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LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

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Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#111

Post by mbesto »

baxtr wrote: post #98
mbesto wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Former SAP employee here, who btw, is very critical of SAP. I also happen to have worked in Escalation Management at SAP, who's prime responsibility was to take SAP projects that were about to go south and put them into "escalation" before they the hit newspapers. Let me try to explain the mystery around SAP. 1. Most of the situations where SAP projects go haywire is largely due to (a) incorrect implementation by the…

Thanks for sharing, great insights there! How do you see the chance for classical “low-end disruption” like Christensen described? i.e. small players buy small solutions because they’re cheaper and have less scope. Then larger companies start using the low-cost software etc.

Just look at Concur, Fieldglass, SuccessFactors, BusinessObjects, etc

All were acquired by SAP because SAP can't do SaaS right and filled specific product areas of ERP.

SalesForce is also the greatest example of someone who started fairly small scope (small team CRM) and moved into bigger scope (enterprise CRM + enterprise application platform development).

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#112

Post by callesgg »

My personal experience is that the SAP software is ok but it suffers from it’s old outdated architecture.

The main problem is not the actual software it is the people who implement it.

Sap as a company has no control over the implementors. The implementors don’t understand how the software is intended to work.

I can compare it to Samsung Android vs Google Android.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#113

Post by petepete »

manmal wrote: post #93
netinmate wrote: post #86

Customization is key, you CAN't customize. I worked on an SAP implementation, a Fortune 500 company, complexity like crazy, sub-companies, of sub-companies, of sub-companies, federal, state and local compliance for what the company did, operating in 50 states, with an International supply chain, and our integrator was nothing special. We held firm to the NO CUSTOMIZATION rule, we re-engineered our processes to fit SA…

Do you think enterprises can even profit from adapting to SAP‘s structure (streamlining etc), or do you think this does not matter anyway?

The profit is in having the ability to upgrade on a whim, to refer to the masses of documentation and expertise without having to translate it into your own lingo and to use off the shelf components without needing to customise them too.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#114

Post by d_e_solomon »

bumholio wrote: post #103
netinmate wrote: post #86

Customization is key, you CAN't customize. I worked on an SAP implementation, a Fortune 500 company, complexity like crazy, sub-companies, of sub-companies, of sub-companies, federal, state and local compliance for what the company did, operating in 50 states, with an International supply chain, and our integrator was nothing special. We held firm to the NO CUSTOMIZATION rule, we re-engineered our processes to fit SA…

> we re-engineered our processes to fit SAP. That sounds just about like the most revolting and negative endorsement you can make for a business solution. Every company is special and the flexibility to adapt to a changing environment is what keeps a company alive during those times of crisis, that always come. "We can't do this because the system does not allow it" is great and expected at the warehouse worker level…

As a former consultant in SAP - Most companies aren't that unique in how they execute most processes. For instance, AP payments generally looks the same at a high level. For the variations of business processes, SAP gives you lots of room to modify configuration to fit your process. If you're in a specialized industry like Aerospace or Oil and Gas, they have unique industry specific solutions.

I've seen the flip side where people custom code the heck out of the system. That becomes impossible to upgrade and impossible to take advantage of new features.

I've also seen lots of bad processes continued that could have been re-engineered to be good processes if the implementer and business had an honest conversation. SAP for better or worse forces these conversations by limiting the ways that you can implement the solution.

SAP failed implementations are not unique from other software failed implementations. It doesn't fail because of the product; it fails because of the people and politics of the organization. SAP tends to make the headlines because of the size of the implementations and the eye watering costs.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#115

Post by mbesto »

barrkel wrote: post #109
bumholio wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we re-engineered our processes to fit SAP. That sounds just about like the most revolting and negative endorsement you can make for a business solution. Every company is special and the flexibility to adapt to a changing environment is what keeps a company alive during those times of crisis, that always come. "We can't do this because the system does not allow it" is great and expected at the warehouse worker level…

Competitive advantage is rarely in processes that a company is trying to replace or automate with third party software.

^ this.

