What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020) • Hacker News Board

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

#451

Post by petesergeant » Fri, Sep 09, 2022, 2:53 PM UTC

CountSessine wrote: post #403

thrown_22 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Same with kid's toys, the difference being that feedback for kid's toys to the purchaser is immediate and painful if the wrong option is selected

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

#452

Post by patja » Fri, Sep 09, 2022, 2:57 PM UTC

tristor wrote: post #419

joegahona wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The sad thing is that Concur used to be great. It was acquired by SAP and then "SAPified", now it's a nightmare. But it does /exactly/ what the bean counters want, which is to mindlessly and stupidly apply policies against business travelers who are just trying to get their job done.

the funny thing about Concur is its origin was the internal expense reporting front end that Microsoft had built on top of their own SAP implementation.

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

#453

Post by achenet » Fri, Sep 09, 2022, 2:57 PM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #273

colonwqbang wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been tons of innovation in the field of electrical engineering since the standard voltages and frequencies were fixed. New installations are made to a better standard than older ones, while still maintaining interoperability. They don't blindly stick to the status quo without ever questioning if there's a more cost-efficient option like big-corp IT departments tend to do.

So if you were building a 40-storey high rise office building and the sparky you hired decided to install electrical outlets that were all 400 Volts and 30 Hz, you'd be fine with that? "Why stick to the status quo?"

I think a better analogy would if the sparky decided to use a new type of wire with better conduction than standard copper.

As GP comment said, there has been innovation in the electrical engineering space that maintains backward compatibility.

So if Open/LibreOffice could actual deal well with MS Office formats, for example, whilst removing the annoying bits (cost, telemetery, UI[0]), then yes, it might be wise to move on from the status quo.

[0] in practice I don't think the OpenOffice UI is better than the MS Office, but in theory some people could prefer it

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

#454

Post by smm11 » Fri, Sep 09, 2022, 3:02 PM UTC

SAP is bizarre. It's like the Objects Anywhere obsession in the late-80s carried on, and here you go.

The rest of the world went one way, and SAP another, and believers are obsessed with it. Despite every other thing they do going an entirely different direction.

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

#455

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Sep 09, 2022, 3:04 PM UTC

ethbr0 wrote: post #363

hef19898 wrote: post #340

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…

[deleted]

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

#456

Post by wing-_-nuts » Fri, Sep 09, 2022, 3:04 PM UTC

giva wrote: post #436

cholantesh wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Microsoft offers Dynamics 365 F&O (previously known as Dynamics AX) for medium to large companies. (Microsoft uses SAP as an ERP).

Absolutely wild to me that MS doesn't dogfood their own offering. That alone would dissuade me from ever considering it.

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

#457

Post by bluedino » Fri, Sep 09, 2022, 3:06 PM UTC

projektfu wrote: post #443

bluedino wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So the answer is no.

Hire a contractor to build an integration. What's what we did to work with Walmart.

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

#458

Post by mopsi » Fri, Sep 09, 2022, 3:09 PM UTC

panick21_ wrote: post #169

tut-urut-utut wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With 100 mildly competent developers on staff (although not with SAP developers) a company can develop in house everything they need to run a business in a period of time that is shorter than what is needed for a typical "SAP adjustment".

It really boggles the mind. What can be so complex that you can not do it in 300 person years of development time plus the cost of SAP. Specially with the tools that exist in open source. Amazing databases, data modeling systems, libraries to integrate into literally everything. It think the bigger problem might actually be to define the process you want to implement. What are the specifications, what of your existin…

> It really boggles the mind. What can be so complex that you can not do it in 300 person years of development time plus the cost of SAP.

Build a inventory planning and tracking system for a company that operates in every country in the world and has to issue and receive invoices, customs documents, waybills etc in hundreds of formats, currencies, languages and accounting standards.

And you are right that the biggest problem is definining processes and data types. Whatever waybill system a 100-head HN Rust and JS crack commando comes up with, you can rest assured that there's some authority somewhere that wants an item displayed differently, so you either patch this and many other edge cases until your codes becomes an unworkable spaghetti, or you go back to the drawing board countless times and ship nothing, or you outsource it to SAP and the likes who have spent decades coming up with a working solution (even if it's not that elegant).

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

#459

Post by solidsnack9000 » Fri, Sep 09, 2022, 3:11 PM UTC

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…

Does it relate to this report in some way? https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA393599.pdf

Authored by Joseph W Kernodle of CLEMSON APPAREL RESEARCH.

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

#460

Post by yyyk » Fri, Sep 09, 2022, 3:11 PM UTC

probably_wrong wrote: post #21

Whenever I read about SAP (which I hate, so don't mistake this for an objective take) it reminds me of the discussion about self-hosting your email: "Oh, no, it's too complicated, you are better off paying someone else to do it for you". The problem being, I host my own email and it works fine , which makes me suspicious of the common takes about ERP too. Now, I get it, once you have to deal with taxes and payroll in…

>Now, I get it, once you have to deal with taxes and payroll in multiple countries it gets messy, but why wouldn't you consider that a core part of your business worth investing into?

Because it's a complex legal issue that isn't in the competency of most companies, getting it wrong has consequences. Since most companies have similar legal requirements, there's enough scale for a large 3rd party. Also, some countries require the local IRS-alike to approve your software if you wish to file certain tax reports. Bad UX pales compared to these requirements.