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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

#121

Post by throwaway_2q121 »

I've been working in this field a bit, not the big two SAP/Oracle but a smaller ERP(PAAS/SAAS) player. Our solutions manage a few steel plants in Slovenia.

The way I see it is that it's tough, solutions are rarely chosen based on technical merits. It's a mix of "nobody gets fired for choosing SAP/Oracle", decisionmaker's ignorance, having someone who will be there to point the finger at in 5 years and... politics.

The bigger the company, the harder it gets to find anyone who would know or care what the hell is going on in the company and what their needs are. The few cases where you can win over SAP/Oracle is when a company is cornered because they have either failed to implement one of the big player's solution or they are out of money so they have to "compromise". IMHO having to "compromise" has turned out very well for some. The level of customization that we did would be very hard or impossible to achieve with SAP/Oracle.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#122

Post by e12e »

"SAP is the best thing that ever happened to computer people. It appeals to businesses that are too stupid to understand and model their own processes but too rich to simply continue relying on secretaries and file cabinets." -- Philip Greenspun: http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/future

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#125

Post by JacobDotVI »

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…

The book Softwars spends a lot of time on this topic, where Larry Ellison blasted all of his integration partners for over-customizing their solutions when the correct approach was to update the business processes to match the software:

https://www.amazon.com/Softwar-Intimate-Portrait-Ellison-Ora...

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#126

Post by JacobDotVI »

mbesto wrote: post #69
DrinkWater wrote: post #11

SAP was, and will always stay, a mystery to me. It is ridiculously expensive and complex. I know that the problems it aims to solve are also highly complex and very specific, but reading stories like this, plus (if you live in Germany and work in the IT industry) sometimes hearing unbelievable stories from your peers, it always confuses me that companies still want so much SAP. In the late 90s/early 00s a lot of peop…

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…

Great insights. Are you seeing startups that grow into multi-nationals adopting SAP? or are their smaller system growing up with their needs? E.g. what does Google, etc. use for ERP?

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#127

Post by adamdrake »

One thing I haven't seen in the comments, but have observed personally is the accounting implications and reasoning for these failed SAP projects.

Sometimes the project cannot be stopped immediately during development, even if it is already known that the project is a failure. The reason is that some companies capitalize the cost of the development over many years, and if they were to cancel the project they would have to book the entire amount as an expense in a given year, instead of depreciating it over multiple years.

I know of one company that worked on an SAP implementation for about 5 years, when it was only supposed to take 6 months or so, and the reason was that if they stopped the project they would have to book the entire cost as an expense in the current financial year. The exec team, who had financially-based bonuses, weren't keen on that.

Instead the project was put together to the extent possible so that it could be declared usable, and then promptly shelved. However, it was "completed" so in theory the sunk cost could have been spread out over multiple years.

Sometimes, you just have to follow the money.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#128

Post by nawitus »

detuur wrote: post #120
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…

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 pro…

The space of possibility within the confines of law is very large.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#129

Post by ghaff »

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…

There's usually some happy or at least less unhappy middle ground.

Yes, businesses often have unique needs and sometimes they're so unique and so critical that they're worth heavily customizing for.

On the other hand, I like telling a story from not that many years ago when a very small business (I'm talking like 10 people) wanted to get off running their own Exchange server. Exchange made sense when they set it up but Gmail and the like had come on the scene since.

The CEO eventually had to mandate it because the person who ran the business side of things was incredibly strongly opposed because they were used to storing emails associated with contracts in a hierarchical folder structure and, at the time, Gmail didn't support nested labels.

In that case, change how you do things to match the software was absolutely the right answer.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#130

Post by rwmj »

mbesto wrote: post #69
DrinkWater wrote: post #11

SAP was, and will always stay, a mystery to me. It is ridiculously expensive and complex. I know that the problems it aims to solve are also highly complex and very specific, but reading stories like this, plus (if you live in Germany and work in the IT industry) sometimes hearing unbelievable stories from your peers, it always confuses me that companies still want so much SAP. In the late 90s/early 00s a lot of peop…

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…

> 5. What's the alternative? Oracle?

I don't think it's possible for software to suck worse than the Oracle E-Business Suite expenses reporting software.

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