Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What's SAP?

retool.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 622 posts

Re: What's SAP?

#151

Post by somesortofsystm »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #95
kriro wrote: post #51

I used to work in a research project where I went to some UX conferences in Germany (not really my field). The big irony/running gag is that SAP seems pretty good in UX-research, Hasso Plattner Institute is fairly recognized for their UX work and yet SAP-UX is a nightmare. They just can't/won't roll out new things.

Yeah, what is that about? Do you have more insights on this?

Academia is easily bought, especially in Germany.

Also, HN is a hacker crowd with a particular axe to grind re: UI, since all the cool new UI shit makes insta-billionaires, or at least thats the dream.

Whereas with a SAP-using business, the computer isn't the product - the products that the computer allows the company to manufacture/distribute are the only thing that matters - and the SAP UI is intentionally set up by bean-counters.

Once you go SAP, like get into the SAP Zone, you can be quite productive - but like another poster said, SAP is like vim.

:wq

Re: What's SAP?

#152

Post by Kaiyou »

deelly wrote: post #108
shrimpx wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If Google had tried hard to adopt Yahoo, it wouldn't have gone very well for them, I figure.

Re: What's SAP?

#154

Post by oblio »

mbesto wrote: post #117
kumarvvr wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I take a very neutral position to this. Enterprise software at the scale SAP is operating (mainly its core ERP) at a Fortune 500 enterprise level. This characteristic (needs at that level) are user-hostile, not the software. Imagine this situation: - You're a F500 pipe manufacturer and a sales person needs to enter an order for 100 pipes to be manufactured and sent to a customer in the US Now imagine you need to: - O…

I really like this industrial parallel:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/05/11/making-wrong-code-...

> The first time I walked into the bakery I couldn’t believe what a mess it was. The sides of the ovens were yellowing, machines were rusting, there was grease everywhere.

> “Is it always this messy?” I asked.

> “What? What are you talking about?” the manager said. “We just finished cleaning. This is the cleanest it’s been in weeks.”

> Oh boy.

> It took me a couple of months of cleaning the bakery every morning before I realized what they meant. In the bakery, clean meant no dough on the machines. Clean meant no fermenting dough in the trash. Clean meant no dough on the floors.

> Clean did not mean the paint on the ovens was nice and white. Painting the ovens was something you did every decade, not every day. Clean did not mean no grease. In fact there were a lot of machines that needed to be greased or oiled regularly and a thin layer of clean oil was usually a sign of a machine that had just been cleaned.

Re: What's SAP?

#155

Post by tonyedgecombe »

zxienin wrote: post #73
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #44

A best case scenario looks like Cisco’s ERP implementation, which took them 9 months and $15 million. In comparison, Dow Chemical’s implementation, for example, took $1 billion and 8 years; At the last SAP site I worked at the general feeling was implementing SAP had left the company weak. This lead to them being taken over by one of their competitors.

what does this competitor run its business on?

I have no idea, it was a long time ago.

Re: What's SAP?

#156

Post by schst »

orbifold wrote: post #128
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…

It really is insane, I know people who don't even work for SAP, are "IT consultants", whose credentials are a (very good) Art History degree and travel around nationally and internationally to essentially push a button to do SAP database migrations after mergers and acquisitions. There are independent companies that just live off the fact how bad SAP is.

It must be a little bit more difficult than "pushing a button" if companies have to hire an external consultant for that. But yeah, SAP has huge ecosystem of external companies that profit from SAP's fails

Re: What's SAP?

#157

Post by leto_ii »

Going through the comments here I notice the recurrent theme that it's your company that has to adapt to SAP and not the other way around.

To me this raises two key questions:

1. Isn't this harmful/limiting for your enterprise in the long run?

2. How can you at some point migrate away from SAP once you adapted to it?

Given these issues and the huge costs, why would it make sense to adopt it in the first place? At least in the year 2020 (maybe the situation was different decades ago).

Re: What's SAP?

#158

Post by lewisjoe »

SAP always is an interesting case. It gets close to zero love from HN, yet the platform has some interesting engineering.

For example, they had their own language that abstracts and operates directly over a database. They had their own drag and drop UI builder, that compiles down to a HTML page or a desktop widget - which is again not an ordinary feat. They view code as data, as in even the UI is stored as a configuration and not as some Java code. They had their own VCS back when Git didn’t exist. Of course, all these weren’t best of their class, but they sure did get there ideas right.

All these must have been interesting engineering concepts back during its time, yet there hasn’t been much tech literature on how they accomplished it or what inspired them to. At least not that I know of.

Now that open source is on fire, of course a single company cannot catch up with the pace these open source softwares are racing ahead.

Companies like Zoho and Salesforce are able to catch up because they do two things right.

#1. Cloud

#2. Adopting open-source and making a clever mix of proprietary engineering

The next SAP or Oracle will certainly be companies that get those two things right.

Re: What's SAP?

#159

Post by swarnie_ »

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…

I work for a competing ERP software house and this is the first bit of advice i give after introducing myself.

Customising an ERP can be interesting, keeping it supported and updateable 5/10 years after the guy who wrote the mods retired is a nightmare i've seen one too many times before.

Re: What's SAP?

#160

Post by dfox »

zxienin wrote: post #53
kumarvvr wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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. Up until some 5 years back, UX really was afterthought to them. Why? Answer is in how enterprise software was (and largely still) sold. Buying was done by CIO, based on all parameters (account relationship, FOMO, $$$ discounts, functional reliability etc.) except us…

one has to differentiate between SAP the product and SAP as implemented by random big-co. The parts that are user actively confusing and user hostile are usually result of customization done during the implementation (and motivated either by requirement to keep some existing ad-hoc process or by requirement to have some report contain something that is otherwise irrelevant for its contents).

It is certainly not true that SAP does not care about UX (in fact the reason why SAPgui has it's decidedly non-native look is result of some UX research in late 90's), only the UX they care about is not about easy onboarding, but about efficiency of use. And by the way in my opinion SAPgui manages exceptionally well to combine power user features with discoverability (on the UI toolkit level).

Post reply on HN