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What's SAP?

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Re: What's SAP?

#31

Post by cm2187 »

randomsearch wrote: post #25
cm2187 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Honestly when I work, I focus on the content. Bloomberg Terminals command based UI is a designer’s nightmare, but you get anywhere you want to go in a few keystrokes, and as far as I can tell, most other users love it too.

Re: What's SAP?

#32

Post by OldGuyInTheClub »

SAP has enabled/mandated an army of people at my company who manage it and ruthlessly control even read access to it. The software is user-hostile, intentionally obscure, and all requests for slightly customized reports have to go through a multilayered approval process - often up to corporate - where it competes for funding against other survivors. Needing something custom invites constant questions of why the standard process is not enough.

It was sprung essentially overnight with no training and expectations to show immediate positive results with no criticism tolerated. The rollout was preceded by a couple of years of secretive process reworking where the business was modified to the way SAP said it ought to be done. We expand it to "Stop All Progress" because it marked the formal transition from a technology influenced company to an integrator focusing on acquiring tech from others.

Re: What's SAP?

#33

Post by Tomte »

ERP software is a monster.

There have been several high-profile cases of German companies migrating to SAP (from their home-grown zoo of different software for different purposes) that have gone spectacularly wrong. They are way over budget, way over time, and sometimes abandoned completely, like with Lidl: https://www.consultancy.uk/news/18243/lidl-cancels-sap-intro...

I have heard (anecdotally, and third-hand) that the only way to successfully introduce SAP (or Oracle, for that matter) is to completely succumb to it and restructure your business along the lines that SAP assumes as default.

You try to keep your little company-specific process for buying christmas gifts to employees? Fine, but it'll cost you several hours with an SAP consultant. You try to keep your non-standard terms with one supplier? Fine, another bag of money.

You do that more than just a very few times? Your migration has failed.

Re: What's SAP?

#34

Post by baxtr »

number6 wrote: post #30
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

I think you are referring to "Lidl"

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lidl-cancels-sap-introduction...

Re: What's SAP?

#35

Post by jakobegger »

randomsearch wrote: post #25
cm2187 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Aesthetics matter.

Everyone seems to think that, and then they produce software that looks beautiful and is horrible to use.

Gray buttons and scrollbars at least make it obvious which part of the UI you can click!

Re: What's SAP?

#36

Post by warpspin »

pojntfx wrote: post #8

SAP is the worst software I've ever used in my entire life; they literally have to publish paid books on how to use it, that's how bad it is.

A bit unfair. In fact most of the SAP books unfortunately are a waste of money because 99% of the content just repeats the help on their webpage.

If there is something I would complain about, it is that their help pages are a convoluted mess of years of content with broken links galore, lots of duplicated content between help pages between different versions and an on site search which is just not very good.

So basically you have to Google stuff, then unfortunately come out on the help pages for an edition you do not actually have and then will have trouble finding the corresponding help page for the thing you actually run.

Re: What's SAP?

#37

Post by spectramax »

samplatt wrote: post #20
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.

SAP suffers from the same issue as all other universally-malleable systems: at best, they're only as good as the designer allows them to be. However, just because it resembles 90's UI (which I'm a massive fan of) doesn't mean it follows it philosophically. It regularly breaks its own rules and is deliberately designed to be obscure as possible.

> “just because it resembles 90’s UI?”

I wasn’t talking about mere resemblance. I’m talking about functionality, density of information, layout, hierarchy of importance exemplified by various aspects of the UI, clarity and intent, feedback and signaling, on and on. The whole thing. The only thing that bothered me about SAP was how clunky it felt, simply because it was slow.

I’ll quote myself: “It is dense, extremely clear and consice.”, yep it’s great to use. I also love JMP statistical software UI and Cinema4D UI. They’re a pleasure to use.

Re: What's SAP?

#38

Post by theshrike79 »

The best advice about SAP I've had is that when a company is starting to use SAP, the company must adjust its processes to match the SAP model - not the other way around.

If you do it the other way, you'll first spend millions and millions customising SAP and then your project will fail at some point. It will also make all SAP upgrades completely impossible and they will cost millions and millions.

All of the successful SAP stories have been about companies who either match the SAP model already or reconfigure themselves to match it.

All failures are the opposite.

Re: What's SAP?

#39

Post by kumarvvr »

OldGuyInTheClub wrote: post #32

SAP has enabled/mandated an army of people at my company who manage it and ruthlessly control even read access to it. The software is user-hostile, intentionally obscure, and all requests for slightly customized reports have to go through a multilayered approval process - often up to corporate - where it competes for funding against other survivors. Needing something custom invites constant questions of why the stand…

> The software is user-hostile, intentionally obscure

This a million times. I don't know if good interfaces can not be built in SAP, or if it's very difficult to do, or if the developers of apps on SAP platform just don't care.

It's a real headache to use and completely confusing.

It's 2020 and one would hope software companies realize the value of a good, clear, effective user interface.

Re: What's SAP?

#40

Post by greatartiste »

Years ago I was involved in a project to scrape certain info out of a SAP system with a web interface. It would have been easier to do it with a API but my conversations with the SAP people at work were going nowhere (is it me or do SAP IT people have no concept of how things are done outside the world of SAP ?).

Anyway I started looking through the Javascript the browser automatically downloads and found there was 10s of MBs of un optimised code only a tiny percentage of which was being used. It was horrific and it was easy to understand why the system was so mind blowingly slow.

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