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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)

#141

Post by taway19920706 »

numlock86 wrote: post #18
JetAlone wrote: post #5

You can copy off my homework, but just this once 1) They do Enterprise Resources Planning. 2) Because ERP is immensely complicated, and encompasses features that would be useful for almost anyone coordinating any organization, and ERP systems are really hard to change, so they have acquired a user base with lots of zeroes and a thick moat to keep them in.

Ah yes, I remember when Lidl tried to integrate SAP in 2015. No one really knows why and after already having spent €500,000,000 in 2016 they pulled the plug and just dropped the project because obviously it wasn't done at that point and they still would have to pay more to finish it. The initial offer never went public but I overheard someone once saying it was like €75,000,000 "only" ... They went back to further d…

Implementing SAP in retail has its own challenges. The large number of products ("articles") sold, locations ("sites"), handling POS data etc.

My first ever SAP implementation was for a large retailer and the project was cancelled (they later implemented SAP ~10 years later after the product matured somewhat) and another project 8 years later was also cancelled. Only two SAP projects I've been involved in that have been cancelled and both were retail (and using IS-Retail, SAP's solution for retail industries).

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

#142

Post by tomnipotent »

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…

> drop the processes that made it big in the first place

This is pretty much never the case, and more often than not the company is successful despite those process, not because of.

Many processes evolve on an ad-hoc and as-needed basis, with some tweaks here and there over time as the company grows and staff turns. You eventually reach a point when no one can remember how a process came to be, or why Sarah has to export four files from three web interfaces and copy/paste data across two Excel files to send to John over in accounting that was just trained last week on how to use this file to true up actuals.

There's only so many ways a company can track inventory, or manage purchase orders, or calculate product costs, or represent sales order and invoices. An ERP acknowledges that a vast majority of businesses operate with the same set of industry-specific operational primitives, and businesses have learned that it's both more time-and-cost effective to adapt your business to the expectations of the ERP than the other way around.

In the rare case you're doing something novel, you can still build your bespoke solution on top of those existing ERP primitives without having to re-invent how the numbers come together so your company can spit out the three financial statements.

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

#143

Post by gHA5 »

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…

That article says Lidl/Schwarz has abandonded SAP and gone back to their custom system. That surprises me because I have a friend who does SAP consulting for them.

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

#144

Post by lycopodiopsida »

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 :)

Greetings to a NeoVIM user from an Emacs/evil user. There are at least two users at the same company who dislike VSCode with some passion :)

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

#145

Post by qikInNdOutReply »

shankr wrote: post #61
qikInNdOutReply wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. This I have experienced first hand where this junior product manager who wrote some ticket whose requirements when got challenged says "it's mentioned here so you have to do it and…

Its really tough to change that mindset though, once it takes hold, its so deeply ingrained. ("Ober sticht unter").

Basically the whole education system needs to push discussions more, were you have to argue a point, proof you are right and stick to your guns. Something regarding this is going right in some education systems and cultures, and fails utterly in others. Its a education to lead, instead of education to be led.

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

#146

Post by tomaaron »

kazinator wrote: post #99
taway19920706 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. SAP has no restrictions on how much you customise it - you can customise and extend to your heart's content. The problems come during upgrade - SAP has very mature tooling to manage upgrades but a customer who has veered too far from standard will need to rework their customisations to fit the new version. Many many customers have been burned by this over the years - being too trigger happy and customising/buil…

Fun with your comment: s/SAP/Debian/g s/mature/so-so/ s/customer/sucker/

This is hilarious.

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

#147

Post by davidkunz »

lycopodiopsida wrote: post #144
davidkunz wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, that's my blog post :)

Greetings to a NeoVIM user from an Emacs/evil user. There are at least two users at the same company who dislike VSCode with some passion :)

Emacs and (Neo)vim users, unite!

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

#148

Post by jwr »

fabfabfab wrote: post #64
_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…

Speaking of purity, the first thing Hacker News would do is try to run SAP on a Kubernetes cluster, refactor crucial bits in Rust and shard the database into sqlite3.db files on per user basis. We'd also recommend you restructure your office for a more open space, bring down the cubicles and make sure the conference rooms are glasswalled and have funny names. Bringing pets to work is mandatory.

This is so true! As the author of a (small) ERP/MRP SaaS, I am often amused when I read HN and observe the thundering herds of fashion followers — today it's Kubernetes and Rust, Postgres and sqlite have a longer lifespan, but tomorrow it's going to be something else entirely, and you necessarily need to use those :-)

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

#149

Post by tus666 »

_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…

Isn't Salesforce the alternative?

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

#150

Post by cygx »

zeroth32 wrote: post #72
_glass wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's mostly the culture surrounding SAP. SAP developers are a lot of times slow to adapt to new technology. For the UI you can use react components https://sap.github.io/ui5-webcomponents-react/?path=/story/g... or you can just generate OData services from CDS Views that are then integrated into your frontend https://blogs.sap.com/2022/02/24/sap-cds-for-new-and-experie... . The problem is that a lot of people…

SAP can be quite innovative. I remember SAP circa 2003. The only think that used XMLHttpRequest (AJAX aka dynamic html) was Outlook web frontend, and SAP web UI. GMail that widely popularized dynamic html did not even existed yet.

AJAX and DHTML are not synonyms: The latter predates the former and refers to interactivity via client-side scripting.
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