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What's SAP?

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Re: What's SAP?

#521

Post by hutzlibu »

carstenhag wrote: post #166
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…

A perfect example for a failure for this is Lidl's Elwis, they invested 500 million € into it and in 2018 they aborted the entire project. English article: https://www.handelsblatt.com/today/companies/programmed-for-... Key quote: >Unlike many of their competitors, Lidl bases its inventory management system on purchase prices. The standard SAP for Retail software uses retail prices. Lidl didn’t want to change, so the…

I believe, that the difference between purchase price and retail price is a major and tricky one, if you set for retail, but if you can't solve it for 500 million, then there is something wrong with your software.

Also

"Critics inside Lidl say that KPS was too slow. But Matthias Nollenberger, a senior manager at KPS who was responsible for overseeing the eLWIS project, says his company was working too short deadlines compared to other similar projects"

I belive when you have the choice between aborting 500 million and increasing some deadlines, I doubt they were the problem. It simply was not possible to adobt SAP with reasonable amount of money. And the consulting company or SAP should have said that at some point clearly.

Re: What's SAP?

#522

Post by gt_grc »

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…

"Beasts of expert domain knowledge hidden in shitty codebases" is a great way to describe most of the enterprise software I've spent my career configuring and administering. And it highlights what most users of enterprise software don't fully grasp: You don't buy it because it's user-friendly or because it's the most modern technology; you buy it for the battle-tested built-in domain knowledge.

Re: What's SAP?

#523

Post by jgalt212 »

user5994461 wrote: post #516
cr0sh wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once worked for a company that let me go because I looked bad on their bottom line and they were looking to sell the company, around 2003. So, severance package in hand, and one week later I had a new position at another company making much more than I was originally. Anyhow - I was essentially the sole developer of a simple ERP system written in VB6 and using an Access 2003 MDB file for storage. It was being used…

That must be the magic of Windows in action. Software still running after 15 years. I have to do some maintenance or decommissioning of very old apps in an old bank. I find anything Linux and C or C++ related is the worst, because the system libraries themselves are unstable. Applications fail because of .so dependencies breaking, both system libraries and application libraries (themselves forming a tree of dependenc…

are there no fat binaries in linux? or are they just not used?

Re: What's SAP?

#524

Post by zamalek »

tomnipotent wrote: post #437
endymi0n wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> configuring SAP to do what you want it to do is often on par with writing your own system from scratch. Hyperbole. A lot of working with an ERP is developing middleware or custom modules that implement business-specific logic on top of an existing API and schema. It's like saying building a Facebook App is equivalent to rebuilding the entire Facebook Platform. > So we've dared to build our own multinational and ful…

> A lot of working with an ERP is developing middleware or custom modules that implement business-specific logic

Indeed. It does, however, seem that these are developed on a system that isn't designed to intuitively express the degree of logic required - or even trivial logic. There are poor souls slogging through whichever level of hell uses SAP for customer relations, purely because that's the way it's done. That attitude worked out poorly for taxis, who's shitty UX was replaced by Uber.

I predict that millennials, who increasingly refuse to interact with anything below "app quality," won't bother with this horseshit. There will be fewer and fewer willing to subject themselves to that awful software, as developers, and everyone will build their own faulty but usable ERP systems.

ERP will be a unicorn in the next decade. The industry is ridden with complacent dinosaurs.

Re: What's SAP?

#525

Post by kochthesecond »

m-p-3 wrote: post #330
reallydontask wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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's also a good practice to keep a massive system as close to the original as possible and tweak it to business needs only when absolutely necessary, otherwise it becomes a beast of its own to support and upgrade later on. This is a great example of technical debt when adding custom features to an existing commercial platform.

I have seen such customizations go badly soooo many times..

Re: What's SAP?

#526

Post by jamestimmins »

olavgg wrote: post #89

Tesla 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.

My understanding is that SpaceX built their own ERP system in-house and then shared it with Tesla. So it's possible that "4 months" was really about forking/customizing it for their needs.

Re: What's SAP?

#527

Post by hef19898 »

madaxe_again wrote: post #469
hef19898 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah - one of the outfits I mentioned had a bit of a catastrophe due to this - BOMs in SAP and XLS were different, they made a medical product (for children) that exceeded RoHS and REACH lead and mercury thresholds. They made millions of units before the mistake was realised. Oops.

Damn. That's worse than anything I saw so far... Hope nothing was actually shipped, or if it was nothing serious happened.

Re: What's SAP?

#528

Post by user5994461 »

jgalt212 wrote: post #523
user5994461 wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That must be the magic of Windows in action. Software still running after 15 years. I have to do some maintenance or decommissioning of very old apps in an old bank. I find anything Linux and C or C++ related is the worst, because the system libraries themselves are unstable. Applications fail because of .so dependencies breaking, both system libraries and application libraries (themselves forming a tree of dependenc…

are there no fat binaries in linux? or are they just not used?

It's possible to make statically linked applications but it's pretty much never done.

And it's against the linux packaging mantra, where you should be able to "apt-get install libqt" for example (noting that libqt package is completely detached from the release cycle of your application).

This leads to a ton of accidental dependencies and they're tied to the OS release. Even the simplest of apps might eventually depend on libc, pcre, openssl, etc...

Windows is simply different on this aspect. It's more friendly to static builds and the system libraries are more stable. If you built against some win32 API or the Visual Studio 2005 SDK, the DLL are still present and working.

Re: What's SAP?

#529

Post by lorenzfx »

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…

Most of them are, as you can easily find out by putting SAP in their careers search, e.g., https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/?company=Google&comp...

Re: What's SAP?

#530

Post by tomnipotent »

zamalek wrote: post #524
tomnipotent wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> configuring SAP to do what you want it to do is often on par with writing your own system from scratch. Hyperbole. A lot of working with an ERP is developing middleware or custom modules that implement business-specific logic on top of an existing API and schema. It's like saying building a Facebook App is equivalent to rebuilding the entire Facebook Platform. > So we've dared to build our own multinational and ful…

> A lot of working with an ERP is developing middleware or custom modules that implement business-specific logic Indeed. It does, however, seem that these are developed on a system that isn't designed to intuitively express the degree of logic required - or even trivial logic. There are poor souls slogging through whichever level of hell uses SAP for customer relations, purely because that's the way it's done. That a…

> developed on a system that isn't designed to intuitively express the degree of logic required

The poor souls are such because they usually fundamentally do not have the knowledge required across the broad spectrum of responsibilities an ERP does and how that all ties into managing a business.

> I predict that millennials, who increasingly refuse to interact with anything below "app quality,"

This makes no sense. What do millennials have to do with anything? I fail to see how a generation label makes any difference to how ERPs are involved in business management and how accounting and finance in general work. How supply chains are managed isn't going to change because of a bunch of woke millennials.

> everyone will build their own faulty but usable ERP systems.

Always said by people that do not understand what an ERP does and the complexities involved in managing a business. I used to think this way myself, until I actually had to deal with these issues in a senior management position with investors breathing down my neck. My naivety was amusing in hindsight.

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