.

Incentivized

IFS Cloud is an upgrade of IFS Applications. IFS Applications solution is under extended support and would eventually be replaced by cloud solution in coming years.

Incentivized

SAP BW / 4HANA and SAP IQ are both used for warehouse; with quick consultations for business analysis and that allows us to obtain dashboards and KPIs efficiently. SAP IQ is columnar and SAP BW / 4HANA immemorial. SAP BW / 4HANA was selected for the response speed of the queries since it saves the information in cache.

Incentivized

• Reduced the time taken for the users to prepare and generate reports since most are automatic with IFS Cloud
• Increased the reliability and visibility of the inventory of the products from procurement of raw materials through the manufacturing of final product to delivering to customer's place
• Took a considerable time configuring the roles and access of the users while implementation

Incentivized

• SAP BW/4HANA has been immensely helpful in eliminating alternate silos of data creation by business users thereby ensuring data integrity and consistency across the organization. The focus is now more on data analysis as opposed to data preparation in spreadsheets saving users hours of laborious manual work in collating data.
• We have been able to quickly integrate and leverage data from multiple SAP systems into SAP BW/4HANA to drive holistic decision making within the organization including streamlining the month end close process using BPC.
• Excel friendly reporting tools such as Analysis for Office have made it much easier for user adoption and training making change management much easier and change the culture within the organization.

Incentivized