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What's SAP?

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Re: What's SAP?

#361

Post by hef19898 »

kthejoker2 wrote: post #287
cognaitiv wrote: post #217

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)

Hey, over-engineering is a German core competency! And we germans are thourough!

Re: What's SAP?

#362

Post by _v7gu »

try-perforate wrote: post #348

It sounds like HN readers could stand to spend a little time studying microeconomics. I would love to see a Valley solution to the problem of sourcing raw materials including energy, storing raw materials, sourcing packaging, storing packaging, sourcing machine parts, storing machine parts, keeping track of vendors, machine maintenance labor, machine maintenance scheduling, cost accounting for the inputs, manufacturi…

If the answer you get is this terrible, then maybe you're asking the wrong question.

For example, I know the tale of a large multinational consumer goods company who bought their supplier for X. Coincidentally, the X supplier was also the largest exporter of X goods to the world and had a team of twelve who managed operations. The multinational company, in their great wisdom, decided to move the operations from what we Turks call "bakkal defteri" (basically pen and paper) to SAP. It turns out that twelve people were not enough to run the system over SAP, and they basically had to tenfold the number of operations people just to get it running.

Re: What's SAP?

#363

Post by chadash »

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 (am actually told to) teach that changing the business to fit SAP is preferable to changing SAP to fit the business. And it's accurate advice. It shouldn't be, but it is. SAP is SAP. It doesn't care about your USP. Or your custom approach to business. As far as SAP is concerned all businesses are the same, they do the same things, and all must conform. Resistance is futile.

I've worked in companies making decisions around which ERPs to implement. You have two options: roll your own ERP or adapt your processes to an existing one.

The first approach means that you are basically committed to becoming a software company. At a minimum an ERP needs to tie together your accounting, supply chain and inventory. So it's not a simple endeavor and it's easy to mess up. You'll need a team of people to build it and you'll need ongoing support. Compared to these costs, the price that SAP or NetSuite will charge you for their ERP is trivial.

Alternatively, you can adapt your processes to an ERP. In many cases, this is the right thing to do. It means that you can use readily-available software and have practices that are good enough.

Re: What's SAP?

#364

Post by _lqaf »

BlobRunner wrote: post #336
MagnumOpus wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Banking (especially in US) is a total complexity nightmare. Yet you have Stripe.com who simplify it. In this analogy the ERP system is the Stripe plumbing that simplifies it for the endpoints (factory logistics manager, salespersons etc) just like Stripe does for its endpoints (merchants and customers). You might find that re-implementing Stripe is not so simple because of the nightmares of naturally-grown internat…

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...…

Ah, but you're not just paying coders.

You need tax lawyers to ensure you're doing that right. You need employment lawyers to ensure your termination process follows the law. You need accounting experts to ensure you're reporting correctly. In every legally distinct market.

How many laws, regulations and reporting requirements does your average chemical plant comply with?

Re: What's SAP?

#366

Post by hef19898 »

_4msi wrote: post #131
bliss wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HR data is necessarily controlled though, there are pretty stingent controls in law around that. I understand the pain of not being able to report on stuff, but there is probably a sound reason. However, the delivery you describe sounds like a broken organisation tbh

No, this is the SAP business model. If people think that Apple, Sony, or Microsoft try to lock you in to their 'walled garden' then these people have never seen an SAP installation/integration. It's almost its own industry. There are fleets of consultants charging ~$1000 a day just to install the system. Then, as the OP said, they charge by the hour for customised reports which means that businesses have to choose th…

Reminds me. I once wanted / needed a KPI to monitor consignment stocks. So I needed agregated inventroy numbers fo the past. Quite a simple calculation, SAP has stock movements and the current stock. So just plus / minus, right? The external devs wanted 70k € back in 2011/12 to put that into SAPs Business Warehouse. Not being able to programm ABAP myself, I went to my manager. He came up with a report, in the prodcution system, after 2 hours, half of it during his lunch brake.

Re: What's SAP?

#367

Post by take_a_breath »

GuB-42 wrote: post #233
deelly wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Its really super strange to adopt Google, Microsoft, Apple processes.. Yes?

