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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

#211

Post by blattimwind »

blattimwind wrote: post #61
lucb1e wrote: post #22

Human translation (I should practice my German anyway): Because introducing a new data system didn't work out, the Deutsche Post (German Mail) has already booked higher losses a few years ago. The same now happened to Lidl. The planned system still doesn't work smoothly after seven years and more than half a billion euros in costs. Now, the discount store pulled the kill chord. For years, Lidl is expanding operations…

> pulled the kill chord. pulled the plug > For years, Lidl is expanding operations. For years, Lidl has expanded operations. > high-turnover countries high-volume or high-revenue

FYI, especially those who took this the wrong way: GP said he's practising German, so I simply offered how I (native German) would've translated it a bit differently. I never said and certainly did not mean to imply that "mine is right" and "his is wrong".

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#212

Post by fullstackchris »

callesgg wrote: post #112

My personal experience is that the SAP software is ok but it suffers from it’s old outdated architecture. The main problem is not the actual software it is the people who implement it. Sap as a company has no control over the implementors. The implementors don’t understand how the software is intended to work. I can compare it to Samsung Android vs Google Android.

This is the most realistic answer here. SAP is legacy software. Any company that has been using SAP since the 1990s is still probably running parts of software that were written around that time - or even earlier (!)

Actually, this leads to the same types of problems that everyone is discussing here over 'customizing'... at the root it is a collision of ever larger growing global companies with ever-increasing complex process that must rely on older and older code (or customizing) bases, because stopping everything and doing a total overhaul just isn't feasible at such scale.

Every custom program or customized process brings rise to a future risk of headaches/breakages when the system is upgraded, a process is once again changed, or something should be added to the process.

I guess the best analogy I can think of as an ABAP developer, is that it sometimes feels like running on a treadmill that just keeps getting faster...

Someone commented above how IBM used to be the company that was infinitely trusted... and indeed, SAP itself as a company is certainly not at fault, but until the environment changes with SAP customers and all their custom code and processes... I guess only time will tell...

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#213

Post by acdha »

woodpanel wrote: post #150
acdha wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any idea how much the savings was that they risked a 500M write-off to avoid?

Nope, but from what I hear the systems are old, organically grown complex systems (see other commenters here that worked for/with SAP and shared their story). I doubt Lidl can quit on SAP altogether, it's rather the question of how to achieve the business goals with SAP in use.

Seems like all the more reason to hire a couple more employees than trying to save an infinitesimal amount playing games to pretend that they’re contractors

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#214

Post by freehunter »

cerberusss wrote: post #202
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,…

> It was $110m down the drain on the first product What happened afterwards? Did this trigger management to consider why the purchase was the wrong one? I.e. was it a $110m lesson? Or was it really wasted money?

The $110m spent on the first product was the cost of the product plus the consultant time to implement it. Both of those were sunk at that point and could not be refunded. The decision was made that Product A was not working for the company's needs, and listening to the engineers, the executives decided to switch to Product B. The blame went to Product A and the company that makes Product A, because it's pretty fashionable to hate them right now. "The product is outdated, it's inflexible, it's not able to be customized" and so on. Product B was brought it and it's so much more flexible since it includes absolutely nothing out of the box, so more money was spent on custom development to build the batteries that Product A includes by default.

My company did cut a deal on the consulting for Product B since we had already been working for them on Product A, but the products were charged at full price and to my knowledge none of the cost of Product A was returned to the customer.

As far as management was concerned, Product A was a failure because it was old and inflexible. Management was super happy to see every screen of Product B with their logo on it, which we put on there because we had to develop those screens from scratch anyway. Product B didn't have their logo in the upper right corner, it only had their logo on the printed output.

The only lesson learned was "ask your engineers what product they recommend", which I guess is an important lesson regardless.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#215

Post by woodpanel »

acdha wrote: post #213
woodpanel wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, but from what I hear the systems are old, organically grown complex systems (see other commenters here that worked for/with SAP and shared their story). I doubt Lidl can quit on SAP altogether, it's rather the question of how to achieve the business goals with SAP in use.

