What's SAP? • Hacker News Board

Re: What's SAP?

#311

Post by carwc » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 2:41 PM UTC

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #269

mr_gibbins wrote: post #230

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 work in some other industry with some other software which is "our SAP"... and i look at it as "another IBM". You have a bunch of smaller companies with different products, and whichever you pick, it will have some faults, missing features bugs, etc., and you'll the the one blamed for picking the "wrong" software. ...or you pick IBM/SAP/..., which is "de facto standard" in your {industry}, and whatever is wrong, is…

Which industry?

Re: What's SAP?

#312

Post by nateburke » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 2:42 PM UTC

One reason why SAP perhaps has remained relatively unscathed by competition, beyond the obvious upfront development and implementation cost barriers, is the sales angle.

An ERP is usually sold directly into the office of the CEO. Any ERP startup hoping to get a foothold must have a founder or head of sales with a rolodex full of CEOs. Folks with CEOs in their rolodexes tend to not have the type of risk-tolerance required to go all-in on a startup.

Re: What's SAP?

#313

Post by schnevets » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 2:43 PM UTC

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…

ServiceNow is another disruptor with an interesting approach similar to SalesForce. SNow started as a Remedy alternative, but really saw IT groups as the infrastructure that every other Department relies on. While SAP hold influence in a company by controlling the purse strings, a good ServiceNow implementation holds the Microservice and Technology information every group is reliant on.

I'm not as familiar with SalesForce, but I think it has a similar stake by focusing on CRM. If you start at the customer data, you can influence the profit centers and influence a company that way.

I mostly mention these success stories to say that a Goliath like SAP won't be taken down by one David, but by a ton of ankle-biters eating their lunch. Maybe these ankle-biters will be easily replaceable, but I wonder what an organization where Enterprise Software is constantly hot-swapped will look like, given how inefficient Application Retirement projects can be.

Re: What's SAP?

#314

Post by organsnyder » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 2:44 PM UTC

swampthinker wrote: post #247

organsnyder wrote: post #232

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.

Oh, absolutely. My previous employer used an Epic migration to standardize workflows across a dozen hospitals that were brought together through a bunch of different mergers over three decades. Before the Epic migration, nurses/schedulers/etc. couldn't easily pick up shifts in other locations because the workflows were so different.

Re: What's SAP?

#315

Post by james-imitative » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 2:44 PM UTC

Stupid Asshole Projection

Re: What's SAP?

#316

Post by kthejoker2 » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 2:44 PM UTC

A whole sea of comments, balmost all focused on the tech stack, reporting, UX, integration ..

SAP's selling point is regulatory compliance and financial control. It doesn't matter if you have a great UX or lightweight extensible third party API ecosystem, what matters is "When the IRS / SEC / Congress / Interpol comes calling, am I clear?"

Government regulation is the ultimate "vendor lock-in" and SAP exploits that fact.

Re: What's SAP?

#317

Post by organsnyder » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 2:45 PM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #302

lonelappde wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Helsinki recently adopted Epic (under the local branding “Apotti”). One hospital death has already been confirmed as being due to UX difficulties with the new system. Link in Finnish: https://www.hs.fi/kaupunki/art-2000006391154.html

Not to downplay that tragedy, but we don't have any information on how many deaths were prevented by switching away from their old system.

Re: What's SAP?

#318

Post by belinder » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 2:45 PM UTC

> A basic installation of SAP has 20,000 database tables, 3,000 of which are configuration tables. In those tables, there are ~8,000 configuration decisions you need before even getting started.

Hard to imagine even getting to that point

Re: What's SAP?

#319

Post by hef19898 » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 2:46 PM UTC

tootie wrote: post #286

mr_gibbins wrote: post #230

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.

Not the Op nor teaching in this field.

Back the day I worked for a couple of years as super key user for SAP, modules MM and PP (material amangement / demand planning and production planning). The one, unbeatable, benefit SAP (or similar monolithic ERP systems) offers is compliance. As every single process is connected to other processes the whole system is auditable and compliant to any tax or accounting legislation out there. Same goes for industry specific things like serial numbers (crucial in aerospace where I used to work). You will never get that by combining nieche products. Not if you aren't willing to create your own in-house developer department. And that will have to be on par with SAPs. Downside, then, is of course that you get zero benefit from improvements out of other companies. Something you will ultimately get using SAP for example.

IMHO, SAP makes perfectly sense if you are a big company with an in-house production. Than you hugely beenfit from SAPs MRP-core, which you need anyway. On-top you get the other modules integrated in the same system. Without production? I would stay away from it.

For my own company, managing logistics and service providers for clients, I opted for another software solution. There is no production to manage, and SAPs solutions for pure logistics, warehousing and transportation but also customs and such things, other providers are way better.

Hybrids can make sense. Customs can be done outside SAP. Same goes for transportation and warehousing. But then interfaces become an issue. Doable, yes. But added complexity and failure modes. It's a trade off between functionality and complexity in these cases.

For production management (classic MRP), I have yet to see something better then SAP. MS Dynamics doesn't look to bad, but I never actually worked with it.

Re: What's SAP?

#320

Post by buzzkillington » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 2:48 PM UTC

joshuaissac wrote: post #308

buzzkillington wrote: post #201

I wanted to be angry at it. But I couldn't. It's so bad it's reached greatness. A piece of software that plays (at least) one sound on every user action, and the sounds are completely arbitrary and 8bit at best . Where you have to press 5 buttons in a row to do the one thing it's meant to do. Where you have an angry fruit salad in a time sheet. A piece of software that takes 30 minutes to enter your worksheet time. A…

That sounds like a great feature for making software accessible to blind people. Even for sighted people, I can see how it could be useful. The next step should be to have a database of standardised, free and open source sounds that can be used by any program, so that the same sound means roughly the same thing across all of them (assuming that this feature is not patent-encumbered).

>That sounds like a great feature for making software accessible to blind people.

Perhaps they should main for the larger market of making it accessible to sighted people first.

There are no words for how terrible the interface is. It is purely mouse driven and this is in no way a feature that increases accessibility to blind people.