Is it Really Easy to Point Fingers at SAP? - Brightwork Research & Analysis

Table of Contents: Select a Link to be Taken to That Section

Executive Summary

When we exposed the falsehoods proposed by SAP around S/4HANA, we were told it was easy to point fingers at SAP.
We provide the reasons why this is a false argument.

Introduction

This article is in response to a question we received about the reports of problems with S/4HANA.

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.

The Quote on How Easy it is to Point Fingers

“Easy to point fingers,now what? Name one mega ERP provider, there are major disasters associated with it…from SAP to workday. Two sides of the coin..three in this case: Software developer, SI and customer. SAP has brilliant minds, I am lucky to know many, but SAP does not own the customers’ processes. Deloitte abounds best consultants, I was there, but Deloitte might not have the best insight into new SAP products or the customers’ real requirements. Customer is not always right here and can certainly be at fault for turning blind eyes counting on SAP or SI to take you down to the unnumbered new house. Until a day everybody runs a process that spells 1,2,3, best chance of success always goes to the three-horse carriage.

Our Response: If it is So Easy, Why Does Almost no One Do It?

The first premise of this comment is not correct.

The SAP space is primarily filled with financially biased entities that rig information against buyers. They not only don’t point fingers, they mindlessly repeat whatever SAP says. So as we are one of the only entities of many thousands to call out SAP, it appears that pointing fingers at SAP is, in practice, quite difficult.

Secondly, we pointed fingers before any of this happened. We predicted the wide-scale problems with S/4HANA while Deloitte and co. were telling everyone they should move to S/4HANA. Just one of our articles dealing with clear exaggerations around S/4HANA goes back to April 2016 in When Articles Exaggerate SAP S/4HANA Benefits.

We covered who got S/4HANA right and got it wrong in this article, Who Was Right About S/4HANA Readiness.

As far as ERP projects having high failure rates, this is true, but S/4HANA has a higher failure rate than any other we track — and this is for one obvious reason. Since its introduction 4 years ago, S/4HANA has not been ready to be implemented. SAP has falsified an enormous number of its go-lives. See our research for the details 2019 Update: How Many Live SOH, and S/4HANA Customers Are There?

S/4HANA has failed as much as it has because it was a product that was immature but presented as ready. If companies had known the actual maturity of S/4HANA, it would likely have not been implemented.

Neither the article nor any of the comments have anything to do with the customer’s processes and do not state or take the position that the customer is always right. In any case, these were not the primary factors for the S/4HANA failures. Many of the S/4HANA customers were already ECC customers, and S/4HANA has no new functionality, so why would the customer processes be related to the issue? Secondly, customers are actively hiding S/4HANA failures. So this is not customers making a claim. This is the evidence coming out through direct contacts from lower-level employees direct to us or media coverage.

We called this correctly years ago, while all of the brilliant minds you talked about in SAP mislead customers about S/4HANA. If you want to talk about solutions, companies and taxpayers could have saved many hundreds of millions if they had listened to us rather than Deloitte and co. That seems like a pretty good solution to us.”

Conclusions

One of the most significant false claims is that it is easy to point fingers at SAP. In fact, it is very rarely done. The reason being that most of the entities in SAP are incentivized not to point fingers at SAP.