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What's SAP?

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Re: What's SAP?

#211

Post by bargle0 »

erikbye wrote: post #136
OldGuyInTheClub wrote: post #32

SAP has enabled/mandated an army of people at my company who manage it and ruthlessly control even read access to it. The software is user-hostile, intentionally obscure, and all requests for slightly customized reports have to go through a multilayered approval process - often up to corporate - where it competes for funding against other survivors. Needing something custom invites constant questions of why the stand…

When my organization (20k+ employees) started its process to migrate many systems to SAP, this project filled a seven-story building. Cost: 2 billion NOK, so far.

$220m

Wow.

Re: What's SAP?

#212

Post by zxienin »

buzzkillington wrote: post #201

I wanted to be angry at it. But I couldn't. It's so bad it's reached greatness. A piece of software that plays (at least) one sound on every user action, and the sounds are completely arbitrary and 8bit at best . Where you have to press 5 buttons in a row to do the one thing it's meant to do. Where you have an angry fruit salad in a time sheet. A piece of software that takes 30 minutes to enter your worksheet time. A…

almost a unique poetry, this is

Re: What's SAP?

#213

Post by james_s_tayler »

cromulent wrote: post #58
ksahin wrote: post #19

"A 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." Wow, really?

He's conflating SAP (a company) with the ERP system, but reality is a little different. There are 133,000 tables in a system I just checked, and 40,000 are flagged as configuration.

Sounds like a perfectly cromulent database.

Re: What's SAP?

#214

Post by Proziam »

bargle0 wrote: post #204
Proziam wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to agree. I've had the massive misfortune to have to implement and test (almost?) every open source ERP/CRM system out there from vTiger, Odoo, SuiteCRM, Yeti, NextERP, Dolibarr, ...and more that I can't recall from the top of my head. Each and every one of these systems suck. Sometimes they suck in creative and extraordinary ways. But, one thing you can count on is that there's a real reason that they suck. I…

Which of the open source ERP systems is the least bad?

If forced, I'd say Dolibarr is probably the best for 'real' ERP use-cases. I say 'real' because ERP is a buzzword that has been beaten to death to describe things that don't even approach what it's intended to mean.

A close second is Vienna Advantage. IIRC the development actually came from former SAP devs who have real-world exposure to the problems ERP is supposed to solve.

Re: What's SAP?

#215

Post by thdrdt »

carstenhag wrote: post #166
theshrike79 wrote: post #38

The best advice about SAP I've had is that when a company is starting to use SAP, the company must adjust its processes to match the SAP model - not the other way around. If you do it the other way, you'll first spend millions and millions customising SAP and then your project will fail at some point. It will also make all SAP upgrades completely impossible and they will cost millions and millions. All of the success…

A perfect example for a failure for this is Lidl's Elwis, they invested 500 million € into it and in 2018 they aborted the entire project. English article: https://www.handelsblatt.com/today/companies/programmed-for-... Key quote: >Unlike many of their competitors, Lidl bases its inventory management system on purchase prices. The standard SAP for Retail software uses retail prices. Lidl didn’t want to change, so the…

But I still think this is a failure of SAP.

What if the business model of Lidl is way better than the standard? Then Lidl is very wise not to follow how SAP works.

Re: What's SAP?

#216

Post by bumby »

OldGuyInTheClub wrote: post #47
kumarvvr wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The software is user-hostile, intentionally obscure This a million times. I don't know if good interfaces can not be built in SAP, or if it's very difficult to do, or if the developers of apps on SAP platform just don't care. It's a real headache to use and completely confusing. It's 2020 and one would hope software companies realize the value of a good, clear, effective user interface.

It brought the "swim lane" mentality to my outfit. There is a "process is king" mindset where people exist to run some report or the other with a completely impenetrable abbreviation and set of unmarked mandatory fields also with no intuitive signifcance. Grab the next item on the work list, do your thing, and mark it complete. If some project asks what's required on either end or how to move their need forward, that…

> with no intuitive signifcance

This isn't a problem with a standardized process, this is a problem with leadership not explaining to those doing the work how they fit into the whole and why their actions are important.

"Process driven" does not have to mean rote, mindless, automaton-like action. It should be more about thoughtful action conscious of how those actions have downstream effects rather than intuitive "do what feels right" methods

Re: What's SAP?

#217

Post by cognaitiv »

Attunity (now Qlik) Replicate [1] has an SAP ABAP change data capture connector. Replicate directly from SAP to Kafka, AWS/Azure, HDFS, etc., in real-time. I am surprised that more SAP shops are not doing this to separate operational ERP concerns from agility in the rest of the business.

[1] https://www.qlik.com/us/sap-analytics/sap-data-replication

Re: What's SAP?

#219

Post by eXpl0it3r »

oblio wrote: post #154
mbesto wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take a very neutral position to this. Enterprise software at the scale SAP is operating (mainly its core ERP) at a Fortune 500 enterprise level. This characteristic (needs at that level) are user-hostile, not the software. Imagine this situation: - You're a F500 pipe manufacturer and a sales person needs to enter an order for 100 pipes to be manufactured and sent to a customer in the US Now imagine you need to: - O…

I really like this industrial parallel: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/05/11/making-wrong-code-... > The first time I walked into the bakery I couldn’t believe what a mess it was. The sides of the ovens were yellowing, machines were rusting, there was grease everywhere. > “Is it always this messy?” I asked. > “What? What are you talking about?” the manager said. “We just finished cleaning. This is the cleanest i…

The provided example is a bit questionable. Sure it "works", but this is a perfect example for using a typed language, so the compiler/transpiler/static analyzer can immediately tell you that type EncodedString can not be implicitly converted to string.

No need for naming conventions that have to be taught to everyone and half of the people keep forgetting. Of course that doesn't take away the responsibility to teach people why there are two types, but even if they don't know and just copy-paste, it's better than someone mislabeling a variable name and thus not making it any easier to track down a bug because of it.

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