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What's SAP?

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Re: What's SAP?

#571

Post by qubex »

tomnipotent wrote: post #534
qubex wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah... when my family business installed SAP the auditors were delighted. But... here’s the thing: standardised ledgers that make a company easy to audit have no positive correlation with corporate effectiveness and competitive advantage. It’s great that your work is simplified, but frankly, it’s totally irrelevant. I’d rather my auditors had to hail their dreaded IT departments than having the whole firm rendered e…

> It’s great that your work is simplified, but frankly, it’s totally irrelevant It's the other way around. It's totally irrelevant to re-invent the wheel and do something in a non-standard way. > I’d rather my auditors had to hail their dreaded IT departments That's not how auditing works. The point of GAAP is that things are done a certain way, and if you do things differently you need to provide that it isn't bulls…

The problem is that installing SAP into a going concern does force you to reinvent the wheel: as an auditor you might not notice it or might even rejoice, but the truth is that the whole operative side of the business needs to reinvent itself in order to conform to the mould the new ERP software requires. Auditing, accountancy, control... those are offline, non-value-adding activities and services that quite frankly the enterprise-minded couldn’t care less about.

Re: What's SAP?

#572

Post by naniwaduni »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #167
naniwaduni wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * "[SAP] customers include 98% of the 100 most valued brands" That, er, ought to be exactly 98 of the 100 of them, shouldn't it??

That sort of report customisation will cost you about £500 /s

For a moment I misread that as pricing by the second...

Re: What's SAP?

#573

Post by buonzz »

sobani wrote: post #560
qubex wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That’s not how auditing works. The point of GAAP... Hate to break it to you, but there’s other countries and other regimens out there.

> > That’s not how auditing works. The point of GAAP... > Hate to break it to you, but there’s other countries and other regimens out there. Which country are you from that it doesn't have Generally Accepted Accounting Principles? Are you saying that in your country every company can make up what they want and the authorities are OK with that?

congrats, you just had discovered the dark web, where things are done in non-GAAP way. surprisingly enough, there are lot of "business transactions" going on out there than all these innocent corporations combined.

Re: What's SAP?

#574

Post by ants_a »

mmcgaha wrote: post #537
zamalek wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

To give you an idea about the real scope of what is behind an ERP system, here is a link to the database definitions behind QAD's MFG/Pro: https://documentlibrary.qad.com/documents/2370665/2368142/Da... This is a product designed for small to medium sized businesses so it is not as comprehensive as a SAP. Take a serious look at the schema and imagine if you just had to write CRUD, it would take hundreds of man years.…

Is this supposed to pass as documentation? Looking at that document the first reaction is that I would rather spend a decade implementing my own ERP than go anywhere near that mess.

Re: What's SAP?

#575

Post by jirir »

QuinnyPig wrote: post #546
Sherl wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla doesn't have SAP and it's home grown. SAP is ymmv thing. Not all businesses fit in their framework.

With respect, Tesla isn’t exactly the poster child of “well run companies with excellent corporate governance.”

Splendid joke:-)

Tesla makes hell of a great cars.

“excellent corporate governance” could be rather irrelevant.

Re: What's SAP?

#576

Post by cognaitiv »

kthejoker2 wrote: post #287
cognaitiv wrote: post #217

Attunity (now Qlik) Replicate [1] has an SAP ABAP change data capture connector. Replicate directly from SAP to Kafka, AWS/Azure, HDFS, etc., in real-time. I am surprised that more SAP shops are not doing this to separate operational ERP concerns from agility in the rest of the business. [1] https://www.qlik.com/us/sap-analytics/sap-data-replication

This is what SAP's HANA platform is for, a microbatched CDC framework to an in memory operational data store with a standard SQL engine for traditional reporting and analytics (in theory .... being SAP, it's also weirdly engineered on the backend)

I’m impressed with core HANA performance for reporting, but it comes with a very dear price tag. Multi-tier architecture concept, I’m not sure..?

Kafka can be useful for more than staging reporting data. This pattern is more about separation from core ERP (and core ERP bureaucracy) vs. ERP reporting.

Re: What's SAP?

#577

Post by danzig13 »

danzig13 wrote: post #487

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…

I will say, even with all the problems, even our ERP is capable of quite a few things, and I couldn't fathom rolling my own.

They just don't want you to plug anything of your own into it.

Re: What's SAP?

#578

Post by burntwater »

npace12 wrote: post #472
cptaj wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For someone with a web development freelancing background wanting to get into enterprise software, would you recommend going into SAP? Would Salesforce be a better path? Which one is better for a freelancer working from home (if any)? Feel free to share any other thoughts on the matter

I think definitely Salesforce if you want to work remotely. It's easy to get into, much smaller system in both scope and complexity, and tons of free documentation. Get a couple of certifications, do the trailhead stuff, contact some consulting firms to tell them you're available for work and it should be easy to find work. Getting into SAP and finding work can be challenging. They have a lot of new things from what…

Wait, you can literally control machines with SAP?

Re: What's SAP?

#579

Post by agentultra »

kumarvvr wrote: post #39
OldGuyInTheClub wrote: post #32

SAP has enabled/mandated an army of people at my company who manage it and ruthlessly control even read access to it. The software is user-hostile, intentionally obscure, and all requests for slightly customized reports have to go through a multilayered approval process - often up to corporate - where it competes for funding against other survivors. Needing something custom invites constant questions of why the stand…

> The software is user-hostile, intentionally obscure This a million times. I don't know if good interfaces can not be built in SAP, or if it's very difficult to do, or if the developers of apps on SAP platform just don't care. It's a real headache to use and completely confusing. It's 2020 and one would hope software companies realize the value of a good, clear, effective user interface.

This is what we hear from our customers all the time.

Our product has been so successful, I think, because people on the floor of the factories like using it. Our developers visit the sites, talk to users, and we take everything into account in the design of our UX.

I talk with a lot of our users and their biggest frustration is SAP. It's only available on particular work stations, you have to manually enter your forms from the paper ones (data entry in 2020 is still a job), and the interface is arcane and painful. When it doesn't work nobody knows how to fix it and it can lock down the release of millions of dollars worth of product. You can't get any reporting out of it without IT approval and it can take years and millions of dollars to get anything done with it.

Our stuff is mobile-first, easy to use, and we deployed it in months instead of years. We met resistance from our customers' IT departments who were irate that the factories weren't waiting for their SAP solution to roll out (it had been several years by the time we came into the picture). So, there's a big win there in UX alone.

We do more than UX but it's still such an important part of software.

Re: What's SAP?

#580

Post by npace12 »

burntwater wrote: post #578
npace12 wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think definitely Salesforce if you want to work remotely. It's easy to get into, much smaller system in both scope and complexity, and tons of free documentation. Get a couple of certifications, do the trailhead stuff, contact some consulting firms to tell them you're available for work and it should be easy to find work. Getting into SAP and finding work can be challenging. They have a lot of new things from what…

Wait, you can literally control machines with SAP?

Not directly, but via a message sent from SAP to a PLC. The point I was trying to make is that SAP has a big foothold in deep the manufacturing space and Salesforce doesn't, so you generally won't get to work on those kind of projects with salesforce.
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