A side question, anyone knows how the illustrations on Retool homepage are made? The animated ones
What's SAP?
181–190 of 622 posts
Re: What's SAP?
#182Nicely written article, but I don’t see what the use of an ERP is? Can’t it just be replicated with some excel spreadsheets?
ERP is basically a centralized hosted version of a lot of spreadsheets. So no, because Excel doesn’t facilitate cooperation very well.
So Google Sheets would work?
Re: What's SAP?
#183SAP 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.
Sounds like a startup opportunity.
Re: What's SAP?
#184Well, SAP has for long been a money making blackbox for consulting firms. Think IBM, Accenture and the likes. They rake boatloads of money for multi-year contracts to implement SAP systems for companies wanting ERP solutions.
The system is outdated and obscure with both technical and non-technical people having a tough time understanding it. Last time I worked with some interfacing systems to some SAP modules, it still relied on web services, XML and SOAP. No REST support.
Salesforce is on the same road. In a few years, they will spin up more modules apart from CRM, like manufacturing and payroll.
Re: What's SAP?
#185> ...and most engineers probably haven’t seen them in the wild.
This is quite a limited view of our industry. I'd agree that young coders focused on the startup community may not have seen it. But it is pervasive in the enterprise world. By all means, pick it apart, analyze its strengths and weaknesses, and compete/disrupt. But pretending it is some unknown thing shows a lack of understanding of a significant market segment.
Re: What's SAP?
#186SAP 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 configur…
I agree with everything you said, they did some pretty neat stuff! the problem is that they started getting things wrong(from the development perspective) somewhere along the way, not sure if due to backwards compatibility or due to massive lock-in's with their own technology.
SAP right now is making a move on cloud using SCP and as open source goes, openUI5 exists.
I don't have much to say about SCP, just that the company I'm on decided to not use it, basically because we don't see advantages and to avoid future lock-ins
About openUI5, I honestly dislike it, the most useful features of that framework are locked inside SAPUI5(a supersetof openUI5) and pull requests are managed by a branch of the company itself and they are pretty harsh on it. SAP documentation on it can be bad and is entirely biased towards deploying things inside SAP or SCP, which is pretty annoying
Re: What's SAP?
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
> ERP is not not for this generation
This generation has options for creating full custom software faster than one can configure an ERP.
Re: What's SAP?
#188SAP 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.
One way to think about it is this: if having good UI in internal enterprise tools was a competitive advantage, companies would move to having good UI.
Re: What's SAP?
#189It's a program built to prevent corporations from spending money
Re: What's SAP?
#190Hi! (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"…
I always wonder about the reality of these kinds of statements. The truth ranges from the optimistic version "we're heavily making use of this software" through "we made use of it a few years back, and are now phasing it out" and "we use it for one or two core services, but everything else is run on Y" all the way to "we have a single instance somewhere we forgot to switch off and we still pay for", etc. This is a bit of a special case, but still, the reality is probably somewhat different than the face value.