Home > ERP Software > SAP S/4HANA Cloud > SAP S/4HANA Cloud vs Skyward ERP

SAP S/4HANA Cloud vs Skyward ERP

Last Updated: November 18th, 2024

Our analysts compared SAP S/4HANA Cloud vs Skyward ERP based on data from our 400+ point analysis of ERP Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

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Product Basics

Running a growing business comes with enough challenges — managing core processes shouldn’t be one of them. That’s where SAP S/4HANA Cloud by SAP steps in, a modern cloud-based ERP solution designed to simplify tasks like finance, procurement, manufacturing and supply chain management.

It’s built for mid-sized to large enterprises, offering real-time insights and advanced analytics to keep things running smoothly. It also integrates advanced technologies such as AI and machine learning.

Top features include its user-friendly interface, customizable dashboards and industry-specific workflows. It beats traditional on-premise ERPs with faster deployment, lower maintenance and automatic updates.

Users love the flexibility and accessibility, helping them simplify daily operations. It offers various deployment options to meet different business requirements, including public cloud, private cloud, on-premise and hybrid models.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud offers a 14-day free trial at no cost that includes guided tours and sample data to help you navigate the system. Pricing depends on company size, number of users and selected modules. However, SAP S/4HANA Cloud hasn’t mentioned it directly on the website.

Skyward ERP is a comprehensive software solution designed to streamline and manage various administrative and operational tasks within educational institutions. It is particularly well-suited for K-12 schools and districts, offering tools for financial management, human resources, payroll, and student information systems. This software helps schools enhance efficiency, reduce manual errors, and improve data accuracy.

Key benefits include centralized data management, real-time reporting, and user-friendly interfaces that facilitate easy navigation and task completion. Popular features encompass budget tracking, employee records management, and automated payroll processing. Users often appreciate its integration capabilities and the ability to customize modules to fit specific needs.

Compared to similar products, Skyward ERP is praised for its intuitive design and robust support services. Pricing typically varies based on the size of the institution and the specific modules required, with options for annual or multi-year payment plans. This flexibility makes it accessible for a range of educational organizations.

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Product Insights

Automate Business Processes: Use intelligent automation, AI and robotic process automation (RPA) to handle routine tasks while optimizing others. This capability reduces manual work and lets employees focus on more valuable tasks. Our analysts give it a 100 for its intelligent capabilities.
Reinvent Your Business Model: Implement industry-specific solutions and best practices to introduce new strategies. Create customized products and explore innovative strategies to elevate how you do business.
Make Data-Driven Decisions: Access real-time data, embedded analytics and digital assistants to make informed decisions quickly. Engage with visual reports and use a context-aware digital assistant for a seamless, intuitive experience. Its standout capabilities earn it a perfect 100 for reporting.
Adapt: Address changes with real-time analysis and flexible tools for configuration, pricing, and quotes. These features help users quickly identify and manage changes. The system also notifies users of issues and suggests solutions. Our analysts rated SAP S/4HANA Cloud as the best solution in its category for procurement.
Accelerate User Adoption: Access a wide range of onboarding resources through openSAP and the SAP Learning Hub. These online hubs offer various learning formats to ensure users can easily understand and adopt the new system, no matter their preferred learning style.
Increase Efficiency: Equip employees with automation tools and real-time data insights to improve decision-making. This strategy reduces errors, saves time and money, and boosts productivity, driving better overall business performance.
Improve Usability: Built with SAP Fiori, the system is responsive, intuitive and designed to be simplistic. It provides a personalized and role-based user experience that can be accessed from any device. The system also supports 85% of functional requirements out-of-the-box so you have the features you need from the get go.
Centralize Data: In-memory computing stores all data in one unified system, avoiding fragmented databases. This centralization enables users to analyze large volumes of data at once and quickly spot trends, making data management more efficient.
Boost Time to Value: Start with guided implementation, quick technical setup and an intuitive interface. This helps the team to adopt the system quickly and deliver results faster.
Lower Expenses: Minimize total cost of ownership (TCO) with a subscription-based model. This cuts hardware, maintenance and upgrade expenses when compared to traditional on-premise systems.