Coca Cola does their financials the same way Pepsico does. Yet both companies have tried to implement them in unique ways and subsequently have cost them a great deal in terms of IT implementation costs that offer little to no competitive advantage.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#116

Post by dragonwriter »

d_e_solomon wrote: post #114
bumholio wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we re-engineered our processes to fit SAP. That sounds just about like the most revolting and negative endorsement you can make for a business solution. Every company is special and the flexibility to adapt to a changing environment is what keeps a company alive during those times of crisis, that always come. "We can't do this because the system does not allow it" is great and expected at the warehouse worker level…

As a former consultant in SAP - Most companies aren't that unique in how they execute most processes. For instance, AP payments generally looks the same at a high level. For the variations of business processes, SAP gives you lots of room to modify configuration to fit your process. If you're in a specialized industry like Aerospace or Oil and Gas, they have unique industry specific solutions. I've seen the flip side…

> SAP failed implementations are unique from other software failed implementations.

No, they aren't.

> It doesn't fail because of the product; it fails because of the people and politics of the organization.

Essentially all project failure are for that reason. (Including ones where one intermediary step on the route to failure was that the people and politics in the organization ended up selecting a solution that was a poor fit for the problem.)

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#117

Post by bflesch »

qualsiasi wrote: post #95
TurboHaskal wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be surprised. I don't know many devs earning >60k.

I honestly thought that average was 60/80k

I've hired many devs in Germany, if you pay less than 60k you get very bad ones.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#118

Post by misja111 »

rwallace wrote: post #99
misja111 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What SAP and Oracle have in common is that they have a very capable sales force, that is able to convince companies that their business case will fit nicely into their model. Then, once the implementation is ongoing and it turns out that there are some corner cases which were overlooked and that don't fit into the SAP model at all, SAP has another option available: hire their expensive consultants. Depending on how l…

Do you know of any case studies of companies being completely destroyed by this process? I have certainly heard of such projects getting into trouble, would be interested to know of any cases where it went as far as the customer going bankrupt.

I witnessed one myself when I was working as a consultant. It was a hospital that chose SAP to automate its invoicing system. When the implementation got stuck, the hospital was unable to send out any invoice for almost a year. In the end the money was finished and the government had to jump in and take over.

It is true that the management of the hospital made some big mistakes, but on the other hand it was SAP's sales team that had been very good at giving them opportunities to hang themselves.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#119

Post by javier2 »

arethuza wrote: post #29
simias wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know much about SAP besides the fact that I don't think I've ever heard anything positive about it (but then again, nobody talks about the trains that are on time). I always assumed that it was a "nobody gets fired for choosing SAP" situation. It's huge, it might be clunky but you know that if you pay for the support it'll probably end up doing mostly what you want and it'll mostly keep working. The alternati…

"you could do the same thing for 1% the cost and it'd work better etc." I used to think that - then I did some work with large scale ERP systems and realised that I was wildly wrong. Fortunately I moved into other areas while I still had some sanity.

That is what I tell people that think they could do the same for 1% of the cost: You can't.

I do believe they would have gotten more out of spending 500M on an internal team though.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#120

Post by detuur »

bumholio wrote: post #103
netinmate wrote: post #86

Customization is key, you CAN't customize. I worked on an SAP implementation, a Fortune 500 company, complexity like crazy, sub-companies, of sub-companies, of sub-companies, federal, state and local compliance for what the company did, operating in 50 states, with an International supply chain, and our integrator was nothing special. We held firm to the NO CUSTOMIZATION rule, we re-engineered our processes to fit SA…

> we re-engineered our processes to fit SAP. That sounds just about like the most revolting and negative endorsement you can make for a business solution. Every company is special and the flexibility to adapt to a changing environment is what keeps a company alive during those times of crisis, that always come. "We can't do this because the system does not allow it" is great and expected at the warehouse worker level…

No, your company isn't special. Look at it from an engineering perspective. The law, by which I mean all laws that you operate under—local, regional, state-level, federal, international alike—is really not much more than a specification that you have to adhere to. More active markets and more rules and laws you're bound to just means a more complex set of specifications. Just like in the software world, we need a process, an implementation to adhere to that specification in order to do business by it. And at the end of the day, if two different implementations are compliant to the same specifications, the complexity of moving from one to another is always going to be minimal. One particular caveat is even similar to software engineering: if you're doing special, non-standard stuff outside of the spec, you should probably not be doing that at all.

This is a fun analogy, but in the world of enterprise-level business, the business often is software. Entire businesses today are ran by software, and that software is written according to the same set of specifications: the law. The small particulars that don't have to do with law or common business practices are pretty much reducible to implementation details.

SAP is one such very comprehensive implementation, that is very possibly the only software suite that has a nearly full coverage of the entire "spec" for business purposes. If you can't translate your business operations to SAP, beg your pardon for my abrasiveness but you're doing things wrong.

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