What's SAP?

I am an IT Consulting (not with SAP) who has a Computer Science degree. I would not hesitate to hire a liberal arts major for a technical role in my company. Programming and analytical thinking is a tiny fraction of my job; most of it demands public speaking, organizational skills, and business relationship instincts.

If these people work at a firm like Accenture that just outsources the technical challenge, coding skills become completely unnecessary.

Also, a ton of the industry is built around the risk of something unexpected happening after you push the button (as mentioned below) and distributing blame if the end-result isn't precisely what customers anticipated (the old "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM" adage)

It may seem backwards to people outside of giant organizations, but it is a necessary aspect of modern business (and there are tons of industries that make more money while generating less value for society).

In the 90's I was one of the project leaders on the internal SAP R/3 deployment at Microsoft. It was one of the most successful IT projects I ever participated in, mostly due to the remarkably strong business leadership the project enjoyed.

It was the third time the company tried to implement SAP's products. I think I may have been one of the very few people who worked on all three attempts. The winning recipe was having a business owner who threw up his hands at the failed efforts to get a larger scoped company-wide project underway and "selfishly" declared that the finance dept would do it for its own benefits. And he tooks his best people out of their day jobs, put them on the project team, and made them move offices to sit in the same open plan war-rooms as the IT staff (which took some doing...Microsoft was pretty much all unshared private offices at that time) I think we reduced the time it took to "close the books" each month from something like 3 weeks to under one week.

And we absolutely changed the business to meet the way the software worked, that's one of the key success factors for implementing any ERP software. Your "unique requirements" for fixed assets accounting and accounts payable processes are not what makes your company successful, but they are what will tank your ERP implementation if you let them.

It was a fascinating project. I especially enjoyed some of the travel to implement it in the subsidiaries, where the really big business wins were. Most of the subs didn't even have a "purchase order" process (they just paid invoices, and had no idea of their outstanding commitments) or any automation around things like employee expense reports. And we got to come up with some decent creative solutions to things like Brazil's requirements for hyperinflationary accounting, without breaking the software.

Fun fact, Concur's expense reporting business was borne out of the Microsoft R/3 implementation -- some of the best consultants and developers took what they built for Microsoft's internal expense reporting and turned it into Concur's expense reporting product.

Please note that I am not saying it is easy ! Far from it. I say it is possible to obtain something friendly that actaully help you get the job done.

I discovered that Lidl spent 500 millions $ for nothing (literally) trying to implement SAP.

Give 500 millions euros to a talented group of Stripe - like engineers and, maybe, you will have something sorted out and maintained for a few decades.

Half a billion dollars....

50 engineers well paid (5000$ net after taxes / month) cost 6 millions a year (France)

With 500 millions your system can be build and maintained for a century.

This is an interesting thread as despite working for many many years in IT I know next to nothing about SAP. I have worked with people from all parts of the IT ecosystem over the years but not SAP. It appears to be its own little closed world that some people enter but then never leave.

That observation aside does anyone know who writes or customises the SAP NetWeaver for Windows programs ? Is that the function of a highly paid consultant somewhere ? I have seen a few of these in different places and the common factor is they always look like they were written in Visual Basic circa 1992. The one I use makes the same beeping sound if a transaction fails as it does if it succeeds. If the transaction fails this is signalled by status box text saying so in a green font but if it succeeds then text says that in a red font. It takes a special mind to come up with that !

Maybe, but I feel like boring business processes are exactly the area where open source solutions are severely lacking.

Also, how are these businesses supposes to hire developers if there is no one in house already with the knowledge to ensure they are actually building something useful?

They are likely to end up with a barely functioning HR and Accounting system and developers with a load of boxes checked on their CV ready for the next job.