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What's SAP?

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Re: What's SAP?

#581

Post by mmcgaha »

ants_a wrote: post #574
mmcgaha wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I get that a list of tables and fields is not great documentation by itself, but QAD also provides ERD diagrams, implementation guides, user guides, administrative guides, and other documents. The overall quality of their documentation is outstanding. I worked in a QAD shop for over ten years, and their documentation is complete, accurate, well organized, and easy to understand.

Re: What's SAP?

#582

Post by lolftw »

agentultra wrote: post #579
kumarvvr wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 for…

Care to share what you product is?

Re: What's SAP?

#583

Post by lawtalkinghuman »

jirir wrote: post #575
QuinnyPig wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They might make even more of them—and do so more effectively—if they didn't have to spend as much time arguing with the government, investors, or lawyers about who or what Elon Musk defamed/tweeted/accidentally said on a podcast/whatever.

Re: What's SAP?

#584

Post by whatsmyusername »

bigger_cheese wrote: post #535
whatsmyusername wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ServiceNow is garbage. They're probably less garbage than working with SAP but they're still garbage.

No. The Industrial Plant I work at uses Service Now (For IT and Helpdesk support) and SAP (For Payroll, HR, Purchasing, Maintenance Scheduling etc.). Service Now is much, much worse. IT department is so dysfunctional and Service Now is a big part of that. One of my coworkers refers to it as "Service Eventually"

I'm amused by the amount of third parties (Sumologic for example) that have ServiceNow plugins. I'm curious what kind of usage metrics they have on the feature. I suspect it's just a feature parity/selling point but not actually used in practice, like EKS and managed SFTP on AWS.

Nowhere I've worked that used ServiceNow encouraged solving practical problems with it. A grand total of once I took a crack at something that would have been trivial if Sumologic could alert to ServiceNow. It became hilariously obvious in 3 or 4 back and forth emails with the gatekeepers that their 3 month testing process, 45 emails, and 16 meetings requirement for a one line change was not cost effective.

My time was better spent crafting an email forwarding rule that sent the related conversations to the trash and moving on to solvable problems.

Re: What's SAP?

#585

Post by buonzz »

tomnipotent wrote: post #556
gt_grc wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

> you buy it for the battle-tested built-in domain knowledge. This was my hardest lesson to learn. Code is only as good as the domain knowledge going into it. I love games because the domain is more often than not in the realm of fellow programmers and erudites like mathematicians and 3D animators that capture their domain knowledge in physics, sound effects, motion capture, fluid dynamics, FSM AI, or combining geome…

captured a bunch of "domain knowledge" of which only 20-30% is relevant to your business.

let me guess, they did not captured/predicted the domain knowledge required to run the following business huh: - search engine (google) - marketplace for arranging or offering lodging ( airbnb ) - ride sharing ( uber ) - social networks (twitter/facebook)

if all businesses does everything the same way (because some german company thinks it is), all end-products will look all the same. The same way if all chefs is following the same recipe.

IMHO the tools/choices to send invoice, manage orders, product lifecycle can also be a differentiator for your business.

Re: What's SAP?

#586

Post by ptruesdell »

mrich wrote: post #94
fogetti wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be interested to know if they are actually using SAP. These companies are so much better at software development and they are swimming in so much money that they could even implement something by themselves.

Why would they? It's none of their core business and SAP already has everything covered. Think of all the legal/financial stuff. The UI is not that important in that field, your domain expert in that area knows how to navigate stuff.

Established ERP systems take so long to configure that sometimes, it makes more sense to write your own in-house. Tesla did just that. And in only 4 months.

Re: What's SAP?

#588

Post by tomnipotent »

buonzz wrote: post #573
sobani wrote: post #560

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. 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.

What does the dark web have to do anything? Should we bring up school kids mowing lawns? We're talking about serious companies managing millions in cash flow with investors or loans providing them a swift kick of responsibility.

Re: What's SAP?

#589

Post by tomnipotent »

qubex wrote: post #571
tomnipotent wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> whole operative side of the business needs to reinvent itself in order to conform to the mould the new ERP software requires

This is exactly expected and a desired outcome in a vast majority of scenarios. These jobs/roles are not snowflakes.

Re: What's SAP?

#590

Post by ryanmercer »

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…

>It's hideous. Hideous. My students complain it is unusable (agree), doesn't make sense (agree), that they can't see the point (agree).

I haven't used it in 13.5 years but when was at DHS as a contractor we used it. Fully agree, it was a steaming pile and made made my job unnecessarily difficult.

But I went from it to being in AS400/BlueZone at the next job (my current job) though so... yeah... actually my email was in AS400 from 2006-2009ish... yeah.

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