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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)

#351

Post by spaniard89277 »

arcturus17 wrote: post #209
threatripper wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Each of the old IT staff in the old system you can replace with 3-5 SAP consultants. Is this facetious, or unintentionally so? Do you mean you need to replace one in-house staff with between 3 and 5 and presumably very expensive consultants?

I work for a large telco in the tech support side. We had a bunch of internally-developed tools that were clumsy but worked and fitted our workflow.

We've been fed an off-the-shelf solution with modern tech like Angular and the like.

And even without the SAP burden the company is basically destroying our departament. I guess they don't care to lose us poor peasants but they're basically losing al know-how and one of the only two edges they have against competition.

I can't say I care too much at this point, but it's amazing how easy can companies destroy themselves for not caring about their employees.

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

#352

Post by greedo »

q-big wrote: post #314
magicalhippo wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

At a certain level, managers have to delegate broadly. I think this is best illustrated by the US Army. In an ideal situation, the commander general guidance about his intent. Then his subordinates plan how to accomplish it. I wouldn't expect a Colonel to remember how to fire a mortar properly, and it's the same in IT. My manager expects a well run, secure and efficient datacenter. He expects his SMEs to take care of the details and bring issues to his attention if they exceed the ability of the SMEs to resolve.

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

#355

Post by pbalau »

GrumpyNl wrote: post #313

All this negativity about SAP, but why do companies invest in it then? A quick search on google shows no happy users.

The reverse survivorship bias. No happy human user will praise SAP, since most of the time they might not even be aware they are using it. All they know is click this, type that, click this other thing and job done.

My parents won't ever praise Delphi, yet they (probably) still use that piece of software I wrote with Delphi 20+ years ago.

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

#356

Post by jl6 »

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…

> 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.

Alternatives do exist. Well, one does - Oracle ERP. Migration is indeed long and close to impossible, and it’s very much out of the frying pan into the fire.

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

#357

Post by tenebrisalietum »

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…

I feel like I see SAP in a US company anytime it has major business units outside of the US. I know Walmart and Honeywell use it, and they both are multinational. I have always wondered: Does SAP do something better for international finance/etc. than others or is it just an accepted standard?

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

#358

Post by greedo »

pilsetnieks wrote: post #183
dandare wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UX is horrible because: a) Engineering: Nobody will rewrite 20 year old views just to improve the UX. In many cases, nobody even dares to touch the 20 years old spaghetti code. b) Sales: The buyer is not the user. The buyer (playing golf with a sales rep) doesn't give a damn about the actual productivity of what he is buying. c) Management: There is a solid economical rationale in not giving a fcuk about UX. Over…

> The buyer is not the user. The buyer (playing golf with a sales rep) doesn't give a damn about the actual productivity of what he is buying I see this trotted out a lot but are all large companies really that oblivious? Do none of the decision makers talk with the people that work for them? Surely those executives aren't so divorced from reality and common sense that they don't see a problem when people complain th…

The simplest explanation is a mis-alignment in incentives.

Executives want to have successful projects to show to their value to an organization. But usually the board members are unable to comprehend the details of a project. So the herd mentality kicks in. The CTO will seek approval for SAP and provide Gartner magic quadrant BS to give the board a level of comfort.

Now whether SAP is the right tool, or if it inconveniences users doesn't matter a whit to the CTO. All that matters is budget and timeline. The CTO wants to be able to speak to the board and say that the project timeline was met and under budget. All else is a complete non-factor.

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

#359

Post by ebiester »

jwr wrote: post #148
fabfabfab wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of purity, the first thing Hacker News would do is try to run SAP on a Kubernetes cluster, refactor crucial bits in Rust and shard the database into sqlite3.db files on per user basis. We'd also recommend you restructure your office for a more open space, bring down the cubicles and make sure the conference rooms are glasswalled and have funny names. Bringing pets to work is mandatory.

This is so true! As the author of a (small) ERP/MRP SaaS, I am often amused when I read HN and observe the thundering herds of fashion followers — today it's Kubernetes and Rust, Postgres and sqlite have a longer lifespan, but tomorrow it's going to be something else entirely, and you necessarily need to use those :-)

I think there's a bigger issue at play that at some point I want to write on.

Small problems benefit from small tools. Large problems benefit from large tools. However, small problems grow and your bet as a small problem is that your tools will grow with you.

In practice, they usually do. If they don't, you end up extending the tool or rewriting it in a larger tool.

So, our tools start small, and small companies use small tools, and the ecosystems grow together. Then, the successful ecosystems end up the next large problem toolkit.

As you're a small ERP SaaS, you're banking on growing with your customers, I presume. And you can make an argument to start on the large tools at the cost of initial velocity, but that's your tradeoff.

I really think the innovation that needs to happen is a system that has a prescribed growth path. Retool/Excel/similar that can compile to a simple app that can adapt to more complex patterns as the need comes.

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

#360

Post by [deleted] »

q-big wrote: post #314
magicalhippo wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

[deleted]
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