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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)

#441

Post by franze »

SAP plays the long game. Friend of mine worked in Uganda to introduce a mobile coffee-farmers-(over-lots-in-between-steps)-national-(to-international)-markets app.

the goal was to create some transparency for the producers and to fight coffee-loss (every step taking a bit coffee away and sells it otherwise).

the project was a huge success. With fast adoption and immidiate benefit for the farmers and village collection centers.

the software behind it is SAP! and they do not even charge for it, they sponsor it - together with Deutsche Entwicklungszusammenarbeit.

Why?

Even though Uganda is not yet a profitable market for SAP.

And not in 10 years. And not in 20 years.

In 30 they might.

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

#442

Post by irrational »

targafarian wrote: post #337
irrational wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work on a home grown solution at work, but they are considering abandoning it for a third party system that everyone we talk to says is inferior in every way. For some reason, the higher ups trust software built by someone else rather than their own people.

Marketing is a helluva drug. People are trained to trust big companies and the bigger the company the more they trust it. I think the issue is the variance in solutions if you compare all the homegrown solutions against all the big company solutions. And that gets managers into the mindset that there's less risk in a generic big company solution. But of course that misses all the details for a specific case like your…

In this case, the third party company is tiny. And they keep screwing up. Even something as simple as right to left language translations they can't get right, even when we walked them through how it should work and shared code with them.

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

#443

Post by projektfu »

bluedino wrote: post #327
projektfu wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could, if it was offered to small customers. Big buyers can insist on EDI. Small ones usually cannot and their systems are not expecting it, because EDI is "Enterprise scale" and not SME-scale. Do you know of a QuickBooks-scale accounting system that does EDI easily?

There are VAN's like Aruba that allow smaller companies to interface with the big players using EDI

So the answer is no.

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

#444

Post by elzbardico »

irrational wrote: post #318
lqet wrote: post #171

My mother works for a fairly large textile lab. For decades, they used an internally developed system for lab reports (they had a few programmers and admins they called the "nerds" that did nothing else than extend and maintain the system). The company switched to a SAP solution a few years ago. Chaos ensued. The SAP solution missed so many edge cases that a huge number of lab reports were either inaccurate or comple…

I work on a home grown solution at work, but they are considering abandoning it for a third party system that everyone we talk to says is inferior in every way. For some reason, the higher ups trust software built by someone else rather than their own people.

Resume padding for managers and executives:

"Successfully lead SAP implementation bla bla bla saving bla bla bla streamlining bla bla bla"

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

#445

Post by yyyk »

vain_cain wrote: post #286
lqet wrote: post #171

My mother works for a fairly large textile lab. For decades, they used an internally developed system for lab reports (they had a few programmers and admins they called the "nerds" that did nothing else than extend and maintain the system). The company switched to a SAP solution a few years ago. Chaos ensued. The SAP solution missed so many edge cases that a huge number of lab reports were either inaccurate or comple…

I see a lot of comments here saying a company should adapt their business processes to their ERP, and in my experience they are wrong - with the exception of accounting(Good luck trying to customize accounting modules within ERPs to fit your process). I don't work with SAP, but I've been working with Microsoft's ERP(Dynamics NAV/Business Central) my whole professional career(almost 5 years). When it comes to shipping…

As someone who has also worked with Microsoft Dynamics - mostly the other products, which are IMHO at least an order of magnitude more complex from NAV/BC - you can customize it heavily, but the high complexity will get to you. Some things are actually rather difficult to do (e.g. anything to do with Ledger or BOM calculations).

Adapting Dynamics ERP to business process is a challenge of its own, and not every company can do it. At least it's possible in Dynamics, SAP is a mess - most customers I know with SAP have to use external software and import/export for significant customization.

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

#446

Post by hef19898 »

joegahona wrote: post #383
cholantesh wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Workday Financials is a meaningful competitor. I used SAP Concur at my last job and "horribly wicked thing" is accurate. It reminds me of that "evil UX" thing that was making the rounds a year or two ago.

In addition to finance SAP covers everything from production over procurement to finance, HR, sales, MRO, logistics and everything in between.

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

#447

Post by avisser »

rvba wrote: post #151
danuker wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can try customising SAP to fit your processes So you are paying hundreds of millions to get a canned, pre-packaged, inflexible solution? Why is SAP still in business? Is it solely customer misinformation?

The competition is generally worse. I tell it as someone who saw few different products offered by the competition. This doesn't mean that SAP is good. Also this doesn't mean that there isn't space for someone who could do it better by starting with a clean state (what sounds easy, but is actually very, very hard to pull off). First you should know that the market for ERP systems is very wide. There are LOTS of vario…

> table and column names are German abbreviations too).

This was the craziest part of doing SAP development. (I'll admit this is an America-centric viewpoint.) But the codes to get to various screens were (to me) totally random. e.g. to create a purchase order, the code is ME21N. Only after 6 months, did my German boss let me in on the secret that all the codes "made sense" if you knew the German phrase for "purchase order" or whatever.

I guess it's fair for the world having to deal with .cfg .txt .exe and all the other English that's essential for modern computing.

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

#448

Post by ramesh31 »

bumby wrote: post #426
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"?).

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 d…

And this is why enterprise software is always so horrid to use when compared to a simplistic web app. It’s about features above all else. If someone can do their job, that’s all that matters. And tightening up the UX around that workflow falls to the very bottom priority against developing new features.

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

#449

Post by jonhohle »

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…

The government funding mechanism doesn’t incentivize cost optimization, and in my experience, does the opposite. Money is allocated to be spent and if not spent is “lost” and may be cut from subsequent budget years. This leads to massive end of year purchases to use remaining funds or starting unnecessary projects just because money was allocated, regardless of whether needs have changed.

It’s a really broken system that no one seems interested in fixing.

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

#450

Post by mejutoco »

ianceicys wrote: post #401
mejutoco wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, some people used Excel (finance). My point is it is not inconceivable to use something other than Microsoft Office.
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