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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)

#111

Post by baxtr »

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…

Hundreds of millions is actually the lower end of the spectrum. For most big companies it’s usually above the billion USD mark.

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

#112

Post by PeterStuer »

Some things you need to know:

SAP is sold to the C=suit, never to IT or business operations, nor any of the people that will ever come onto contact with the software.

SAP is priced based on your company's revenue. In industry X typical spend on IT is y% of revenue, so SAP will charge you a project for an amount equal to y% of your revenue.

SAP project often fail (this is not specific to SAP but common for large projects). Making sure that in case the project fails it is the customers fault will be strategically taken into account from day 1.

SAP's revenue is for the large majority based on consultancy and education revenue, not on software sales.

SAP's data and business process model maturity varies extremely depending on the industry and business segment. This will not be clear in the sales trajectory and not easy to discover upfront.

SAP is a fairly closed ecosystem. Typically consultants are recruited straight out of school and never leave the stack as it is very different from the rest of the industry. It has it's own cultute and habits that do not travel well outside of it's niche.

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

#113

Post by tut-urut-utut »

rjzzleep wrote: post #88
danuker wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

It's the same reason why Jira is so popular. CIOs recommend it to each other, because nobody wants to admit they made a mistake and that it wasn't as easy to integrate in the end after all. It's like getting a nose surgery and telling all your friends to get one as well. In most cases people look worse afterwards. It's funny to see people here defending SAP, because the way I see even the smaller shops that did bend…

No, Jira is popular because it's flexible. You can customize Jira to fit any process. That flexibility comes with a price tag, which is performance. SAP is a complete opposite, a truly inflexible “my way or highway” type of system.

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

#114

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

zxienin wrote: post #60
2Gkashmiri wrote: post #22

for anyone wondering, erpnext.com is a good "alternative" and it is very active on github with lots of people working on it each and every day. they have hosted plans as well as allowing users to selfhost and only pay for "support and customization" for anyone needing which works out pretty well for many.... SAP is well and good but you have good alternatives

I have been pretty impressed with with what erpnext has achieved till date. Underdog IMHO. I think that its founder should consider scaling installed base more.

yeah, they do not encourage whitelabeling but other than that, its pretty nice with the whole ecosystem of FOSS stuff they put out.

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

#115

Post by ThePadawan »

thinkingemote wrote: post #97

Curious: does SAP have modules for illegal activities, both dealing with it e.g, official bribes, internal corruption, employee theft, cyber ransoms etc, and for actual illegal stuff like money laundering, or for "off the books accounting", special operations etc.

Not SAP, but ERP developer here. The project I worked on included a logistics module which stock-keeping and accounting.

When you tell a warehouse worker to pick up an iPhone from row A4-143-X and it's not there, you need to figure out why. So yes, doing the accounting for that involved a "status" flag to figure out what happened. If another iPhone is later found in A5-143-X, great.

If not, at the end of the year you do the math how much stock dissappears "for unknown reasons" and you have your number on "possibly employee theft". To balance the books you can't just put an amount and "IDK what happened to it".

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

#116

Post by rocqua »

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…

Is it the business processes that make a company successful, or is it the product, employees and business culture that make a company successful?

If its the former, than conforming to SAP is giving up what made you good. But if its the latter, then conforming to SAP is just making the basics more standard and easier to maintain.

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

#117

Post by BlargMcLarg »

dandare wrote: post #74
meibo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The UX is horrible because: a) Engineering: Nobody will rewrite 20 year old views just to improve the UX. In many cases, nobody even dares to touch the 20 years old spaghetti code. b) Sales: The buyer is not the user. The buyer (playing golf with a sales rep) doesn't give a damn about the actual productivity of what he is buying. c) Management: There is a solid economical rationale in not giving a fcuk about UX. Over…

I hate how bad UX has become the standard due to management/executive negligence, and there is so little the actual users can do about it. Even small players tend to neglect UX because of the financial incentives.

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

#118

Post by primax »

wheels wrote: post #108
tut-urut-utut wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

The average age of companies on the S&P is 18. That's just about long enough to start being killed by SAP

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

#119

Post by tut-urut-utut »

isoprophlex wrote: post #33
carstenhag wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue there was that Lidl did not adapt to SAP. They tried to adapt the SAP system to Lidl. Everyone tells you that this is a really bad idea. Everyone.

Yeah you build your business around what SAP allows you to do, or you roll your own. Adapting SAP to existing business is just madness.

Only startups that don't have business yet should use SAP ;)

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

#120

Post by taway19920706 »

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…

Not the OP, but my feeling is that you use standardised processes when they are not your core. For example, if you produce a widget using various raw materials, is the way you pay your staff delivering any competitive advantage? Or the MRP process you use to re-order engineering spares? Probably not - standardise those. Implement unique processes where they differentiate you from your competition. Standardise everything else.
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