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What's SAP?

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Re: What's SAP?

#481

Post by jboy55 »

chadash wrote: post #363
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 decisio…

I've lost track of the months I've spent building for some specific custom request. I haven't done ERP, but back in the 00s I did a bunch of work customizing software for the 'big enterprise' potential customers that were going to 'save the day'. Months being, one month for each weird request, because somewhere a Karen or Dave says we 'always have done it this way'.

Re: What's SAP?

#484

Post by appleiigs »

tomnipotent wrote: post #417
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 can do can be done at the local level using intuitive software No they cannot. ERP's are beasts of expert domain knowledge hidden in shitty codebases, but don't be confused for an even a moment to think you can do it yourself. It's a fools errand, and I'd fire or not hire anyone that tried to intentionally do this rather than just build something basic to hedge time until you have to implement something more se…

What if you were given a budget of $100 million to $500 million - just for 1 company? What about $1 billion like Dow Chemical and the US Navy?

Re: What's SAP?

#485

Post by Barrin92 »

lonelappde wrote: post #290
swampthinker wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone working in healthcare, I can attest to the value in getting an healthcare org to adopt standardized workflows. I'll take an org that follows process over better software that isn't used in a consistent manner. There is too much operational and human complexity to solve healthcare with software alone.

What happens when the disease in my body declines to adapt to Epic's standardized workflow?

probably nothing good, but the alternate question is, what happens to the well-being of patients overall if no standardized workflow exists, what error rate and dysfunction will it produce across the entire system?

Complaining about large corporate structures failing to meet individual needs is always a very appealing criticism, but people rarely seem to point out that these large behemoths need to be judged by their overall throughput.

The mass of people who benefit from standardized workflows are always anonymous, the failure cases always have a face, but it doesn't mean the trade-off isn't net positive.

Re: What's SAP?

#486

Post by appleiigs »

monkeynotes wrote: post #267

SAP implementation basically sunk Target's huge investment into operations in Canada https://www.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target-can... Seems to me SAP is ripe for disruption, but it would be a very challenging throne to unseat.

Also, from Canada: Phoenix pay system based on PeopleSoft. Budget of $310M turned into $2.2B.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system

Re: What's SAP?

#487

Post by danzig13 »

I have been working for YEARS on an ERP implementation in a custom manufacturing operation practically by myself.

As bad as I'm sure SAP is to deal with, I crave it or anything else (Salesforce?) that has any sort of easy customization, automation API and fosters some sort of community.

A large part of my particular ERP's business model seems to be to make the data model so esoteric that you are forced to go to them for any type of customization at all. Unfortunately, they make a habit of firing any of their halfway decent employees every time they get acquired (4 or 5 times so far).

Re: What's SAP?

#488

Post by RobertRoberts »

I have a company that runs Filemaker Pro databases for managing some parts. And they have considered using SAP recently.

How much product/inventory/sales/etc... processes is required before you should move from FMP to something like SAP?

Is it number of users, client accounts, employees, products? What is the break point for needing ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software?

Re: What's SAP?

#489

Post by S3raph »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #455
mark-r wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a third option - customize the ERP to conform to your existing processes. The last place I worked chose that option, they were a medical device company and didn't want to change their processes. Of course it made a huge amount of extra work, much of which was done by expensive contractors.

That option is a long thick gray line. Every ERP will be "customized". It has to be - provide your own chartfields, business units, workflows, decision points, etc. It's the amount of the customization that makes the difference. I've been on ERP implementation projects that were 28 days long, and 5 years long. I am the "expensive contractor", and I have never ever in 20 years met another expensive contractor who did…

That's so true. We are running SAP, which is so heavenly customized (someone 10 years ago thought it was a great idea, thanks!) that applying patches is nearly impossible and requires months of pain and expensive contractors.

Re: What's SAP?

#490

Post by asc_jiji »

tubbs wrote: post #405
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…

No, you got code clarity wrong. Code clarity in ABAP means using System Hungarian Notation and it baffles me that almost every ABAP programmer I talk to think it's not redudant to use a command such as READ TABLE on a variable called GT_VBAK(for non-abapers, G for global variable, T for table).

The only advantage that I see is that for the most part, every program will look almost the same regarding standard SAP tables.

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