Paradigm shift with SAP HANA
Updated June 25, 2019
Paradigm shift with SAP HANA
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
SAP HANA, enterprise edition
Overall Satisfaction with SAP HANA
SAP HANA is used as a database across the entire organization to support day to day operations in Siemens for various business divisions and product lines in the Americas. It is used as the basis to support everyday business transactions, for planning and forecasting purposes, support integrated end-to-end business and business consolidation.
- SAP HANA has alleviated some long running jobs in the back-end based on a database read for critical reports to higher management.
- SAP HANA has helped provide super users and controllers insights to key figures and margins in their profit centers within desired time-frame. Reports that in the past took more than 20 hours to complete now become available in less than 2 hours.
- Month-end, Quarter-end and Year-end long running batch jobs have seen drastic improvements in performance. Corporate Finance and Shared Services Departments that used to have heartaches and pain points with the critical dependent jobs at month end now see the results within desired time frames.
- SAP HANA has helped not only improve the performance of read access based reports but also the performance of jobs used to update the database (write-access based programs) resulting in a paradigm shift resulting in an increased leverage to perform the corrective actions as part of error handling.
- SAP HANA has room for improvement in providing a user-friendly interface to help users create their own queries. Currently, the provision to create queries is controlled and could improve on the intuitive features.
- The cost of the RAM is quite expensive compared to disks. Cost per bite is higher with SAP HANA.
- There had been a couple occurrences where the productive system went down after the go-live. Both times, SAP folks, local IT, Global IT, Infrastructure support and network folks were involved in discussions to troubleshoot and no concrete reason was discovered. The recommendations were to increase the server size, limit the HANA view usage (to limit resource pulls) and to ensure to keep latest versions of SAP Hana in the backend. There is room for improvement in this area.
- One of the biggest positive impacts on the implicit ROI of SAP HANA was realized in improved closed time at month end. This has provided the shared services and corporate accounting folks [the opportunity] to work closely with the business and IT to proactively perform error handling without jeopardizing the close.
- Another big positive impact on ROI was realized with empowering the users to create/modify and enhance their own Fiori tiles without relying on IT.
- The overall satisfaction index of the business due to the paradigm shift with upgrading to HANA was increased due to the increased performance of the backend jobs - the complex time consuming tasks were in some cases eliminated while in others improved drastically on performance driving up the business satisfaction.
SAP HANA uses the sheer power of in memory analytics based on columnar compression of data in the back-end resulting in an overall decreased footprint of the data resulting in a paradigm shift. The traditional RDBMS database would rely heavily on additional indexes to retrieve the row based data storage which took hours for retrieval and subsequent interpretations. SAP HANA is indeed the technology of the future that is in alignment with the requirements of the next generation users.