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What's SAP?

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Re: What's SAP?

#281

I teach enterprise systems at a university, with emphasis on SAP. It's hideous. Hideous. My students complain it is unusable (agree), doesn't make sense (agree), that they can't see the point (agree). When you look at the underlying database 'schema' (inverted commas deliberate) you'll find it's a massive, denormalised mess. Much of what SAP can do can be done at the local level using intuitive software. Reports, for…

I’m not sure I agree with your finally point. There is a lot of software out there that can be customised extensively to fit any particular business, and it’s awfully tempting to do so because you incur a financial cost rather than a social one. But while the social cost of changing how you do things might have been a one off thing the financial cost will turn into a recurring thing every time you want to upgrade.

It is literally equivalent to forking software and merging each new release from upstream, but usually without access to something like git to help deal with this.

It doesn’t even help to skip versions because now you’ll have even more changes to merge with when you finally upgrade.

This is one of the biggest reasons I’ve seen for people sticking with old versions of software for decades. You reach a point where any upgrade will be as expensive as a whole new system, so you might as well hold out till you request quotes for replacing the whole thing, and probably repeat the mistake all over again.

Re: What's SAP?

#282

I teach enterprise systems at a university, with emphasis on SAP. It's hideous. Hideous. My students complain it is unusable (agree), doesn't make sense (agree), that they can't see the point (agree). When you look at the underlying database 'schema' (inverted commas deliberate) you'll find it's a massive, denormalised mess. Much of what SAP can do can be done at the local level using intuitive software. Reports, for…

SAP, IBM and Oracle mostly rely on free fiat money straight from the government or other artificial monopolies to keep their businesses going. They don't need to deliver anything. What they do is beyond inefficient. Companies would be better off using open source solutions and hiring developers to integrate various systems from scratch.

Re: What's SAP?

#283

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.

> It's 2020 and one would hope software companies realize the value of a good, clear, effective user interface. SAP is not the only one; ever tried the enterprise software from Oracle? Or the open source ERPs/CRMs? Painful. But everything has API's these days, so lot of departmental work is done on top. Small budgets so they have small, simple LoB apps made on top which are 'idiot proof'. These apps are very localize…

I have only been exposed to SAP a long, long while ago, but back then it was leaps and bounds better than the two ERP systems the company had used previously. If you think SAP is a nightmare, these other systems would probably drive you clinically insane.

One system had three completely different, supposedly equivalent, client UIs. Each was equally undiscoverable, and had its own set of arcane, non-standard and inconsistent UI conventions that was completely different fron the other clients. So even if you knew how to enter a certain record in one client, your knowledge was almost wntirely useless with confronted with one of the other two. I am not even getting started on the server implementation and the myriad of bugs in the system.

Re: What's SAP?

#284
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is a competitive advantage. A good, consistent UI would make people at-least not hate their job when it comes to handling SAP systems. See, using an SAP system requires a lot of unnecessary cognitive load, so much to remember, so much to digest. So un-intuitive. I am sure people would be more productive with a UI that is not complete crap.

Neither of these things are directly connected to the SAP relationship with your company. The people feeling the pain from the bad user experience are multiple steps removed, and generally powerless to do anything. When they complain, they get presented with an improve UI versus implement thing that auditors need argument. Normal people are going to pick the latter.

Re: What's SAP?

#285
We had this at a telecom I worked at in the early 2000s. It's easy to sit back and bitch about "the things you have to use at work", so I usually avoid it. However, short of whatever-the-heck-is-used-for time tracking/time sheets[0], this application was the single largest software cause of rage at the company that I've ever been exposed to in my entire working life.

My experience with the application was limited mostly to expense report submissions and for that simple task, it was abysmal. It was so bad that it was hard not to conclude that it was chosen due to its horribleness: making employees think twice about sending in expense reports. And we did. If it was a small dollar amount, the time cost exceeded the monetary cost.

The UI, at the time (2005...ish), actually looked pretty slick compared to most web-based tools. It stopped there. Date fields, upon clicking, reloaded the whole page (which you waited for), to display a pop-up calendar, which when the date was clicked, reloaded the whole page. At least once while filling in the expense reports myriad of screens, the page would fail to load and you'd have to hit the refresh button, or you'd make a mistake and need to go back. Clicking any of the usual buttons in the browser for those functions invariably lead to an account DoS feature.

