151–160 of 227 posts
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Sure, but that’s a small salary, even for Germany.
You'd be surprised. I don't know many devs earning >60k.
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…
I’ve rolled out SAP throughout all three of our SME-sized family companies. My mantra has always been ”we don’t install SAP into our company; we mould our company into SAP”. Ten years in and the strategy seems to have worked.
exactly. People from "unique" camp fail to recognize that SAP isn't just software, it is "best [business] practices" coded into that software, the practices distilled from huge experience during many years with many customers. Granted, for many techies any business practices/processes and related software look disgusting - this is why we're techies, not accountants. At some point in the bright future we'll develop super AI which will take over the world and abolish business processes....
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> Then they can say "Yeah man, SAP sucks, soooo inflexible, I argued against it but what are you gonna do, changing it is really expensive, I guess we'll just have to do it their way" and message boards fill up with complaints about how inflexible and expensive SAP is. Funny how that works! Scapegoat as a Service. I wonder just how common this is in practice.
it's called strategy consulting
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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.
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…
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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.
Anyone have a good recommendation for SAP alternative for small medium businesses (SMB)? All the companies I work for use something equally convoluted like Oracle and SAP. When I worked at a startup, I debated for a long time which ERP/PDM system will be the most effective (which I never answered).
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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?
Apple is definitely a big SAP shop.
Honestly don't know the others, but I would guess SAP/Oracle (and very likely under very strict NDA).
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Yes - most roll-outs will do phase approaches (unclear if Lidl did this or not). A good strategy is to do a smaller country roll-out for example, learn all of the lessons and then roll it out elsewhere. It's however not a blanket strategy and requires context to decide which is the right way.
Lidl rolled it out in the smaller countries, learned the lesson that it's not going to work, and stopped it.
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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?