SAP S/4HANA Cloud Reviews & Pricing

Key Features

• Financial Management: The SAP S/4HANA financial and accounting management tool scored 100 in our assessment. Below are some key capabilities:
  • Run your business efficiently using built-in best practices, reporting and predictive analytics to maintain compliance and manage risks.
  • Analyze your revenue and costs in real time, allowing you to view data across various dimensions to understand profitability at any level of detail.
  • Automatically record financial transactions as they occur, ensuring reports are up-to-date while supporting multiple accounting principles for asset valuation.
  • Use KPIs to monitor and manage payables, receivables, and cash flow, giving you a real-time view of key financial metrics through a centralized dashboard.
  • Prioritize payments, track overdue invoices and identify high-risk customers to help your team manage costs more effectively and reduce the risk of bad debt.
  • Centralize tax and financial reporting, ensuring that all departments access the same consistent data, while guiding users through an interactive financial analysis process.
• Sales Management: The SAP S/4HANA Sales module offers effective order and contract management, incentive and commission management, and support for sales teams. Its key capabilities include:
  • Manage the order-to-cash process efficiently across various revenue streams, including physical and digital goods, services, subscriptions, projects and bundles.
  • Oversee bundled orders from one place, tracking profit, cost and revenue for each order line item. Automate alerts for project changes, deadlines and expirations.
  • Equip sales reps to sell more effectively with a personalized home page, intuitive interface and quick access to tasks, applications and reports.
  • Create sales orders from unstructured data like PDF or image-based purchase orders using machine learning to extract information automatically.
  • Simplify incomplete sales order documentation with AI-powered autocomplete, which suggests missing fields based on historical data.
  • Automate invoicing by integrating billing and accounting, improving cash flow accuracy and simplifying accounts receivable, all while meeting local requirements.
• Supply Chain Management: The SAP S/4HANA Supply Chain tool achieved an outstanding score of 100 in our assessment, surpassing Visibility ERP and Oracle Fusion Cloud. It offers users a range of capabilities, including:
  • Get real-time visibility into your supply chain with customizable dashboards. Track inventory, predict stock trends with AI and monitor deliveries instantly.
  • Automatically confirm and process customer orders, ensuring that they align with business priorities to meet customer expectations.
  • Help teams cut costs and reduce waste with easy-to-use mobile apps for packing goods more efficiently as part of the logistics process.
  • Shorten delivery times by making sure you have the right vehicles, optimized routes, and the right quantity of goods, saving both time and fuel.
• Manufacturing Management: The SAP S/4HANA Manufacturing module is built on methods like lean control, continuous improvement and just-in-time replenishment. It can:
  • Optimize production by integrating processes smoothly, whether you're manufacturing to stock, order or custom specifications.
  • Meet customer demands by identifying and fixing capacity issues, bottlenecks or shortfalls early, using planning simulations to find the best solutions.
  • Balance supply and demand with real-time material requirements planning (MRP). The system immediately flags MRP exceptions and helps you resolve them quickly.
  • Ensure timely product delivery by tracking each container’s status with a real-time graphical Kanban board.
  • Deliver high-quality products by running quality inspections throughout the production process.
• Procurement Management: The SAP S/4HANA Procurement module offers a scalable, value-driven and compliant process for managing operations. Its key features include:
  • Easily view and update all purchase requisitions at once. The Joule copilot simplifies how employees collaborate during procurement tasks.
  • Efficiently manage the entire procure-to-pay process, with real-time insights available at every stage.
  • Identify bottlenecks and cost-saving opportunities with a customizable dashboard that shows all key tasks. Automate workflows for purchase orders, contracts and invoices, and analyze them in detail.
  • Improve purchase contracts by setting up approval workflows. Track contract usage, plan renewals and negotiate long-term discounts with suppliers.
  • Predict delivery dates for purchase orders to improve planning and avoid production delays.
  • Make informed decisions by accessing real-time purchasing data without needing to open multiple reports.

Approach to Common Challenges

• Data siloing and lack of real-time insights: S/4HANA Cloud's unified platform integrates all business data and utilizes in-memory technology for instantaneous access to operational dashboards and predictive analytics, improving decision-making across departments.
• Inefficient processes and manual workarounds: Pre-built industry-specific workflows and automation capabilities streamline procedures, eliminating manual tasks and redundancies to boost productivity and agility.
• Limited scalability and flexibility: The cloud-based architecture scales seamlessly to accommodate growth, while the modular design allows for customized configurations and extensions to tailor the solution to unique business needs.
• Disparate systems and complex integrations: S/4HANA Cloud provides native integration with other SAP solutions and a robust open API platform, simplifying data exchange and collaboration with external applications.
• Lack of mobile accessibility and collaboration: Mobile-optimized Fiori interface and cloud-based access enables real-time visibility and updates from any device, empowering remote teams and enhancing collaboration.

Limitations

• Key fiscal year and currency selections cannot be changed after initial setup, hindering flexibility for specific accounting practices.
• Public edition offers shared infrastructure with less customization freedom compared to dedicated private cloud deployments.
• Seamless data exchange might require costly upgrades or intermediary tools for pre-S/4HANA systems.
• Custom code extensions face stricter security and governance controls compared to on-premise deployments.
• Scheduled maintenance windows in multi-tenant public clouds may impact critical business operations.
• Only some modules contain embedded analytics. However, in most cases, a separate data warehouse is required.

Cost of Ownership

Demo Resources

• Live Demos: Request a live demo to see SAP S/4HANA Cloud in action, allowing you to ask real-time questions and explore its features interactively.
• Guided Tours: Take a guided tour to explore specific use cases and features, helping you understand how the system can work for your business.
• Trial Experience: Start a 14-day free trial to test SAP S/4HANA Cloud with sample data and pre-defined scenarios across different business functions.
• Webinars and Webcasts: Join webcasts like the "Cloud ERP Essentials" series to learn best practices and watch demonstrations of key features.

FAQs