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LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

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Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#51

Post by arethuza »

PaulHoule wrote: post #35
raverbashing wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using services from big name companies is (half) the corporate world version of an expensive fashion item/fancy car and half "wanting someone to sue in case things go wrong". Except an expensive fashion item doesn't ruin your ability to do your job and is still probably cheaper in relative scales.

I think the big attraction of SAP is that it lets CEOs smooth out earnings. They can get projections of what the number are going to be for the quarter continuously so in the last few weeks of the quarter they can speed up or slow down sales and spending to hit the earnings numbers they want.

Not sure why you are being downvoted - I used to know a guy who had been head of sales for a large tech company that you will have heard of and he said they did exactly that - delay sales from one period to the next to smooth things out and to be closer to market expectations.

Their sales contracts apparently had clauses allowing them to delay sales for just this reason.

NB That kind of sales reporting isn't just from SAP - Oracle Hyperion and IBM Cognos are the biggest players in consolidated financial reporting.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#52

Post by arethuza »

simias wrote: post #39
arethuza wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"you could do the same thing for 1% the cost and it'd work better etc." I used to think that - then I did some work with large scale ERP systems and realised that I was wildly wrong. Fortunately I moved into other areas while I still had some sanity.

Well that's an other thing, when you look at these solutions from afar you often see the core functionality and think it's not a big deal but the devil is always in the details, the millions of small functionalities hidden everywhere for specific tasks is what makes it very hard to compete. Every company has specificities, they want to interface with $external_software, they want to import $arcane_data_format etc...…

ERP systems are basically accounts packages with aspirations for world domination.

From a long way, and I mean a really long way, they seem straightforward - but get close and they are Lovecraftian horrors.

Remember, SAP is how Lucifer interacts with our world.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#53

Post by [deleted] »

patman81 wrote: post #37
antpls wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My model is basic, but at $1200/day per consultant, with 100 consultants, that's still about 4160 days, or about 11 years. Not what I would consider fast.

One way to calculate: 7years × 365days × 2k/day × 100 "experts" = 500m

[deleted]

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#54

Post by sparkling »

DrinkWater wrote: post #11

SAP was, and will always stay, a mystery to me. It is ridiculously expensive and complex. I know that the problems it aims to solve are also highly complex and very specific, but reading stories like this, plus (if you live in Germany and work in the IT industry) sometimes hearing unbelievable stories from your peers, it always confuses me that companies still want so much SAP. In the late 90s/early 00s a lot of peop…

I have not yet seen a SAP software that could not be replaced with a homemade Django/Rails web app (90% CRUD) and some external API integrations to other services that may exist in the company such HR, invoicing etc.

Of course, at the fraction of the the cost of the SAP solution.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#55

Post by wenc »

DrinkWater wrote: post #11

SAP was, and will always stay, a mystery to me. It is ridiculously expensive and complex. I know that the problems it aims to solve are also highly complex and very specific, but reading stories like this, plus (if you live in Germany and work in the IT industry) sometimes hearing unbelievable stories from your peers, it always confuses me that companies still want so much SAP. In the late 90s/early 00s a lot of peop…

As the other commenters have noted, none of the offerings in the large-scale ERP space are "good" for most measures of good, but they tend to be good enough to keep things operational. SAP is reputedly the least bad vendor in this space (we use a competing system and it is much worse).

ERPs are tedious, uninspiring, production-level software that have to deal with all manners of ill-defined business rules and variations. It's almost impossible to come up with an elegant product because the problem space itself is inelegant and in many cases irreducibly so. I imagine it's hard to attract talented developers (except those solely attracted to money) to this space because the feedback loop and intellectual payoff is so unrewarding. Most of the time the implementation problems have to do with human problems, not technical ones. Most ERP customization is outsourced to pools of fungible labor.

