361–370 of 703 posts
This doesn't seem realistic if they mean inflation adjusted; do they mean using today's exchange rate? Or are both numbers inflation adjusted?
At the end of that year, Mercedes hosted a "we're sorry" conference in San Diego and paid for all parts and service managers across the nation to travel and drink at the open bars for a week. I guess that part was okay.
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…
One of the reasons why ERP systems were ao sucessful is because they replaced the majority of administrative jobs by automating them away. One of the results is that those remaining are either highly knowledgable and skilled, or working in a function that has yet to be automated away or outsourced to a cheaper country in that specific company.
For every "We had a great internal platform that we custom built" story, there are multiple "We used a small vendor's product, and it was a nightmare."
Why is SAP successful? Because the general purpose tools (or worse, amalgamations of multiple single-purpose tools) that came before were absolute shit, and SAP is instead only difficult to use.
Progress!
(Also, a TAM that is literally every company, ever)
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.
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.
At these kinds of numbers, I've got to ask a genuine question here: what's the benefit of using SAP as opposed to rolling your own solution?
From reading some of the other comments here, it sounds like getting your business to integrate with SAP involves trying to fit a lot of square pegs in round holes and doesn't always succeed in the end anyways.
At these levels of stratospheric costs, it seems like it would often be cheaper and less risky to simply use your standard software stack of choice and build a custom web app over a database that mirrors your existing business processes perfectly, and then transform/integrate those processes over time as needed for increased efficiency.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Bloomberg Terminal really ? I've never gotten to use it, what can it do ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
SAP is better though as a set of libraries than a solution, and it's worth a lot precisely because it will fit whatever whacky process an organization has so that the org doesn't need to change itself while adopting the software. The most obvious failure modes are going for the lowest bidders incentivizing them to deliver with a skeleton crew, trying to nickel and dime the budget cutting features or their scope or st…
> because it will fit whatever whacky process Funny considering in the 80/90s SAP sales/management was known for saying that you don't adapt SAP to fit your company, you adapt the company to fit SAP. There was another company (was it Baan or JDE? I think Baan as I had too many meetings at the time with those religious fruitcakes) that said they were better than SAP because you don't need to change your processes; you…
Baan still exists as Infor ERP Ln
"Business went well: SAP ended their first year with DM620,000 in revenue, a little over $1M in today’s dollars." This doesn't seem realistic if they mean inflation adjusted; do they mean using today's exchange rate? Or are both numbers inflation adjusted?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the reasons why ERP systems were ao sucessful is because they replaced the majority of administrative jobs by automating them away. One of the results is that those remaining are either highly knowledgable and skilled, or working in a function that has yet to be automated away or outsourced to a cheaper country in that specific company.
Exactly. People underestimate how much SAP is doing behind the scenes when properly configured. And beyond that, they overestimate the ergonomics of any enterprise alternative , especially ones that pre-dated SAP. For every "We had a great internal platform that we custom built" story, there are multiple "We used a small vendor's product, and it was a nightmare." Why is SAP successful? Because the general purpose too…