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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)

#471

Post by achenet »

lonelyasacloud wrote: post #170
theplumber wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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? It may work using an open source model. However you don't really want to invest into non-core business(es). It takes away money, talent and energy that you would better put into doing what you do best. I've experienced this first hand…

> Time spent on the none core business is time wasted. Except there are many businesses that have and are doing very nicely precisely because they ignored what would labeled as non-core activity by many. Take Apple for example, where would it be if it had stuck to making Macs? Or more recently spent billions moving to their own chips. What about Amazon? Truth is more subtle. And with SAP, it's easy to understand both…

Apple is a bad example - they make computers, that is their core business. From chips (ok, they don't own any chip fabs, iirc they used to have their own manufacturing but later outsourced to China, but they do design) up to software, plus marketing and distribution (which is always where the money is - eg Nike makes boatloads selling shoes while the sweatshop workers are paid pennies). The iPhone? It's a computer with access to cellular networks. The iPad? It's a computer. Everything Apple has made since OS X in ~2000 is a Unix computer. Even, if I'm not mistaken, watchOS and tvOS are Unix based.

It's like when Mercedes/BMW et al started making SUVs after years of making sedans and coupés. It's a different form factor, but still the same basic product.

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

#472

Post by derefr »

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…

Sounds kind of like the old mainframes that airlines use. And I would think the same solution applies: rather than replacing it per se, why not wrap the SAP data model by creating bespoke "gateways" that expose a more business-domain-oriented UX — where each thing people want to do is just one obvious button, but drives all those same complex SAP processes underneath?

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

#473

Post by AlbertCory »

dangerboysteve wrote: post #398
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…

The risk alone from a company switching ERP systems, or switching versions of the same ERP, is well documented in the press. Companies have lost tens to hundreds of millions on failed projects. So the pain points to switch to another platform must be so great even to think about going down this road. Like all ERP software, cost to implement is 2x - 3x the cost of the software. https://www.thirdstage-consulting.com/th…

Funny you have a quote from Ellison. I was at Oracle in the 90s, and "Oracle Apps" had its own building. At the same time, I was on lots of social events in the Valley and always running into Stanford IT people, and all of them could rant for hours about Oracle Financials.

Apparently Stanford had its own homebrew system, and some dean had decreed that they had to move to Oracle Financials. For literally years, these poor people struggled with it.

I never worked with that or SAP so I can't compare them, but I think both are the Full Employment Act for consultants.

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

#474

Post by achenet »

elzbardico wrote: post #434

SAP is like nicotine. It doesn't give you anything back, you start it because it looks like all of your friends are doing it. It stinks like hell, but you get used to it. And once you become a user, it is fucking hard to leave it.

nicotine actually stimulates your acetylcholine receptors, making it a mild nootropic and can be taken in non-smelly ways (patches, gum, etc).

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

#475

Post by Lightbody »

jonhohle wrote: post #449
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…

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 problem isn’t unique to government. most sufficiently large public companies do the same thing.

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

#476

Post by marcosdumay »

dominotw wrote: post #345
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…

> . The SAP solution missed so many edge cases that a huge number of lab reports were either inaccurate or completely wrong because information was lost in SAP translation between different labs. Is this the story of every migration, every rewrite though?

On every rewrite, the system gets either better with time or abandoned.

A system completely broken forever is something only the upper management can create.

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

#477

Post by blueyes »

ERP lockin is enormous.

Most companies stick with a single ERP provider for 20-30 years. And 80% of attempts to swap in one ERP for another fail. Usually after customers waste millions of dollars and years of engineering work.

The underlying complexity of the physical processes managed by ERP is enormous. ERP systems are digital models of a company's physical operations.

Platform lockin and platform innovation are inversely proportional. Companies like SAP in ERP, and Epic in EHR, simply don't have to innovate to make lots of money.

That's one reason why technological change in those industries is so slow.

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

#478

Post by jabroni_salad »

sumedh wrote: post #334
undreren wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SAP is sold to the C=suit, never to IT or business operations, nor any of the people that will ever come onto contact with the software. Plenty of terrible corporate software works like this. Precurement has a checklist of features, and that list never includes "Has great UX", because only the people on the floor has to use it. I'm looking at you JIRA... > SAP project often fail (this is not specific to SAP but com…

> I'm looking at you JIRA... I always see this comment on HN, I think I have been using Jira for a decade, never really had any major complaints.

If you guys think JIRA is bad you should check out BMC Remedy...

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

#479

Post by derefr »

jonhohle wrote: post #449
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…

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…

Seems to me that the actual "lower the budget if nobody uses it" part works just fine — the problem is that the people affected by it are aware of it and form a feedback loop with it (i.e. "the measure becomes the target.")

If you could hide the budgeting effects from anyone with the ability to 1. start projects or 2. add scope to projects, then it seems like it'd work out just fine.

(Of course, actually doing that would require splitting "planning" roles into separate, almost-adversarial "defining projects + increasing scopes for projects" and "feasibility-analyzing + cost-optimizing + decreasing scope for projects" roles. But that seems like exactly the sort of thing the DHS would be fond of. War-games for the project managers; and separate levers for both kinds of sitting presidents to pull on to satisfy their bases, where building up one capability doesn't tear down the other.)

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

#480

Post by FredPret »

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…

SAP, and any other ERP, is just the operating system for your organization. If you run it intelligently, the OS won’t prevent you from getting a good outcome.

In this case, it sounds like they should’ve bolted the JIT platform onto SAP

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