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What's SAP?

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Re: What's SAP?

#531

Post by Mandatum »

adeel_siddiqui wrote: post #184

Well, SAP has for long been a money making blackbox for consulting firms. Think IBM, Accenture and the likes. They rake boatloads of money for multi-year contracts to implement SAP systems for companies wanting ERP solutions. The system is outdated and obscure with both technical and non-technical people having a tough time understanding it. Last time I worked with some interfacing systems to some SAP modules, it sti…

Billing is the #1 growing package YoY here in Australia for our consulting firm. Nobody knows what they're doing. It's great.

Re: What's SAP?

#532

Post by swampthinker »

shostack wrote: post #396
swampthinker wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone working in healthcare, I can attest to the value in getting an healthcare org to adopt standardized workflows. I'll take an org that follows process over better software that isn't used in a consistent manner. There is too much operational and human complexity to solve healthcare with software alone.

I feel like your "following process over better software" remark holds true to any company I've seen.

Mostly agree. However, I think pure software companies/ software companies that have far less human complexity can get away with building better software over improving processes and compliance.

Re: What's SAP?

#533

Post by Sherl »

tomnipotent wrote: post #417
mr_gibbins wrote: post #230

I teach enterprise systems at a university, with emphasis on SAP. It's hideous. Hideous. My students complain it is unusable (agree), doesn't make sense (agree), that they can't see the point (agree). When you look at the underlying database 'schema' (inverted commas deliberate) you'll find it's a massive, denormalised mess. Much of what SAP can do can be done at the local level using intuitive software. Reports, for…

> SAP can do can be done at the local level using intuitive software No they cannot. ERP's are beasts of expert domain knowledge hidden in shitty codebases, but don't be confused for an even a moment to think you can do it yourself. It's a fools errand, and I'd fire or not hire anyone that tried to intentionally do this rather than just build something basic to hedge time until you have to implement something more se…

Tesla doesn't have SAP and it's home grown. SAP is ymmv thing. Not all businesses fit in their framework.

Re: What's SAP?

#534

Post by tomnipotent »

qubex wrote: post #511
jsmith99 wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a financial auditor, if a client uses SAP or some other standard ERP we can just ask for a general ledger report and get to work. If they are using something bespoke I would probably put my head in my hands and send an urgent email to our dreaded IT systems audit team, at major expense to the client.

Yeah... when my family business installed SAP the auditors were delighted. But... here’s the thing: standardised ledgers that make a company easy to audit have no positive correlation with corporate effectiveness and competitive advantage. It’s great that your work is simplified, but frankly, it’s totally irrelevant. I’d rather my auditors had to hail their dreaded IT departments than having the whole firm rendered e…

> It’s great that your work is simplified, but frankly, it’s totally irrelevant

It's the other way around. It's totally irrelevant to re-invent the wheel and do something in a non-standard way.

> I’d rather my auditors had to hail their dreaded IT departments

That's not how auditing works. The point of GAAP is that things are done a certain way, and if you do things differently you need to provide that it isn't bullshit. Otherwise Enron & WorldCom all over again.

Re: What's SAP?

#535

Post by bigger_cheese »

whatsmyusername wrote: post #355
schnevets wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ServiceNow is another disruptor with an interesting approach similar to SalesForce. SNow started as a Remedy alternative, but really saw IT groups as the infrastructure that every other Department relies on. While SAP hold influence in a company by controlling the purse strings, a good ServiceNow implementation holds the Microservice and Technology information every group is reliant on. I'm not as familiar with Sales…

ServiceNow is garbage. They're probably less garbage than working with SAP but they're still garbage.

No.

The Industrial Plant I work at uses Service Now (For IT and Helpdesk support) and SAP (For Payroll, HR, Purchasing, Maintenance Scheduling etc.). Service Now is much, much worse. IT department is so dysfunctional and Service Now is a big part of that.

One of my coworkers refers to it as "Service Eventually"

Re: What's SAP?

#536

Post by vetrom »

user5994461 wrote: post #528
jgalt212 wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are there no fat binaries in linux? or are they just not used?

