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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)

#171
My mother works for a fairly large textile lab. For decades, they used an internally developed system for lab reports (they had a few programmers and admins they called the "nerds" that did nothing else than extend and maintain the system). The company switched to a SAP solution a few years ago. Chaos ensued. The SAP solution missed so many edge cases that a huge number of lab reports were either inaccurate or completely wrong because information was lost in SAP translation between different labs. Sometimes clients (huge international players) noticed the mistakes, which then led to costly product delays. It became so bad that communication between labs eventually had to be done on two levels - within SAP, and "informally" by mail, telephone, or by simply walking to the other lab, adding a huge time overhead to every report.

SAP removed virtually every automation advantage of the old system, and added the additional complexity of navigating the SAP GUI. Because of this additional workload and the reluctance of the company to hire more people to counter it (after all, SAP was implemented to streamline everything!), employee turnover suddenly skyrocketed. Everytime I talk with my mother, she complains about the system and tells me that another colleague has quit. She only stays because she only has 2 years until retirement.

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

#172

Some things you need to know: SAP is sold to the C=suit, never to IT or business operations, nor any of the people that will ever come onto contact with the software. SAP is priced based on your company's revenue. In industry X typical spend on IT is y% of revenue, so SAP will charge you a project for an amount equal to y% of your revenue. SAP project often fail (this is not specific to SAP but common for large proje…

> SAP is sold to the C=suit, never to IT or business operations, nor any of the people that will ever come onto contact with the software. Plenty of terrible corporate software works like this. Precurement has a checklist of features, and that list never includes "Has great UX", because only the people on the floor has to use it. I'm looking at you JIRA... > SAP project often fail (this is not specific to SAP but com…

Agree 100%. The whole "management consulting" industry is rotten and all of the "Big 4/5" accounting firms suck. There are boutique consultancies that do excellent work but so many CIOs will go with Accenture et al. because of their name and perhaps because they perform their annual audits, etc.

BTW, on the last point - ABAP (SAP's proprietary language) has improved a lot over the years. Variable names are no longer so short (a vestige of the R/2 mainframe days) and the language has adopted a lot of features from Java and JavaScript. Not always the best (OOP like it's Java in 1998, woo!), but definitely a lot better than in the past.

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

#173
post #171

My mother works for a fairly large textile lab. For decades, they used an internally developed system for lab reports (they had a few programmers and admins they called the "nerds" that did nothing else than extend and maintain the system). The company switched to a SAP solution a few years ago. Chaos ensued. The SAP solution missed so many edge cases that a huge number of lab reports were either inaccurate or comple…

What was the motivation to switch to SAP? Was the in-house solution lacking?

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

#174
post #171

My mother works for a fairly large textile lab. For decades, they used an internally developed system for lab reports (they had a few programmers and admins they called the "nerds" that did nothing else than extend and maintain the system). The company switched to a SAP solution a few years ago. Chaos ensued. The SAP solution missed so many edge cases that a huge number of lab reports were either inaccurate or comple…

They probably cheaped out on SAP consultants. Each of the old IT staff in the old system you can replace with 3-5 SAP consultants.

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

#175
post #171

My mother works for a fairly large textile lab. For decades, they used an internally developed system for lab reports (they had a few programmers and admins they called the "nerds" that did nothing else than extend and maintain the system). The company switched to a SAP solution a few years ago. Chaos ensued. The SAP solution missed so many edge cases that a huge number of lab reports were either inaccurate or comple…

What was the motivation to switch to SAP? Was the in-house solution lacking?

Working in a large corp, I find IT consultants from the outside overpromise and underdeliver on projects

It’s infuriating as anybody below senior management can see right through it

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

#176
post #171

My mother works for a fairly large textile lab. For decades, they used an internally developed system for lab reports (they had a few programmers and admins they called the "nerds" that did nothing else than extend and maintain the system). The company switched to a SAP solution a few years ago. Chaos ensued. The SAP solution missed so many edge cases that a huge number of lab reports were either inaccurate or comple…

What was the motivation to switch to SAP? Was the in-house solution lacking?

AFAIK, they introduced SAP elsewhere in the company, and it became difficult/too expensive to manage the communication between the old system and the SAP system. I can imagine too well how the conversation between the SAP people and the company went because I also took part in similar conversations with clients in a previous job a long time ago: client asks you if software X can do thing Y. Both you and the person representing the client have only superficial domain expertise on Y. "Oh, you mean enter data into a form? Of course software X can do that, it was designed exactly for that purpose!"

The complexity of the task is eventually discovered in production.

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

#177
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…

A company I once worked at was taken private by a private equity firm. One of the first initiatives this firm kicks off upon closing an acquisition is moving the company to Oracle for ERP. It can take years and many millions of dollars (as it did in this case--the company was built around an in-house sales and order system), but it's part of their playbook. I have no idea if it's truly worth the cost, but that equity firm surely believes so.

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

#178
post #151
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can try customising SAP to fit your processes So you are paying hundreds of millions to get a canned, pre-packaged, inflexible solution? Why is SAP still in business? Is it solely customer misinformation?

The competition is generally worse. I tell it as someone who saw few different products offered by the competition. This doesn't mean that SAP is good. Also this doesn't mean that there isn't space for someone who could do it better by starting with a clean state (what sounds easy, but is actually very, very hard to pull off). First you should know that the market for ERP systems is very wide. There are LOTS of vario…

Going away from SQL Tables based storage to RDF type store (that can model graphs) with a powerful scheme validation system seem like it would make sense given the insane complexity of the data models involved.

I have done work with some subsystems like you would also find in SAP and usually I found the SQL Databases weren't that amazing at modeling what I wanted.

But I don't know enough of how these systems work. Does every location or subsystem have its own db that get some compared in the software layer or is there usually a single source of truth db somewhere?

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

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly there was someone making part of that $500,000,000 that wasn't telling them this.

You would think so, but all of the large consulting firms (Accenture, Deloitte, etc) are driven by billing and people wanting to climb the corporate ladder. What the customer needs comes a distant second. Many projects are staffed with 90-95% juniors or people who have no industry knowledge. I've worked alongside consultants from Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, etc over the years and, while many of them are very competent,…

this imo is exactly why many projects “fail”, overrun or budget

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

#180
post #171

My mother works for a fairly large textile lab. For decades, they used an internally developed system for lab reports (they had a few programmers and admins they called the "nerds" that did nothing else than extend and maintain the system). The company switched to a SAP solution a few years ago. Chaos ensued. The SAP solution missed so many edge cases that a huge number of lab reports were either inaccurate or comple…

They probably cheaped out on SAP consultants. Each of the old IT staff in the old system you can replace with 3-5 SAP consultants.

SAP is better though as a set of libraries than a solution, and it's worth a lot precisely because it will fit whatever whacky process an organization has so that the org doesn't need to change itself while adopting the software.

The most obvious failure modes are going for the lowest bidders incentivizing them to deliver with a skeleton crew, trying to nickel and dime the budget cutting features or their scope or straight up coming at the table with no documentation of how orgs own internal processes actually work.

I know of no project failing because of sap or their consultant on its own without any of the above comorbidities.

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