Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

retool.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 703 posts

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

#201

Post by throwaway787544 »

I have worked in places where they didn't have a real ERP, and things were a mess. Hard to get anything done, hard to understand, a decent amount of time wasted.

Then I worked places with SAP. And if they were lucky and just "did things the SAP way", the result was easy to understand, actually worked, and saved time.

Can you do that without SAP? Of course. Can a SAP system also suck? Of course. I have no argument to make here, other than it's sometimes good and sometimes not. If I had to compare it to anything it'd be IBM.

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

#202

Post by threatripper »

mr_gibbins wrote: post #187
avereveard wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

I taught enterprise systems for a while and SAP's ethos is very much 'change your business processes to fit SAP, because if they don't fit SAP, they're probably wrong'. This is actual advice (in slightly different wording) that comes from their training materials.

It's probably both. If you fit the standard pattern you'll have an easy time to adopt. But they also support edge cases with extra work. A small company with many non-standard processes will need so much extra work that it's not worth it. Then it is cheaper to redesign the company and reshape the company processes.

I find it very difficult to fight for sensible defaults in a company when everybody only sees their area and has a very strong opinion about that. Only a strong force like the SAP transition can break up with those encrusted structures.

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

#204

Post by crubier »

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".

[flagged]

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

#205

Post by TacticalCoder »

danuker wrote: post #35
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…

> 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?

> Why is SAP still in business? Is it solely customer misinformation?

The lock-in is huger than huge. I don't think a single company on earth managed the art of locking in customers as well as SAP. Does anyone ever drop SAP? I don't know: the cases have to be exceptionally rare.

It's a racket. Highway robbery. This kind of behavior brings in a lot of revenues.

I personally do think the sale to the customer is complete and total misinformation. And once you've fallen for it, there's no way out.

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

#206

Post by tibbydudeza »

Former SAP ABAP developer here with 11 years of experience in Retail/FICO/MM/HR/CRM/POSDM.

The software is rather shit esp the old HR and MM stuff ported over from R3 but there is a HUGE ecosystem around it of consultants and consulting companies - nobody is going to get fired for choosing SAP.

It is a huge money hole - take any proposed budget and multiply it by 3.

But heck it transaction flow works and all the modules tie in with each other and the accountants are very happy.

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

#207

Post by johannes1234321 »

lqet wrote: 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…

The thing with an SAP introduction is that one has to analyze and understand how the business actually works to adapt the system to it. However in reality nobody really knows. There is a general idea, hopefully, but over time there are more and more shortcuts and side processes and things. Unless you analyze them an introduction of any new business software (be it SAP or Oracle or whatever) will fail.

Whether it is worth it depends a lot and is hard to say. It will certainly demotivate many employees who are used to the old way, but might lead to streamlining (partially due to software, but norendue to analysis) and more insights (with risk of then optimizing the wrong metric)

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

#208

Post by PeterisP »

wahern wrote: post #177
tut-urut-utut wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you postpone the transfer, then it simply costs more, as you've put more effort on the in-house system that you'll throw away.

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

#209

Post by arcturus17 »

threatripper wrote: post #174
lqet wrote: 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.

> Each of the old IT staff in the old system you can replace with 3-5 SAP consultants.

Is this facetious, or unintentionally so? Do you mean you need to replace one in-house staff with between 3 and 5 and presumably very expensive consultants?

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

#210

Post by emptyfile »

pilsetnieks wrote: post #183
dandare wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UX is horrible because: a) Engineering: Nobody will rewrite 20 year old views just to improve the UX. In many cases, nobody even dares to touch the 20 years old spaghetti code. b) Sales: The buyer is not the user. The buyer (playing golf with a sales rep) doesn't give a damn about the actual productivity of what he is buying. c) Management: There is a solid economical rationale in not giving a fcuk about UX. Over…

> The buyer is not the user. The buyer (playing golf with a sales rep) doesn't give a damn about the actual productivity of what he is buying I see this trotted out a lot but are all large companies really that oblivious? Do none of the decision makers talk with the people that work for them? Surely those executives aren't so divorced from reality and common sense that they don't see a problem when people complain th…

ERP guy here

>people complain that things don't work

that's a problem and we're going to have to fix it

>it takes an order of magnitude more time and effort

that's not a problem

the fact that Jane the accounting drone has to do twice the amount of work, or has to hire an intern to help her out, or even wants to quit because the job is so awful now is not a problem

it's a rounding error in the overall cost of implementing an ERP system

a new screen with some new data to show for the exec is worth 20 Jane's and her opinions on the new system

you can't even call the new system unethical or fraudulent because 10 people other then Jane can now stop using broken excel sheets to organize their work

basically Jane is collateral damage

Post reply on HN