Improved Efficiency: Skyward ERP streamlines administrative tasks, reducing the time spent on manual data entry and allowing staff to focus on more strategic activities.
Enhanced Data Accuracy: By centralizing data entry, Skyward ERP minimizes errors and inconsistencies, ensuring that all departments work with the same accurate information.
Real-Time Reporting: The software provides up-to-date reports and analytics, enabling informed decision-making based on the latest data.
Cost Savings: Automating routine processes reduces the need for additional staff and lowers operational costs, leading to significant financial savings over time.
Scalability: Skyward ERP can grow with your organization, easily accommodating new users, departments, and functionalities as needed.
Improved Compliance: The system helps ensure that your organization adheres to regulatory requirements by maintaining accurate records and providing audit trails.
Enhanced Collaboration: By providing a single source of truth, Skyward ERP fosters better communication and collaboration across departments.
Customizable Workflows: The software allows for the customization of workflows to match your organization's specific processes, improving overall efficiency.
Better Resource Management: Skyward ERP helps in tracking and managing resources effectively, ensuring optimal utilization and reducing waste.
Increased Transparency: With centralized data and comprehensive reporting, stakeholders have greater visibility into operations, enhancing accountability.
Enhanced Security: The system includes robust security features to protect sensitive data, ensuring that only authorized personnel have access.
Improved Customer Service: By providing quick access to accurate information, Skyward ERP enables staff to respond to customer inquiries more efficiently.
Streamlined Financial Management: The software integrates financial data across departments, simplifying budgeting, forecasting, and financial reporting.
Reduced Redundancy: By eliminating duplicate data entry and redundant processes, Skyward ERP ensures that efforts are not wasted on repetitive tasks.
Enhanced Decision-Making: With comprehensive data analytics and reporting tools, leaders can make more informed decisions that drive organizational success.

Financial Management: The SAP S/4HANA financial and accounting management tool scored 100 in our assessment. Below are some key capabilities:
- Run your business efficiently using built-in best practices, reporting and predictive analytics to maintain compliance and manage risks.
- Analyze your revenue and costs in real time, allowing you to view data across various dimensions to understand profitability at any level of detail.
- Automatically record financial transactions as they occur, ensuring reports are up-to-date while supporting multiple accounting principles for asset valuation.
- Use KPIs to monitor and manage payables, receivables, and cash flow, giving you a real-time view of key financial metrics through a centralized dashboard.
- Prioritize payments, track overdue invoices and identify high-risk customers to help your team manage costs more effectively and reduce the risk of bad debt.
- Centralize tax and financial reporting, ensuring that all departments access the same consistent data, while guiding users through an interactive financial analysis process.
Sales Management: The SAP S/4HANA Sales module offers effective order and contract management, incentive and commission management, and support for sales teams. Its key capabilities include:
- Manage the order-to-cash process efficiently across various revenue streams, including physical and digital goods, services, subscriptions, projects and bundles.
- Oversee bundled orders from one place, tracking profit, cost and revenue for each order line item. Automate alerts for project changes, deadlines and expirations.
- Equip sales reps to sell more effectively with a personalized home page, intuitive interface and quick access to tasks, applications and reports.
- Create sales orders from unstructured data like PDF or image-based purchase orders using machine learning to extract information automatically.
- Simplify incomplete sales order documentation with AI-powered autocomplete, which suggests missing fields based on historical data.
- Automate invoicing by integrating billing and accounting, improving cash flow accuracy and simplifying accounts receivable, all while meeting local requirements.
Supply Chain Management: The SAP S/4HANA Supply Chain tool achieved an outstanding score of 100 in our assessment, surpassing Visibility ERP and Oracle Fusion Cloud. It offers users a range of capabilities, including:
- Get real-time visibility into your supply chain with customizable dashboards. Track inventory, predict stock trends with AI and monitor deliveries instantly.
- Automatically confirm and process customer orders, ensuring that they align with business priorities to meet customer expectations.
- Help teams cut costs and reduce waste with easy-to-use mobile apps for packing goods more efficiently as part of the logistics process.
- Shorten delivery times by making sure you have the right vehicles, optimized routes, and the right quantity of goods, saving both time and fuel.
Manufacturing Management: The SAP S/4HANA Manufacturing module is built on methods like lean control, continuous improvement and just-in-time replenishment. It can:
- Optimize production by integrating processes smoothly, whether you're manufacturing to stock, order or custom specifications.
- Meet customer demands by identifying and fixing capacity issues, bottlenecks or shortfalls early, using planning simulations to find the best solutions.
- Balance supply and demand with real-time material requirements planning (MRP). The system immediately flags MRP exceptions and helps you resolve them quickly.
- Ensure timely product delivery by tracking each container’s status with a real-time graphical Kanban board.
- Deliver high-quality products by running quality inspections throughout the production process.
Procurement Management: The SAP S/4HANA Procurement module offers a scalable, value-driven and compliant process for managing operations. Its key features include:
- Easily view and update all purchase requisitions at once. The Joule copilot simplifies how employees collaborate during procurement tasks.
- Efficiently manage the entire procure-to-pay process, with real-time insights available at every stage.
- Identify bottlenecks and cost-saving opportunities with a customizable dashboard that shows all key tasks. Automate workflows for purchase orders, contracts and invoices, and analyze them in detail.
- Improve purchase contracts by setting up approval workflows. Track contract usage, plan renewals and negotiate long-term discounts with suppliers.
- Predict delivery dates for purchase orders to improve planning and avoid production delays.
- Make informed decisions by accessing real-time purchasing data without needing to open multiple reports.

