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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)

#311

Post by psytrx »

threatripper wrote: post #174
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…

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.

From experience, the factor is more like 5-10. Depending on the complexity of the existing solution, and depending on the wealth of custom implementations, of course.

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

#312

Post by NikolaNovak »

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?

I think key part is "for duration of project". Savings, if successful, then come for the lifetime of erp.

One thing I've seen frequently is treating erp implementation as IT project. I'm a technical team member doing erp implementations for last 25 years (not sap) but I'll freely admit erp implementation is not about me or technology. It's primarily a business transformation project. You need those erp business process experts to guide and customize, AND you need thorough willingness to change your internal processes to fit the industry best practices you're buying. "successful erp project" empathically does not mean "installed it and it runs". It means thorough and detailed understanding of requirements, mapping to new processes, customization where absolutely positively necessary, substantial and organized and embraced business transformation, extensive training, and thorough testing including user acceptance testing.

If you think is erp as something you just install and life will be the same but magically better, you're gonna fail hard. Missed requirements and edge cases, and or significant internal resistance to change, are frequent challenges.

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

#314

Post by q-big »

magicalhippo wrote: post #222
ornornor wrote: post #200

Earlier 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…

Isn't this story rather a strong sign that many managers are simply incompetent? I mean: how can you seriously manage things if you don't even know what kind of tasks you actually manage?

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

#315

Post by tiborsaas »

hef19898 wrote: post #245
roydivision wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It isn't use for you as a user, it is meant to run your company. You are not the user, you are the one feeding data into the system. And that is actually perfectly fine in case of ERP systems.

That's nonsense, people interacting with software are by definition users. If they pay for it we call them customers.

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

#316

Post by 7thaccount »

My father worked for a company that had its own in-house system and migrated to SAP as their CTO made them. Everyone views it as vastly inferior as apparently SAP doesn't do anything out of the box and requires a zillion customs to do anything. At the end of the day you get locked into a very expensive system that has to replicate everything you were doing before.

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

#317

Post by calvinmorrison »

my tidbit of the SAP world (I now work for a company building connectors to these ERP).

I had a upgrade process meeting for SAP and I invited my usual SAP engineers.

I had a polite decline from one of my favorites so I dropped by her desk to ask her why she wouldn't come.

"I work on SAP 7, not SAP 8. I'm going to be retired in 2 years by the time this project kicks off and dead by the time it's implemented"

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

#318

Post by irrational »

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 work on a home grown solution at work, but they are considering abandoning it for a third party system that everyone we talk to says is inferior in every way. For some reason, the higher ups trust software built by someone else rather than their own people.

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

#319

Post by hef19898 »

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…

As a rule of thumb, take 80% of an ERP system as is adopt max. 20%. If said edge cases are truely your competitive advantage by all means get them working in your ERP system. More often than not, people consider edge cases competitive advantages when they usually are just legacy stuff that doesn't really matter.

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

#320

Post by calvinmorrison »

magicalhippo wrote: post #222
ornornor wrote: post #200

Earlier 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…

It's human nature. I do this rote task so frequently that I don't know the steps.

Most of my work right now is trying to eke information out of customers about their ERP system so we can get it connected via EDI or to their Ecommerce system (shopify whatever).

So we go live, with a whole process revolving how payments are accepted - and then within an hour there's a problem. Nobody mentioned that certain customers have a different payment workflow!

Back to the drawing board, except we're already live.

This happens again and again.

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