Expanding Section: The Case Study Problem

SAP has published a number of case studies for S/4HANA that show it as live. However, in a study funded by SAP and published by Forrester, SAP was only able to come up with three customers for Forrester to use in the study. And the average implementation budget for what they called the “composite customer” was $877,000. We estimate the TCO of SAP and other projects, and the sub-million dollar SAP ERP implementation is unknown to us. This means that SAP completely lied to Forrester, and Forrester went ahead and published this ludicrous study anyway. We covered this topic in the article How to Understand Forrester’s Fake S/4HANA TCO Study. This Forrester study is a complete joke, but it brings up interesting questions, and if SAP had thought it through, they probably would not have funded its publication. The biggest curiosity is how an application with 3,500 live customers (and with more than that currently in implementation), can result in SAP only giving Forrester three very small customers to use. It was easy money for Forrester. In their haste to publish the study, they forgot to include any listing for HANA, which means that either S/4HANA was implemented at all three customers without a database, or they made a reporting error. SAP resources, normally quite accepting of a study any quality as long as it reinforces their billability, tried to guess where that HANA budget may have gone. If it was included in the average $877,000 figure that is extra weird, as HANA is a very expensive database to buy and to implement.