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What's SAP?

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Re: What's SAP?

#121

Can please a decision maker regarding SAP buying/implementing tell us how on earth SAP is that mainstream (in corporate) ? I've had to use it at EU big corp, and it to this day the worst experience I had. I've seen at techcrunch Berlin 2019 that there is something called SAP.io, somewhat opening its plateform ?

I’ve witnessed several SAP implementations, along with the buying process. In short, it’s seen as a safe option, because it’s what “everyone else” uses, and the decision makers have typically come from businesses where SAP has been used. Nobody actually likes it - but they don’t see any alternatives as viable. Similarly, I’ve seen folks migrate to and from the various MS Dynamics platforms, and it’s a universal shits…

> ERP software generally sucks

The question isn't whether it "sucks" or not, but rather to whom it "sucks".

It rightly reads as sucking to us as tech-savvy developers, but that's not the reality for the actual consumers of such products who are not programmers. To them, irregardless of our protests of inefficiency or bloat, there are only 2-3 possible platforms and the competitive advantages of each over the others are judged on entirely different criteria than we would use.

Remember the first rule of design (for better or only in this particle case, almost certainly worse): you do not represent your users.

Re: What's SAP?

#122

Maybe ERPs are the ultimate test of an agile culture. Sounds weird right? But bear with me. Most ERP projects fail. They end up over-budget and delivered really late. Why? They are sold like custom implementations, promising the stakeholders they’ll be adapted to their specific needs. It's rarely the case. The reality requires the whole business to change: its processes, its workflows, its traditions. Therefore, only…

That judgment is based on the premise that the processes mandated by the ERP software are more effective than the company's current processes.

If a company terminates its adoption of an ERP solution, it does not necessarily mean that the company is not "agile" enough. The company's leadership may simply be concluding that changing its processes to the ones mandated by the ERP would make the company run less efficiently, a consideration that could outweigh the benefits of using a centralized piece of software to manage its operations.

Re: What's SAP?

#123
post #100

I don't know any decent CS/software engineering student that would want to work on SAP. As a result, all the SAP consultancies I know are filled with business graduates that happened to know a bit about software. I wonder how much that contributes to the SAP clusterfuck.

I do, especially at SAP itself there was and is lots of interesting work hidden under all the crud. For the rest, relative wages and job security seem to be the driving factors for young graduates to join the space these days. The day to day there isn't really worse or more or less boring than any other B2B integration gig. Consultancies and working at the larger ones also suck for their very own reasons. That'd be the case with SAP or without. They hire business type people because the technical challenge of these projects is minimal compared to other aspects. Sure, most of these projects could often use a bit more of technical seniority, expertise, and overall strategy. But I think it's too easy to attribute failures solely to that, it's a mixture of problems, just like any large scale failure in the space.

Re: What's SAP?

#124
post #106

Can please a decision maker regarding SAP buying/implementing tell us how on earth SAP is that mainstream (in corporate) ? I've had to use it at EU big corp, and it to this day the worst experience I had. I've seen at techcrunch Berlin 2019 that there is something called SAP.io, somewhat opening its plateform ?

Can you name good alternative that supports all SAP features?

'More modern' these days appears to be the 'thousand papercuts' approach - many SaaS products that collectively provide the same feature set.

It's still hell, just a different kind of hell.

Bespoke is a genuine competitor. In the UK it's not uncommon for SAP implementations to cost several million £s, this could be used to build bespoke software.

There's a massive risk here though - there are thousands of ways bespoke ERP can go wrong. Underfunding the project causes problems, but arguably the worst projects were overfunded. Then there's recruiting the right people and developing the right culture - archaic business hierarchies are almost mutually exclusive with good software teams.

In other words, there isn't really a very good option. You can understand why business leaders, who are often not technology experts, would go with something that has 'worked' for them in the past.

Re: What's SAP?

#125

SAP has enabled/mandated an army of people at my company who manage it and ruthlessly control even read access to it. The software is user-hostile, intentionally obscure, and all requests for slightly customized reports have to go through a multilayered approval process - often up to corporate - where it competes for funding against other survivors. Needing something custom invites constant questions of why the stand…

HR data is necessarily controlled though, there are pretty stingent controls in law around that. I understand the pain of not being able to report on stuff, but there is probably a sound reason. However, the delivery you describe sounds like a broken organisation tbh

Re: What's SAP?

#126
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know if we are using the latest versions but the UI has many other sins, not the least having buttons in odd places (submit is often at the top), many many screens to get to a place, slow as you say. I don’t care so much that the UI looks from the 90s. For an internal application, a battleship grey winform is perfectly fine, as long as the workflow is simple, fast and intuitive.

Do you work in a grey office with grey carpets and grey desks? Aesthetics matter. Make software that is beautiful and a joy to use.

First, software should be efficient to use.

Too many designers, maybe a majority, make "beautiful" software that is a pain to use.

Are forms today better than they used to be? I don't think so. Most "web based" or "web inspired" apps today are slow, unintuitive, and have idiosyncratic behavior. How often have you had a form that didn't work right because some Javascript request failed and/or it decided your entry wasn't correct? How often did tabbing through fields actually work as you expected?

While your statement is technically correct, it leads to software that just isn't a joy to use. We get used to having bad usability, and we take for granted that forms just don't work 100% and so we take the safe route - for example writing long text in an editor and copy-and-pasting to be sure. Have you never done this?

Having beautiful interfaces is nice, but it should be an afterthought and not a priority. Because it is difficult to optimize everything at the same time, and beauty is lexicographically unimportant compared to efficiency.

Re: What's SAP?

#127
post #94
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be interested to know if they are actually using SAP. These companies are so much better at software development and they are swimming in so much money that they could even implement something by themselves.

Why would they? It's none of their core business and SAP already has everything covered. Think of all the legal/financial stuff. The UI is not that important in that field, your domain expert in that area knows how to navigate stuff.

Event Microsoft does it (https://www.erpsoftwareblog.com/2012/11/why-does-microsoft-h...), despite the fact that they have their own ERP product (Dynamics).

Re: What's SAP?

#128

SAP today are just plainly incompetent and ripe for disruption. I've had quite a bit of interaction with SAP over the last few years, here are some examples: - Almost all meetings I've been in start with prospective clients mentioning to SAP consultants that SAP has a 'certain reputation'. The SAP consultants acknowledge this. - Some of the solution pitch ideas they come up with signal they have almost zero knowledge…

It really is insane, I know people who don't even work for SAP, are "IT consultants", whose credentials are a (very good) Art History degree and travel around nationally and internationally to essentially push a button to do SAP database migrations after mergers and acquisitions. There are independent companies that just live off the fact how bad SAP is.

Re: What's SAP?

#130
SAP own Crystal Reports. It's buggy slow garbage, IMHO. Wildly popular for unknown reasons but I found that it threw internal C# exceptions all the time in its own DLLs and was slow and buggy. Awful.

Oddly others thought it was great and accepted it taking 30 seconds to load a report (yes, it's just a few database queries with the output put onto a canvas...) but I think that was because they didn't understand how basic it should be, and knew no alternative (of which there was none!).

I ended up writing my own report system as I detested this so much.

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