But when you run a large enterprise, ERPs are absolutely necessary, so someone's gotta do it.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#56

Post by misja111 »

arbitrary_name wrote: post #48
DrinkWater wrote: post #11

SAP was, and will always stay, a mystery to me. It is ridiculously expensive and complex. I know that the problems it aims to solve are also highly complex and very specific, but reading stories like this, plus (if you live in Germany and work in the IT industry) sometimes hearing unbelievable stories from your peers, it always confuses me that companies still want so much SAP. In the late 90s/early 00s a lot of peop…

Not quite. I have worked with sap at many different clients. Some Reasons for buying SAP ( by that i mean their ERP as well as funxtional or industry specific tools and applications.) are as follows Scale: at this size, you pick SAP or Oracle. There's very little else out there in the market. Proven implementation: speaking for most clients, you cannot get a major ERP implementation done without outside help. You wil…

What SAP and Oracle have in common is that they have a very capable sales force, that is able to convince companies that their business case will fit nicely into their model.

Then, once the implementation is ongoing and it turns out that there are some corner cases which were overlooked and that don't fit into the SAP model at all, SAP has another option available: hire their expensive consultants. Depending on how locked-in they are and how big their projects, this can completely destroy some companies.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#57

Post by blattimwind »

arbitrary_name wrote: post #48
DrinkWater wrote: post #11

SAP was, and will always stay, a mystery to me. It is ridiculously expensive and complex. I know that the problems it aims to solve are also highly complex and very specific, but reading stories like this, plus (if you live in Germany and work in the IT industry) sometimes hearing unbelievable stories from your peers, it always confuses me that companies still want so much SAP. In the late 90s/early 00s a lot of peop…

Not quite. I have worked with sap at many different clients. Some Reasons for buying SAP ( by that i mean their ERP as well as funxtional or industry specific tools and applications.) are as follows Scale: at this size, you pick SAP or Oracle. There's very little else out there in the market. Proven implementation: speaking for most clients, you cannot get a major ERP implementation done without outside help. You wil…

I've used some SAP-based solutions a few times and the closest experience I can relate it to is late 90s MS Access applications: Everything takes ages. Things that should be easy and quick (e.g. viewing a related record or item) are often difficult and take time. Every form of search function doesn't really work, even with perfect input data. Searching doesn't work if your input is slightly off (e.g. names in wrong order or a typo). Searching takes much longer than makes sense in any sensible manner.

Of course, user's experiences don't matter when selling or supporting a software like this. I don't think it's part of the decision maker's conscious that usability (in the sense of being able to accomplish tasks efficiently) for a software that will be used by a larger part of the corporate workforce might be important not only for the employees using it, but also for the company. These systems can eat up so much work time of employees and create so many issues within a company and in customer or supplier relations...

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#58

Post by darkcha0s »

_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #49
darkcha0s wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that price is a little inflated. 1200€ a day for a freelancer maybe, but the "normal" consultants will cost no more than 800-900€ a day because of blanket orders, etc.

Not sure whom Lidl hired for their SAP project, if they hired from one of the big 'consultancies' which I assume, cost would be easily >2000 EUR/day.

I work with big consultancies, and they don't charge >2000€ a day for SAP developers, I know that for sure ;)

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#59

Post by vertex-four »

lowkeyokay wrote: post #19
osrec wrote: post #7

That is an unbelievable amount of money to waste on a cancelled project. It's funny how these turn into an ego thing for the project owner. If the person in charge has good links and reputation, they can keep getting funding year on year, even when the project has gone bad. Usually they are good talkers, but bad executors and have been at a firm for a significant number of years (so people think twice about firing th…

I think it has to with peoples inherent lack of discounting sunk costs. “We have already spent X amount. We must make sure it isn’t wasted, so let’s spend Y more and see if that’ll fix it”. At least they pulled the plug.

It often isn’t clear that spending Y more won’t fix it, or that spending Z on a new project will - by the time you’re anywhere near half a billion euros into a project you’ve already worked around an incredible amount of unforeseen issues, lost cultural knowledge about them once they’re fixed, and there’s every chance that those issues (or more) will show up again if you start from scratch.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#60

Post by sparkling »

arethuza wrote: post #29
simias wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know much about SAP besides the fact that I don't think I've ever heard anything positive about it (but then again, nobody talks about the trains that are on time). I always assumed that it was a "nobody gets fired for choosing SAP" situation. It's huge, it might be clunky but you know that if you pay for the support it'll probably end up doing mostly what you want and it'll mostly keep working. The alternati…

"you could do the same thing for 1% the cost and it'd work better etc." I used to think that - then I did some work with large scale ERP systems and realised that I was wildly wrong. Fortunately I moved into other areas while I still had some sanity.

Care to elaborate?
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