I don't remember the details, but it basically caused the system to get confused into thinking there were two of you and it gave priority to the "you" living in the alternate universe where you didn't click "Back" or "Refresh" and were still filling out your expense report. You had to wait for the first session to time out before you could continue, and the error message you received was placed in the "status bar" and appeared to be the name of a const variable "APP_BOWEL_MVMT_ERR" that gave no hint as to what the fsck was wrong. There was admin "unlock" feature (help desk calls were met with "just sit tight"). So you would give up and forget to return 3 hours later. A few days of this and the expense deadline passed.

There wasn't a more hated "enterprise tool" in our shop and we ran every single one of Microsoft's early attempts at web-ifying the world (early Sharepoint is the only I recall, but we had others).

It was decided to shelve it after a last-ditch effort was made to fix it. We'd put a job opening up to get a solid SAP developer and got ... someone ... after bumping the salary up several times. The rumor is that the gentleman we hired was the highest paid developer at the company. He lasted 3 months before taking a job at IBM at a substantially higher salary. A look at his job history and the circumstances surrounding it made it not unreasonable to conclude that we weren't the job he was ever interested in and talking to other SAP folks ... this sounded extremely common. The joke was "if you have to work with that crap, it better pay well".

We finally ditched it when we were acquired by another telecom; while most of the choices "our side"'s IT made were fought for, nobody advocated for keeping SAP ... even having no idea of what the acquiring company was using -- we knew if it wasn't SAP, it had to be better. It was Oracle; and it might be the only time I've heard a colleague speak positively about "Oracle" outside of The Matrix[1].

[0] Time sheet software always comes to mind. Nobody likes doing "time sheets" at any job I've ever had, but at every company I've ever worked for, we've had a home-grown time tracking tool. 30,000 employees to 100 employees. Every. Single. Company. It's such a necessary "evil" that even at those places where executives had known deadly-allergic reactions to building anything in-house, somehow a case was able to be made to build a completely custom time tracking tool tailored precisely to the businesses perceived needs. Death, taxes and time sheets, I guess.

[1] My experience with Oracle up to that point was Sun's acquisition and a perception-backed-by-coincidence that when the Oracle sales guys couldn't land a deal, their software auditors would step in to give the necessary motivation.

Re: What's SAP?

#286

I teach enterprise systems at a university, with emphasis on SAP. It's hideous. Hideous. My students complain it is unusable (agree), doesn't make sense (agree), that they can't see the point (agree). When you look at the underlying database 'schema' (inverted commas deliberate) you'll find it's a massive, denormalised mess. Much of what SAP can do can be done at the local level using intuitive software. Reports, for…

Ooo, this is fascinating. What's your syllabus? I'd love to understand the economics of buying this kind of software, versus buying lots of niche software versus hiring a services firm to build versus hybrid approaches.

Re: What's SAP?

#287

Attunity (now Qlik) Replicate [1] has an SAP ABAP change data capture connector. Replicate directly from SAP to Kafka, AWS/Azure, HDFS, etc., in real-time. I am surprised that more SAP shops are not doing this to separate operational ERP concerns from agility in the rest of the business. [1] https://www.qlik.com/us/sap-analytics/sap-data-replication

This is what SAP's HANA platform is for, a microbatched CDC framework to an in memory operational data store with a standard SQL engine for traditional reporting and analytics (in theory .... being SAP, it's also weirdly engineered on the backend)

Re: What's SAP?

#288
post #92
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...

Competitors cannot outsmart the leader in every facet of business. They creatively optimize some processes, but for the rest of the business their choices are wing it or purchase the Commercial Software solution.

Even a bleeding-edge company will hit an obstacle they cannot improvise through (like in QA or Compliance). That's when enterprise software creeps into an otherwise lean operation.

Re: What's SAP?

#289
post #188

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.

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.

It's a competitive advantage in ONE category.

If your business model is being a gatekeeper who requires expensive training and long adoption periods just for users to do basic shit, and then never switch because they think ALL software is that complicated to learn, then....

What I'm trying to say is, the intricacy is intentional. They thrive on their consultant/contractor money.

No one will make a trillion dollars disrupting them. But they will be disrupted.

Re: What's SAP?

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's similar to Epic's value proposition in the healthcare space. Sure, their software is above average (with "average" being barely functional or vaporware), but their main selling point is their ability to assist leadership in strongarming an organization to adopt standardized workflows.

As someone working in healthcare, I can attest to the value in getting an healthcare org to adopt standardized workflows. I'll take an org that follows process over better software that isn't used in a consistent manner. There is too much operational and human complexity to solve healthcare with software alone.

What happens when the disease in my body declines to adapt to Epic's standardized workflow?
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