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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)

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For the duration of the ERP project, SAP is not different to any other vendor in that regard, from preparation through hyoer care after go live, yes. Yes, you have 3-5 expensive SAP, or other ERP system, consultants sitting next one internal IT guy and another 3-5 internal business people with a very deep understanding of the business processes in question and solid basic knowledge about ERP systems. Otherwise you set yourself up for failure.

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

#222
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…

> I’m amazed that this is what happens every. Single. Time.

The details about the day-to-day operations disappear quickly as you move up the hierarchy.

My boss recently had a meeting with a large customer of us, we deliver a product used heavily by one of their departments. Here's roughly how that went down:

My boss: "Well, what about when you do orders of type X?"

Manager: "Oh we don't do those"

My boss: "Really?"

My boss brings up the order list and filters on type X, finds at least one entered each day by user ABC

Manager: "Oh... so that's what she does"

So that information was lost in just one level.

This is why we try our best to get the actual users involved when discussing requirements with a customer. I don't think I've ever experienced a project where at least one of the users haven't brought up some edge case the manager wasn't aware of or had completely forgotten.

On the flip side, the projects where the users are left out of it until it goes live never goes well. We'll get it fixed eventually, but there's always pain for far longer than necessary.

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

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same today - S/4HANA is still accessible from the GUI and DIAG is still used. Web applications (which SAP is pushing customers towards) are freed from this, of course (they talk native http to the SAP application server). Remember that back in the late 90s SAP had a native GUI that ran on Windows, OS/2 and Unix (Motif-based) and each had their own native controls (a native Windows listbox is implemented diff…

and experienced users can move very quickly through screens like a terminal but Fiori UI5 is the root of all evil

Agreed! SAP's GUI is generally terrible for occasional users (luckily most have now been moved to web-based applications, of varying levels of user friendliness), but in the hands of experienced back office staff it works well. Not pretty, but very functional and with shortcuts for everything.

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

#224
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

This is not for me to prove or answer, but the OP who brought the anecdotal case here as "proof" that SAP is Scheiße. :)

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

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the motivation to switch to SAP? Was the in-house solution lacking?

Working in a large corp, I find IT consultants from the outside overpromise and underdeliver on projects It’s infuriating as anybody below senior management can see right through it

SAP and ERP consultants are not your average IT consultant in that case.

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

#227
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…

> Do none of the decision makers talk with the people that work for them?

In many cases, no. In part because the people that do the operational work aren't the same people who work for the decision maker.

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

#228
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And ironically, the end result would be worse and more complicated, but the people that worked on it would get to write a blog and put it on their CV about it, and move on elsewhere without having to live with their own decisions.

Declare victory and move on...

Way better than declaring victory and staying for sure.

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

#229

Curious: does SAP have modules for illegal activities, both dealing with it e.g, official bribes, internal corruption, employee theft, cyber ransoms etc, and for actual illegal stuff like money laundering, or for "off the books accounting", special operations etc.

First of all this post is a joke and dont treat it as advise. Tax evasion is illegal.

In Germany, for a long time you could write-off bribes made in foreign countries as a tax expense. It was handled just like any other expense (e.g. telephone cost goes to "telephone costs" account, bribery went to a "bribery costs" account). Also you had to provide some proof that the bribe was actually made. It was ok to cheat foreign countries by bribing their officials or bribe purchasers from other countries to purchase your stuff, but it was illegal to cheat the state of Germany by making a non existant tax expense (for a non existand bribe). After EU was formed this practice became illegal

For the rest of your question, SAP allows you to keep multiple ledgers. One ledger can be official, others unofficial. Those ledgers are conceptually something like "views". Some managers look at different stuff. For example you can have one ledger ("view") done as per local accounting regulations, another as per US GAAP, another per international accounting standards, another just to calculate local tax.. and yes "local tax ledger" is often different than "local bookkeeping ledger" (mostly different way depreciation is calculated). Why would you make self incriminating evidence I dont know. Probably you are sarcastic. But usually the cheaters misclassify stuff in their books (e.g. revenue recognition - like Enron), or not show it at all (e.g. financial derivatives). I saw also something made of nothing (inventory movements that increased value).

Employee theft is just generic FI-AA accounting. When you have many employees sooner or later someone will steal something valuable that the company kept on its books (say an expensive laptop). Other thing is if you catch them.

If your company stole something, you can supposedly just recognize it as unusual gain and pay tax on it. I am not a lawyer so I dont know if your corpotation can go to prison ;), but some say that the tax office wont care if you paid the tax on the stolen goods (this is not tax advise). I heard about a construction company that got some tools from other company (that didnt want it back - they were shipped far away) and they just recognized it. Not sure how the other company dealt with it, sounds like criminal negligence. But maybe they didnt write it off from tax point of view. Was just a cost of running business that ate their result, but not a cost that decreases tax.

I heard that corruption is just handled by giving a bonus to the sales person. Then the sales person just cashes it out and uses this cash as a bribe. Of course such practice is illegal in civilized world. Also illegal if your parent company is in civilized world - they will even make you take those obligatory trainings about that.

If you are interested in reading about tax crime then search for articles about samen dividend used multiple times to change tax scandal. What has the very unfortunate name "cum-ex" ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CumEx-Files ). Some argue that the practice was legal in Germany for many years. Some say it wasnt.

Also you can read about money parked in Bermuda, Irish sandwich, treasure islands... many of those big companies seem to do those tricks.

Those arent related to the software you use

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

#230
post #90

They also own Sybase. (For those who don’t know Sybase supports an SQL implementation which is seemingly used nowhere except sales and trading for Wall Street banks, who largely adopted it in the 90’s and have been slow to move off. MS SQL Server was originally a port of Sybase.)

I've seen Sybase being used by a product sold to telecom operators. If I understand correctly it's most important feature was doing distributed in memory analytics before stuff like Spark or Presto existed.
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