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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)

#211

Post by sascha_sl »

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".

For one, it's similar to the "nobody ever got fired for picking IBM" saying. Especially in Germany. As far as I remember, one of the managers involved was former SAP too.

But also, SAP has a lot of accounting and legal process knowledge baked in that is reusable even if you customize everything about it. That's what "mildly competent" developers are missing.

Essentially, they used SAP as a framework.

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

#212

Post by lotsofpulp »

ornornor wrote: post #200
lqet wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK, they introduced SAP elsewhere in the company, and it became difficult/too expensive to manage the communication between the old system and the SAP system. I can imagine too well how the conversation between the SAP people and the company went because I also took part in similar conversations with clients in a previous job a long time ago: client asks you if software X can do thing Y. Both you and the person re…

> The complexity of the task is eventually discovered in production. I’m amazed that this is what happens every. Single. Time. And yet we plow ahead with this kind of projects like we have no idea it’s the usual outcome. A couple years and millions over budget later, we rediscover this axiom. I really don’t get it. And try to warn about this, you’re labeled as not a team player or whatever and paint crosshairs on you…

On an individual decision making scale, there are no repercussions for the bad outcome. The people who decide on plowing ahead get another bullet point on resume for “accomplishing” something, since the outcome is impossible for an outside entity to verify, but doing “something” is verifiable.

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

#213

Post by hansel_der »

wheels wrote: post #108
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…

Sorry, but that's just not borne out by data: almost all of the Fortune 500 companies use SAP (something like 80-90%; probably the rest use Oracle, which isn't significantly less painful to move to).

what percentage of those would you say has stagnated?

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

#214

Post by jve »

I'm glad I'm seeing some SAP post on HN frontpage. Why?

When my sister started to working at SAP working on documentation, I had to look at some of those. I noticed something like SAPUI5 and thought: hey, this looks pretty modern and nice and something that competes with Microsoft offerings! https://sapui5.hana.ondemand.com/#/topic/8b49fc198bf04b2d980...

Then I see them documenting/pushing people in CI/CD direction (https://help.sap.com/docs/BTP/65de2977205c403bbc107264b8eccf...) involving Docker, Kubernetes, github and stuff like that. Pretty modern.

I went onto HN to learn how people feel about the development tools they provide and found... nothing. I was like: what? How can they have slick documentation, processes, tools, frameworks, cloud offerings, database (SAP HANA?). So basically I thought - so much competitiveness for Microsoft there. How come HNers don't mention this? What are the people working with this tech? Germans mostly or what? But navigating their documentation, tutorials feels something that could be evaluated as a modern development platform.

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

#215

Post by lock-the-spock »

qikInNdOutReply wrote: post #145
shankr wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My little pet theory is that the old "Do as you told" buisness-culture is to blame for germanys inability to produce great software. Software needs developers with agency, who refuse "idiotic" tasks and fight back to improve the product. This I have experienced first hand where this junior product manager who wrote some ticket whose requirements when got challenged says "it's mentioned here so you have to do it and…

Its really tough to change that mindset though, once it takes hold, its so deeply ingrained. ("Ober sticht unter"). Basically the whole education system needs to push discussions more, were you have to argue a point, proof you are right and stick to your guns. Something regarding this is going right in some education systems and cultures, and fails utterly in others. Its a education to lead, instead of education to b…

On the other hand you could argue too many people that stick to their guns are wrong and this too would be a failure of the education system. The scientific method is what we all need to learn and appreciate: form theories, find evidence for but also against that theory to test your thesis. Improve and refine on this basis or drop a disproved thesis.

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

#216

Post by D_Alex »

_glass wrote: post #27

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 espec…

I am a project manager and a SAP user. First I hated it. And the more I used it, the more I hated it. It's like a really, really uncomfortable chair, strong, but designed with zero attention to ergonomics.

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

#217

Post by kensai »

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…

I am sorry, but anecdotal cases of hickups in the transition between a bespoke system to an SAP one do not mean that SAP is useless. I don't understand why you don't blame the internal IT guys who did not nail the specifications for the SAP to work exactly as wanted in the first place?

And what is the take-home-message here? Should they have stayed with their (admittedly not good enough) internally developed system? Should they have gone for an Oracle solution (plagued with its own set of anecdotal catastrophes)?

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

#218

Post by hef19898 »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #207
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 w…

Agree, except one point. You adapt your system to SAP, not the other way round. And tgat is actually a much better thing than it seems, because SAP is used in so many comoanies that you get a load of best practices out of the box. Adapt those core competitive advantages you have, take the rest as is.

By the way, edge cases, if if they work in a legacy system, are a thing to get rid of during a SAP / ERP implementation. Most people see ERP systems as IT projects and fail. ERP projects are at least as much business reengineering projects as they are IT projects.

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

#219

Post by wanderingmind »

Just wanted to say there are Opensource alternatives to SAP that are used by organizations with large velocity not just in transactions but also in business process changes. For example, Zerodha one of the leading stock brokers in India seems to be using ERPNext. This is just from advertising data, but their CTO is frequently on HN and could probably provide more details.

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

#220

Post by nordsieck »

kensai wrote: post #217
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…

I am sorry, but anecdotal cases of hickups in the transition between a bespoke system to an SAP one do not mean that SAP is useless. I don't understand why you don't blame the internal IT guys who did not nail the specifications for the SAP to work exactly as wanted in the first place? And what is the take-home-message here? Should they have stayed with their (admittedly not good enough) internally developed system?…

> I don't understand why don't you blame the internal IT guys who did not nail the specifications for the SAP to work exactly as wanted in the first place?

Often times it's very difficult to correctly specify a system. This is one of the problems with lock files and why some people have gone over to docker for development.

IMO, the people to blame are management, who needed to appropriately staff the transition for enough time to get it right.

> Should they have stayed with their (admittedly not good enough) internally developed system?

What evidence is there that it wasn't good enough? Sometimes management gets sold on a "better" system, only to find out that it isn't actually better.

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