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What's SAP?

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Re: What's SAP?

#21

Post by cm2187 »

hanniabu wrote: post #5

SAP wouldn't be that disheartening to use if it weren't so damn slow and if UI/UX wasn't from the 90s.

I don’t know if we are using the latest versions but the UI has many other sins, not the least having buttons in odd places (submit is often at the top), many many screens to get to a place, slow as you say.

I don’t care so much that the UI looks from the 90s. For an internal application, a battleship grey winform is perfectly fine, as long as the workflow is simple, fast and intuitive.

Re: What's SAP?

#22

Post by probably_wrong »

diminish wrote: post #4

Some consultant had told "Adopting an ERP (SAP, Oracle or other) is a stronger bond than marriage". So those valuations could be strong and long term.

I used SAP at work to keep track of monthly working hours. The GUI had this... feature that doesn't allow you to resize the form you're working with. And you can scroll vertically, but the first columns are frozen in place. As a result, only 15% of your screen is usable, showing 4 out of the 30 columns you need to fill at a time and requiring constant scrolling.

As a user, I would have been happy to dump it and use anything else. But who am I going to complain to? I'm not the customer, my company was. And it's not like they are going to switch ERPs just because employees hate it (which we all did). Even if they wanted, the cost of switching now would probably be astronomical - not only on migration, but also on training and support.

It's no surprise that SAP is worth that much, seeing as they have the perfect captive audience: the wealthy kind.

Re: What's SAP?

#23

Post by spectramax »

meddlepal wrote: post #14
spectramax wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the SAP UI - yea, its the 90's when UI was far superior than today's whitespace filled, shadow-less buttons, complete lack of skeumorphic elements, magenta gradients and huge typography - See Windows 95 UI: https://twitter.com/tuomassalo/status/978717292023500805 It is dense, extremely clear and consice. I agree with the slowness though.

I feel like there continues to be a huge disconnect between UI designers and their users. I'm a power user so I am not the best person to ask for UX advice, but I talk to people all the time that just wish they still had the classic Windows 9x UI's and things more or less were "boring". Reminds me a little bit of a statement about how Taxi drivers can tell you what works architecturally better than an actual architec…

That's because contemporary designers are obsessed with trends, frameworks and aesthetics. When Dieter Rams designed Braun products, he didn't have a UI framework. He deeply thought about interaction and feedback to the user.

Contemporary UI trends bother me except one: websites like drewdevault.com and text.npr.com are refreshing.

Re: What's SAP?

#24

Post by pferde »

What the HN crowd might find interesting is that SAP does not support any kind of containerization technology to run their products in, despite the fact that certain components, like the dialog instance or saprouter, are prime candidates for just that. Let's give them a few more decades, they'll get it.

(From randomly perusing their help portal, it seems that there are one or two modern - and quite exotic - software products from SAP that do support Docker and I think also LXC, so it looks like they're slowly moving ahead in this regard. :) )

Re: What's SAP?

#25

Post by randomsearch »

cm2187 wrote: post #21
hanniabu wrote: post #5

SAP wouldn't be that disheartening to use if it weren't so damn slow and if UI/UX wasn't from the 90s.

I don’t know if we are using the latest versions but the UI has many other sins, not the least having buttons in odd places (submit is often at the top), many many screens to get to a place, slow as you say. I don’t care so much that the UI looks from the 90s. For an internal application, a battleship grey winform is perfectly fine, as long as the workflow is simple, fast and intuitive.

Do you work in a grey office with grey carpets and grey desks?

Aesthetics matter. Make software that is beautiful and a joy to use.

Re: What's SAP?

#26

Post by john_minsk »

dvdhsu wrote: post #7

Hi! (I'm one of the editors of this post.) When I was researching SAP, I found a fact sheet: https://www.sap.com/docs/download/2017/04/4666ecdd-b67c-0010... , that has quite a few interesting facts: * "[SAP] customers distribute 78% of the world’s food and 82% of the world’s medical devices" * "[SAP] customers include 98% of the 100 most valued brands" * "77% of the world’s transaction revenue touches an SAP system"…

TBH SAP is almost required for big corporations as they usually are publicly traded companies, require external audits from BIG4(and these guys know how to get data from standard SAP models, not so much from you self-developed system) and have to report their financials in consistent way.

For example Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google all can use SAP internally. But it would be false to state that all their businesses are run on SAP...

Re: What's SAP?

#27

Post by godelmachine »

Warning - very very vague question

Would someone kindly differentiate between the ERP vs ITSM (IT Service Management) industry in perspective for me? I would in ITSM and often wonder if I would had been better off staying in ERP like SAP?

Secondly, how does ERP fare in terms of complexity between game development vs ERP Software development? I understand the target base is totally different (Gamers vs Enterprise clients)

Let me know if I am too vague

Re: What's SAP?

#28

Post by cm2187 »

meddlepal wrote: post #14
spectramax wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the SAP UI - yea, its the 90's when UI was far superior than today's whitespace filled, shadow-less buttons, complete lack of skeumorphic elements, magenta gradients and huge typography - See Windows 95 UI: https://twitter.com/tuomassalo/status/978717292023500805 It is dense, extremely clear and consice. I agree with the slowness though.

I feel like there continues to be a huge disconnect between UI designers and their users. I'm a power user so I am not the best person to ask for UX advice, but I talk to people all the time that just wish they still had the classic Windows 9x UI's and things more or less were "boring". Reminds me a little bit of a statement about how Taxi drivers can tell you what works architecturally better than an actual architec…

That’s the problem with software. There are two categories of software: software that their developers use themselves, and software made for other people. Visual Studio is the prime example of a software made by people who use it, it continuously improves (minus a few hiccups), it is made for the most used functionalities to be at your fingertips, it doesn’t hide stuff in layers of submenus, etc. The list is long of software made for others, and the general rule is “fuck it, good enough”.

This is also why I believe the Windows 8/10 developers must be working on macs.

Re: What's SAP?

#29

Post by jimnotgym »

hanniabu wrote: post #5

SAP wouldn't be that disheartening to use if it weren't so damn slow and if UI/UX wasn't from the 90s.

In some of the repetitive data entry areas, like forms to enter purchase invoices, it used to have the most productive UI I have ever used. The cursor started in the right box, tabbed to the right places etc. I would swap that screen for my current modern one any day

Re: What's SAP?

#30

Post by number6 »

dvdhsu wrote: post #7

Hi! (I'm one of the editors of this post.) When I was researching SAP, I found a fact sheet: https://www.sap.com/docs/download/2017/04/4666ecdd-b67c-0010... , that has quite a few interesting facts: * "[SAP] customers distribute 78% of the world’s food and 82% of the world’s medical devices" * "[SAP] customers include 98% of the 100 most valued brands" * "77% of the world’s transaction revenue touches an SAP system"…

Also lidl sunk 500 mil € in SAP and cancelled the gig after that.

SAP has a reputation to take down businesses

*edit: mistook aldi and lidl

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