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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)

#21

Post by probably_wrong »

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 multiple countries it gets messy, but why wouldn't you consider that a core part of your business worth investing into? You may not be paying with accountant salaries, but you are still paying with yearly contracts you can never get away from and with a horrible user experience for every employee that has to interact with it (oh, P69, how much I hate you).

Some people dream of being a superhero. I dream of being one day big enough to have an SAP salesman come to me so I can tell them "no".

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

#22

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

for anyone wondering, erpnext.com is a good "alternative" and it is very active on github with lots of people working on it each and every day.

they have hosted plans as well as allowing users to selfhost and only pay for "support and customization" for anyone needing which works out pretty well for many....

SAP is well and good but you have good alternatives

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

#23

Post by carstenhag »

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…

The issue there was that Lidl did not adapt to SAP. They tried to adapt the SAP system to Lidl. Everyone tells you that this is a really bad idea. Everyone.

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

#24

Post by gryn »

cm2187 wrote: post #11
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.

Though they have many competitors. A consultant who works on integrating SAP told me once that what gave them a competitive edge is that they let 3rd party consultants integrate SAP while others insist on in house consultants. That means that 3rd party consultant have a clear preference when it is time to advise the client on which system they should pick. That was 20y ago, not sure if it is still the case.

still the case today with salesforce doing the same on the CRM side of things.

the few consultants that I know that work with these two seems to be paid more than generalist consultants.

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

#25

Post by sally_glance »

raverbashing wrote: post #14
hardware2win wrote: post #4

ERP industry is so hard(painful) that I wouldnt want to work in it unless they paid top of the top Good luck competing in that industry > basic installation of SAP has 20,000 database tables, 3,000 of which are configuration tables. In those tables, there are ~8,000 configuration decisions you need before even getting started. Gotta be fun :)

True But most companies are realizing their use case is not that complex and that in reality you don't need all those config options Then you go with Salesforce or something else saving you one zero or maybe two even

I saw a lot of SF projects budgeted and staffed in roughly the same way as you would SAP.

SF started with CRM and has been expanding to ERP, SAP is the other way around. Both are mainly Cloud/Platform-based offerings today, both feature multi-month certifications, high rates for contractors and lots of effort administering/configuring/customizing.

I expect in a couple of years they either turn out exactly the same or swallow each other.

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

#26

Post by kumarvvr »

hardware2win wrote: post #4

ERP industry is so hard(painful) that I wouldnt want to work in it unless they paid top of the top Good luck competing in that industry > basic installation of SAP has 20,000 database tables, 3,000 of which are configuration tables. In those tables, there are ~8,000 configuration decisions you need before even getting started. Gotta be fun :)

I always wondered, why wouldn't an in-house developed lean, ERP system would not trump a behemoth like SAP. A few reasons seem plausible.

  - No one gets fired for hiring SAP
  - Getting an in-house software developer team that can develop an easily extensible / modifiable ERP system is neigh impossible
It is one of my dream to build an alternative ERP system. But it looks like sub-ERP functions (payroll, HR, etc) have been tackled by many companies and they are wildly successful.

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

#27

Post by _glass »

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 especially now is the different paradigm changes in between. ABAP, the programming language of SAP, is quite nice nowadays. CDSViews are a great invention, and so on. There's really a lot of innovation buried in the bad documentation, it's getting better. In summary as bad as it is, I don't see an alternative for all of the backoffice work. SAP is really flexible and supports a lot of different processes. A thing that makes it so costly is a lot of time culture, no small releases, MVP, and so on. But you can be agile with SAP, especially if you move to the cloud.

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

#28

Post by simonjgreen »

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…

This is really rule 1 for any core LOB/BIS/ERP system, not just SAP

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

#29

Post by fxtentacle »

In effect, SAP is like a franchise system for running certain industries.

SAP sells you a software system that includes ready-made workflows and battle-tested instruction manuals. Plus they can synchronize your purchasing and sales departments with everyone else that also uses their software. So if you want to start a small company working with the big car manufacturers, you buy SAP and suddenly you can send quotes in precisely the format that VW expects, because you and VW now both use the SAP specification. In that regard, signing up for SAP is quite similar to signing up to be a Subways location.

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

#30

Post by lobochrome »

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…

Because you can find SAP data entry employees/specialists everywhere - but full-stack developers nowhere.
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