Seems like all the more reason to hire a couple more employees than trying to save an infinitesimal amount playing games to pretend that they’re contractors

Why should freelancers be forced to become employees? And how is Lidl supposed to find suitable candidates, if - as I said - the most capable and suitable ones, are freelancers?

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#216

Post by passing_by_and »

syntaxing wrote: post #68

Anyone have a good recommendation for SAP alternative for small medium businesses (SMB)? All the companies I work for use something equally convoluted like Oracle and SAP. When I worked at a startup, I debated for a long time which ERP/PDM system will be the most effective (which I never answered).

IFS Applications may be something to consider.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#217

Post by cerberusss »

freehunter wrote: post #214
cerberusss wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was $110m down the drain on the first product What happened afterwards? Did this trigger management to consider why the purchase was the wrong one? I.e. was it a $110m lesson? Or was it really wasted money?

The $110m spent on the first product was the cost of the product plus the consultant time to implement it. Both of those were sunk at that point and could not be refunded. The decision was made that Product A was not working for the company's needs, and listening to the engineers, the executives decided to switch to Product B. The blame went to Product A and the company that makes Product A, because it's pretty fashi…

Thanks, extremely insightful. I've never worked on projects worth more than, say, 5 million euros so these 100+m projects have a sense of scale that's hard to comprehend.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#218

Post by Annatar »

lagadu wrote: post #97
Annatar wrote: post #67

The article says that in the end, “Lidl” decided to ditch “SAP” and continue developing their own, internal solution. From my own experience: good on them; it’ll certainly cost them an order of magnitude less, on the order of five million, to get it going again and then maybe 750 grand a year for the staff salaries. Good on “Lidl” for going back to classic IT.

> and then maybe 750 grand a year for the staff salaries. That is completely unrealistic, it arguably won't even cover the operations teams that you need to have in place for keeping it running and the teams for maintaining and updating the software are going to be a lot more than that.

Even two good full stack, experienced system engineers are enough, and their combined salaries won’t come anywhere close to 750 grand a year. Hell we could engineer you high performing, high availability infrastructure around it for just several grand, and you won’t find any of the usual enterprise garbage like DELL/hp/Cisco/hardware RAID/SAN in the delivered solution because we design our own systems from bottom to top for performance, reliability and economy. Are such people hard to find? Yes they are, but it’s clear why.

A colleague and myself handle many such applications by automating the living daylights out of everything around them. I just finished SAS integration system engineering project, fully automated. Two weeks’ worth of work which took the previous engineer six months non-stop. 750 grand was a generous overkill.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#219

Post by orlovs »

freehunter wrote: post #135
dragonwriter wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SAP failed implementations are unique from other software failed implementations. No, they aren't. > It doesn't fail because of the product; it fails because of the people and politics of the organization. Essentially all project failure are for that reason. (Including ones where one intermediary step on the route to failure was that the people and politics in the organization ended up selecting a solution that was…

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,…

Each problem have got name and surname

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#220

Post by nexxer »

rushabh wrote: post #91
DrinkWater wrote: post #11

SAP was, and will always stay, a mystery to me. It is ridiculously expensive and complex. I know that the problems it aims to solve are also highly complex and very specific, but reading stories like this, plus (if you live in Germany and work in the IT industry) sometimes hearing unbelievable stories from your peers, it always confuses me that companies still want so much SAP. In the late 90s/early 00s a lot of peop…

ERP is probably the slowest moving market in software. Trying to sell ERPs for almost a decade now here is what I learned 1. The first reason for this is compliance. Most large companies are worried about compliance and trust only comes with many years of successful deployments. For a new entrant to be recognized can take upto 10 years and for clients to accept the solution as a solid one. 2. The second reason is com…

I looked around https://erpnext.org , got to https://erpnext.org/get-started , where there is a broken link "Start a Free Trial on ERPNext.com" ( https://erpnext.com/sign-up ).
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