Expanding Section: The Missing Details
In addition to the public case studies above, there are also case studies published on SAP’s website. The issue is that when SAP publishes a case study they either provide a video, which contains a lot of praise of the solution, but very few details about the implementation. The case studies or they provide a 3 page PDF. The three page PDF only contains two pages of actual information because the 3rd page is legal boilerplate that basically states that nothing in the press release should be relied upon. One well-known sentence is the following:
“All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations.”
Secondly, other problems persist:
- SAP marketing leaves out important details from the case studies. Some of the case studies have the company size included, but when the company is small, those details are often excluded.
- The public case studies are filled with quotes that are directly taken from SAP marketing. This calls into question the independence of the reference companies, as quite a few of these marketing claims are not true, and would not have been observed by the reference company post go live.
- When independently verified a number of the case studies with contacts that have worked on some of these projects, they have so little in common with the published SAP document, that all of SAP’s S/4HANA published case studies should be considered unreliable.
These published studies, as with the studies of pretty much any software are really just pure marketing collateral.
Of all the sources of information that we reviewed, the case studies on the SAP website were the poorest quality. Now there is most certainly some good information contained in these case studies, however, the source is so problematic I cannot include them and be considered to follow a good research approach.