Hmmm, worst thing ever used. Glad it's getting retired in our organization.
As a matter of interest, what's it being replaced with?
What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
231–240 of 703 posts
Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?" M…
At least we’re paid decent amounts of money to crash the bus into the wall…
Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking of purity, the first thing Hacker News would do is try to run SAP on a Kubernetes cluster, refactor crucial bits in Rust and shard the database into sqlite3.db files on per user basis. We'd also recommend you restructure your office for a more open space, bring down the cubicles and make sure the conference rooms are glasswalled and have funny names. Bringing pets to work is mandatory.
This is so true! As the author of a (small) ERP/MRP SaaS, I am often amused when I read HN and observe the thundering herds of fashion followers — today it's Kubernetes and Rust, Postgres and sqlite have a longer lifespan, but tomorrow it's going to be something else entirely, and you necessarily need to use those :-)
Same here, all the hip trends of the day, and then back to the same Java, .NET and C++ that I have been touching for several decades, Boring Technology™.
Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
#234Earlier 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…
I hate how bad UX has become the standard due to management/executive negligence, and there is so little the actual users can do about it. Even small players tend to neglect UX because of the financial incentives.
I hate it how UX is so much more important than actual funtionality. I blame Instagram, Apple and consumer apps in general for that.
Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 implemen…
IT guy for ERP customer here.
This sounds about right to me. In particular, it tends to partiton the organization into (A) the people whose job it is to plug away at the ERP system (orders, invoices, tickets, etc), and (B) the people who actually do whatever it is that the company does.
(C) - License costs can also play into this partitioning.
Then you hope (and work to ensure) that the benefit achieved for B, by having consistent org-wide information systems to work from, is enough to cover the overheads of A and C.
Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 implementatio…
Yes, that is also my understanding. SAP implements "best practice" solutions, and companies adapt to SAP to get the advantages af that.
Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hate how bad UX has become the standard due to management/executive negligence, and there is so little the actual users can do about it. Even small players tend to neglect UX because of the financial incentives.
I hate it how UX is so much more important than actual funtionality. I blame Instagram, Apple and consumer apps in general for that.
I don't see why you'd split the two. Actual good functionality is UX. Lack of good functionality implies the user has a bad experience given the intended goal.
Big players tend to do the minimum, either attracting with shiny red herrings or barely doing anything at all. Both are bad UX.
Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
#238I 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…
This is a genuine question, I don't mean to rip on you: Why is everything SAP I've used terrible? From payroll, employee/student management to industrial control systems - the UX is horrible and it seems so brittle that you're happy if you're out of there as quickly as possible. I've had to reach out to my school's IT multiple times over the years since random parts of the SAP tool they used break.
I think part of it is the problem space to be honest. SAP basically gets used to glue all the fiddly bits of organisations together and I don't know that there is an approach to that set of problems that doesn't get tangled up in corner cases.
With a lot of the nice looking web based apps we're used to looking at, the UX and the target domain evolve together and if there isn't an elegant way of doing a particular operation then there's going to be pressure to drop that operation entirely. SAP deployments always have to do everything in the organisation so complicated corner cases either get dropped (bad) or end up with suboptimal interfaces (also not great!).
Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
#239"Everyone" is on SAP or Oracle. And yet...
They send you PDF invoices with no consistent formatting.
There's never a decent way to get an electronic invoice.
Any electronic files you do get, such as lists of invoices, are in a completely different format from all the others.
There's no way to place an electronic order without using their website (manually or by scraping)
At best, stuff comes by email. Often, you get emails that say you can go to the website to manually download the PDF.
Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 se…
"'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"'
Where do you think the customer is going to find that army of hyper competent experienced staff ideling around their premisess waiting for the day an SAP project drops?