How Accurate Was SAP on HANA Being an Perfect Fit for ERP?

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Executive Summary

For years SAP has said that HANA was an excellent fit for ERP.
In this article, we review the accuracy of this claim.

Video Introduction: What SAP Said About HANA Being an Excellent Fit for ERP

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SAP proposed HANA as being equally suitable for either transaction processing or analytics from the day that HANA was first introduced. SAP stated that HANA was so good that they refused to certify any other database aside from HANA for S/4HANA. Hasso Plattner proposed that MRP systems would be radically improved in performance, as we cover in the article Is Hasso Plattner Right on S/4HANA? SAP claimed that even though HANA was designed for analytics, it was the best database for S/4HANA. You will learn how accurate SAP was in its claims around HANA being superior in supporting ERP systems’ needs.

Our References for This Article

If you want to see our references for this article and other related Brightwork articles, see this link.

Notice of Lack of Financial Bias: We have no financial ties to SAP or any other entity mentioned in this article.

This is published by a research entity, not some lowbrow entity that is part of the SAP ecosystem.
Second, no one paid for this article to be written, and it is not pretending to inform you while being rigged to sell you software or consulting services. Unlike nearly every other article you will find from Google on this topic, it has had no input from any company's marketing or sales department. As you are reading this article, consider how rare this is. The vast majority of information on the Internet on SAP is provided by SAP, which is filled with false claims and sleazy consulting companies and SAP consultants who will tell any lie for personal benefit. Furthermore, SAP pays off all IT analysts -- who have the same concern for accuracy as SAP. Not one of these entities will disclose their pro-SAP financial bias to their readers.

Quote from Hasso Plattner

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“It is sad to still hear the same arguments after all the sales success, the implementations in record time and happy productive customers. We have written books, where we describe dozens of new or improved application scenarios, specific events are taking place throughout the world and we have many success stories on our website. I just heard of a Chinese fashion manufacturer who installed SAP S/4HANA and reports a game changing improvement of the MRP2 run from more than 24 hours to under two hours. My advice for the smaller and midsize SAP Business Suite customers is to carefully watch the early adopters, soon approaching 2000, especially in related industries.” – Hasso Pattner

After detailed analysis, which included when S/4HANA became available, when its MRP functionality could have been used, and when Hasso made this statement, we concluded that this could not have happened.

What Really Has Been Happening with ERP on HANA?

In numerous reports from the field, we have found that HANA has no performance benefit over previous generation databases but significant performance problems running MRP.

This we covered in the article How to Interpret MRP Performance Problems HANA.

As is covered in the article Why HANA is a Mismatch for S/4HANA and ERP, HANA is a poor match for ERP systems because it has shown to be inferior to previous versions of Oracle and IBM, and Microsoft for transaction processing.

Conclusion and Calculation

SAP receives a 0% accuracy rating on HANA being perfect for ERP systems.

Link to the Parent Article

This is one of many research articles on a specific topic that support a larger research calculation. For the overview of the research calculation for all of the SAP topics that were part of the study, see the following primary research A Study into SAP’s Accuracy.