Scale matters. Unless your company has thousands of employees and billions in revenue, Google/Microsoft/Apple processes are probably not for you.

==Unless your company has thousands of employees and billions in revenue, Google/Microsoft/Apple processes are probably not for you.==

Then you probably don't need and shouldn't buy SAP.

Re: What's SAP?

#368

Post by hef19898 »

smiler wrote: post #148
madaxe_again wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say this, but I can think of two large market leading electronics corporations who are using a big pile of excel spreadsheets to bridge gaps in SAP, as the regulatory environment is moving faster than their development cycle.

I integrate into SAP for manufacturing and the users can certainly do every transaction they need to do to account for cost and shipping product and keep finance / supply chain happy. But yes, to actually plan and run their manufacturing area, that's where the software I write comes in... as well as a ton of spreadsheets :)

As lng as the data in these spreadsheets goes back into SAP. If it doesnt' you can kill SAPs MRP. I saw that happen. Which is then kind of hell's hell. And then the spreadsheet-users complain about SAP.

Re: What's SAP?

#369

Post by NikolaNovak »

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 (am actually told to) teach that changing the business to fit SAP is preferable to changing SAP to fit the business. And it's accurate advice.

Never worked with SAP, but spent a lifetime working on other ERPs, and would agree.

Your USP is NOT how you do HR, Finance, etc. Walmart's expertise is Retail/Supply-Chain Management. SpaceX's expertise is rockets. Backoffice is a cost centre, and the assumption (validated by decades of projects) is that you are probably (exceptions do exist) not a special snowflake when it comes to HR or Financials, no matter how much Sally in Accounting or Joe in Recruitment office insist.

As I've mentioned elsewhere on this site, the #1 success criteria for ERP implementation is whether you take it as an IT, or a BT project.

- Take it as an IT project, try to adapt a COTS system to whatever gobblety-gook of disjoint processes you have right now through a myriad of customizations, and you will have a failed implementation project which will be over-budget, over-schedule, and result in dissatisfaction of all stakeholders.

- Take is as a BT (Business Transformation) project, and adapt your backoffice processes to match the industry standards and best practices as exemplified in the ERP, and you'll have a smoother implementation project and at least a chance that some stakeholders will satisfied - though more likely to be VP of Finance or HR, rather than Sally & Joe, because Sally & Joe, while experts in their field, are humans who are resistant to change, but more importantly unfortunately in most companies are not privy to the big picture results.

It is absolutely true that most ERPs are hobbled by decades of legacy code; I would agree in principle that it's theoretically possible that a company could make their own ERP that is more efficient; but in reality, company's expertise is probably not making efficient ERPs, and in the end it would be seen as an IT project and no business transformation would take place - IT in service of business, after all. Even as a techie, my jaded/experienced view now is that amongst other things, when done right, ERPs provide drive and impetus for business transformation that needs to take place.

As a techie, I would agree with your students on probably all the issues they see with ERPs. But their USP is not the brilliance of technical design - it's the proven business workflow and processes that have been standardized over decades of experience across hundreds and thousands of real world enterprises. Students are also likely to see inelegance of code or even business processes in isolation, but may not have real-world experience to understand why some business workflows are the way they are; why processes are seemingly inefficient but minimize ambiguity, or provide traceability and auditability; and myriad other unfortunate but realistic real-world constraints, scenarios, and frictions :-/

Re: What's SAP?

#370

Post by hef19898 »

swarnie_ wrote: post #159
theshrike79 wrote: post #38

The best advice about SAP I've had is that when a company is starting to use SAP, the company must adjust its processes to match the SAP model - not the other way around. If you do it the other way, you'll first spend millions and millions customising SAP and then your project will fail at some point. It will also make all SAP upgrades completely impossible and they will cost millions and millions. All of the success…

I work for a competing ERP software house and this is the first bit of advice i give after introducing myself. Customising an ERP can be interesting, keeping it supported and updateable 5/10 years after the guy who wrote the mods retired is a nightmare i've seen one too many times before.

I have yet to not see it.
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