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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)

#341

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

sotix wrote: post #310

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, intelligen…

SAP, Excel, and Bloomberg Terminal are applications where there such a long tail of uses that it is hard to see them being replaced in the corporate world anytime soon.

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

#342

Post by 656565656565 »

psidium wrote: post #339
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 (…

For all the documentation you see surrounding SAPUI5, it is very incomplete when you have to actually use it do develop something. It is built on top of jQuery and extremely slow. They are very adamant on MVC with two-way databinding (the opposite of React or most other frontend libraries that have been around for almost 10 years). The backend request is geared toward OData (think graphql but table-oriented), and add…

slow is putting it very polite

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

#343

Post by max51 »

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…

>It will certainly demotivate many employees who are used to the old way

In my experience, what demotivate them is that a lot of the features in the marketing materials for these types of products are lies and they are filled with bugs. The executive who chose the product typically don't use it so they think it's a great tool. When you report major problems or workflows that makes no sense, they brush it off like it's just small details that need to be ironed out in the future because aren't the ones dealing directly with them on a daily basis.

The exec get sold on an AI feature and it's the intern who is then forced to deal with a search bar that take 2 minutes instead of 0.5s to search and gives you vastly inferior results.

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

#344

Post by sumedh »

wvh wrote: post #270

SAP software is the Jira for non-IT software. A slow corporate mess nobody wants to log in to until your boss complains you haven't fill out the SAP thing, so you sigh and try to accept the fact, go in there and try to get it done before life becomes totally dark and unbearable. Most are only exposed to SAP software for time allocations, travel arrangements and expense management, but I imagine there's some poor soul…

> Jira for non-IT software. A slow corporate mess nobody wants to log in

What problems do you have with Jira?

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

#345

Post by dominotw »

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 SAP solution missed so many edge cases that a huge number of lab reports were either inaccurate or completely wrong because information was lost in SAP translation between different labs.

Is this the story of every migration, every rewrite though?

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

#346

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

irrational wrote: post #318
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.

I worked on home grown internal apps a long while ago and saw the same happen. Upper management gets sold on some ERP system (SAP, Oracle doesn't matter) and believe it will save money, streamline things, etc. whatever the marketing/sales people of the ERP say it will do. The yearly expense for licenses on the ERP was enough to fund a team of 5-10 developers and QA.

Here are things upper management doesn't consider:

* Picking the same ERP solution everyone else in your industry uses means you have zero competitive advantage now. Homegrown solutions with teams staffed to run them could give you an advantage.

* You need to pay expensive consultants to do things with ERP. If you want any customizations they will be a bottleneck for all future updates, possibly having to bring in expensive consultants every time you need to upgrade.

* The culture shift for employees is usually negative across the board. The IT people supporting it, the end users inside the company, basically the choice implies that management doesn't value its people or their thoughts on how to do their work.

* Vendor lock in. Switching from one ERP to another isn't likely to happen. They can raise their licensing/cloud costs when contracts are up and your company is likely stuck.

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

#347

Post by hef19898 »

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).

If you dig you find as much screwed up ERP projects for SAP as you find for Microsoft or for any other system. Differences in absolute numbers are caused different market share of the systems in question.

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

#348

Post by tootie »

sotix wrote: post #310

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, intelligen…

This kind of thing is that gave rise to RPA as an industry.

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

#349

Post by tootie »

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…

I feel like you could search and replace "SAP" with "Salesforce" in this thread and everything would still be perfectly accurate.

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

#350

Post by hef19898 »

jasamer wrote: post #297
threatripper wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh yeah, Lidl is such a great example of what not to do when it comes to ERP systems!

If memory serves well, Liqui Molly had similar, but cheaper, experiences with Microsoft.

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