Human Resource Management: Make the hiring process smarter with a data-driven applicant tracking system. Manage job openings and position requests with ease.
- Position Management: Leverage the position management module to track employees’ professional growth, degrees and certifications and credits. Identify useful development milestones to trigger updates in payroll. Review hire dates and staff vacancies to fill up open positions.
- Position Budgeting: Categorize employees into batches to automate salary calculations and boost transparency with what-if scenarios. View hourly rate, FTE counts and assignment details and more from a single interface.
- Substitute Tracking: Use custom rate tables to formulate robust pay rates. Automate pay hikes based on sub frequency, and auto calculate half-day, full-day or hourly pay rates.
Financial Management: Eliminate budgeting guesswork and implement robust financial controls to eliminate fraud and deception. Automate manual workflows to save time and effort.
- Accounts Receivable: Receive and process payments faster with the accounts receivable module. Clone and import invoices and apply discounts to them with ease. Make use of graphical indicators to assimilate complicated information within seconds.
- Accounts Payable: Clone invoices for monthly bill payments, generate fixed asset records from invoices and automate encumbrance adjustments with the accounts payable module. Auto-populate invoices with the purchase order information.
- Budgeting: Access real-time information and printable budget worksheets to create budget forecasts. Use built-in state reports or e-files to create or customize reports based on local requirements.
Employee Portal: Empower employees to access and manage personal information, including work experience, educational qualifications, skills, payslips and more to boost transparency and accountability.
- Employee Access: Provide real-time access to payroll history, time-off balances, time-off days, expense reimbursements and more to employees to boost communication with team members. Employees can access W2s and other important forms electronically via a dedicated customer portal.
- Expense Reimbursement: Set up default accounts based on expense reimbursement types. Attach notes, receipts and screenshots and empower managers to review details and approve requests from any device. It facilitates transparency in the review and approval process.
- Custom Forms: Personalize forms, roll out surveys or event sign-ups and set up virtual signatures for acknowledgment to boost the onboarding experience.
Asset Management: Manage supplies and track the value of assets in real time.
- Fixed Assets: Evaluate existing assets and gauge their status to reduce the possibility of shortages and overstocks. Simulate depreciation, log additions and disposals for review by auditors.
- Warehouse Management: Get real-time stock updates to see if items are below a certain level. Set alerts and notifications to inform the users if items are under certain thresholds. Leverage built-in reporting capabilities to make informed decisions

Product Ranking

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#97

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Analyst Rating Summary

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User Sentiment Summary

87%

of users recommend this product

SAP S/4HANA Cloud has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 87% when considering 2815 user reviews from 4 recognized software review sites.

88%

of users recommend this product

Skyward ERP has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 88% when considering 283 user reviews from 3 recognized software review sites.

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Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Real-Time Inventory Visibility: It optimizes stock levels and avoids stockouts with instant inventory updates, reducing carrying costs and boosting customer satisfaction.

Purchase Order Accuracy: Some users say automating purchase order generation based on real-time inventory and demand has minimized errors in procurement.

Production Planning: It refines production schedules and resource allocation with real-time data insights from connected machines and sensors, increasing efficiency and output.

Financial Reporting: Many users appreciate the ability to generate accurate and timely financial reports with automated data consolidation from all departments.

