Earlier quoted context omitted.
Answer from former SAP employee (may have changed in the last 15 years): Two main reasons: - It's actually terminal software, that's translated into a GUI from a text interface on the fly. - The people that buy SAP never have to use SAP. Its interface is not a selling point.
The article says you should reserve 17% of your project budget in training. Couldn't good UX help with that?
What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
241–250 of 703 posts
Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
#242Earlier 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…
Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
#243My 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…
Unfortunately I don't think this is realistic scenario because when you start a company you probably don't have time/money or need for SAP or anything like that.
Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you don't see the full picture here. The developers working for SAP usually don't need any certifications. They are regular computer scientists/physicists/mathematicians etc. who write code / design systems. There are of course the certified consultants that work for clients of SAP. I can however understand why they need certifications. It's probably impossible to configure these systems without some kind of…
I think they were talking about "front end" SAP devs that are hired to work on custom solutions by a client. Not the core devs that actually work for SAP on building the product itself.
Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The UI isn’t just terrible, it’s hostile to the user. The rare times I am forced to interact with it I feel like I’m using software that was meant for some other purpose. I’ve worked in the industry for 25 years, I’ve never come across worse UI.
Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
#246My 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…
What was the motivation to switch to SAP? Was the in-house solution lacking?
Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
#247Earlier 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.
SAP is better though as a set of libraries than a solution, and it's worth a lot precisely because it will fit whatever whacky process an organization has so that the org doesn't need to change itself while adopting the software. The most obvious failure modes are going for the lowest bidders incentivizing them to deliver with a skeleton crew, trying to nickel and dime the budget cutting features or their scope or st…
Funny considering in the 80/90s SAP sales/management was known for saying that you don't adapt SAP to fit your company, you adapt the company to fit SAP. There was another company (was it Baan or JDE? I think Baan as I had too many meetings at the time with those religious fruitcakes) that said they were better than SAP because you don't need to change your processes; you change the software.
Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
#248I worked at a global multi-national telecom that used an ancient version of the software. You suffered with it. I'm convinced -- because we were always cash strapped (having been through bankruptcy and back) that part of the motivation for keeping it was that it made doing expense reports so difficult that many abandoned them.
SAP looked cool at the time[0]. The web UI had an appearance of a web app and attempted to behave like one. It had many flaws, but they all went unnoticed because of one massive flaw -- it failed to handle the Back button in the browser ... and the UI often put you in a state that "instinct" made you want to click it. When you did click the back button, the web app would see two of you. As this was not an allowed state for a user, the new "you" couldn't access the system until the old "you" timed out ... an hour later. This meant a sufficiently complex expense report could take two days to complete since, on average, hitting the back button (by accident) twice per line wasn't unusual. So if it resulted in less than $40 coming back, it often wasn't worth the effort to do the expense report.
My entire experience with SAP was limited to integration with downstream (simple) internal applications and expense reports. Others spent all day within it. It was bad enough to warrant a special launch page that popped the thing up in a window that lacked the back button[1] but that was a pretty inadequate solution.
The worst part was hiring SAP developers. Having not looked at the product since the mid-00s (and being far from huge-company-land), I don't know if it's still the case, but I suspect so -- SAP was basically a custom setup everywhere it existed. It had the same graphics, similar UI, but requires substantial development to tie everything into it and tie it into everything else. I ended up participating in the interview when the company "got serious" and decided to put some money toward hiring a solid SAP developer/lead to get everything upgraded and solve some of the worst problems we had. We brought on a guy and paid him 25K more than the highest paid developer on staff[2]. He, like the previous four (under-paid) employees, lasted about three months before he left for substantially more money. We tried "paying some third party", too. The problem there was similar -- whomever was contracted to us was either incapable of doing the work or didn't last long enough to get past initial planning.
The end result was SAP existed in our organization at the same version it was when it was setup, initially, until we got rid of it ten years later when we merged with a competitor. The competitor ran Oracle for ERP and had a team of people to manage/develop/maintain it. Personally, I'm not an Oracle fan, but I wanted to buy Larry Ellison a beer.
[0] This was the mid 00s.
[1] This idea, I think, was tried -- IIRC, the more frequent case was accidentally running into the Backspace key on a non-text field and having the browser hot-key back which isn't solved by taking the buttons away.
[2] This was saying a lot considering we had software actively developed in C++ that managed a pretty massive audio-conferencing service (and set of related bridges/hardware). I met with several on that team -- they were geniuses. The "SAP Guy" had to know Java and SAP. I interviewed him. I wasn't impressed.
Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 kinda feel like SAP is the ultimate in checkbox checking. If you ask every department what they need, and write it all down, then find the product that matches all the checkboxes, SAP is it.
Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
#250Earlier 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…
Second part is actually correct - you have to change your way into how SAP works, its just a typical crappy legacy rigid mammoth software that requires overpriced army of devs/analysts, not much more. If it would be marketed that way, they would go bankrupt very quickly because no company willingly wants to do that, and certainly not at that cost.
But anytime some c-suite manager picks up SAP, you can be sure there were some nice meetings done in ultra luxurious places and more often than not some bribes went that way, in one form or another. This is the way, if your system sucks so much it destroys companies