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LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

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Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#181

Post by tzs »

lixtra wrote: post #167
rwallace wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know of any case studies of companies being completely destroyed by this process? I have certainly heard of such projects getting into trouble, would be interested to know of any cases where it went as far as the customer going bankrupt.

Here are two examples where such claims were made: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2530405/it-careers/sap... https://www.t-online.de/finanzen/boerse/news/id_47703844/sch...

From the first:> Shane Co. signed a contract with SAP AG in 2005 for a "highly sophisticated point-of-sale and inventory management system," with an original projected cost of $8 million to $10 million and a one-year rollout schedule, the filing states. But costs ended up skyrocketing to $36 million, and the implementation stretched out to 32 months before the ERP system eventually went live in September 2007.

Does anyone offer SAP rollout insurance?

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#182

Post by jhayward »

arethuza wrote: post #51
PaulHoule wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the big attraction of SAP is that it lets CEOs smooth out earnings. They can get projections of what the number are going to be for the quarter continuously so in the last few weeks of the quarter they can speed up or slow down sales and spending to hit the earnings numbers they want.

Not sure why you are being downvoted - I used to know a guy who had been head of sales for a large tech company that you will have heard of and he said they did exactly that - delay sales from one period to the next to smooth things out and to be closer to market expectations. Their sales contracts apparently had clauses allowing them to delay sales for just this reason. NB That kind of sales reporting isn't just fro…

Cisco Systems used to be renowned for hitting consensus revenue projections precisely, always consensus +1 cent.

That kind of "management" is a red flag IMO.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#183

Post by [deleted] »

dragonwriter wrote: post #140
freehunter wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last big project failure I had was due to the company selecting the right technology for the problem, but the wrong one for the company culture. The company's engineers were young and viewed themselves as a startup, which means they like to use bleeding-edge solutions. The company themselves were an old enterprise with well-worn problems, and picked exactly the technology they should have. Unfortunately a newer,…

> The last big project failure I had was due to the company selecting the right technology for the problem, but the wrong one for the company culture. The company culture is a central piece of any business problem you are addressing, if your solution doesn't address it, it isn't addressing the actual problem, but at best a lower-dimensional projection.

[deleted]

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#184

Post by lurker456 »

auvi wrote: post #124

Honest question: how do people go about learning SAP?

Join a SAP customer or SAP integrator. At a customer you'll normally get sent on several multi week training sessions. At integrators you'll get some PDF's and be thrown in the deep immediately. As a junior, the pay is bad, so be sure to move on quickly, don't stick around at the same position (this is the norm). After 5 years or so you should have multiple certifications, a few war stories to tell and the contacts to become independent.

The IT part of SAP is quite small and easy to grok if you have CS training, what you will learn is mostly SAP specific terminology, the details of the business process(es) you're working with, learning to work with outdated software packages and learning to work around people in an IT role who have no interest (or skill) in IT.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#185

Post by brazzledazzle »

mbesto wrote: post #111
baxtr wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing, great insights there! How do you see the chance for classical “low-end disruption” like Christensen described? i.e. small players buy small solutions because they’re cheaper and have less scope. Then larger companies start using the low-cost software etc.

Just look at Concur, Fieldglass, SuccessFactors, BusinessObjects, etc All were acquired by SAP because SAP can't do SaaS right and filled specific product areas of ERP. SalesForce is also the greatest example of someone who started fairly small scope (small team CRM) and moved into bigger scope (enterprise CRM + enterprise application platform development).

Seems like Concur has been suffering under SAP based on the outages I keep seeing.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#186

Post by bassman9000 »

bumholio wrote: post #103
netinmate wrote: post #86

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…

> we re-engineered our processes to fit SAP. That sounds just about like the most revolting and negative endorsement you can make for a business solution. Every company is special and the flexibility to adapt to a changing environment is what keeps a company alive during those times of crisis, that always come. "We can't do this because the system does not allow it" is great and expected at the warehouse worker level…

Every company think it's special

FTFY. There's huge benefits in using standardized solutions, like faster upgrades, and fixes to bugs you even didn't know you had but that were solved for other customers.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#187

Post by derefr »

bumholio wrote: post #103
netinmate wrote: post #86

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…

> we re-engineered our processes to fit SAP. That sounds just about like the most revolting and negative endorsement you can make for a business solution. Every company is special and the flexibility to adapt to a changing environment is what keeps a company alive during those times of crisis, that always come. "We can't do this because the system does not allow it" is great and expected at the warehouse worker level…

Yes, every company is special. That doesn’t mean your company has any valid justification for being special, instead of adhering to standards that business technologies can be targeted toward. Most ways that companies are special are just ways that those companies are broken. (Calling to mind the classic “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” quote.)

Look at it like any other utility infrastructure: if you want your factory to hook up to the same power grid as everyone else, it’s your factory that’s got to change, not the power grid. Or do you want to spend half of every new factory bring-up winding your own three-phase-220V-to-five-phase-39.2V transformers to meet your “unique” needs?

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#188

Post by sjwright »

762236 wrote: post #145
pmyteh wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > pulled the kill chord. > pulled the plug Kill cords are a thing (on powerboats, particularly) and the original metaphor is fine. > > For years, Lidl is expanding operations. > For years, Lidl has expanded operations. 'For years, Lidl has been expanding operations'. Past continuous tense is better if the expansion's still going on. > > high-turnover countries > high-volume or high-revenue High-turnover is complete…

It's not about being correct. It has to sound good to the audience too, which guides you to choose one of multiple correct ways to phrase something.

Which is good advice if the audience is exclusively American and fears difference, diversity or the unexpected. Other than cord/chord (which my brain quickly dismissed as a typo) the original post sounds completely fine to me.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#189

Post by derefr »

dragonwriter wrote: post #140
freehunter wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last big project failure I had was due to the company selecting the right technology for the problem, but the wrong one for the company culture. The company's engineers were young and viewed themselves as a startup, which means they like to use bleeding-edge solutions. The company themselves were an old enterprise with well-worn problems, and picked exactly the technology they should have. Unfortunately a newer,…

> The last big project failure I had was due to the company selecting the right technology for the problem, but the wrong one for the company culture. The company culture is a central piece of any business problem you are addressing, if your solution doesn't address it, it isn't addressing the actual problem, but at best a lower-dimensional projection.

Usually there’s no interface to addressing such problems.

Interacting with the cultures of some companies is like trying to treat the mental illness of someone in a dissociative fugue state. You might have a solution that fits how things are on the inside—but how are you going to even get through to them to communicate that, when they can’t hear or see you and are instead lost in their own little world?

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#190

Post by muxator »

JacobDotVI wrote: post #125
bumholio wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we re-engineered our processes to fit SAP. That sounds just about like the most revolting and negative endorsement you can make for a business solution. Every company is special and the flexibility to adapt to a changing environment is what keeps a company alive during those times of crisis, that always come. "We can't do this because the system does not allow it" is great and expected at the warehouse worker level…

The book Softwars spends a lot of time on this topic, where Larry Ellison blasted all of his integration partners for over-customizing their solutions when the correct approach was to update the business processes to match the software: https://www.amazon.com/Softwar-Intimate-Portrait-Ellison-Ora...

So, let's say you manage to update your client's processes to the ones that best fit the SW you are selling. Eventually, the time for upgrading will come. Magically the specification for the new system will be: "it has to work exactly like the last one", and the last one will naturally happen to be yours.

Who wins? The customer? Maybe (how clumsy it may be, he now has a stable, supported process, after all). The vendor? A thousand times this: he has successfully locked-in yet another client, foraging on its inertia.

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