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What's SAP?

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Re: What's SAP?

#401

Post by pmart123 »

reallydontask wrote: post #295
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. This isn't necessarily bad advice when moving to a new system. If the development cost exceeds or far exceeds the retraining cost then this is sound advice. I appreciate that this could be a tough calculation to make. Change resistance will like…

It likely should be a combination. If processes are so different than the "standard" vendor approach, is there a good reason? Step two would be answering what is the key 10% that is different to customize.

Re: What's SAP?

#402

Post by blaser-waffle »

bargle0 wrote: post #211
erikbye wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When my organization (20k+ employees) started its process to migrate many systems to SAP, this project filled a seven-story building. Cost: 2 billion NOK, so far.

$220m Wow.

Total cost means nothing. What was forecast? What was the original budget?

If the original was billed at 1.3 billion NOK and we're at 2 that's still very high, but it's a different discussion from a 400K NOK estimate.

"Take whatever you think you need and double it" comes to mind.

Re: What's SAP?

#403

Post by cr0sh »

SAP is a company (and software system) that exists to buy up other company's software, business, and services and then integrate that all into SAP's "core" systems, and do so in such a poor manner that their name and the system has almost become synonymous with the words and phrases "nasty", "unreliable", "run away now", "if you know what's good for ya" and a host of others.

However, due to their entrenchment in various other markets (and who knows if there is any graft or other under-the-table business going on), they continue to manage to exist, and scary enough sell their products to new victims (ahem - customers).

SAP is the old-is-new-again-we're-IBM type of business; nobody ever got fired for buying SAP (but the golden parachute was nice)?

Ok - hyperbole and I don't really know what I'm talking about, so the above should probably be ignored...

...that said - I don't think I'm too far off, either.

Re: What's SAP?

#404

Post by dcolkitt »

Question for those in the know. Do the major Silicon Valley tech giants (i.e. Google, Apple, Amazon) use SAP or even ERP?

I say this as someone who has no experience whatsoever with ERP. But the entire concept seems like an anti-pattern. A kludge that's only necessary when your org lacks basic technical competence.

Why does everything need to be in a single monolithic system? Does HR really need to run on the same database and software as the manufacturing plant? Haven't we learned that small modular, independent systems with well-defined interfaces at the system boundary work. If for some reason manufacturing needs to talk to purchasing, why can't they just do so over JSON/HTTP endpoints or a Kafka message bus or even direct SQL connections? Trying to integrate by just locking everyone together into a single system that tries to be all things to all people sounds like a recipe for disaster.

But, again I don't really have any direct experience with ERP. So that's why I'm really curious what orgs that are actually technically competent do. If Google or Amazon or Netflix was using ERP, despite having the engineering firepower to build alternative systems, then I'd really think that there's something important to the concept that I'm missing.

Re: What's SAP?

#405

Post by tubbs »

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…

It's funny - I spend years as an SAP ABAP developer and the very day I start my new position apart from SAP, it's on the front page of HN.

ABAP will always hold a special, quirky little place in my heart. It's very powerful, but also totally frustrating. The language is a COBOL-like language made by Germans with a keyword graveyard as big as Berlin. The ABAP community (in my experience, online and offline) is totally unacademic: algorithmic complexity is a foreign concept, "code clarity" meant "hitting the Pretty Printer button every few years" (which was a nice feature), and there's no remote concept of best practices.

On the bright side, it makes for a good income, and the debugger is a gem.

Re: What's SAP?

#406

Post by jboggan »

I've been working on exporting SAP data to a new data lake and it's a tortuous process, though amazing when you finally get the data out and can finally do something with it. SAP works within its own sandbox but woe unto you if you want to integrate data from Google Analytics or third party APIs to do forecasting or more sophisticated business models. The RFC libraries for pulling report data out of SAP are . . . finicky . . . and I spend too much time manually formatting output tables which look like something pretty-printed in J.

Re: What's SAP?

#407

Post by friendlybus »

jerf wrote: post #325
delfinom wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem nobody wants to admit is that any competitor to SAP will just become SAP. SAP grew to what it is because it was made to fit everybody's workflow to make sales to businesses wanting ERPs. Business is a wild world of so many ways to structure the org down from workflows to departments which is basically the only thing that differentiates a large majority of businesses these days. Sure, you could enforce a s…

"The problem nobody wants to admit is that any competitor to SAP will just become SAP." This is an entire category of software. Closer to most of our homes, see "bug tracking software", "web frameworks" (frontend or backend), or "programming languages". Countless examples of someone getting frustrated and starting a "lightweight alternative", gets lots of attention, gets lots of customers who find various issues and…

The majority of these projects are created to explore an idea, they are not meant to get big. They work well for small companies or niche customer bases. When the public and investors show up with demand to be big and cash is the author supposed to turn it down?

The amount of good money thrown after bad on Kickstarter shows the money has no idea what it's investing in.

Re: What's SAP?

#408

Post by [deleted] »

dcolkitt wrote: post #404

Question for those in the know. Do the major Silicon Valley tech giants (i.e. Google, Apple, Amazon) use SAP or even ERP? I say this as someone who has no experience whatsoever with ERP. But the entire concept seems like an anti-pattern. A kludge that's only necessary when your org lacks basic technical competence. Why does everything need to be in a single monolithic system? Does HR really need to run on the same da…

[deleted]

Re: What's SAP?

#409

Post by collyw »

BlobRunner wrote: post #244
mbesto wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take a very neutral position to this. Enterprise software at the scale SAP is operating (mainly its core ERP) at a Fortune 500 enterprise level. This characteristic (needs at that level) are user-hostile, not the software. Imagine this situation: - You're a F500 pipe manufacturer and a sales person needs to enter an order for 100 pipes to be manufactured and sent to a customer in the US Now imagine you need to: - O…

I don't buy the "real world is complex deal with it" explanation. Banking (especially in US) is a total complexity nightmare. Yet you have Stripe.com who simplify it. Your PC operating system complexity and the International Network of computers is so complex you cannot figure it all with your brain alone. Yet you write your email everyday with it and your colleague in China get's it in seconds. Your supply chain is…

> Banking (especially in US) is a total complexity nightmare. Yet you have Stripe.com who simplify it.

Strip only handle a tiny fraction of what banks do.

Re: What's SAP?

#410

Post by jsd3 »

warpspin wrote: post #110
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…

While I share your general notion that companies better adjust to the process of SAP, I still want to comment on the "impossible to upgrade" part, as that is simply not true. First off, in SAP speech, "customization" is the act of simply adjusting the vast configuration options. This does not affect your upgrade possibilities at all. Even if you go so far as to add custom programming, as long as you (lowest complexit…

That "customization" definition is not quite right. Configuration is not typically called customization. A lot of companies use "Z" programs (a prefix indicating something is custom) to front-end or augment existing SAP functionality. Companies may also create user-exits in SAP programs, or additional code to run when something happens ("send xx an email when the first sales order for a customer is created", for example).

When they upgrade, these additional programs require regression testing. Those programs make upgrades risky, and those programs may need to be rebuilt. Historically, companies built a ton of these customizations, then had issues during upgrades. The most recent model (since S4 and HANA emerged) is to do as much as possible in configuration, and limit customization.

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