What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020) • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by NolF » Fri, Sep 09, 2022, 9:43 AM UTC

wheels wrote: post #63

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.

Answer from former SAP employee (may have changed in the last 15 years): Two main reasons: - It's actually terminal software, that's translated into a GUI from a text interface on the fly. - The people that buy SAP never have to use SAP. Its interface is not a selling point.

The article says you should reserve 17% of your project budget in training. Couldn't good UX help with that?

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

#162

Post by pdpi » Fri, Sep 09, 2022, 9:47 AM UTC

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.

"SAP developers" can mean two different groups of people. The developers who build SAP, and the developers who build the custom stuff that clients need. The former can be quite innovative, but the situation with the latter is pretty damn grim (and I say this having worked in the industry, and my dad still works on it)

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

#163

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Sep 09, 2022, 9:49 AM UTC

xcambar wrote: post #154

fabfabfab wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And apply to YC

[deleted]

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

#164

Post by taway19920706 » Fri, Sep 09, 2022, 9:52 AM UTC

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 AFAIK but there are components for governance, risk and compliance, etc.

Bit harsh to mention this, but SAP (who run SAP ERP internally, naturally) have not been immune from bribery scandals -

https://www.thesouthafrican.com/news/sap-apologise-to-south-...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sap-se-safrica-exclusive-...

A bit more background: https://www.news24.com/Fin24/what-sap-really-knew-when-it-pa...

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

#165

Post by panick21_ » Fri, Sep 09, 2022, 9:53 AM UTC

gHA5 wrote: post #143

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.

Usually those processes end with having both running.

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

#166

Post by wheels » Fri, Sep 09, 2022, 9:54 AM UTC

NolF wrote: post #161

wheels wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Answer from former SAP employee (may have changed in the last 15 years): Two main reasons: - It's actually terminal software, that's translated into a GUI from a text interface on the fly. - The people that buy SAP never have to use SAP. Its interface is not a selling point.

The article says you should reserve 17% of your project budget in training. Couldn't good UX help with that?

I'm not actually sure, because I feel like most of the things people do with SAP are very repetitive. Their UIs are mind-bendingly bad, but you mostly learn to do the 3 things you have to do all of the time, and then do them over and over again. I'm not sure how much having a nicer UI would make that easier.

It's absolutely not something you just randomly explore. I think that's a more interesting question: what sort of empowerment of employees could you create if the UI wasn't so terrible?

But SAP's moat is elsewhere. You put up with its terribleness because nothing else can do what it does. Beating SAP would require you to reach that, and do something else, part of which could be a nicer UI.

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

#167

Post by 656565656565 » Fri, Sep 09, 2022, 9:54 AM UTC

wheels wrote: post #155

lqet wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's actually terminal software, that's translated into a GUI from a text interface on the fly I am intrigued - you mean terminal output is actually parsed, and a GUI view is then generated from it? E: this would certainly explain the issue of listboxes only having the currently shown items loaded (described by another commenter) - everytime you scroll, the terminal output has to be produced + parsed again

Historically, yes. It was basically like translating an ncurses (semi-GUI command line thing) into a UI. There were attempts to move away from that model, but at least when I worked for SAP, most actual deployments were still text-to-UI. It was basically a way of slapping some varnish on what was fundamentally an old-school mainframe system.

at least DIAG is relatively small on the network, probably as a result

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

#168

Post by colonwqbang » Fri, Sep 09, 2022, 9:55 AM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #158

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…

Reminds me of large government departments where some idiot in the IT architecture team says: "Woah there buddy! Why do you think it's safe to assume that Microsoft Office is what we're going to use? What if we decide to use Open Office?" That's maybe one or two words away from a literal conversation in a huge meeting with dozens of high-level IT staff overseeing an org with 30K staff and a petabyte of existing Micro…

There have been tons of innovation in the field of electrical engineering since the standard voltages and frequencies were fixed. New installations are made to a better standard than older ones, while still maintaining interoperability. They don't blindly stick to the status quo without ever questioning if there's a more cost-efficient option like big-corp IT departments tend to do.

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

#169

Post by panick21_ » Fri, Sep 09, 2022, 9:58 AM UTC

tut-urut-utut wrote: post #107

sascha_sl wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've known one place that did bend SAP to their will, and they were stuck on a soon to lose support version despite having almost 100 SAP developers on staff (almost half their entire IT)

With 100 mildly competent developers on staff (although not with SAP developers) a company can develop in house everything they need to run a business in a period of time that is shorter than what is needed for a typical "SAP adjustment".

It really boggles the mind. What can be so complex that you can not do it in 300 person years of development time plus the cost of SAP.

Specially with the tools that exist in open source. Amazing databases, data modeling systems, libraries to integrate into literally everything.

It think the bigger problem might actually be to define the process you want to implement. What are the specifications, what of your existing system is actually needed and what isn't. Rather then the actual implementation of those processes in some digital process.

I have a friend who work himself up from worker in a warehouse to team leader and now SAP something something manager. And from the story he tells me I am mostly constantly confused. The whole environment feels incredibly foreign.

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

#170

Post by lonelyasacloud » Fri, Sep 09, 2022, 9:58 AM UTC

theplumber wrote: post #31

probably_wrong wrote: post #21

Whenever I read about SAP (which I hate, so don't mistake this for an objective take) it reminds me of the discussion about self-hosting your email: "Oh, no, it's too complicated, you are better off paying someone else to do it for you". The problem being, I host my own email and it works fine , which makes me suspicious of the common takes about ERP too. Now, I get it, once you have to deal with taxes and payroll in…

>> Now, I get it, once you have to deal with taxes and payroll in multiple countries it gets messy, but why wouldn't you consider that a core part of your business worth investing into? It may work using an open source model. However you don't really want to invest into non-core business(es). It takes away money, talent and energy that you would better put into doing what you do best. I've experienced this first hand…

> Time spent on the none core business is time wasted.

Except there are many businesses that have and are doing very nicely precisely because they ignored what would labeled as non-core activity by many. Take Apple for example, where would it be if it had stuck to making Macs? Or more recently spent billions moving to their own chips. What about Amazon?

Truth is more subtle. And with SAP, it's easy to understand both why businesses buy it - and at the same time - why most competent software developers believe if they were given the same investment they could do better.