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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)

#491

Post by giva »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #456
giva wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be honest, i think that even if they offering overlaps with SAP R/3 or S/4HANA, they overlap at the lower end (500-5k employees) and not really at the top end (> 100k employees) where MS sits.

Furthermore, AFAIK Microsoft started using SAP well before they acquired Axapta.

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

#492

Post by brightball »

solidsnack9000 wrote: post #459
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…

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.

Wow! Good find. That's probably exactly it (although I haven't seen that document before).

I was a GA from 2003-2004.

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

#493

Post by purpleblue »

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…

There are two major ERP software out there right now: SAP and Peoplesoft.

SAP is the "European" way of doing things, which means there's one right way and you need to align your business to SAP's way of doing things. If you do that, things work very well.

Peoplesoft is the "American" way of doing it, which means that you make your software fit around you. This means a lot of customizations. This makes integrations much more challenging if you're too far off kilter, and things like upgrading is much much harder, because there's too many customizations.

That's the information I had about 10 years old and not sure how much SAP has evolved since then.

Smaller companies these days have a lot more options, like Netsuite is already there for small businesses and Workday is moving in that direction. Startups come and go every day. Rippling appears to be one that is headed in this direction as well.

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

#494

Post by DubiousPusher »

derefr wrote: post #479
jonhohle wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

This is a trust problem. Trust problems don't usually get better when you start hiding more shit. Isn't the real solution to make organizations feel confident that they can let unused funding go because they can get it back in the future if they need it?

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

#495

Post by purpleblue »

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…

It doesn't make sense for the Army to be in the business of developing software. They should be outsourcing this, and having a well-known vendor like SAP means there's a lot of different avenues to get bids to lower prices.

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

#496

Post by taway19920706 »

Nihilartikel wrote: post #399
jiggawatts wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SAP targets ERP, and basically nothing else. You will never[1] see SAP HANA used outside of a SAP deployment, even though it is a general purpose in-memory database with some nice features. Similarly, you never see SAP ABAP used outside of a SAP deployment. Microsoft targets the most generic use-cases possible, even more so than, say, Linux. You can do anything[2] with Windows, SQL Server, ASP.NET, Azure, etc... [1]…

I have 'one' exception to that. I worked with a medical data analysis company that had implemented SAP HANA as a data warehouse/analysis platform for tons of treatment records. My task was replacing it with Spark/S3 :P

My current workplace has implemented a custom SAP HANA-based solution for forecasting (code is written in a mixture of Python and R). I wasn't involved in the project but I'm not convinced it couldn't have been architected completely differently - perhaps a suite of microservices running on K8S with a PostgreSQL backend. Having an in-memory database licensed by RAM usage quickly gets mother-f'ing expensive as Nathan Fielder would say.

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

#497

Post by civilized »

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.

> For some reason, the higher ups trust software built by someone else rather than their own people.

The pointy-haired bosses of our nightmares are real.

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

#498

Post by taway19920706 »

rr888 wrote: post #285
hardware2win wrote: post #4

ERP industry is so hard(painful) that I wouldnt want to work in it unless they paid top of the top Good luck competing in that industry > basic installation of SAP has 20,000 database tables, 3,000 of which are configuration tables. In those tables, there are ~8,000 configuration decisions you need before even getting started. Gotta be fun :)

> I wouldnt want to work in it unless they paid top of the top Anecdotally I knew a few people in the mid nineties that did SAP work and they were paid multiples of everyone else, literally hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Since then lots has been outsourced and offshored so its the opposite, but for a few glory years before dotcom boom it was definitely the place to be.

Likewise. I know people who bought helicopters from the money they made during the boom years pre-2000.

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

#499

Post by FredPret »

jerf wrote: post #430
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 comp…

Spot on. Also, SAP’s “everything” really does cover everything a big business is likely to encounter, which is a lot of things that all have to be interconnected

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

#500

Post by memset »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #456
giva wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was responsible for a MS dynamics implementation at a public company. I would agree.

(This was also my motivation to start my own financial reporting startup: what if we designed a system in the year 2022 to be able to support big businesses without it being as awful as big business software.)

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