281–290 of 445 posts
Every industry seems to be full of these. The last place I worked is using timeclock software that doesn't look like it's been updated since the Windows 3.1 days. They probably paid someone $50k at the time to develop it, and the minimum installation of it costs $25k.
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Ah,I guess context would help - "The Beer Store" is Ontario's [Corrected From "Canada"] monopoly province-wide beer retail chain. You are absolutely right, a single retail store would not use such an ERP :)
Er, an Ontario-wide beer retail chain, owned by the province-wide beer wholesale monopoly, in turn owned by a cartel of foreign breweries. Let me guess, you live in Toronto?
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Because the ERP solution comes with a gaggle of sales people, sales eng, and bizdev folks to convince your co's decision makers that it is best thing since butter. SQL doesn't.
"SQL doesn't"... you are correct, SQL can't figure out how much tax you need to pay across 9 tax jurisdictions. SQL can't tell me the best way for my warehouse picking robots to move across the floor based on the layout of the warehouse and what others products are being picked right this second plus over the next few minutes. The list is really endless of what SAP will do and SQL won't. It would take decades to repl…
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That is fascinating to me, because virtually all my friends have heard of SAP outside of IT - as users or recipients. My engineer friend uses it for supply chain management, a beer store hq clerk helped implement it, construction accountant has used it, etc. At the same time, I guess you have to be at a company of a certain size for it to be relevant to your life... But that perhaps proves the point - HN is very star…
> At the same time, I guess you have to be at a company of a certain size for it to be relevant to your life... But that perhaps proves the point - HN is very starup focused That’s pretty dismissive. I work at a company with ~80B in revenue, I never interacted or heard of SAP in work context. In fact it is only incidentally that I’ve heard of them previously. There are hundred of thousands of engineers working in com…
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This reminds me of something I read while helping a business major friend with a case study a while back. One of the readings she had as background mentioned that companies like SAP that sell ERP are almost selling the process/workflow more than the actual software. Part of me wonders if these things are more of a "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" thing than anything else. Are people buying the workflow because…
1. You're absolutely right - you're buying software, a set of best practices, workflows, and a proven way to implement and use them. 2. HR, Finance, all the backoffice stuff - that's not your competitive advantage. It's not your core business. You just want to do it as efficiently and quietly as possible. 3. Therefore, in ideal case, a company realizes it is not a special snowflake, buys an ERP, implements it as vani…
however, not once have I ever heard of an SAP implementation going well. It's a massive undertaking and takes total commitment from so many different people and roles in an enterprise. You need genius PMs and BAs along with a genius client team before you even talk about the actual technical people.
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Want your mind to be blown even more? I worked for a multinational company, I would not be surpised that this company is among the top 10 SAP customers worldwide. Well, everybody hated hated hated SAP, it was a huge hindrance instead of any help.Any use beyond of a "dumb" database was a huge PITA, and I am not fully convinced that all in all it helped more than damaged the business. It was clunky, unintutive, slow, u…
SAP's ugly green, old style-UI screens are wonderfully optimised for data-entry. You can be ultra-fast . It's like VIM. It's like driving at 300 mph. Its all the new fangled dumbed-down, web-ui's that is sheer crap and leaves your head scratching. Well..the old UI's were coded by old-school, C programmers who started their career in the 70s and 80s. They even wrote a multi-process Erlang style kernel to back the appl…
I remember reading this article about SAP a few months ago, and it just blew my mind: https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/ Here was an entire market segment I'd never heard of, and just the market leader is worth $163B . And on top of that, the technology is so totally alien to anything I'd ever heard of before. It's like an alternate-history kind of thing. Like if we discovered a continent somewhere in the Pac…
Thanks for sharing, very interesting to read. > basic installation of SAP has 20,000 database tables, 3,000 of which are configuration tables. In those tables, there are ~8,000 configuration decisions you need before even getting started Wow, this is nuts. 20,000 database tables?
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> At the same time, I guess you have to be at a company of a certain size for it to be relevant to your life... But that perhaps proves the point - HN is very starup focused That’s pretty dismissive. I work at a company with ~80B in revenue, I never interacted or heard of SAP in work context. In fact it is only incidentally that I’ve heard of them previously. There are hundred of thousands of engineers working in com…
And was that a FAAMNG? Presumably the larger, "new-wave" tech companies roll their own solutions of some kind
What would be the point of Google writing their own financial consolidation software?
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Have them read this: https://fee.org/resources/i-pencil-audio-pdf-and-html
This is a political tract. The only actual information that it conveys could be obtained more easily by googling "How are pencils made?"
Something can just be interesting to read. Especially for kids.