Sales Team Productivity: It gives the sales team the ability to access customer data and manage orders directly from mobile devices. This increases overall productivity and works efficiently from anywhere.

Automatic Updates: Users say that SAP manages regular updates and maintenance, ensuring up-to-date features and security patches without the need for external resources.

User-Friendly Interface: Users praise Skyward for its intuitive design and ease of navigation, making it simple to find the information they need without extensive training.

Streamlined Communication: Skyward facilitates seamless communication between teachers, administrators, and parents through features like messaging and notifications, keeping everyone informed and connected.

Comprehensive Reporting: The platform offers robust reporting capabilities, allowing administrators to generate detailed reports on student performance, attendance, and other key metrics, enabling data-driven decision-making.

Steep Learning Curve: It can be tough to transition from traditional ERPs to a new interface and cloud-based model. This could affect initial productivity, requiring user training to get fully up to speed.

Limited Customization: Users say the customization options are limited compared to on-premise systems. The ability to tailor the system for specific business needs is restricted.

Integration Challenges: Users find integrating with older, non-S/4HANA systems challenging. The process often requires additional tools and expertise, which can increase the complexity and overall costs.

Vendor Lock-in: Some users mention the reliance on SAP's cloud infrastructure makes it harder to switch to alternative solutions later. This dependency can reduce flexibility for future expansion.

High Subscription Costs: Some users say the cost of the software is a big barrier for small businesses since the initial implementation and ongoing subscription fees are relatively high.

Response Time: Customer support could be more responsive and efficient in addressing issues. Users mentioned that providing more thorough assistance would enhance the overall customer experience.

Clunky Interface: Users frequently express frustration with the user interface, finding it cumbersome and outdated compared to modern software.

Limited Customization: Adjusting the system to fit specific workflows or unique business needs can be challenging due to limited customization options.

Reporting Complexities: Generating reports and extracting meaningful data from the system is often perceived as a difficult and time-consuming process.

As a free trial user of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, I can confidently say it excels in simplifying core business processes and offers top-notch capabilities. Our analysts give a perfect 100 for their Finance, Procurement and Supply Chain Management modules.SAP S/4HANA Cloud is a robust ERP solution widely used across various industries due to its flexible, modular design and comprehensive functionality. After trying it firsthand, I was surprised by the initial setup. It was smooth and intuitive, with sample data and guided tours provided to explore all modules easily.The main menu and search bar were easy to navigate without redirects. I also liked how user-friendly the interface felt, especially for a first-time user.The finance module stood out to me. It provides a centralized dashboard where you can store and generate all sorts of reports, and it's easy to keep track of payments and overdue invoices. For someone looking to optimize manufacturing, it offers real-time visibility into operations, making it easier to meet customer demands efficiently.That said, the free trial had its limitations. I couldn’t access all features or sample data completely, which made it harder to fully explore the system’s potential.That being said, our analysts rated the Finance, Procurement, and Supply Chain Management modules a perfect 100. Many recent reviews have echoed the same sentiment, praising its real-time inventory view and automated workflows. However, others mentioned the inability to customize workflows during the trial.Users also pointed out the system’s complexity, but I personally found it easier to navigate than expected with the sample data. Still, I’m unsure how it would perform with real-time data in an actual business setting.Pricing wasn’t listed directly on the site, but compared to competitors, SAP S/4HANA costs—including implementation, licensing and training—are higher, especially for smaller organizations with tighter budgets.Overall, SAP S/4HANA Cloud is a powerful tool with advanced capabilities, though its learning curve and customization limitations may be challenging for some. For larger organizations with the budget and resources to implement it fully, it can significantly improve operations and drive growth.

Skyward ERP is a cloud-based ERP solution that has received positive reviews from users. They praise its user-friendly interface, which makes it easy to learn and use, even for employees who are not familiar with ERP software. Users also appreciate the wide range of functionality that Skyward ERP offers, which allows businesses to manage all of their core operations in one place. However, Skyward ERP is not without its drawbacks. Some users have reported that the software can be slow and buggy at times. Others have complained that the customer support is not as responsive as they would like. Despite these weaknesses, Skyward ERP is a solid ERP solution that is well-suited for small and medium-sized businesses. Its user-friendly interface and wide range of functionality make it a good choice for businesses that are looking for an ERP solution that is easy to use and can grow with their business.

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FAQ

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