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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)

#291

Post by roflc0ptic »

taway19920706 wrote: post #89
roflc0ptic wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly there was someone making part of that $500,000,000 that wasn't telling them this.

You would think so, but all of the large consulting firms (Accenture, Deloitte, etc) are driven by billing and people wanting to climb the corporate ladder. What the customer needs comes a distant second. Many projects are staffed with 90-95% juniors or people who have no industry knowledge. I've worked alongside consultants from Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, etc over the years and, while many of them are very competent,…

fully agree, think what you're saying is a misread of my comment. GP said "literally everyone says this thing is bad." My comment was "Well, clearly there were people not telling them [or else they'd probably have stopped short of $500,000,000 in expenditures]".

Your comment is a mechanistic explanation of the failure mode, which again, I quite agree with. I worked at PwC for a couple of years; quite corrupt incentive structures and quite a dysfunctional organization because of it.

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

#292

Post by taway19920706 »

jordanbeiber wrote: post #257

Gartner has at least one thing down that I believe is “the way” - they call it “postmodern ERP”. [0] In a postmodern ERP there is no ERP. It’s a strategy where you accept that different domains and companies know their business and processes best and you integrate best of breed systems & services with homegrown solutions. You trade the convenience of letting SAP or Salesforce own your processes against flexibility an…

Jeez, don't mention Gartner. If I see another $%&" "magic quadrant" in my life it'll be too soon.

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

#294

Post by pid-1 »

JackFr wrote: post #262
pid-1 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well they do also have a columnar product SybaseIQ that actually has some adoption. But if that was ASE, their SQL server that would be the first I’d heard of in like 15 years.

I think you are correct, it was SybaseIQ

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

#295

Post by ineedasername »

vain_cain wrote: post #286
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 see a lot of comments here saying a company should adapt their business processes to their ERP, and in my experience they are wrong - with the exception of accounting(Good luck trying to customize accounting modules within ERPs to fit your process). I don't work with SAP, but I've been working with Microsoft's ERP(Dynamics NAV/Business Central) my whole professional career(almost 5 years). When it comes to shipping…

>should adapt their business processes to their ERP, and in my experience they are wrong

That depends. I’ve seen a lot of adaptation to processes that are legitimately & measurably better in time & accuracy ignored in favor of costly customizations out of nothing more than “not created here” syndrome. If a customer doesn’t like that then an off the shelf product is the worst choice they can make unless they are prepared to hire a significant in house dev team.

Otherwise, if you have been adapting your current business processes to deal with the limitations of a legacy system first deployed in the early 80's then there's an excellent chance that at least some of those things can be done more easily in a more modern system. (Though SAP may not always be the best place for that to actually be the case).

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

#296

Post by jordanbeiber »

taway19920706 wrote: post #292
jordanbeiber wrote: post #257

Gartner has at least one thing down that I believe is “the way” - they call it “postmodern ERP”. [0] In a postmodern ERP there is no ERP. It’s a strategy where you accept that different domains and companies know their business and processes best and you integrate best of breed systems & services with homegrown solutions. You trade the convenience of letting SAP or Salesforce own your processes against flexibility an…

Jeez, don't mention Gartner. If I see another $%&" "magic quadrant" in my life it'll be too soon.

Well, this is possibly the only one thing they have down, IMO.

It’s a strategy. No products. No quadrants. Just a more reasonable way of looking at business IT and enterprise development.

It happens to mesh well with my experiences and it’s sometimes nice to be able to whack “Gartner” about in certain settings - especially when someone’s trying to get traction for a magic quadrant product! :)

And to be fair - this is a thread about SAP and ERP…

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

#297

Post by jasamer »

threatripper wrote: post #202
mr_gibbins wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I taught enterprise systems for a while and SAP's ethos is very much 'change your business processes to fit SAP, because if they don't fit SAP, they're probably wrong'. This is actual advice (in slightly different wording) that comes from their training materials.

It's probably both. If you fit the standard pattern you'll have an easy time to adopt. But they also support edge cases with extra work. A small company with many non-standard processes will need so much extra work that it's not worth it. Then it is cheaper to redesign the company and reshape the company processes. I find it very difficult to fight for sensible defaults in a company when everybody only sees their are…

Lidl tried to switch to SAP, keeping their own processes and customising SAP to fit their needs.

After seven years and 500 million euro spent, the project was cancelled and they went back to using their old inventory system.

So, in this case, customising SAP to fit the company's processes wasn't worth it even for a rather large company like Lidl.

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

#298

Post by yyyk »

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…

>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.

Anyone who's ever worked with ERP software knows the entire system pushes you to do the reverse - adapt the business to the ERP. Going against that flow is possible, but expensive. This is especially the case with SAP which was always even more difficult and expensive to customize.

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

#299

Post by taway19920706 »

jiggawatts wrote: post #263
jve wrote: post #214

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 (…

SAP targets ERP, and basically nothing else. You will never[1] see SAP HANA used outside of a SAP deployment, even though it is a general purpose in-memory database with some nice features. Similarly, you never see SAP ABAP used outside of a SAP deployment. Microsoft targets the most generic use-cases possible, even more so than, say, Linux. You can do anything[2] with Windows, SQL Server, ASP.NET, Azure, etc... [1]…

It's an interesting observation. SAP has opened up some of their offerings (like OpenUI5) but there's been very little buy-in. Perhaps it's also partly due to the earlier comments from then-SAP CTO Shai Agassi claiming that open source stimulates innovation? Maybe it's because the products aren't great (I'm no fan of UI5).

FWIW, I'm a massive HANA skeptic - I think it's overpriced and SAP betting the farm on it a few years ago wasn't necessarily the best option. It's a product that was put together from various disparate components - TREX, P*TIME (from Transact in Memory), etc - and that shows. It hangs together like something made of brown paper and string, with so many tuneables it puts Oracle to shame.

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

#300

Post by treis »

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…

>Everytime I talk with my mother, she complains about the system and tells me that another colleague has quit

I used to be a consultant for a big non-SAP workflow product. Had a long time employee quit specifically because of how bad the product was. That was not an easy thing to explain away.

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