Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

retool.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–540 of 703 posts

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

#531

Post by MattRix »

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…

What about some sort of tool that hooks into SA directly? Something that acts as a more user friendly front end and allows people to automate common tasks etc?

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

#532

Post by joegahona »

hef19898 wrote: post #446
joegahona wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Workday Financials is a meaningful competitor. I used SAP Concur at my last job and "horribly wicked thing" is accurate. It reminds me of that "evil UX" thing that was making the rounds a year or two ago.

In addition to finance SAP covers everything from production over procurement to finance, HR, sales, MRO, logistics and everything in between.

Yeah, I conflated "SAP" with "Concur" -- my bad.

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

#533

Post by xxpor »

phamilton wrote: post #523

My primary datapoint on SAP is that Google has a class of high memory instances designed for SAP: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/memory-optimized-machi... The come in ~6TB and ~12TB. Somehow, that tells so much about SAP and the institutions that depend on it.

As does AWS. Of course, they have to be Certified (TM).

OTOH, the general principle of "just have a giant in memory DB" isn't actually that crazy. In fact, a lot of the complex distributed data storage systems that a lot of services use might just be better off with a system like it. See also: Stack Overflow.

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

#534

Post by cgh »

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…

Exactly right. Everyone dumps on enterprise software in general, not just SAP, but the truth is that enterprise software is hard. There are so many requirements and specific workflows that it becomes everything to everyone and thus “horrid”.

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

#535

Post by joegahona »

nradov wrote: post #516
ghaff wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Concur the software is OK though not great. What is distinctly often not OK is the mandatory fields that companies want, often arbitrary travel policies, and often needlessly nit-picky auditing. If putting in an expense report into Concur typically sailed through unless something was clearly wrong, missing reasonable documentation, or was significantly out of policy, Concur would mostly be fine.

My expense reports in Concur almost always sail through. It shows you warnings if you're missing a receipt or something.

For me the real pain was paying vendors or freelancers. They all had to be input as an additional vendor, which is reasonable, but there were dozens of fields within each vendor, many of which were esoteric in they're labeling (likely a fault of implementation on our side). Then I would get a rejection via email that a particular field wasn't filled out (why wasn't it a required field?), and it was often hard to find where to input that field -- very unintuitive. I think I even had to go through a company admin once to add an associated email address to a vendor.

Beyond that, just the philosophy of creating a "purchase order" to pay a UX researcher who did 10 hours of work over three months seemed goofy -- purchase order is what I think of when doing something like ordering printer paper, not getting an invoice paid.

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

#536

Post by brightball »

jwess wrote: post #468
dpflan wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any documents supporting this? I ask because I am curious what official documents exist around this idea of mandated return to inefficiency -- there must've been a gain elsewhere (or is that too optimistic)? Plus there must be costs documented associated with the first and second program. Genuinely curious about this type of decision (call it "inefficiency thrash"?).

Here's a link to a report that has a lot more information about the system: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA393599.pdf

How in the world did y’all find that?

I saw it posted below. The system was/is called Balanced Flow.

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

#537

Post by kodah »

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…

The lower the budget if nobody uses it is a perverse incentive. Costs at units are variable, but the budget model does not reflect that which incurs silly expenditure so that you can ensure that next year when New variables occur (radios, weapons, etc are a year older, new climate changes, solar flares, etc) will not hinder the progress of unit affairs.

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

#538

Post by smooc »

cholantesh wrote: post #367
qorrect wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bloomberg Terminal really ? I've never gotten to use it, what can it do ?

Gives you access to a bevy of financial data and news through a TUI.

Did you know it has a Jupyter Notebook interface with python support?

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

#539

Post by 98codes »

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.

MS uses Dynamics for a ton of internal processes, just not all of them. I suspect the SAP installation predates the existence of Dynamics as a product.

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

#540

Post by moffkalast »

arcturus17 wrote: post #209
threatripper wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably cheaped out on SAP consultants. Each of the old IT staff in the old system you can replace with 3-5 SAP consultants.

> Each of the old IT staff in the old system you can replace with 3-5 SAP consultants. Is this facetious, or unintentionally so? Do you mean you need to replace one in-house staff with between 3 and 5 and presumably very expensive consultants?

This is intentional and part of the business model of most companies selling ERP solutions. They deliberately (or incompetently) make their product so overcomplicated that noone outside of their consultant team can make heads or tails of it. Then they can charge big bucks or consulting fees.
Post reply on HN