It's possible to make statically linked applications but it's pretty much never done. And it's against the linux packaging mantra, where you should be able to "apt-get install libqt" for example (noting that libqt package is completely detached from the release cycle of your application). This leads to a ton of accidental dependencies and they're tied to the OS release. Even the simplest of apps might eventually depe…

Even in the dotnet era, you have WinSxS and exe/dll specific manifests pinning specific library artifacts with apps and a loader that keeps a repository of every version referred to on the system. The linux/ELF ecosystem on the otherhand decided to try to implement various degrees of semantic library versioning, with differing (often poor) degrees of success.

When your target is a system image thats rebuilt entirely from source you can get away with the latter somewhat more easily, but its definitely no panacea. Just look at OpenSSL. (libmemcache is another personal 'favorite' of mine.)

Re: What's SAP?

#537

Post by mmcgaha »

zamalek wrote: post #524
tomnipotent wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> configuring SAP to do what you want it to do is often on par with writing your own system from scratch. Hyperbole. A lot of working with an ERP is developing middleware or custom modules that implement business-specific logic on top of an existing API and schema. It's like saying building a Facebook App is equivalent to rebuilding the entire Facebook Platform. > So we've dared to build our own multinational and ful…

> A lot of working with an ERP is developing middleware or custom modules that implement business-specific logic Indeed. It does, however, seem that these are developed on a system that isn't designed to intuitively express the degree of logic required - or even trivial logic. There are poor souls slogging through whichever level of hell uses SAP for customer relations, purely because that's the way it's done. That a…

To give you an idea about the real scope of what is behind an ERP system, here is a link to the database definitions behind QAD's MFG/Pro:

https://documentlibrary.qad.com/documents/2370665/2368142/Da...

This is a product designed for small to medium sized businesses so it is not as comprehensive as a SAP. Take a serious look at the schema and imagine if you just had to write CRUD, it would take hundreds of man years. But it is not a CRUD app because there is business logic behind ever module.

Now imagine that there is also a whole ecosystem of vendors that sit under the QAD tree to provide niche solutions for the various use cases not covered by QAD. So not only do you have to write the ERP, but you have to write the pieces picked up by the other vendors in this ecosystem.

Re: What's SAP?

#538

Post by Noumenon72 »

rbosinger wrote: post #391

In the last couple years I've been more and more interested in this world of "big enterprise software that seems to be a complex mess but has seemingly unstoppable momentum and makes billions". That whole world seems to be hidden to many of us developers who often see a few lines of code we don't like and assume a whole product will die because of it. Meanwhile there are these giants out there dragging along this wei…

This whole thread has made me feel like my life writing clean Java and Postgres has been charmed and the future is working on behemoths that are too big to fail.

Re: What's SAP?

#539

Post by ethbro »

tomnipotent wrote: post #530
zamalek wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of working with an ERP is developing middleware or custom modules that implement business-specific logic Indeed. It does, however, seem that these are developed on a system that isn't designed to intuitively express the degree of logic required - or even trivial logic. There are poor souls slogging through whichever level of hell uses SAP for customer relations, purely because that's the way it's done. That a…

> developed on a system that isn't designed to intuitively express the degree of logic required The poor souls are such because they usually fundamentally do not have the knowledge required across the broad spectrum of responsibilities an ERP does and how that all ties into managing a business. > I predict that millennials, who increasingly refuse to interact with anything below "app quality," This makes no sense. Wh…

> How supply chains are managed isn't going to change because of a bunch of woke millennials.

Parent's point was that systems require trained and capable people.

If the job entails dealing with something arcane, and you can't pay more (because cost center), then at some point you face a labor gap.

Re: What's SAP?

#540

Post by totololo »

zxienin wrote: post #246
totololo wrote: post #210

Do "high innovation velocity" companies like Tesla or SpaceX use any ERP? If so, do they develop in house? Use a modern equivalent to SAP?

Tesla built their ERP. Unclear, to what extent. I hope an (ex) insider can share facts.

Interesting, thanks. Amazon is known for having built an API for all departments to share information right?
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