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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)

#571

Post by intuxikated »

hedora wrote: post #543
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…

Salesforce carved off a big chunk of SAP's business, and is currently valued at $155B. I'm sure their goal was to eventually replace SAP. Instead, I think they ended up with an 80% solution that requires the customers to invest 20% as much time as a full SAP setup. For instance, Salesforce spends a lot of effort on sales and customer facing things. SAP does that too, but it also does logistics. Logistics infrastructu…

Salesforce is great, but heavily focussed on Sales / CRM part of the equasion. I'm not sure if salesforce is able to replace other parts of ERP systems like Purchasing, Inventory management, Manufacturing etc... ERP systems are much more vast than Salesforce (which I agree, is great in what it does, but it's not ERP)

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

#572

Post by cosmodisk »

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 think what's often being overlooked is the complexity of the business ( or underlying processes) that SAP supports. There's this strong,yet often unsupported argument that something complex can somehow be made super simple. I work with Salesforce, which on its own approaching the complexities SAP supports, only in different areas. So we have a system,which supports a nonlinear process with tons of inputs, multiple supply chains, etc. The system is designed to support it. It takes users a few weeks to be at least somewhat comfortable with it. Can it be simplified? A little bit, but the underlying business complexities won't change because of it.

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

#573

Post by starik36 »

progfix wrote: post #411
_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…

> ABAP, the programming language of SAP, is quite nice nowadays I took a brief look at the ABAP wikipedia article and this insanity [1] stood out to me. I think after a decade of SAP you are too brain-washed to give an objective opinion anymore. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABAP#Spaces

Wow. That is pretty insane. I hope there is a tooling to surface a warning when it detects this.

But lots of domain specific languages have idiosyncrasies. The Apex language used to program Salesforce is a half-implemented clone of Java from a decade ago. And they didn't cherry pick the best parts.

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

#574

Post by kelnos »

bumby wrote: post #565
ska wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I don't think we need a study to show the obvious outcome when you set up incentives in certain ways.

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

#575

Post by politician »

cosmodisk wrote: post #572
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 think what's often being overlooked is the complexity of the business ( or underlying processes) that SAP supports. There's this strong,yet often unsupported argument that something complex can somehow be made super simple. I work with Salesforce, which on its own approaching the complexities SAP supports, only in different areas. So we have a system,which supports a nonlinear process with tons of inputs, multiple…

While the business problems are complex, there are precious few affordances given to the humans operating SAP user interfaces and even fewer capabilities provided to integrators. Indeed, while it may void your warranty, it's often simpler to query the underlying database directly -- and many vendors do -- than to use the trash interfaces provided by the software.

SAP will fall from a thousand cuts of the facade pattern.

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

#576

Post by at-fates-hands »

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…

>> Its UX is the most horribly wicked thing I’ve ever come across.

A few years ago, I was working for a small, family owned industrial company. They were in the process of moving all of their ERP stuff over to SAP. Things were slow with some of the UI/UX stuff I was working on and someone asked me if I wanted to learn how to be an ERP developer.

Before I was shown anything, the SAP guy pulled me to the side and told me, "Fates, I know you could probably write a DB program significantly faster than what you're about to learn, but this is just the way the software was written."

Cue several of their SAP people dropping random stuff in my lap and me taking days and sometimes weeks to discern how to do it in their UI. It was the most maddening thing I've ever tried to learn. I just remember this graph paper like grid and having to line everything up perfectly or the program wouldn't run at all. I felt like I was working with something from the 1970's, it felt that out of date.

I finally told my boss I couldn't do it anymore, it was driving me mad.

On the flip side, I play hockey with a guy who is an SAP sales person and makes hella money selling their software and thinks its the greatest thing ever.

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

#578

Post by erybodyknows »

cmuguythrow wrote: post #563
jerf wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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" nich…

Likely because of B2B vs B2C. Individual users can easily switch when a better solution appears on the market. Business use cases tend to involve a little more friction in those decisions.

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

#579

Post by phone8675309 »

brightball wrote: post #387
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…

20 years ago I was a grad assistant for a couple of professors who'd built a pretty incredible JIT supply chain platform. The US Army started using it to manage their uniform orders and it worked so well that two entire warehouses were torn down due to lack of use. A new general came in and insisted on using SAP. 6 months later, they had to rebuild both warehouses. EDIT: For some additional context, the system manage…

I wonder how much of a kickback that general got for insisting on it.

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

#580

Post by implements »

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?

If you pre-approve but not fund certain desirable projects, and allow unused funding or surpluses gained through efficiency to spent on those, you get the double-win of maintaining trust and making efficiency organisationally desirable.
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