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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)

#401

Post by ianceicys »

mejutoco wrote: post #306
jiggawatts wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of large government departments where some idiot in the IT architecture team says: "Woah there buddy! Why do you think it's safe to assume that Microsoft Office is what we're going to use? What if we decide to use Open Office?" That's maybe one or two words away from a literal conversation in a huge meeting with dozens of high-level IT staff overseeing an org with 30K staff and a petabyte of existing Micro…

I have worked at Fortune 500 companies that use the Google Suite products. Microsoft Office is not the only option in this space.

Just because you didn't see office doesn't mean it's not there running some backend processes. Excel is embedded everywhere in Fortune 500 companies.

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

#403

Post by CountSessine »

thrown_22 wrote: post #394
ethbr0 wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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. The people who are hurt by it are not the people deciding to buy it. SAP looks great for Csuite executives when it produces reports. For an engineer trying to enter their hours it's an hours long torture session every two we…

This is the very definition of enterprise software - the people who buy it are not the same people who use it.

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

#404

Post by russb »

crazygringo wrote: post #366

> ERP isn’t cheap. A large multinational company may spend $100 million to $500 million in total on implementation: $30 million in software license fees, $200 million in consulting fees, millions for hardware, and millions more to train managers and employees. A full implementation takes four to six years. A CEO of a large chemical firm was quoted as saying, "competitive advantage in this industry might just come fro…

It's been said before: you don't customize SAP to fit your company, you customize your company to fit SAP.

"We held firm to the NO CUSTOMIZATION rule, we re-engineered our processes to fit SAP. Other than a few hiccups when integrating all aspects of a company that has 100 sub companies, and is under federal, state and local regulation the project basically went off without a hitch." [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17541092#17542500

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

#405

Post by mardifoufs »

brightball wrote: post #387
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…

20 years ago I was a grad assistant for a couple of professors who'd built a pretty incredible JIT supply chain platform. The US Army started using it to manage their uniform orders and it worked so well that two entire warehouses were torn down due to lack of use. A new general came in and insisted on using SAP. 6 months later, they had to rebuild both warehouses. EDIT: For some additional context, the system manage…

I'd have thought that the US army would be using its own solution, or at least an American one. Using a foreign made platform to handle such a critical aspect of your military (logistics) sounds a bit weird. Not that I think that those risks, if they even exist, haven't been thoroughly evaluated by tons of experts in the army!

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

#406

Post by alexdbird »

> the automation of white collar work (often via the computer!) began in the 1960s.

The Lyons Electronic Office would beg to disagree. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEO_(computer)

The first business application to be run on LEO was Bakery Valuations, which computed the costs of ingredients used in bread and cakes [and] LEO took over Bakery Valuations calculations completely on 29–30 November 1951

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

#407

Post by jcpham2 »

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 this comment deeply as a child company of a parent that uses SAP and they really really really want us to use their (the same/unified) ERP system but it's really bad. 37 clicks across 7 tabs to place an order. No thanks.

We've spent 3 years refining our processes and automating our ERP system, both the data structures we need and the design of the UX. No thank you SAP

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

#408

Post by brightball »

dpflan wrote: post #392
brightball wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20 years ago I was a grad assistant for a couple of professors who'd built a pretty incredible JIT supply chain platform. The US Army started using it to manage their uniform orders and it worked so well that two entire warehouses were torn down due to lack of use. A new general came in and insisted on using SAP. 6 months later, they had to rebuild both warehouses. EDIT: For some additional context, the system manage…

Are there any documents supporting this? I ask because I am curious what official documents exist around this idea of mandated return to inefficiency -- there must've been a gain elsewhere (or is that too optimistic)? Plus there must be costs documented associated with the first and second program. Genuinely curious about this type of decision (call it "inefficiency thrash"?).

Over my career I've seen it communicated as "leadership support" where people implementing different programs know that they are only as effective as the leadership support behind it.

I do some Scaled Agile Framework consulting and the implementation a good example, because it can be fantastic but if leadership at the top of the company doesn't get on board the entire process will self destruct or be bastardized.

The professors who built the system knew this about every customer they talked to and it was a big learning experience for me. New leaders will come in and often insist on tools that they already know, rather than take the time to learn about better options.

If you've ever read Skunk Works (fantastic book), you see lots of this in the military procurement process in the US. It's bad enough that you worry how much it's hurting US national security innovations.

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

#409

Post by spaniard89277 »

jjslocum3 wrote: post #375
cholantesh wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there really no meaningful competitors to SAP in this space?

Siebel is a meaningful competitor to SAP

I've used a Siebel frontend and I wanted to cut my veins every time.

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

#410

Post by wwarner »

There’s a really great novel called Red Plenty by Francis Spufford which is set in the USSR of the 1960s. The protagonists are mathematicians and economists who build a computerized planning system, not so different from SAP, to support of Kruschev’s goal of fully automating planning and manufacturing by 1980. Beautiful prose, too.
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