How to Best Understand SAP’s S/4HANA Announcement

Executive Summary

• Accenture and other Big Consulting Companies provide large amounts of information on S/4HANA.
• We evaluate the accuracy of this information.

Introduction

SAP introduced its S/4HANA system, and it had its partners chime in about how great S/4HANA is and why companies should implement it.

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. 

Analyzing the Quotes

“Numerous long-standing SAP partners are ready to resell and provide services for customers along their journey to run simple with SAP S/4HANA. Read what early adopter partners — including Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte Consulting LLP, EY and PwC — have to say.”

Accenture

“For businesses looking to take advantage of an always on, digitally connected and Big Data-driven world, Accenture has developed a high velocity enterprise approach that delivers enhanced ERP assets featuring disruptive technology like in-memory and powered by digital accelerators like social, mobile, analytics and cloud. For companies ready to embark on their digital transformation journey, SAP S/4HANA is a powerful platform that works with our high velocity enterprise framework to extend the value of SAP HANA. Our broad understanding of digital and the SAP solutions landscape combined with our superior industry expertise and global delivery capabilities means Accenture is ready to help organizations use SAP S/4HANA to create differentiated capabilities for their businesses and engage with their customers in new and more meaningful ways.” – Mark Willford, senior managing director, Technology Ecosystem & Platforms, Accenture

It’s interesting how completely vacuous this paragraph is.

• What exactly is a high-velocity enterprise?
• Ahhh, the term digital transformation is raised, which is a misleading marketing term as this article covers The Problem With Using the Term Digital Transformation for IT Projects.
• Superior industry expertise for what industry? Or does Accenture maintain that it has superior industry expertise in every single sector?

This is utterly meaningless from beginning to end.

Let us see what Capgemini has to say.

Capgemini

“We are delighted to join SAP for the launch of SAP S/4HANA and offer our customers the opportunity to simplify their ERP landscapes and accelerate innovation through the adoption of the SAP HANA platform. As an early investor in SAP HANA and a leading partner in terms of the number of active SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA projects worldwide, Capgemini is ideally positioned to demonstrate the value of SAP S/4HANA to both IT and business decision makers. We look forward to helping our clients take advantage of the game-changing real-time insights of SAP Simple Finance and working with them to maximize the business benefits of SAP S/4HANA.” – Jerry Lacasia, Global SAP partner executive at Capgemini

S/4HANA does not simplify anything; in fact, it makes implementation far more complicated and more expensive. It also does nothing to simplify ERP landscapes. S/4HANA is not particularly innovative. Adjustments have been made to ECC, but it hard to identify any innovation.

Cap Gemini may be an early investor in S/4HANA, but they even now have very few S/4HANA resources that have ever been on a S/4HANA project. The rest of the paragraph is throwaway.

Deloitte Consulting LLP

“Deloitte has been delivering SAP HANA since some of the first clients adopted the platform, and working closely with clients on the adoption of SAP Simple Finance. As an in-memory technology, SAP HANA removes the latency of decision-making and is foundational to the future of real-time business. SAP S/4HANA is a game-changer for ERP and provides an entirely new way for our clients to simplify their business and provide a better customer experience in a digital, networked and complex world.” – Jan Waals, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP and global SAP practice leader

Deloitte did adopt the S/4HANA platform, but primarily to resell the experience in the form of billing consulting hours. HANA does not remove the latency of decision making. It improves the speed of analytics processing, but we do not know about decision making speed changing. S/4HANA does not simplify the business of companies that implement it.

EY

“We have seen tremendous interest in SAP HANA from our customers as a means to transform their business. The combination of EY’s transformation focus and SAP S/4HANA will allow our clients to begin managing their businesses more efficiently by bringing access to data and analytics real-time and helping to deliver instant value to the business. EY continues to invest in building and growing our SAP offerings and experience and we have highly skilled, industry focused consultants ready to help our clients transform their business and enable this next generation of ERP.” – Michael Yadgar, EY Americas SAP Leader

Will S/4HANA deliver instant value to the business? This article was written by SAP in February 2016, but in 2017 very few companies anywhere have seen benefit from S/4HANA. I have research coming out that indicates that very few customers even have S/4HANA live, and this is over a year after this article was written.

PwC

“Businesses today are awash in data and faced with increasingly complex markets, customer engagement channels and business processes. Transforming technology systems can help simplify business processes, while providing more value to customers. SAP S/4HANA can help users connect processes, devices, Big Data and networks in real time. SAP has combined its expertise in business software applications with the unique power of SAP HANA to help businesses jump-start innovation and manage processes smoothly.” – Rodney Seligmann, Advisory Principal and SAP Global Alliance Leader, PwC

S/4HANA has absolutely nothing to do with Big Data. SAP does not have much of a Big Data solution. As far as connecting to networks, ECC is already connected to the network through something called an “ethernet cable.” The ethernet cable is a hyper-advanced technology that plugs into the server. Rodney Seligmann may have seen this in his life. Ethernet cables also come in different colors and it also connects to ECC right now in real time. The ethernet cable carries information all around companies through the network infrastructure, all in real time. That is how emails get from companies as well.

ECC can also connect to devices. You don’t need S/4HANA to connect to devices. As for processes, S/4HANA does not connect to processes. Rather it models processes. But ECC also models processes. If it didn’t, it would not have sold very well.

This quotation makes one wonder if Rodney knows what an ethernet cable is or that devices can be already connected to ECC or that SAP has nothing to do with Big Data.

Conclusion

The falsehoods contained in these comments is impressive. These companies have spokesman who has no idea what they are talking about and are simply repeating platitudes provided to them by SAP. The quotations are both deceptive and idiotic as well as being insulting to anyone with a reasonable intelligence or above.