Gives a plethora of analytics opportunities that solve tough business issues
September 26, 2019
Gives a plethora of analytics opportunities that solve tough business issues
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SAP S/4HANA
SAP S/4Hana is our ERP platform. All business processes from planning, procurement, production, sales, distribution, and financial reporting are performed on S/4HANA applications. Our previous implementation was a best of breed solution with much integration into core SAP. We implemented S4 with a focus on being current, agile and able to adapt to updates quickly. Our user experience has greatly improved with the use of Fiori apps. With or implementation we are now able to apply upgrades and patches at a much faster pace. New millennial employees are adapting to S4 with limited training compared to our previous environment.
- Usability or ease of user - Our users share that the S/4 Hana system is easier to use and understand.
- Speed - With the in-memory database our updates and reports are measurably faster. This is not sub-second response but more than 50% faster than our previous database for similar activities.
- Upgrades and enhancements are being delivered at a higher frequency than previous versions of SAP.
- The in-memory database has enabled analytics to be embedded into the core application. Before we relied on long-running processes overnight. With S/4HANA , SAP has delivered many out of the box dashboards and provided analytics that previously all customers had to create manually and support. Since these are provided in core SAP, they are automatically maintained, supported and updated by SAP.
- Some Fiori apps are incomplete - SAP created a great app but failed to provide a change or delete the app for the process. This forced us to use classic SAP transactions through the app finder to perform those functions.
- Many customers are using IAAS and thus are on-prem installs in a cloud data center. SAP has a mix of cloud and on-prem offerings. If a customer is a Hybrid customer there are complexities with integration between software that was planned for cloud-only.
- Globally information protection and identity protection are serious cyber-security concerns. SAP has provided some solutions with UI Masking and UP logging to partially address these items. SAP should deliver security by design and not depend on every customer to build controls that SAP should have provided to be compliant.
- The security architecture between on-prem and cloud apps are vastly different. Architects need to understand application and database security concepts. How security is provided to the different cloud apps are different. Although many of these products were acquired, they need to be aligned with the SAP cloud strategy.
- Ability to curb production when sales were down.
- Ability to identify product mix issues so production schedules could be aligned to meet demands.
- Real-time financials are available daily. You do not need to wait for month-end processes to complete to see a real-time snap shot of major items such as sales, profitability, margins, EBIT and more.
S/4HANA included the most integration and real-time analytics of other best of breed applications. The improvements in ease of use have greatly improved user experience. I was not directly involved in the selection process but on a team of about 30 who provided feedback on different applications. SAP may not have been the top vote in every category, but the number of functions provided in core SAP greatly distanced the other applications.