How Accurate Was SAP on S/4HANA's Go Live Numbers?

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Executive Summary

For years SAP has made exaggerated proposals about S/4HANA go live numbers.
In this article, we review the accuracy of this claim.

What SAP Said About SAP S/4HANA’s Go Live Numbers

SAP has been exaggerating both the sales of S/4HANA and the go-lives for S/4HANA since S/4HANA was introduced. These exaggerations are released quarterly, as we covered in the article Inaccuracies in SAP’s Q2 2017 Earnings Call and in the article How SAP Mislead Analysts on the Q1 2017 Call.

Our References for This Article

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

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

This is published by a research entity.
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.

The Truth About SAP S/4HANA’s Go Live Numbers

SAP has a tough time explaining why the number of go-lives is such a small percentage of the number of S/4HANA “customers.” The number of S/4HANA “customers” is inflated by SAP offering S/4HANA either for free or at huge discounts or forced purchases based upon indirect access claims, as we cover in the article How SAP Controls Perceptions with Customer Numbers.

The number of S/4HANA go-lives is significantly exaggerated because so many companies have tried and failed to get S/4HANA to work. That means the companies did invest in S/4HANA implementations but failed or stopped the implementation. This is explained in great detail in the research A Study into S/4HANA Implementations.

The reason for these problems is simple — S/4HANA is being implemented before it is ready because S/4HANA was released far too early.

Conclusion and Calculation

SAP receives a 20% accuracy rating on S/4HANA purchases (that is, “customers”) and how many customers that have purchased S/4HANA are live.

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.