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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)

#551

Post by shrimpx »

dandare wrote: post #74
meibo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The UX is horrible because: a) Engineering: Nobody will rewrite 20 year old views just to improve the UX. In many cases, nobody even dares to touch the 20 years old spaghetti code. b) Sales: The buyer is not the user. The buyer (playing golf with a sales rep) doesn't give a damn about the actual productivity of what he is buying. c) Management: There is a solid economical rationale in not giving a fcuk about UX. Over…

> Sales: The buyer is not the user. The buyer (playing golf with a sales rep) doesn't give a damn about the actual productivity of what he is buying.

This is the crux of why enterprise software sucks: the user is not the buyer.

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

#552

Post by hosh »

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…

The blog post is written by Retool, and it is something that we (early stage startup) is adopting for internal operations. I was hoping to see Retool talk about what they see their market opportunity is, and what they think Retool is doing different, but the post only sketches out a few things on how things have changed.

I don't know about SAP, but one of the main reasons we're adopting Retool internally is because our engineering team keeps deprioritizing writing internal operational tools in favor of adding features for out customers, yet our operations are becoming increasingly more complex. Something like Retool lets our end users (our own staff) be able to work with it.

In a lot of ways, Retool is more like an MS Access, only it is a cloud native SAAS and from the get go, work with integrating existing databases. Writing about SAS, I think it's clear Retool has been thinking about how to grow with the organization, possibly where organizations can stay with Retool instead of trying to implement SAP. I'm also curious about how they are going to work with the increasing shift from "data lakes" to "data mesh".

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

#553

Post by [deleted] »

qorrect wrote: post #364
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SAP, Excel, and Bloomberg Terminal are applications where there such a long tail of uses that it is hard to see them being replaced in the corporate world anytime soon.

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

[deleted]

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

#554

Post by airstrike »

IceDane wrote: post #289
vain_cain wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see a lot of comments here saying a company should adapt their business processes to their ERP, and in my experience they are wrong - with the exception of accounting(Good luck trying to customize accounting modules within ERPs to fit your process). I don't work with SAP, but I've been working with Microsoft's ERP(Dynamics NAV/Business Central) my whole professional career(almost 5 years). When it comes to shipping…

> and in my experience they are wrong - with the exception of accounting > I don't work with SAP .. Yeah.. that's just it. Your experience doesn't matter. Adjusting your business to fit SAP nearly as much as an unspoken requirement. It's not just a smart bit of wisdom people throw around. It's literally what you have to do if you want to have any hope of implementing SAP successfully, because it is such a colossal, m…

I'm definitely stealing charlie-foxtrot

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

#555

Post by kornhole »

purpleblue wrote: post #493
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 mu…

You mean SAP and Oracle. Oracle acquired Peoplesoft and Netsuite long ago. Oracle has its Fusion product where it attempts to fuse their acquisitions into one platform. Some call it Confusion. SAP has built most of its product to work seamlessly together, but they have acquired a few such as Ariba and Concur.

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

#556

Post by ska »

endtime wrote: post #502
DubiousPusher wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It seems more like an incentive problem. I'd be interested to see what happens if you give the deciders X% of any unused budget as an EOY bonus.

> It'd be interested to see what happens if you give the deciders X% of any unused budget as an EOY bonus.

We already know the answer to this, on average at least the system will be gamed to put money in their pockets, to overall detriment of service.

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

#557

Post by rad_gruchalski »

joegahona wrote: post #535
nradov wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> purchase order is what I think of when doing something like ordering printer paper, not getting an invoice paid

How can you pay an invoice for a service / item you haven’t purchased? If you buy a service from a supplier, you raise a po, you pay an invoice based on the po. As a supplier, I always ask for a po.

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

#558

Post by kornhole »

antidnan wrote: post #416
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…

Sometimes this is why I think we'll end up with a refresh of the corporate world with digitally native businesses not running on SAP. I imagine at some point we'll run out of people who know SAP and are even willing to learn it.

Google recently implemented SAP. Microsoft, Apple, and many other big players are deeply entrenched in SAP with almost no chance of switching. There has always been a shortage of good SAP consultants which creates lucrative opportunities for those who want to learn it.

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

#559

Post by miragecraft »

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

Most organizations have horribly convoluted organizational structures and processes, and SAP has been shaped by those customers over the years to cater to those clusterfucks.

A clean, sensible ERP system can only work if the organization it serves is also sensibly organized. It is much easier (and less risky) for a company to choose an ERP system that caters to them, warts and all, rather than overhaul the way it conducts business.

As the old saying goes, SAP and its customers deserves each other.

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

#560

Post by raverbashing »

threatripper wrote: post #174
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…

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.

Ah yes, in typical "enterprise software" fashion, blame and gaslight the victim
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