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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)

#51

Post by zxienin »

_glass wrote: post #27

I am an SAP developer since kind of forever, my first job after university (since 2009). First I hated it, but the deeper I am entrenched, the more I see why you choose SAP: Because there really is no alternative. The data model is so complex because it is growing iteratively since the 80s. Hacker News is valuing businesses that adjust to the customer instead of going for some kind of purity. Another complexity espec…

> But you can be agile with SAP, especially if you move to the cloud.

Does SAP even have ERP in the „real“ cloud?

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

#52

Post by ReptileMan »

appleflaxen wrote: post #38
theshrike79 wrote: post #10

This is a good time to remind everyone of the rules of SAP integration: 1) Your company processes MUST adapt to SAP processes. That's it. You can try customising SAP to fit your processes, but you will just waste time and hundreds of millions of money and then you will fail. Lidl spent almost a decade and 500M€ on its SAP project, but didn't follow rule #1: https://www.henricodolfing.com/2020/05/case-study-lidl-sap-d…

What are the fundamentals of "SAP processes"? Can you provide any detail?

The main is to hire hordes of extremely expensive sap consultants

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

#53

Post by _glass »

carstenhag wrote: post #23
numlock86 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, I remember when Lidl tried to integrate SAP in 2015. No one really knows why and after already having spent €500,000,000 in 2016 they pulled the plug and just dropped the project because obviously it wasn't done at that point and they still would have to pay more to finish it. The initial offer never went public but I overheard someone once saying it was like €75,000,000 "only" ... They went back to further d…

The issue there was that Lidl did not adapt to SAP. They tried to adapt the SAP system to Lidl. Everyone tells you that this is a really bad idea. Everyone.

To be honest, I had so many SAP implementations in my career, and it was most likely not that one. Everybody adapts the software to the real existing business processes. Especially in Germany we are not yet there yet, that tech people can tell business people how to work. I think that Lidl most likely did the upfront design approach instead of building a reliable MVP, and moving forward from that. You have to integrate then a lot more with the old system, but more space to move forward and agile. Funny because it mimics a German military concept of Führen mit Auftrag ("mission type tactics").

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

#54

Post by suction »

theshrike79 wrote: post #10

This is a good time to remind everyone of the rules of SAP integration: 1) Your company processes MUST adapt to SAP processes. That's it. You can try customising SAP to fit your processes, but you will just waste time and hundreds of millions of money and then you will fail. Lidl spent almost a decade and 500M€ on its SAP project, but didn't follow rule #1: https://www.henricodolfing.com/2020/05/case-study-lidl-sap-d…

Isn't it the most rational thing to assume that a company that is extremely experienced and successful at analyzing business processes and digitalising them will know better than any newcomer with less resources and less experience who operates mainly on "we're disrupting for the sake of it" swagger?

Telling SAP that you want them to change their ways to accommodate your brilliant idea is akin to a layman telling a brain surgeon how he wants his surgery done.

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

#55

Post by zxienin »

kumarvvr wrote: post #26
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 always wondered, why wouldn't an in-house developed lean, ERP system would not trump a behemoth like SAP. A few reasons seem plausible. - No one gets fired for hiring SAP - Getting an in-house software developer team that can develop an easily extensible / modifiable ERP system is neigh impossible It is one of my dream to build an alternative ERP system. But it looks like sub-ERP functions (payroll, HR, etc) have b…

I recall that Tesla built own ERP in-house

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

#56

Post by wheels »

theshrike79 wrote: post #10

This is a good time to remind everyone of the rules of SAP integration: 1) Your company processes MUST adapt to SAP processes. That's it. You can try customising SAP to fit your processes, but you will just waste time and hundreds of millions of money and then you will fail. Lidl spent almost a decade and 500M€ on its SAP project, but didn't follow rule #1: https://www.henricodolfing.com/2020/05/case-study-lidl-sap-d…

Again, as I noted elsewhere in the thread, I worked in R&D at SAP for 4 years (16 years ago), but I have no deep love for it. But I do have some understanding of where it fits in the landscape.

What you've said is absolutely true, but it's mostly a feature, not a bug. Once you get big enough to need SAP, it's actually useful to put your business processes on a standardized platform. It's painful, always mind bendingly expensive and often fails. But few companies want to be innovative in their business processes. It's actually better to move to "the standard" since it makes processes more understandable across different ginormacorps, which is useful for the upper management sorts that tend to move between them. There's virtually no competitive advantage to having unique business processes. There are many folks that even will say that that's the advantage of moving to SAP is it makes the internal mechanics of the company work a lot like every other giant company.

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

#57

Post by _glass »

zxienin wrote: post #51
_glass wrote: post #27

I am an SAP developer since kind of forever, my first job after university (since 2009). First I hated it, but the deeper I am entrenched, the more I see why you choose SAP: Because there really is no alternative. The data model is so complex because it is growing iteratively since the 80s. Hacker News is valuing businesses that adjust to the customer instead of going for some kind of purity. Another complexity espec…

> But you can be agile with SAP, especially if you move to the cloud. Does SAP even have ERP in the „real“ cloud?

Yes, sure https://www.sap.com/products/erp/s4hana.html It's quite nice, even though they do some crazy (also cool) stuff with it https://blogs.sap.com/2021/09/30/steampunk-is-going-all-in/

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

#58

Post by logifail »

theplumber wrote: post #31
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? 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…

> However you don't really want to invest into non-core business(es)

The problem is who gets to decide what is "core" to your business?

Look at airlines, once the McKinsey types were let loose it turned out none of the stuff we think is core is needed at an airline; no need for in-house staff, catering, baggage handling, check-in, maintenance or even [owning] any actual aircraft. So much easier to operate without all that stuff to look after!

Taken to the extreme presuambly one would end up with nothing but an airline's name and trademarks, a handful of overpaid management types, and maybe a bunch of lawyers to look after all the outsourcing/subcontracting and licencing deals.

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

#59

Post by meibo »

_glass wrote: post #27

I am an SAP developer since kind of forever, my first job after university (since 2009). First I hated it, but the deeper I am entrenched, the more I see why you choose SAP: Because there really is no alternative. The data model is so complex because it is growing iteratively since the 80s. Hacker News is valuing businesses that adjust to the customer instead of going for some kind of purity. Another complexity espec…

This is a genuine question, I don't mean to rip on you: Why is everything SAP I've used terrible? From payroll, employee/student management to industrial control systems - the UX is horrible and it seems so brittle that you're happy if you're out of there as quickly as possible. I've had to reach out to my school's IT multiple times over the years since random parts of the SAP tool they used break.

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

#60

Post by zxienin »

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #22

for anyone wondering, erpnext.com is a good "alternative" and it is very active on github with lots of people working on it each and every day. they have hosted plans as well as allowing users to selfhost and only pay for "support and customization" for anyone needing which works out pretty well for many.... SAP is well and good but you have good alternatives

I have been pretty impressed with with what erpnext has achieved till date. Underdog IMHO. I think that its founder should consider scaling installed base more.
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