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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)

#101

Post by Phurist »

danuker wrote: post #35
theshrike79 wrote: post #10

This is a good time to remind everyone of the rules of SAP integration: 1) Your company processes MUST adapt to SAP processes. That's it. You can try customising SAP to fit your processes, but you will just waste time and hundreds of millions of money and then you will fail. Lidl spent almost a decade and 500M€ on its SAP project, but didn't follow rule #1: https://www.henricodolfing.com/2020/05/case-study-lidl-sap-d…

> You can try customising SAP to fit your processes So you are paying hundreds of millions to get a canned, pre-packaged, inflexible solution? Why is SAP still in business? Is it solely customer misinformation?

How to say that you lack experience running a successful business without saying you lack experience running a successful business.

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

#102

Post by _glass »

zxienin wrote: post #70
_glass wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, sure https://www.sap.com/products/erp/s4hana.html It's quite nice, even though they do some crazy (also cool) stuff with it https://blogs.sap.com/2021/09/30/steampunk-is-going-all-in/

No, S4HANA is marketed as cloud. Reality is different. How common is „three system landscape“ in cloud, like S4HANA? Elastic scaling? No. TCO footprint of an new tenant? Sigh.

There are two versions, the on-premise landscape and the cloud version. The on-premise version makes sense sometimes. You can even deploy SAP platform to cloud foundry.

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

#103

Post by texasbigdata »

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.

tldr: hard stuff is hard and not fun to work on

Why did AWS, a group probably fairly technical savy and a direct competitor to its vendor, take so long [1] to migrate from Oracle?

Why does Google, as of today, have job openings for SAP in its Rev Rec division [2], and more widely in areas touching [3] “ SAP ERP domains (e.g. Finance, Revenue/Cost Management, Billing, Materials Management, Sourcing, Procurement and/or Inventory Management)”?

Granted you could say, and I believe in one of the many google “corporate biography” books Eric Schmidt allegedly worked through this same problem: hey is an ERP a product for us? A core competency? Should we build it? [Seems HN discussed this in 2021 already, 4]

Conversely, given the wide ranging scope of random things Google has built and how naively simple accounting and something like a fixed asset ledger looks at first glance…why did they never do it? Surely not because building 7 conflicting chat tools was a priority.

My guess (as a non developer) would be it’s crazy hard to build SAP. From personal experience even QB Online has a daunting level of “backwards compatible” complexity [5] in its data scheme even coming from an accounting background. The API keeps versioning up incrementally and you’ll find gems like “XYZ local French Tax” and other accumulated baggage. As an anecdote, using arguably a knowledgeable vendor, as of a year ago it wasn’t possible to populate a full simple profit and loss statement via Fivetrans ETL tool [6], even though they did a phenomenal job in mapping out the ERD compared to anything else that existed imho [7]. CDATA let you run SQL queries, but the complexity of scripting some of the reports was much more fragile. The community even built a DBT layer [8] and given how cumbersome it was to generate even just the “Revenue” line on the P&L out of a simple non-enterprise tool like QBO, SAP seems 1000x harder.

That’s probably why everything in-market, post-sales cycle is garbage. But hey, someone in a dorm room might be working on replacing SAP right now :)

Note: this excludes versioning, which I believe Workday does every six months, which is also a bunch of work twice a year.

1. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/migration-complete-amazons-...

2. https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/142858723165905606-r...

3. https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/118792275728704198-s...

4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26706991

5.(imprecise but good starting point) https://developer.intuit.com/app/developer/qbo/docs/api/acco...

6. https://fivetran.com/docs/applications/quickbooks

7. https://docs.google.com/presentation/u/0/d/1u0dnyq5L_rcEgR2_...

8. https://fivetran.com/docs/transformations/dbt/data-models/qu...

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

#104

Post by ThePadawan »

simonjgreen wrote: post #28
theshrike79 wrote: post #10

This is a good time to remind everyone of the rules of SAP integration: 1) Your company processes MUST adapt to SAP processes. That's it. You can try customising SAP to fit your processes, but you will just waste time and hundreds of millions of money and then you will fail. Lidl spent almost a decade and 500M€ on its SAP project, but didn't follow rule #1: https://www.henricodolfing.com/2020/05/case-study-lidl-sap-d…

This is really rule 1 for any core LOB/BIS/ERP system, not just SAP

I was a developer on an ERP developed in-house once. In that case you're off.

