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What's SAP?

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Re: What's SAP?

#171

Post by disiplus »

mayankkaizen wrote: post #132
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…

It exactly feels like you are telling the story of my previous company. Although they started using SAP because company was going public and it E&Y advised company to implement SAP. Implementation was never successful. Day to day productivity greatly suffered. You had to do things SAP way, regardless of it being right or wrong. There were training sessions every weekend. Even trainers were confused. Everyone was mad.…

my friend works ata company that is an sap partner and they are required to use some sap software (i think some helpdesk component) and they use some external software and import stuff into sap later. afaik the reason is partly how bad it is and how the licensing does not make sense.

Re: What's SAP?

#173

Post by julienfr112 »

ProstetnicJeltz wrote: post #124
deelly wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you name good alternative that supports all SAP features?

'More modern' these days appears to be the 'thousand papercuts' approach - many SaaS products that collectively provide the same feature set. It's still hell, just a different kind of hell. Bespoke is a genuine competitor. In the UK it's not uncommon for SAP implementations to cost several million £s, this could be used to build bespoke software. There's a massive risk here though - there are thousands of ways bespok…

I know of a French Organic retailer that took that road ( postgres / java / angular). The story ends well. May be an exception. Or not.

Re: What's SAP?

#174

Post by myspy »

Arwill wrote: post #72
greatartiste wrote: post #40

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 1…

There are/were 5 different Web technologies over the years you could use to make Web apps for SAP. There are also standard WebService (XML SOAP) and REST interfaces over HTTP. There are also SAP native interfaces for specifically transferring data. There are ways to do stuff in SAP, lots of implementation problems arise from the fact that people don't know how to do it right, and just try to apply whatever they do kn…

The problem with SAP APIs and services is that each user that uses the system is billed individually. When you try to build an app that helps one department you have to pay for each of the user accounts despite the fact they just use your app, not all the other stuff. On top, there are no real pricing schemes to know what is coming at you. Either 100$ per user per month or 5000$. Depends. The cloud solution doesn't make that easier.

Re: What's SAP?

#175

Post by jasonlhy »

dfox wrote: post #160
zxienin wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

In my previous company, there is a senior worked on SAP for a long period of time. In his point of view, the UI of SAP was nice in 90s, but they are outdated now. And you can’t customise the user interface with what you want. He also thinks we should not put too much effort in learning SAP product as a developer because he thinks ERP is not not for this generation. He suggested We can learn the integration with SAP, but don’t waste most our time to learn the SAP configuration from the top to the bottom, SAP programming etc.

Re: What's SAP?

#176

Post by hef19898 »

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 last paragraph is the core issue, IMHO. SAP, while as software is cumbersome, user hostile and the opposite of intuitive, has some really great standard processes. Stick to them and SAP as an ERP system will run, almost, like a charm . When your company has the scale to benefit from it. And sticks to 90% of the standard processes.

Try to implement it without the necessary scale of operations, with sticking to standards and without training at your own peril.

That being said, without any production going on I would never even consider SAP. When don't have any use for their MRP-functions, forming the very core of SAP, you are better of with different solutions. And their licensing schemes are just aweful, not to even to talking about pricing yet...

Re: What's SAP?

#177

Post by tastroder »

_4msi wrote: post #131
bliss wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HR data is necessarily controlled though, there are pretty stingent controls in law around that. I understand the pain of not being able to report on stuff, but there is probably a sound reason. However, the delivery you describe sounds like a broken organisation tbh

No, this is the SAP business model. If people think that Apple, Sony, or Microsoft try to lock you in to their 'walled garden' then these people have never seen an SAP installation/integration. It's almost its own industry. There are fleets of consultants charging ~$1000 a day just to install the system. Then, as the OP said, they charge by the hour for customised reports which means that businesses have to choose th…

I'm not sure comparing walled gardens is that benefitial here. Most larger firms will either have consultancies on retainer or in-house personnel that can generate these reports anyway.

> They are being frustrated by consultants who want to keep their billable hours up, and extraneously restricting access under guises such as "this person doesn't have enough training to touch the system," because it keeps them in paid work.

I'm not sure why there's quite a few people pointing these aspects out in here. As opposed to the person using that data to keep their own billables up? "this person doesn't have enough training to touch the system," seems like a perfectly valid thing to say given what these systems do and is certainly not unique to SAP. The learning curve might be steep, the documentation looks ancient, the ecosystem might seem unapproachable, but at the end of the day this isn't that different to similarly scaled products from players like AWS or MS for example. They might have more approachable lower tiers and are nicer in quite a few technical aspects but other than that? It's often consultants and "certification or gtfo" as well. It's not like the consultant costs come as a surprise to anybody in these industries. Sure, it's their own little sub industry but you could say the same about these other ecosystems as well, that's not special - it is just how a few of these sub sectors are structured.

Re: What's SAP?

#178

Post by mathattack »

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…

On prem software is notoriously hard to keep modern. Every customization makes upgrades that much harder. SAP’s approach is “We know best.” Oracle is even worse. At least with SAP if they say the App does something, they aren’t lying.

Re: What's SAP?

#179

Post by john61 »

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…

All big ERP Software is like this. SAP is not unique in this regard, it is just everywhere in this market segment. Studies show that ERP user dissatisfaction grows exponentially with project / company size for all systems / implementation partners.

Re: What's SAP?

#180

Post by olavgg »

kamaal wrote: post #163
olavgg wrote: post #89

Tesla decided a few years ago to replace SAP with something they built themself https://www.mendix.com/blog/tesla-cio-builds-erp-house-4-mon... I love this story, it really isn't that hard to replace SAP once you know the requirements.

A lot of this is just plain pointless bravado. Eventually a lot of people have to outsource their payroll and other admin work, it's just cheaper that way. Then you just discover your are doing many things unique to your company so you kind of have to retrain a lot of finance and office management staff. And keep retraining them. Then also maintain teams of programmers to do maintain your software. You don't want a c…

Payroll software is an example which is easy to outsource. What I mean is that I think that Tesla is more of a software company, than a car company.
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