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What's SAP?

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Re: What's SAP?

#41

Post by john_minsk »

godelmachine wrote: post #27

Warning - very very vague question Would someone kindly differentiate between the ERP vs ITSM (IT Service Management) industry in perspective for me? I would in ITSM and often wonder if I would had been better off staying in ERP like SAP? Secondly, how does ERP fare in terms of complexity between game development vs ERP Software development? I understand the target base is totally different (Gamers vs Enterprise clie…

SAP has a separate product for ITSM: Solution Manager. Everything else is beyond that scope.

What is important to understand is that SAP is standardized way to do business for ALL departments in big corporation. You probably can't be "expert is SAP". You can be expert in SAP treasury system, SAP data warehouse, SAP ITSM, SAP data analysis, SAP call center etc.

I heard that SAP consultants are paid very well and I think it will stay that way. But I guess this thread sums it up perfectly: it is due to the complexity that these implementations bring to organisation and lack of elegant solutions from modern software development world. So in terms of money it is good, but the trade offs are quite big.

Re: What's SAP?

#42

Post by wrdalex »

john_minsk wrote: post #26
dvdhsu wrote: post #7

Hi! (I'm one of the editors of this post.) When I was researching SAP, I found a fact sheet: https://www.sap.com/docs/download/2017/04/4666ecdd-b67c-0010... , that has quite a few interesting facts: * "[SAP] customers distribute 78% of the world’s food and 82% of the world’s medical devices" * "[SAP] customers include 98% of the 100 most valued brands" * "77% of the world’s transaction revenue touches an SAP system"…

TBH SAP is almost required for big corporations as they usually are publicly traded companies, require external audits from BIG4(and these guys know how to get data from standard SAP models, not so much from you self-developed system) and have to report their financials in consistent way. For example Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google all can use SAP internally. But it would be false to state that all their business…

Every respectable ERP provides ways to export/access the data in a way that covers all national/international requirements for audits and reporting. This is not SAP-specific.

Re: What's SAP?

#43

Post by halfnormalform »

sdan wrote: post #11

Nicely written article, but I don’t see what the use of an ERP is? Can’t it just be replicated with some excel spreadsheets?

In the the same way the Mona Lisa can just be replicated with some canvas and paint, sure.

Re: What's SAP?

#44

Post by tonyedgecombe »

A best case scenario looks like Cisco’s ERP implementation, which took them 9 months and $15 million. In comparison, Dow Chemical’s implementation, for example, took $1 billion and 8 years;

At the last SAP site I worked at the general feeling was implementing SAP had left the company weak. This lead to them being taken over by one of their competitors.

Re: What's SAP?

#45

Post by warpspin »

godelmachine wrote: post #27

Warning - very very vague question Would someone kindly differentiate between the ERP vs ITSM (IT Service Management) industry in perspective for me? I would in ITSM and often wonder if I would had been better off staying in ERP like SAP? Secondly, how does ERP fare in terms of complexity between game development vs ERP Software development? I understand the target base is totally different (Gamers vs Enterprise clie…

Regarding the second question, it is not comparable at all. ERPs are still "standard" software, despite what the article implies. The difficulty is not so much on the software side, but on getting the software actually agree with the business processes and often the fault is less the software, more a convoluted business process which is simply not truly automatable. Then you run against the whole organizational inertia while implementing.

I can only speak from a bit of SAP experience:

So usually, implementing an ERP, at least SAP, first means "customizing" it, that means adapting the thousands of configuration parameters to the organization. This is no programming task, in fact you "just" operate a GUI. The difficulty is more in finding the proper the option.

True development tasks are often very restricted in scope - most often it is just the development of a new report or custom data export (one of the annoying things of SAP ECC always was, that it really really really loves to keep its data to itself. While theoretically everything is open - you can even browse the underlying the database directly from the UI, with appropriate rights, and can also quite comfortable run even DDL statements against it - often you are back to ABAP very soon for any kind of interfacing tasks simply because SAP likes to live in its own world with its own standards for data import/export (Idocs for example or its proprietary RFC interface). Things might have gotten better recently with e.g. the OData support, but I haven't yet worked with a system which had that.

