Having brought up an ERP solution with a team, this is no joke. A company with payroll, inventory, contracts, and logistics (to name a few), needs an ENORMOUS infrastructure of software to keep things running. There's a reason ERP is so expensive. In fact, I'm surprised it is only a US$41B industry. I would expect 10x that.
What's SAP?
501–510 of 622 posts
Re: What's SAP?
#502I 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 worked for a 500 people Swiss company that had this big,fat,custom built thing based on Lotus Notes.It was ERP of sorts. We hated it. change backlog was 2-3 years.It took us a year to get a single button added. Then I moved on and ended up in a position where I was no longer the end user but rather the one behind the system.5 years later and I still keep "borrowing" design ideas from that system we all hated. Shortly after I quit, a 5000 people US company acquired it and decided to migrate all the data to their own,more modern system. 6 month later and the project was still in Excel only with no hopes of completing it at all. Don't underestimate what SAP can do.
Re: What's SAP?
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
As a financial auditor, if a client uses SAP or some other standard ERP we can just ask for a general ledger report and get to work. If they are using something bespoke I would probably put my head in my hands and send an urgent email to our dreaded IT systems audit team, at major expense to the client.
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Re: What's SAP?
#504Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Yes, after all the customizations they decide to upgrade to a new version of SAP. The whole shebang can start over again. At least these days it's all SAP S/4HANA. HANA is not bad actually.
And you need to pay up every time you data grows by 64 GB. I guess sap is happy
Re: What's SAP?
#505Earlier quoted context omitted.
It really is insane, I know people who don't even work for SAP, are "IT consultants", whose credentials are a (very good) Art History degree and travel around nationally and internationally to essentially push a button to do SAP database migrations after mergers and acquisitions. There are independent companies that just live off the fact how bad SAP is.
I am an IT Consulting (not with SAP) who has a Computer Science degree. I would not hesitate to hire a liberal arts major for a technical role in my company. Programming and analytical thinking is a tiny fraction of my job; most of it demands public speaking, organizational skills, and business relationship instincts. If these people work at a firm like Accenture that just outsources the technical challenge, coding s…
Frankly, computer science knowledge and software abilities can be a real liability as an engineer.
Many times what is needed is to let go of a sensible technical approach and just help the organization go where it is trying to go. It may not make sense technically, but it makes sense to the org, and that sort of matters more. I find my knowledge of good architecture often just makes it more painful to watch the code go through the inevitable logjams, rewrites, and process failures that are a crucial part of an organization “feeling” it’s way through a very complex multi-dimensional domain that includes many considerations that have nothing to do with code.
I think in many ways, people with less technical skills can do that better, to live in the meta space.
My brain keeps getting dragged down into the “why can’t we just do the sensible, minimal, technically correct thing that needs to happen for this problem to go away”. But the answer is “because the org doesn’t see the problem the way you do”.
What good is it if I can solve problems no one else in the organization even recognizes as problems?
Re: What's SAP?
#506Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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Re: What's SAP?
#507SAP 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…
> ... when compared to alternatives. What do you see as the alternatives?
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Re: What's SAP?
#508A whole sea of comments, balmost all focused on the tech stack, reporting, UX, integration .. SAP's selling point is regulatory compliance and financial control. It doesn't matter if you have a great UX or lightweight extensible third party API ecosystem, what matters is "When the IRS / SEC / Congress / Interpol comes calling, am I clear?" Government regulation is the ultimate "vendor lock-in" and SAP exploits that f…
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Re: What's SAP?
#509Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
The correct answer here is "it depends". SAP isn't (just) a giant pile of steaming data model mess because of the thousands of people involved building that software, but really because it can model every tax case in every country in the world. Thought you had a great model for your sales tax that covered US and the EU? Well, enter Brazil and think again, with four slightly different taxes, some of which are applied…
Full ERP? For what size organisation? I expect the finance team are using a 'real' ERP behind the scenes and posting the values from the custom system manually every month, copying and pasting from it almost as if it was an old fashioned day-book.
Re: What's SAP?
#510I 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…
When I was overseeing a deployment of SAP into the family business (a really inane decision taken on a whim by my father and his trusted CFO) I was told, to my utmost horror but with utmost seriousness by an earnest SAP consultant, that “a company does not install SAP, a company conforms to SAP’s best practices”.
Years of consolidated competitive advantage went down the drain.