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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)

#421

Post by mikesabbagh »

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 left SAP 1 year ago, they just try to add every option to their software and keep maintaining 25 years old applications that are still used by some companies. This is why their software is super bloated and a small and simple task takes so many steps to achieve.

Now they are migrating to the cloud, and loosing customers as they push them off their on prem s0lutions

Clayton Christensen has some nice youtubes about disruptive innovation where he predicts the death of SAP

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

#422

Post by Seattle3503 »

brightball wrote: post #408
dpflan wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> New leaders will come in and often insist on tools that they already know, rather than take the time to learn about better options.

I've seen this with developers. Newly joining developers, particularly junior and mid career developers, tend to insist on using the languages, libraries, and techniques they are familiar with. Senior Developers don't seem to do it as much. Either because they are familiar with many things, or because they have been on the other side of these well intentioned suggestions to know when it is actually productive.

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

#426

Post by bumby »

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"?).

My (completely speculative) hunch is that they may have been chasing efficiencies beyond the scope of uniforms, or even beyond the scope of the army.

For example, the solution may not have worked well with other procurement items and they wanted a single platform. Or the navy already had an SAP contract that could be leveraged without spending money on a separate stand-alone army solution.

So it can look like a bad decision that generated local inefficiency while globally it was a better choice. That's not to say SAP actually delivered on those promises.

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

#427

Post by marcosdumay »

hef19898 wrote: post #221
arcturus17 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

For the duration of the ERP project, SAP is not different to any other vendor in that regard, from preparation through hyoer care after go live, yes. Yes, you have 3-5 expensive SAP, or other ERP system, consultants sitting next one internal IT guy and another 3-5 internal business people with a very deep understanding of the business processes in question and solid basic knowledge about ERP systems. Otherwise you se…

Yeah, I can't see any better argument against contracting an ERP package. This is exactly true, and those 3-5 way more expensive new developers you are hiring through a 3rd party won't create anything better than the original one that knew your company. (They are not temporary either, because the duration of the ERP project is forever.)

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

#428

Post by notanormalnerd »

jumpifzero wrote: post #66

Welcome to my world:) I'm a software dev and always worked in or around sap (~13years). Sap's secret sauce was understanding that different companies have mostly the same needs. All have employees that need paying and maybe shifts to be tracked. All generate invoices. All buy stuff from suppliers, etc. So they built different solutions (HR/FI/etc.) For those needs. All running on the same technical platform with its…

This needs to be higher up. Big points that SAP has going:

* Compliance * Standard Processes * Interoperability between companies (a lot of purchasing runs automatically through some sort of SAP Software)

What mostly fails in my experience is the customization. Everybody thinks their process is super special and important and needs 100 escape hatches. But if you ask them to draw their process on a whiteboard, they couldn't do it for one single process without drawing 100 question marks.

That is where SAP shines: The whole thing is so bureaucratic, coming from Germany, which is something you will need after your company has grown beyond a certain size.

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

#429

Post by benibela »

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.

In my department, we only use LaTeX

(but it is in academia)

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

#430

Post by jerf »

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"

Probably not. SAP is an everything-to-everyone product. Using Fred Brook's terminology for essential versus accidental, the problem with everything boxes is that even just the essential complexity of such a product is so insanely large that they are sufficient to produce a "horrid" product. Of course they don't have just the essential complexity and add a healthy dose of accidental complexity, but so would any putative "less horrid" replacement by the time it successfully solved the same essential problems as SAP.

Closer to home, "bug tracking" is an example of an everything-to-everyone product. I can't even count the number of times I've seen a "simpler, less horrid" bug tracker get started due to the perceived horribleness of the current bug tracker, but the new bug tracker simply became the old one once it tried to grow into the same niche. This may sound strange to 2022 ears, but I remember when JIRA was being pitched as the simpler solution and developers were pretty keen on it. There will never be a mature bug tracker that is any fun to use, because by the time it's everything to everyone it'll just be the same morass of being everything to everyone again. It turns out that the "less horrid" bug tracker wasn't actually intrinsically less horrid... it just wasn't everything to everyone. Instead it was a bug tracker for developers, so developers love it. But then if developers are going to be allowed to use it everywhere, it has to satisfy all the other stakeholders too, and it inevitably mutates into an everything for everyone product.

(See also: Salesforce. Letting users configure custom DB schemas is a key indicator of being an everything to everyone product. To some extent, programming languages too; there's a lot of people who pine for something simpler (such as the people who think that if we just went to visual languages, or tried to jam everything into "no code") and don't understand that by the time you have a general purpose language that is truly general purpose you've got a large amount of irreducible essential complexity whether you like it or not.)

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