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

#105

Post by Barrin92 »

qikInNdOutReply wrote: post #12
hardware2win wrote: post #4

ERP industry is so hard(painful) that I wouldnt want to work in it unless they paid top of the top Good luck competing in that industry > 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. Gotta be fun :)

The only field german software could compete. [ ] Digital Bureaucracy [ ] All of the above [ ] None of the above My little pet theory is that the old "Do as you told" buisness-culture is to blame for germanys inability to produce great software. Software needs developers with agency, who refuse "idiotic" tasks and fight back to improve the product. Know an israeli who complained about "endless arguing" in israeli sof…

it's a pretty good field to compete in when the rest of your economy is large or middle scale industry. There's no point for Germany to built "great consumer software tm" in an economy that isn't consumer centric (or so small to largely compete in foreign markets from the beginning).

I worked for a software company in Aachen for a while that supplied software for local manufacturing and this is necessarily "meh" and largely consists of doing as your told and building to specification because that's what industry-adjacent work is like. Doesn't mean it's not good software.

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

#106

Post by cromka »

theshrike79 wrote: post #10

This is a good time to remind everyone of the rules of SAP integration: 1) Your company processes MUST adapt to SAP processes. That's it. You can try customising SAP to fit your processes, but you will just waste time and hundreds of millions of money and then you will fail. Lidl spent almost a decade and 500M€ on its SAP project, but didn't follow rule #1: https://www.henricodolfing.com/2020/05/case-study-lidl-sap-d…

> In April 2017, SAP even awarded Lidl a prize for being one of their best customers.

I found this hilarious.

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

#107

Post by tut-urut-utut »

sascha_sl wrote: post #45
theshrike79 wrote: post #10

This is a good time to remind everyone of the rules of SAP integration: 1) Your company processes MUST adapt to SAP processes. That's it. You can try customising SAP to fit your processes, but you will just waste time and hundreds of millions of money and then you will fail. Lidl spent almost a decade and 500M€ on its SAP project, but didn't follow rule #1: https://www.henricodolfing.com/2020/05/case-study-lidl-sap-d…

I've known one place that did bend SAP to their will, and they were stuck on a soon to lose support version despite having almost 100 SAP developers on staff (almost half their entire IT)

With 100 mildly competent developers on staff (although not with SAP developers) a company can develop in house everything they need to run a business in a period of time that is shorter than what is needed for a typical "SAP adjustment".

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

#108

Post by wheels »

tut-urut-utut wrote: post #98
wheels wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, as I noted elsewhere in the thread, I worked in R&D at SAP for 4 years (16 years ago), but I have no deep love for it. But I do have some understanding of where it fits in the landscape. What you've said is absolutely true, but it's mostly a feature, not a bug. Once you get big enough to need SAP, it's actually useful to put your business processes on a standardized platform. It's painful, always mind bendingl…

I have to disagree here strongly. You are just saying, that a company that became big enough, so it can afford SAP, should drop their way of doing business, drop the processes that made it big in the first place and go through a painful and expensive process where it will become just another SAP shop, with zero competitive advantage. Telling that losing your uniqueness and being like “everyone else” will actually bec…

Sorry, but that's just not borne out by data: almost all of the Fortune 500 companies use SAP (something like 80-90%; probably the rest use Oracle, which isn't significantly less painful to move to).

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

#109

Post by ano88888 »

kumarvvr wrote: post #26
hardware2win wrote: post #4

ERP industry is so hard(painful) that I wouldnt want to work in it unless they paid top of the top Good luck competing in that industry > 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. Gotta be fun :)

I always wondered, why wouldn't an in-house developed lean, ERP system would not trump a behemoth like SAP. A few reasons seem plausible. - No one gets fired for hiring SAP - Getting an in-house software developer team that can develop an easily extensible / modifiable ERP system is neigh impossible It is one of my dream to build an alternative ERP system. But it looks like sub-ERP functions (payroll, HR, etc) have b…

The main reason is a third one: You need to have smart and capable business process owners to work with you the right things to build and what to ignore. Most software projects fail because you're giving inadequate or the wrong scope.

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

#110

Post by _glass »

davidkunz wrote: post #96
_glass wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:D You can run SAP in the cloud on Kubernetes: https://cap.cloud.sap/docs/guides/deployment/deploy-to-kyma Also you can re-write everything in Rust https://blogs.sap.com/2020/07/23/learning-rust-with-cap-part...

Ah, that's my blog post :)

It's some years ago, did you succeed rewriting CAP in Rust :P Thanks for being a hipster SAP developer, and I mean it :)
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