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What's SAP?

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Re: What's SAP?

#101

Post by sdan »

taneq wrote: post #12
sdan wrote: post #11

Nicely written article, but I don’t see what the use of an ERP is? Can’t it just be replicated with some excel spreadsheets?

If you're a big enough organisation to need an ERP like SAP, it would cost more to manage your data with spreadsheets than it would cost to just license SAP. I mean, that's literally how you price enterprise software.

Interesting. Was thinking that some startup could exactly do this, but realized that given how deeply integrated SAP/Oracle is (as mentioned in the article) it's very hard to do.

Basically: Make a really bad product + make it mission critical = a product that people are literally glued to using

Re: What's SAP?

#102

Post by shrimpx »

I live and work in USA but spend time in Europe. I noticed that in Europe SAP is wildly popular and a large percentage of “software engineers” are “SAP/ABAP programmers”. I have some engineer friends in Eastern Europe and they’re taking about how their employers are in the process of, or considering moving to SAP and away from in-house programming. These are not massive enterprises, mind you. Just small to mid size companies. In the US, on the other hand, I’ve never met a SAP engineer and in-house systems are the norm. What’s the deal with this disparity?

Re: What's SAP?

#103

Post by sdan »

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…

Make a really bad product + make it mission critical = a product that people are literally glued to using

Re: What's SAP?

#104

Post by 9dev »

new_here wrote: post #90

SAP today are just plainly incompetent and ripe for disruption. I've had quite a bit of interaction with SAP over the last few years, here are some examples: - Almost all meetings I've been in start with prospective clients mentioning to SAP consultants that SAP has a 'certain reputation'. The SAP consultants acknowledge this. - Some of the solution pitch ideas they come up with signal they have almost zero knowledge…

I suspect the only reason for their continued relevance is that they're too big to fail. So many huge enterprises rely on SAP, and its way too integrated into their core business processes to move off it at that point. Management elsewhere follows the larger players, and from what I've heard, SAP consultants are great at luring.

Kind of like lemmings jumping the cliff.

Re: What's SAP?

#105

Post by zxienin »

mrich wrote: post #94
fogetti wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be interested to know if they are actually using SAP. These companies are so much better at software development and they are swimming in so much money that they could even implement something by themselves.

Why would they? It's none of their core business and SAP already has everything covered. Think of all the legal/financial stuff. The UI is not that important in that field, your domain expert in that area knows how to navigate stuff.

I won't wave that question off completely.

It wasn't Amazon's core competency to offer IaaS/PaaS, before they did. GCP and AWS are closely playing in SAP's enterprise customer base. There is huge addressable market there. They've innovated better than SAP in technology space, on parts other than business software.

If they can succeed developing their own ERP, better than SAP, they could even redeploy the development teams from being cost center to profit center.

If I am SAP, I see them as strategic long term risk.

Re: What's SAP?

#106

Post by deelly »

lucasverra wrote: post #98

Can please a decision maker regarding SAP buying/implementing tell us how on earth SAP is that mainstream (in corporate) ? I've had to use it at EU big corp, and it to this day the worst experience I had. I've seen at techcrunch Berlin 2019 that there is something called SAP.io, somewhat opening its plateform ?

Can you name good alternative that supports all SAP features?

Re: What's SAP?

#108

Post by deelly »

shrimpx wrote: post #92
fefe23 wrote: post #70

People complaining about how user-unfriendly SAP is or how companies adapt to SAP instead of the other way around are missing the point of SAP. The point of SAP is that the module for your type of business is being implemented at the market leader in your area, because they are the only ones who can afford it. SAP will come to the market leader and put their processes into software. Then everybody else adapts to SAP…

It seems super strange to adopt the market leader’s processes. You’d think the spirit should be that you can outdo/outcompete then instead of adopting what they’re doing...

Yes, Its really super strange to adopt Google, Microsoft, Apple processes.. Yes?

Re: What's SAP?

#109

Post by cm2187 »

achow wrote: post #64
cm2187 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most existing and trained users love it. I have heard same argument for command line interface in yester years, why switch to Graphical User Interface, when CLI is so much more faster and I love it (and so do my other friends around me). Attrition (so new employees), interns, fresh campus hires, I guess does not happen in that universe.

No it's not that bad, it has auto-complete, it has search functionalities for both commands and data, and there has been a help button to chat with a bloomberg support person for as long as I have been in this industry.

Re: What's SAP?

#110

Post by warpspin »

theshrike79 wrote: post #38

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 success…

While I share your general notion that companies better adjust to the process of SAP, I still want to comment on the "impossible to upgrade" part, as that is simply not true.

First off, in SAP speech, "customization" is the act of simply adjusting the vast configuration options. This does not affect your upgrade possibilities at all. Even if you go so far as to add custom programming, as long as you (lowest complexity) just have programmed additional "transactions"/reports, you will usually not run into a problem.

The system also provides various mechanisms to extend standard transactions via hooks or to extend standard tables and still be able to upgrade without additional effort. I was actually astonished how much customization SAP allows in that regard while still staying compatible to the standard codebase - probably one of the reasons everything is so damn resource hungry, because there are multiple layers of indirection at work to allow this. From a development point of view, the major annoyance here is there are so many different options to extend stuff from different decades, so for some use cases you will use BADIs (https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=1...), for others "exits" (https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=1...) and it is all a pain to lookup and locate.

The one thing which will get you into trouble is if you manually patch standard programs - which you are able to, the whole business logic comes with sourcecode - and which is usually not necessary.

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