How Accurate Was SAP on MRP Performance on HANA? - Brightwork Research & Analysis

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Executive Summary

For years SAP has said MRP ran far faster on HANA than any other database.
In this article, we review the accuracy of this claim.

Video Introduction: What SAP Said About HANA Running MRP Faster than On Any Other Database

Text Introduction (Skip if You Watched the Video)

A primary argument put forth by SAP is that processor intensive activities, such as running MRP, would run faster on HANA. Hasso Plattner stated that due to HANA that there would be no more batch processes. This means that MRP should run instantaneously no matter the size of the system. Hasso Plattner further stated that S/4HANA with HANA reduced the processing time of MRP for a Chinese company from 24 hours to 2 hours (although still not to zero minutes, which is what “no more batch processes” would mean). You will learn how accurate SAP was in its claims around how fast HANA was in running MRP.

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.

What Really Has Been Happening with MRP on HANA?

There are several problems with this. The first is timing. We created a project plan to calculate that a period of 18 months would have elapsed from Dr. Plattner’s statement about the Chinese company to the date on which a company could run MRP in S4.

But there is a second problem. Information from the field and lab results show that HANA has performance problems in supporting MRP and underperforms MRP run on older versions. Purely row oriented versions of Oracle, IBM and MS. This is covered in the article MRP Performance Problems with HANA.

From our estimation, the story provided by Hasso about the Chinese company did not happen. It actually could not have happened. Furthermore, S/4HANA has performance problems with MRP at the time this research is published.

In numerous reports from the field, we have found HANA not only 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 Microsoft for transaction processing.

Conclusion and Calculation

SAP receives a 0% accuracy rating on MRP being either faster on HANA or MRP without processing time with HANA.

Link to the Parent Article

This is one of many research articles on a specific topic that supports 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.