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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)

#301

Post by vain_cain »

IceDane wrote: post #289
vain_cain wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> and in my experience they are wrong - with the exception of accounting > I don't work with SAP .. Yeah.. that's just it. Your experience doesn't matter. Adjusting your business to fit SAP nearly as much as an unspoken requirement. It's not just a smart bit of wisdom people throw around. It's literally what you have to do if you want to have any hope of implementing SAP successfully, because it is such a colossal, m…

You're right, for some reason I just assumed all ERP's are as easily extendible as Microsoft's. It just makes sense they would be oriented that way due to the complexity of the world. I often hear horror stories about SAP, and can't for the life of me figure out why it's so popular(except it's more oriented than other ERP's to non-tech savvy people).

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

#302

Post by yyyk »

saiya-jin wrote: post #250
hef19898 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

First part what you mention is a bit arrogant, no company wants to do that, and by doing it would lose most of competitive advantage which can very well be in those edge cases and their handling (and often they do lose their edge by going SAP way and sometimes collapse because of it). Like hearing SAP sales guy. Second part is actually correct - you have to change your way into how SAP works, its just a typical crapp…

>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

The drive to ERP is understandable. The issue is that homegrown solutions suck too - most businesses aren't IT companies and can't properly maintain a custom solutions. Using a third party makes sense, and allows you to hire outside devs with experience. SAP is however usually not the best solution...

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

#303

Post by taway19920706 »

roflc0ptic wrote: post #291
taway19920706 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 incentiv…

Yes, fair point - I didn't explain myself clearly (I've been commenting too much in this thread as it is!). My thinking is that why would they speak up? Lidl has deep pockets so the thinking was probably "another $5/10/20 million will get the project over the line". Not looking at the project and saying "we've billed you so much already, we've delivered something that's not fit for purpose so we'll absorb some of that and get something that works".

For all its faults, SAP is the market leader ERP. Without knowing anything more than what I've read in the general press, I'm fairly confident that the implementation could have been a success.

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

#304

Post by pavlov »

shp0ngle wrote: post #255
wheels wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, as I noted elsewhere in the thread, I worked in R&D at SAP for 4 years (16 years ago), but I have no deep love for it. But I do have some understanding of where it fits in the landscape. What you've said is absolutely true, but it's mostly a feature, not a bug. Once you get big enough to need SAP, it's actually useful to put your business processes on a standardized platform. It's painful, always mind bendingl…

I mean, Lidl is a big company that knows what they are doing. Either is SAP though so, who knows.

Lidl is a private and entirely family-owned business. They tend to have more idiosyncratic business processes compared to public companies. That might partially explain why they struggled with SAP so much.

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

#305

Post by PeterStuer »

hef19898 wrote: post #252
PeterStuer wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"'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?

The externals arw hired as needed, expensive of course. The latter because having good people helps in any scenario.

Yes. I have been one of those. Where do you think the externals get the expertise needed that is particular to the business? We can be professional about it and try to point out the real exceses or answer generic questions, redress and inform on specific knowledge traps or consequences of answering choices placed in front of the customer, but in the end it is still a business that is running 'right-sized' being required to drop everything for a few years to assist an IT transitioning project?

Overloading the customer is one of the simplest ways to make sure ít is not your fault when things most often go south.

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

#306

Post by mejutoco »

jiggawatts wrote: post #158
theshrike79 wrote: post #10

This is a good time to remind everyone of the rules of SAP integration: 1) Your company processes MUST adapt to SAP processes. That's it. You can try customising SAP to fit your processes, but you will just waste time and hundreds of millions of money and then you will fail. Lidl spent almost a decade and 500M€ on its SAP project, but didn't follow rule #1: https://www.henricodolfing.com/2020/05/case-study-lidl-sap-d…

Reminds me of large government departments where some idiot in the IT architecture team says: "Woah there buddy! Why do you think it's safe to assume that Microsoft Office is what we're going to use? What if we decide to use Open Office?" That's maybe one or two words away from a literal conversation in a huge meeting with dozens of high-level IT staff overseeing an org with 30K staff and a petabyte of existing Micro…

I have worked at Fortune 500 companies that use the Google Suite products. Microsoft Office is not the only option in this space.

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

#307

Post by IceDane »

vain_cain wrote: post #301
IceDane wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and in my experience they are wrong - with the exception of accounting > I don't work with SAP .. Yeah.. that's just it. Your experience doesn't matter. Adjusting your business to fit SAP nearly as much as an unspoken requirement. It's not just a smart bit of wisdom people throw around. It's literally what you have to do if you want to have any hope of implementing SAP successfully, because it is such a colossal, m…

You're right, for some reason I just assumed all ERP's are as easily extendible as Microsoft's. It just makes sense they would be oriented that way due to the complexity of the world. I often hear horror stories about SAP, and can't for the life of me figure out why it's so popular(except it's more oriented than other ERP's to non-tech savvy people).

I work in this industry(though thankfully very rarely directly with SAP) and I cannot fathon why it is popular either. As I explained in my other answer in this thread, everything they touch turns to garbage.

I think it's really a case of a self-fulfilling prophecy, of a sort. They are the biggest in the business, so people go with them, which makes them bigger, which attracts people.. and so on. It probably helps(SAP) that they also decades worth of man-hours implementing all sorts of insane business logic(like for accounting, as you mentioned, which is something you definitely don't want to get wrong) where other players are likely to be behind.

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

#308

Post by friendzis »

NolF wrote: post #161
wheels wrote: post #63

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?

Every business software is at least as complex as the business process it models. That's the thing you training for.

Every detail of the business process is now explicit. Employees have to be forced to work according to actual process. You need quite a bunch training for that. Then employees will find shortcuts to make their own job a bit faster/easier, which will fuck up some cases. You need even more training for that and possibly some redesigns. And all you get from that is depression

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

#309

Post by psytrx »

j-bos wrote: post #242
hef19898 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Then why would any one choose to use SAP with that additional tax?

Because SAP is what most other companies in the sector use and because there are few alternatives. And because everyone else is m uses it, it must be good. Right? Right?!

Also, because leading employees usually have no idea about the intricacies of the "old" system and think it's easily replaceable with a solution from the shelf.

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

#310

Post by sotix »

I worked in public accounting with some major corporations as clients. Every single company I interacted with used SAP. It is the de facto software in its field and is deeply entrenched. Its UX is the most horribly wicked thing I’ve ever come across. We would conduct walkthroughs with process control owners that showed us what they would do in SAP to perform their job functions, and it would take multiple, intelligent people to capture all of the processes. The knowledge that the users at the client had built up was extensive and highly specialized. If something happened to that person, I don’t think you could quickly plug in a new person and have them take over. The initial learning curve felt far too high. I’m sure it gave those people a sense of job security.

I feel there is a lot of room to develop better tools that are not so horrid, however, the process for replacing SAP will be long and close to impossible. SAP feels like one of those businesses that’s too big to fail because it’s so entrenched in the corporate world. Somewhat jokingly, I think it would be easier to switch the US over to the metric system. Any challenger will have to be massive, accept losses for over a decade to gain market share, and have incredible support for their clients if they ever want to takeover in the Fortune 500 world. Challenges too great for a mere startup to accomplish.

It’s easier to just hire people to learn the SAP workflow and then hire external auditors to make sure the accounting policies are properly being followed.

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