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What's SAP?

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Re: What's SAP?

#351

Post by npace12 »

TheHypnotist wrote: post #346
npace12 wrote: post #339

I was an ABAP developer around 10 years ago, wrote a bunch of Planning & Scheduling apps/"screens" running in SAPGUI R/3 and APO for a (brand new) manufacturing plant with a new SAP implementation. I learned ABAP in a literally one weekend and was able to make stuff really quickly. For the most part, you could just "loop at " extract what you want and show it on a screen using one of their existing ui components. The…

My biggest complains is running queries against tables in german. Most of my time is searching tables for fields i actually need. But i'm a complete SAP novice, i understand it gets easier with experience.

One thing I found helpful was to find a "native" transaction that does something similar to what I want then debug it. It was nice to be able to read and debug the existing "SAP" code. Also, that was the only way I remember to find the "user exits" where you can extend an existing transactions.

Re: What's SAP?

#352

Post by _jal »

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).

You're better off spending your time making sure your general accessibility is up to snuff. Given standard OS widgets, textual error messages, proper i18n, etc. screen readers are much better at this than someone gluing on beeps and boops when they think appropriate.

Re: What's SAP?

#353

Post by jve »

avra wrote: post #294
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…

This is exactly the experience I had with MS Dynamics. Hideous. So hideous I refuse to work in that field anymore.

You should specify which MS Dynamics you mean. Because Dynamics has AX/GP/CRM, everything under Dynamics 365 umbrella.

Working with Dynamics CRM and it is an absolute joy customizing the system and building custom stuff on top of it. Very well architected under the hood. Well, it's CRM ofcourse and not ERP monster.

Re: What's SAP?

#354

Post by eftpotrm »

I once worked on a project that only existed because the end users had seen the SAP web UI and rebelled, hard. In fairness I don't blame them; when we dug down it was easily the worst HTML I've ever seen and some impressively weird behaviour. I can't quite imagine which team at SAP thought it was appropriate to release as a tool.

So, we spent 6 months or so building a front-end that the users wouldn't refuse to touch. HTML5, responsive, attractive, flexible. I mostly worked on the toolkit side of the project to try and keep UIs vaguely standard across the multitude of screens.

And alongside us, the two highest paid contractors I've ever worked with (who seemed to be earning their money), were building what amounted to SQL stored procedures that went into a tool that let them be interfaced as REST APIs. The article talks about the amount to which businesses have to mash themselves around how SAP works - from what I saw and heard, that was even after they'd spent more customising SAP than I would expect to bill to have built very large parts of it from scratch.

So yes. I'm sure that, at a really large corporate scale, SAP has its advantages to organisations. But in a 20 year career it's probably my least favourite technology, including the email server which you could misconfigure so receiving an email would bring down the whole machine. I wouldn't be remotely surprised to see SAP disrupted into oblivion, and a bit of me would love to be part of the disruption.

Re: What's SAP?

#355

Post by whatsmyusername »

schnevets wrote: post #313
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 Sales…

ServiceNow is garbage. They're probably less garbage than working with SAP but they're still garbage.

Re: What's SAP?

#356

Post by blaser-waffle »

lonelappde wrote: post #299
mwexler wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And let's not forget Hershey's disaster which they blamed on SAP and their implementation partners, mentioned here with 14 other ERP failures (yes, SAP is predominant, but there are other offenders as well...; article Oct 2019) https://www.cio.com/article/2429865/enterprise-resource-plan...

How much does the CEO get paid to offload responsibility for failure onto vendors?

Their entire salary, or close to. They're there to ensure profitability and stability, so you choose stable and reliable vendors.

Re: What's SAP?

#357

Post by hef19898 »

nachteilig wrote: post #252
hef19898 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sta…

What would you say is the right scale for something like SAP? We are only at a few million right bald and around 250 people and are starting to think about it.

As the other comment stated, I would say you're not there yet, sclae-wise. Hard to tell without further details, so. If you decide to the SAP-route in the future I would advise the following (no complete list by far, so):

- Stick to the standard, the smaller you are the less customization you do. ususally I'd say 90% standard, if you're small aim for 100%. makes it faster and easier to implement. And cheaper, because you need less external resources.

- Wait. SAP is deprecating SAP APO by 2023 (IIRC, something like that). So implementing before that could be a problem. Either you end with a legacy system and have your first release change right after, or during, implementation. And release changes are unique kind of hell themselves. or you end up with a new system that is yet untested. I wouldn't want either of that.

- Try to model your business already now along SAP-processes. First, these processes aren't that bad. especailly for the back office side of things as other pointed out already. Plus, it makes and future SAP implementation a lot easier. Same should be true for other ERP-systems, but I have not that much experience with those. Aside Odoo, which I wouldn't touch with a ten feet pole ever again in my life.

- get external consultants. Really, get them. get the good ones. A lot of hours. At least one for every module of SAP you want to implement. And have one of your own devs sitt on the consultants lap during the project. One per consultant. It's expensive, sure. But less expensive than an aborted SAP-project.

- Invest hours, days, weeks and months in user training. From day one, ideally as soon as you have a test envioronment. Start with key-users, experienced, smart peolple open for change. And work from ther to every singel user of the system. You need their buy in, without even the best SAP-project will fail. These people are alos the backbone for the future, trea them well and listen to them.

In case you want to hear more of my rambling, just shoot me a mail, adress is in my profile.

Re: What's SAP?

#358

Post by take_a_breath »

cryptica wrote: post #282
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…

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.

==Companies would be better off using open source solutions and hiring developers to integrate various systems from scratch.==

Funny enough, this is the type of solution SAP is typically displacing. There are huge flaws in the fully-customized process you suggest.

Re: What's SAP?

#359

Post by CameronBarre »

I worked as a PeopleSoft developer in college. It's a competitor to SAP. Working with esoteric software taught me how to properly read documents with hundreds of pages. It also showed me how to get by in a less than ideal circumstances.

I am a bit of a maverick in that sort of environment, though. I wrote a JSON encoder [1] to ship PeopleCode objects to the browser via these webscript endpoints you could make in order to use modern web technologies. PeopleSoft actually moved in that exact same direction years later with better JSON support, 'FluidUI', and better html5/javascript support.

ERP systems are hell to work with. It was fun, but ultimately I was glad to get back to the real world. I got back to my main interest C#, but then went fully into the Clojure world :).

[1] https://bitbucket.org/cjbarre/jsoft.json/src/master/

Re: What's SAP?

#360

Post by solarkraft »

Aeolun wrote: post #270
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.

If they did it in 4 months they must’ve had requirements that were so simple SAP was the wrong decision to begin with.

They were using the Mendix "low code application development platform", which I suspect already comes with many ERP features.
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