SAP demonstrates the power of sales relationships and corruption over utility.
What's SAP?
381–390 of 622 posts
Re: What's SAP?
#382Having worked in the ERP space for close to 15 years, I have seen no other software even come close to the features of SAP & Oracle. A lot of next gen software even lacked basic features like revenue splitting or multi-currency or multi-org that are pivotal to any company that has any more than 500M in revenue.
Re: What's SAP?
#383Years ago I was involved in a project to scrape certain info out of a SAP system with a web interface. It would have been easier to do it with a API but my conversations with the SAP people at work were going nowhere (is it me or do SAP IT people have no concept of how things are done outside the world of SAP ?). Anyway I started looking through the Javascript the browser automatically downloads and found there was 1…
We figured out how to get at least some reports to export into Excel. Some others implemented MS Access dbs to postprocess exported SAP data. Browser tricks were also part of the mix. Then the directives came down that working outside of SAP was not acceptable and amounted to criticizing SAP. I think SAP views APIs as a threat. That COBOL-like ABAP language is part of their lock in.
Working outside SAP for things you are using SAP is one of the worst ideas, ever. You create data redundancy, jeopardize compliance, erode user trust and make migration and even simple changes near impossible. So yes, forbidding that is a good idea. One I enforced more than once. Well, at least I tried. Might even have worked once or twice.
Reasons why people started working outside of SAP:
- because they didn't know the system well enough and didn't receive proper training. Sometimes also out of pure spite.
- sometimes because SAP didn't have that functionality yet. Ship planning for example was an issue in the early 2000s IIRC
- because people wanted and had to use a SAP-standard process, but couldn't because somepone else ripped that standard appart to do something differetn. Either because the original standard for that was itself ripped appart by someone else. Or because people refuse to follow the standard out of reasons. Misusing standards is beast in SAP. Once you start with a single process, that spirals out of control and cannot be stopped. Part of the reason a lot SAP implementations just suck. Not purelySAPs fault so.
Re: What's SAP?
#384In 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 ha…
Thanks for sharing that! Do you happen to know how MS feels about that implementation nowadays?
Re: What's SAP?
#385Tesla 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.
A lot of this is just plain pointless bravado. Eventually a lot of people have to outsource their payroll and other admin work, it's just cheaper that way. Then you just discover your are doing many things unique to your company so you kind of have to retrain a lot of finance and office management staff. And keep retraining them. Then also maintain teams of programmers to do maintain your software. You don't want a c…
So Tesla is again loosing focus? man, if they would just focus on a) developing EVs and b) mass-produce them traditional car makers wouldn't stand a chance by know. That hybris can kill them one day...
Re: What's SAP?
#386I 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…
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.
Cerner does pretty much the same thing. They are trying to approach the hospital market pretty broadly. Much of the software is pretty rigid and if you sign up for them, you are customizing their software and meeting in the middle by reorganizing your business. Many integration issues between vendors are conflicts about where this midpoint is.
Re: What's SAP?
#387I 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 decisio…
Agree.
It´s buying what doesn´t add much value/differentiation to focus on the things that are important to the company.
Re: What's SAP?
#388I 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…
>A piece of software that plays (at least) one sound on every user action, and the sounds are completely arbitrary and 8bit at best. I've worked places that have SAP, Oracle, and one place that had both. I've never personally used SAP, and rarely dealt with Oracle. I would be curious though, if it makes that many sounds - how much error checking is done because something "didn't sound right"? Does doing business task…
I assume that the sound refers to fact that about half of Windows SAPgui components are implemented by embedding MSHTML, which by default makes "click" sound for every onload event.
Re: What's SAP?
#389I 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…
>A piece of software that plays (at least) one sound on every user action, and the sounds are completely arbitrary and 8bit at best. I've worked places that have SAP, Oracle, and one place that had both. I've never personally used SAP, and rarely dealt with Oracle. I would be curious though, if it makes that many sounds - how much error checking is done because something "didn't sound right"? Does doing business task…
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Re: What's SAP?
#390In 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 ha…
Thanks for sharing that! Do you happen to know how MS feels about that implementation nowadays?
No idea...I left in 2008. At that time, it was still being promoted as a big success story externally. It was turned into a "IT showcase" case study to show customers that SAP could successfully run on SQL Server and Windows. I did maybe 30 presentations of that case study to different customers at Redmond and South America. Internally, we did what we could to soften the hard edges of the SAP UX for the casual user by putting web app front ends on top of things like purchase orders expense reports.