Great and Scalable Enterprise Business Warehouse Tool
February 27, 2020

Great and Scalable Enterprise Business Warehouse Tool

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SAP BW/4HANA

We use SAP BW/4HANA across the whole organization primarily for reporting and also as a data source for our broader data lake. Most users are on Supply (Logistics, Inventory), Planning (Sales, Demand, Inventory, Business), and Finance. It integrates with most of our landscape - ERP, Product Lifecycle Management Systems, Planning tools, and even Excel Spreadsheets.

Pros

  • BI and Reporting out of the ERP Layer
  • Self Service Capabilities to build reports and cubes out of SAP
  • Great Performance for simple and analytical reporting out of SAP
  • Broad availability of BW Tools to integrate - such as Business Explorer

Cons

  • ETL implementation can be complicated
  • Integration with non-SAP systems can take a long time
  • Cost to implement and maintain can be high, even in Cloud
  • Reduced our Dev time to generate queries and views out of the ERP layer.
  • Be conscious of the Infrastructure costs
  • It is easily integrated with broader SAP Landscape, reducing overall implementation costs.
We use a mix of different tools, primarily Snowflake and SAP BW/4HANA - the first as our main Data Lake and integrated with other reporting and visualization tools, and the second as the main source of BI/Reporting into the ERP layer - Operations, Logistics, Inventory, Finance. We preferred to use BW in that case given the out of box functionalities you can find when integrating with the rest of SAP.
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.

Do you think SAP BW/4HANA delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with SAP BW/4HANA's feature set?

Yes

Did SAP BW/4HANA live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of SAP BW/4HANA go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy SAP BW/4HANA again?

Yes

SAP BW/4HANA integrates well within the SAP Landscape (ECC, S4HANA, IBP, etc.), and you can easily implement it if already an SAP shop. You can also find several Public Cloud implementations, especially on AWS, that can accelerate your Proof of Concept and validation. If you are adding more tools and systems into the landscape, you may want to consider another agnostic toolset that can easily integrate with non-SAP products.

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