Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

br.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 227 posts

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#31

Post by kirbypineapple »

antpls wrote: post #13
_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #3

Many (article says 100) consultants with xK$ per day runs up 500M fast.

My model is basic, but at $1200/day per consultant, with 100 consultants, that's still about 4160 days, or about 11 years. Not what I would consider fast.

$150 per hour is on the low end for good SAP consultants. We were paying $300 per hour for some InfoSys SAP HANA people, and even independents were around $200+.

If they're doing anything beyond vanilla consulting work with SAP then I doubt they're using cheaper offshore talent. Or maybe they are and that's why this project has failed so spectacularly. (Note: I'm not saying all offshore talent is hot garbage, I'm saying the cheap talent is hot garbage, especially SAP consultants).

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#32

Post by tluyben2 »

philipodonnell wrote: post #14

> Software from the Walldorf-based software company SAP was to be adapted to the needs of Lidl. So far, however, the new system has only been introduced in the small agencies in Austria, Northern Ireland and the USA. It has been shown that the SAP version developed by over one hundred IT specialists is not suitable for high-turnover countries. I realize these words are not directly from the company and I am reading t…

This is what I always said; you change your company to adapt to SAP, not the other way around. Then you chose the wrong product. SAP has everything and then a billion configuration switches which should match what you want; they say they would want you to adapt it to your needs by programming, but really it's not very good for that.

On the other hand I know some consultants making millions by creating customizations to SAP specific in their vertical and then sell that as a packaged product to all competitors. Usually these products are incredibly niche (like a specific workflow for Scandinavian utility companies that implements some stuff all Scandinavian utility companies require by law but SAP does not provide. Picking between then implementing it by hiring Accenture or buying off the shelve from someone who did this before is easy.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#34

Post by tluyben2 »

pdpi wrote: post #25
philipodonnell wrote: post #14

> Software from the Walldorf-based software company SAP was to be adapted to the needs of Lidl. So far, however, the new system has only been introduced in the small agencies in Austria, Northern Ireland and the USA. It has been shown that the SAP version developed by over one hundred IT specialists is not suitable for high-turnover countries. I realize these words are not directly from the company and I am reading t…

> If you are getting into SAP and "adapting it to your needs" then you will almost certainly fail. This is a tricky topic. If you're getting into SAP and you're not adapting it to your needs, you're almost certainly doing something wrong. The trick is that it _has_ to be a "meet in the middle" kind of situation, where SAP wants to be used in a certain fashion, but also allows a certain amount of leeway — any non-triv…

I think it depends what adapting means. People often (and I guess LIDL fell for that too) just think they can adapt everything to their needs and that really is not possible. A lot of processes benefit more from changing the processes than the SAP implementation of those processes. IMHO.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#35

Post by PaulHoule »

raverbashing wrote: post #15
DrinkWater wrote: post #11

SAP was, and will always stay, a mystery to me. It is ridiculously expensive and complex. I know that the problems it aims to solve are also highly complex and very specific, but reading stories like this, plus (if you live in Germany and work in the IT industry) sometimes hearing unbelievable stories from your peers, it always confuses me that companies still want so much SAP. In the late 90s/early 00s a lot of peop…

Using services from big name companies is (half) the corporate world version of an expensive fashion item/fancy car and half "wanting someone to sue in case things go wrong". Except an expensive fashion item doesn't ruin your ability to do your job and is still probably cheaper in relative scales.

I think the big attraction of SAP is that it lets CEOs smooth out earnings.

They can get projections of what the number are going to be for the quarter continuously so in the last few weeks of the quarter they can speed up or slow down sales and spending to hit the earnings numbers they want.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#36

Post by fps_doug »

raverbashing wrote: post #5

Well at least they pulled the plug and didn't go bankrupt like Target Canada

That's what I thought. I have direct experience from two companies who wasted a shit-ton on SAP, and pretty much everybody who had to deal with it was happy afterwards. And I'm not just talking people being grumpy because they had to get used to something new. Often used processes became much more complicated, logic flaws were introduced (I witnessed someone breaking into tears a couple weeks in).

One of those companies also wen't bankrupt a couple years later. They weren't doing all too well before either, so wasting a huge load of money on a system that basically makes your internal processes grind to a halt probably didn't help.

Hearing that you waste half a billion on this really makes me wonder if it isn't much more practical to just develop custom made software in house.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#37

Post by patman81 »

antpls wrote: post #13
_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #3

Many (article says 100) consultants with xK$ per day runs up 500M fast.

My model is basic, but at $1200/day per consultant, with 100 consultants, that's still about 4160 days, or about 11 years. Not what I would consider fast.

One way to calculate: 7years × 365days × 2k/day × 100 "experts" = 500m

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#38

Post by vertex-four »

simias wrote: post #20
DrinkWater wrote: post #11

SAP was, and will always stay, a mystery to me. It is ridiculously expensive and complex. I know that the problems it aims to solve are also highly complex and very specific, but reading stories like this, plus (if you live in Germany and work in the IT industry) sometimes hearing unbelievable stories from your peers, it always confuses me that companies still want so much SAP. In the late 90s/early 00s a lot of peop…

I don't know much about SAP besides the fact that I don't think I've ever heard anything positive about it (but then again, nobody talks about the trains that are on time). I always assumed that it was a "nobody gets fired for choosing SAP" situation. It's huge, it might be clunky but you know that if you pay for the support it'll probably end up doing mostly what you want and it'll mostly keep working. The alternati…

The problem is, I think, that using SAP essentially is creating your own solution in-house... but being tied to a certain amount of structure from the start rather than being able to go off and completely do your own thing. The way it’s implemented also doesn’t generally allow for creating small solutions and building up - either the entire project succeeds several years after it’s started, or it all fails.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#39

Post by simias »

arethuza wrote: post #29
simias wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know much about SAP besides the fact that I don't think I've ever heard anything positive about it (but then again, nobody talks about the trains that are on time). I always assumed that it was a "nobody gets fired for choosing SAP" situation. It's huge, it might be clunky but you know that if you pay for the support it'll probably end up doing mostly what you want and it'll mostly keep working. The alternati…

"you could do the same thing for 1% the cost and it'd work better etc." I used to think that - then I did some work with large scale ERP systems and realised that I was wildly wrong. Fortunately I moved into other areas while I still had some sanity.

Well that's an other thing, when you look at these solutions from afar you often see the core functionality and think it's not a big deal but the devil is always in the details, the millions of small functionalities hidden everywhere for specific tasks is what makes it very hard to compete. Every company has specificities, they want to interface with $external_software, they want to import $arcane_data_format etc... You start by writing a slim and tidy database engine and the next thing you know you have to implement an MS Excel to protobuf converter.

It's easy to underestimate the complexity of an ERP for even a moderately sized company, let alone one the size of LIDL.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#40

Post by darkcha0s »

antpls wrote: post #13
_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #3

Many (article says 100) consultants with xK$ per day runs up 500M fast.

My model is basic, but at $1200/day per consultant, with 100 consultants, that's still about 4160 days, or about 11 years. Not what I would consider fast.

I think that price is a little inflated. 1200€ a day for a freelancer maybe, but the "normal" consultants will cost no more than 800-900€ a day because of blanket orders, etc.
Post reply on HN