Re: What's SAP?

#46

Post by wrdalex »

jimnotgym wrote: post #29
hanniabu wrote: post #5

SAP wouldn't be that disheartening to use if it weren't so damn slow and if UI/UX wasn't from the 90s.

In some of the repetitive data entry areas, like forms to enter purchase invoices, it used to have the most productive UI I have ever used. The cursor started in the right box, tabbed to the right places etc. I would swap that screen for my current modern one any day

This is the feedback I've got while working on a customisation project based on a different ERP (red one). Users actually expect your interface to behave in the exactly same way as their ERP does (TABs and keyboard shortcuts included).

Re: What's SAP?

#47

Post by OldGuyInTheClub »

kumarvvr wrote: post #39
OldGuyInTheClub wrote: post #32

SAP has enabled/mandated an army of people at my company who manage it and ruthlessly control even read access to it. The software is user-hostile, intentionally obscure, and all requests for slightly customized reports have to go through a multilayered approval process - often up to corporate - where it competes for funding against other survivors. Needing something custom invites constant questions of why the stand…

> The software is user-hostile, intentionally obscure This a million times. I don't know if good interfaces can not be built in SAP, or if it's very difficult to do, or if the developers of apps on SAP platform just don't care. It's a real headache to use and completely confusing. It's 2020 and one would hope software companies realize the value of a good, clear, effective user interface.

It brought the "swim lane" mentality to my outfit. There is a "process is king" mindset where people exist to run some report or the other with a completely impenetrable abbreviation and set of unmarked mandatory fields also with no intuitive signifcance. Grab the next item on the work list, do your thing, and mark it complete. If some project asks what's required on either end or how to move their need forward, that's not your problem. That project has to divert someone to first figure out the unpublished process and then contact everyone in the chain. If you can't run reports yourself, you're at the mercy of others. And the first rule of SAP is that there is no mercy.

Re: What's SAP?

#48

Post by djmobley »

kumarvvr wrote: post #39
OldGuyInTheClub wrote: post #32

SAP has enabled/mandated an army of people at my company who manage it and ruthlessly control even read access to it. The software is user-hostile, intentionally obscure, and all requests for slightly customized reports have to go through a multilayered approval process - often up to corporate - where it competes for funding against other survivors. Needing something custom invites constant questions of why the stand…

> The software is user-hostile, intentionally obscure This a million times. I don't know if good interfaces can not be built in SAP, or if it's very difficult to do, or if the developers of apps on SAP platform just don't care. It's a real headache to use and completely confusing. It's 2020 and one would hope software companies realize the value of a good, clear, effective user interface.

> It's a real headache to use and completely confusing.

You could say the same about Vim.

I suspect there are workflows and shortcuts heavy SAP users have learned over time that make them highly effective, and they are now resistant to change.

Re: What's SAP?

#49

Post by reportgunner »

cm2187 wrote: post #28
meddlepal wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like there continues to be a huge disconnect between UI designers and their users. I'm a power user so I am not the best person to ask for UX advice, but I talk to people all the time that just wish they still had the classic Windows 9x UI's and things more or less were "boring". Reminds me a little bit of a statement about how Taxi drivers can tell you what works architecturally better than an actual architec…

That’s the problem with software. There are two categories of software: software that their developers use themselves, and software made for other people. Visual Studio is the prime example of a software made by people who use it, it continuously improves (minus a few hiccups), it is made for the most used functionalities to be at your fingertips, it doesn’t hide stuff in layers of submenus, etc. The list is long of…

I agree with your comment except Visual Studio part. Everytime I use Visual Studio it feels like I'm using a big pile of hacks of varying age.

Re: What's SAP?

#50

Post by halfnormalform »

oaiey wrote: post #18
JackPoach wrote: post #3

That's actually a very well written article. I never imagined an article about SAP or ERP would be interesting to read.

The last paragraph is not good. Is it only me or does it leave a conclusion lurking around without saying it aloud?

It doesn’t match the quality of the rest of the article and would really benefit from some fleshing out.
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