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What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

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Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

#321

Post by FlyingSnake »

jwr wrote: post #148
fabfabfab wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of purity, the first thing Hacker News would do is try to run SAP on a Kubernetes cluster, refactor crucial bits in Rust and shard the database into sqlite3.db files on per user basis. We'd also recommend you restructure your office for a more open space, bring down the cubicles and make sure the conference rooms are glasswalled and have funny names. Bringing pets to work is mandatory.

This is so true! As the author of a (small) ERP/MRP SaaS, I am often amused when I read HN and observe the thundering herds of fashion followers — today it's Kubernetes and Rust, Postgres and sqlite have a longer lifespan, but tomorrow it's going to be something else entirely, and you necessarily need to use those :-)

Meanwhile people are spinning up profitable SaaS based on PHP and making it to the bank.

Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

#322

Post by RNAlfons »

irrational wrote: post #318
lqet wrote: post #171

My mother works for a fairly large textile lab. For decades, they used an internally developed system for lab reports (they had a few programmers and admins they called the "nerds" that did nothing else than extend and maintain the system). The company switched to a SAP solution a few years ago. Chaos ensued. The SAP solution missed so many edge cases that a huge number of lab reports were either inaccurate or comple…

I work on a home grown solution at work, but they are considering abandoning it for a third party system that everyone we talk to says is inferior in every way. For some reason, the higher ups trust software built by someone else rather than their own people.

The reason is that their own people become exchangeable if you switch to something of the shelf.

Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

#323

Post by vain_cain »

ineedasername wrote: post #295
vain_cain wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see a lot of comments here saying a company should adapt their business processes to their ERP, and in my experience they are wrong - with the exception of accounting(Good luck trying to customize accounting modules within ERPs to fit your process). I don't work with SAP, but I've been working with Microsoft's ERP(Dynamics NAV/Business Central) my whole professional career(almost 5 years). When it comes to shipping…

>should adapt their business processes to their ERP, and in my experience they are wrong That depends. I’ve seen a lot of adaptation to processes that are legitimately & measurably better in time & accuracy ignored in favor of costly customizations out of nothing more than “not created here” syndrome. If a customer doesn’t like that then an off the shelf product is the worst choice they can make unless they are prepa…

>If a customer doesn’t like that then an off the shelf product is the worst choice they can make unless they are prepared to hire a significant in house dev team

Correct. This is the problem my company solves. We are ERP consultants/dev's who also know web development. Through the years we've made 50+ web apps to extend Microsoft's ERP, most of which can be used in most companies with similar needs with slight modifications.

And, of course you don't blindly follow a process. There's always some improvements to be made to the process before developing an app for it.

EDIT: Drastically changing workflows for employees within huge companies will ultimately almost always cost you more... It all depends on the company of course, but we have to generalize a bit.

Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

#324

Post by calvinmorrison »

sph wrote: post #264
ornornor wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The complexity of the task is eventually discovered in production. I’m amazed that this is what happens every. Single. Time. And yet we plow ahead with this kind of projects like we have no idea it’s the usual outcome. A couple years and millions over budget later, we rediscover this axiom. I really don’t get it. And try to warn about this, you’re labeled as not a team player or whatever and paint crosshairs on you…

The guy making a deal with SAP and their revolutionary solution is a few steps removed from the poor technician/engineer that is aware of how many corner cases the business runs on. This is why every company with at least 2 levels of hierarchy is doomed to repeat this costly mistake. This is what big corp suppliers like IBM, Oracle or SAP thrive on. CEOs and executives not actually knowing the intricacies of their co…

I guarantee the CTO has a much more realistic view of these projects and understands how hard it is to deliver these things successfully than the average engineer. There's a metric ton of complexity and their jobs depends much more on their ability to deliver the project at a whole without knowing all the details.

The fact is the higher you go the concerns separate. I think the army motto was "go 2 levels up". You're a grunt, you need to know what your platoon and your company are up too and what the goals are so that if you can't follow the plan directly, you can still hit the objective. This is good because no plan army or business, survives reality without changing.

In the same way, you can only go so many levels down.

Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

#325

Post by hef19898 »

ozim wrote: post #243
johannes1234321 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing with an SAP introduction is that one has to analyze and understand how the business actually works to adapt the system to it. However in reality nobody really knows. There is a general idea, hopefully, but over time there are more and more shortcuts and side processes and things. Unless you analyze them an introduction of any new business software (be it SAP or Oracle or whatever) will fail. Whether it is w…

I think most bang for the buck one would get if you start with SAP - so to say you start shipping company and you get people with knowledge that configured other such systems and you build process on top of SAP from start. Unfortunately I don't think this is realistic scenario because when you start a company you probably don't have time/money or need for SAP or anything like that.

Shipping is actually one of those cases, well logistics in general, where SAP actually isn't that good. Still usable if those are supporting functions, if thosr domains are your core business I'd use something different. If you are creating a production company some lite version SAP, there was one back the day that was light and easy (for ERP standards), wouldn't be the worst choice long term.

Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

#326

Post by sumedh »

math-dev wrote: post #175
forinti wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the motivation to switch to SAP? Was the in-house solution lacking?

Working in a large corp, I find IT consultants from the outside overpromise and underdeliver on projects It’s infuriating as anybody below senior management can see right through it

> anybody below senior management

This happens because the people working below senior management are usually not slick talkers and many people in senior management do not understand IT. So a savvy salesman who knows the right words can convince the guys at the top to do what he (its almost always a he) says.

Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

#327

Post by bluedino »

projektfu wrote: post #284
bluedino wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EDI solves all of these

It could, if it was offered to small customers. Big buyers can insist on EDI. Small ones usually cannot and their systems are not expecting it, because EDI is "Enterprise scale" and not SME-scale. Do you know of a QuickBooks-scale accounting system that does EDI easily?

There are VAN's like Aruba that allow smaller companies to interface with the big players using EDI

Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

#328

Post by cgeier »

meibo wrote: post #59
_glass wrote: post #27

I am an SAP developer since kind of forever, my first job after university (since 2009). First I hated it, but the deeper I am entrenched, the more I see why you choose SAP: Because there really is no alternative. The data model is so complex because it is growing iteratively since the 80s. Hacker News is valuing businesses that adjust to the customer instead of going for some kind of purity. Another complexity espec…

This is a genuine question, I don't mean to rip on you: Why is everything SAP I've used terrible? From payroll, employee/student management to industrial control systems - the UX is horrible and it seems so brittle that you're happy if you're out of there as quickly as possible. I've had to reach out to my school's IT multiple times over the years since random parts of the SAP tool they used break.

I would disagree that the UX is horrible.

It definitively is neither pretty, discoverable nor intuitive, but in the hands of experienced power users (who have spent a lot of time learning the UI), it works really well. I have seen people (who have used the system probably for > 10 years) dig the most arcane information out in seconds, navigating through about ten different views without ever touching a mouse.

It's a UI from another era, but if you take the time to learn it properly, it can be very efficient.

Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

#329

Post by bluGill »

sotix wrote: post #310

I worked in public accounting with some major corporations as clients. Every single company I interacted with used SAP. It is the de facto software in its field and is deeply entrenched. Its UX is the most horribly wicked thing I’ve ever come across. We would conduct walkthroughs with process control owners that showed us what they would do in SAP to perform their job functions, and it would take multiple, intelligen…

>I feel there is a lot of room to develop better tools that are not so horrid

It seems like it, but I don't think it is possible. Sure you can clean up SAP itself a bit, but most of the problem is custom UIs that companies develop only to the point where they are useful, but then they decide it is cheaper to train people on how to use the clumsy UI they have instead of paying developers to clean it up. They probably are not long, it only takes a few minutes to train most people on the how to find the few things they actually need, and the slow workflow costs them a couple hours per person per year (and most of them are low wage employees), while cleaning up the UI would costs several man-years of programmer effort.

Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

#330

Post by sally_glance »

sirwitti wrote: post #81
sally_glance wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Odoo comes to mind as well. Nowhere close to the commercial options in terms of ecosystem/features and hiring/consulting availability though.

If anyone thinks about going for odoo - which I did for a customer - do yourself a favor and try anything else. Here's why: The developer experience is terrible, simple template changes need a your modules to be "upgraded" which means every change takes several seconds at least. The quality of the app ecosystem is so bad you almost can't install any non-core apps if you want to be able to maintain your project. And a…

Thanks for the great report! I also encountered it at a client's place but didn't have to dig in too deeply, which I count myself lucky for after reading this :-D
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