Nicely written article, but I don’t see what the use of an ERP is? Can’t it just be replicated with some excel spreadsheets?
What's SAP?
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Re: What's SAP?
#12Nicely written article, but I don’t see what the use of an ERP is? Can’t it just be replicated with some excel spreadsheets?
If you're a big enough organisation to need an ERP like SAP, it would cost more to manage your data with spreadsheets than it would cost to just license SAP.
I mean, that's literally how you price enterprise software.
Re: What's SAP?
#13SAP is the worst software I've ever used in my entire life; they literally have to publish paid books on how to use it, that's how bad it is.
Or maybe resource planning is just that hard.
Re: What's SAP?
#14SAP wouldn't be that disheartening to use if it weren't so damn slow and if UI/UX wasn't from the 90s.
I love the SAP UI - yea, its the 90's when UI was far superior than today's whitespace filled, shadow-less buttons, complete lack of skeumorphic elements, magenta gradients and huge typography - See Windows 95 UI: https://twitter.com/tuomassalo/status/978717292023500805 It is dense, extremely clear and consice. I agree with the slowness though.
I feel like there continues to be a huge disconnect between UI designers and their users.
I'm a power user so I am not the best person to ask for UX advice, but I talk to people all the time that just wish they still had the classic Windows 9x UI's and things more or less were "boring".
Reminds me a little bit of a statement about how Taxi drivers can tell you what works architecturally better than an actual architect when it comes to ground floor interaction.
Re: What's SAP?
#15SAP is the worst software I've ever used in my entire life; they literally have to publish paid books on how to use it, that's how bad it is.
There are "paid books" about everything from Python to Go to Swift to whatever. That is quite frankly a bad heuristic.
Re: What's SAP?
#16Some consultant had told "Adopting an ERP (SAP, Oracle or other) is a stronger bond than marriage". So those valuations could be strong and long term.
I consulted for a company once that had made several attempts to migrate from their ERP (as well as having made several acquisitions and mergers over the decades). When I was there the state of things was 3 ERP systems that they had built, and another 2 that they had gained through mergers, all still operating and ERPing between each other. No matter how many enormous multi-year migration projects they started, they never managed to turn a single one of them off.
Re: What's SAP?
#17Nicely written article, but I don’t see what the use of an ERP is? Can’t it just be replicated with some excel spreadsheets?
ERP is basically a centralized hosted version of a lot of spreadsheets. So no, because Excel doesn’t facilitate cooperation very well.
Re: What's SAP?
#18That's actually a very well written article. I never imagined an article about SAP or ERP would be interesting to read.
The last paragraph is not good. Is it only me or does it leave a conclusion lurking around without saying it aloud?
Re: What's SAP?
#19"A 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, really?
Re: What's SAP?
#20SAP wouldn't be that disheartening to use if it weren't so damn slow and if UI/UX wasn't from the 90s.
I love the SAP UI - yea, its the 90's when UI was far superior than today's whitespace filled, shadow-less buttons, complete lack of skeumorphic elements, magenta gradients and huge typography - See Windows 95 UI: https://twitter.com/tuomassalo/status/978717292023500805 It is dense, extremely clear and consice. I agree with the slowness though.
SAP suffers from the same issue as all other universally-malleable systems: at best, they're only as good as the designer allows them to be.
However, just because it resembles 90's UI (which I'm a massive fan of) doesn't mean it follows it philosophically. It regularly breaks its own rules and is deliberately designed to be obscure as possible.