Expanding Section: The Discrepancy Between the Public S/4HANA Case Studies and the Private S/4HANA Case Studies

There is a very considerable discrepancy between the public case studies and the private case studies.

The first obvious difference is the implementation duration, with the public case studies not only being significantly shorter in duration than the public case studies, but suspiciously the implementation times for the public case studies being far shorter than the generally accepted duration of ERP implementations. These implementation durations to not match with experience implementing ECC and they are not realistic. ECC should be significantly faster to implement than S/4HANA as ECC is far more mature than S/4HANA. Secondly, experienced ECC resources are simple to find, whereas finding resources who have been through even one S/4HANA implementation is difficult.

Secondly, and quite importantly, the public case studies all met customer expectations, while most of the private case studies did not. A number of private case studies did not complete the implementation. Complaints about how SAP supported the implementation exist in the private case studies, and interestingly in one public case study, but not in the official press release by SAP for this case study.

Rather a single consultant published his experiences being on the same implementation that was published by SAP (and implemented by IBM), but the consultant offered realities not covered in the SAP press release. And these realities were not complementary to SAP in terms of their support for S/4HANA.

With the Florida Crystals public case study, the CIO was effusive with his praise of SAP and pointed to SAP’s support as what allowed Florida Crystals to implement an “upgrade” of S/4HANA in “4 weeks.”

Facts, which are quite verifiable, such as the lack of documentation for areas of S/4HANA, are not mentioned at all in the public case studies but are mentioned by implementers.