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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)

#561

Post by Vanderson »

silvershell wrote: post #550
Vanderson wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are doing an Odoo implementation right now. (a few months in) What did you find is a mess about Odoo? And why is customizing it a nightmare?

Hi, Vanderson. I'm doing the same thing here where I work. I would be interested in sharing experiences. You can contact me via my profile if you'd like to chat more about it. I would say from my part it's been a good choice, but so much complexity to deal with.

I actually have not touched any of the code yet as we are using a 3rd party developer to help us. (I will likely work on templates and other things down the road)

My experience when evaluating Odoo was using Studio, which I have found can really mess up your Odoo instance.

Are you working with Odoo code directly?

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

#562

Post by khendron »

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

Isn't that where Salesforce came from? At least in the CRM space. It is not as horrid, though that is not saying much :P

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

#563

Post by cmuguythrow »

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…

How does this idea merge with the idea of "unbundling"? For example, I think of Craigslist, and its famous "unbundling" story[1]. For Aibnb, fiverr, Getaround, etc., the individual niches were enough to build a big product off of, and there was no need (or maybe no ability?) to grow that product back into the "everything for everyone" of Craiglist. What is different about SAP/JIRA/Salesforce? Why can't "not bad" niche-focused subsets of these products become big and profitable while still focusing on their initial niche/area?

[1] https://www.cbinsights.com/research/craigslist-unbundling/

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

#564

Post by bumby »

tmpz22 wrote: post #512
bumby wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My (completely speculative) hunch is that they may have been chasing efficiencies beyond the scope of uniforms, or even beyond the scope of the army. For example, the solution may not have worked well with other procurement items and they wanted a single platform. Or the navy already had an SAP contract that could be leveraged without spending money on a separate stand-alone army solution. So it can look like a bad d…

Or this small company built by a pair of professors didn't have the customer support arm or continuity guarantees to service an organization as large as the US Army. Its always good to call out corruption, but its also important to realize when a situation is actually crazy complex and while its an awesome story might not be worth formulating a summary judgement from.

That could very well be the case. I looked up the professor and the company he created for this solution and the link is dead.

However, for an organization like the army that spends $$$ on logistics, I would bet they would continually fund something like this if it showed enough promise. One thing the DoD and Congress are good at is throwing money at R&D efforts.

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

#565

Post by bumby »

ska wrote: post #556
endtime wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do we already know this? Is there actual studies that show this impact?

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

#566

Post by bumby »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #494
derefr wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

I agree that trust is part of it, but I don't think it's the whole story. A lot of this is also due to cognitive biases. For example, optimism biases make public works project managers continually underestimate cost and schedule. Then sunk-cost biases make funding managers scramble to find additional money to make up the difference. Often, those funds come in the form of "unspent" funds from other projects.

That's the generous interpretation. There's also the case when project managers deliberately low-ball their project estimates to take advantage of the phenomenon. I'd put that in the trust problem category.

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

#567

Post by bumby »

dorgo wrote: post #514
endtime wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wouldn't go for it. Suppose my budget is Y and I could reduce it to Y/2 and get X%*Y/2 as a bonus. But in subsequent years I would only get a budget of Y/2. With half the budget I can only employ half the staff and be half as important. I don't think it works out. edit: on the other hand: If I'm going to quit the job next year and I don't like my successor I'm definitely going to cut corners and budget.

Since the original context here is an army procurement, I don't think that hypothesis works out. Civil servants are not going to get that type of monetary incentive structure.

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

#568

Post by rjtavares »

suggala wrote: post #520
purpleblue wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

PeopleSoft is now replaced by Workday.

PeopleSoft became part of Oracle (and now uses the Oracle brand) and some of their people left and founded Workday.

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

#569

Post by Arwill »

MattRix wrote: post #531
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?

Its not called "hooking into", building your own UI's is the expected and proper way of working with SAP now. SAP even provides the tools for building your own HTML based (simplified functionality) GUIs. There will always be power users who will fix data in the backend directly, but working with custom GUIs is the way to work with SAP.

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

#570

Post by rjtavares »

tus666 wrote: post #149
_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…

Isn't Salesforce the alternative?

No, it's Oracle.
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