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What's SAP?

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Re: What's SAP?

#591

Post by unixhero »

NohatCoder wrote: post #229
starfallg wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Process is king in mature industries where profits are extracted from scale and volume. Anything outside of standard process is expensive. If there is no external entity to bear the cost, then this cost is to be minimised. You and I may not agree with this approach, and the formula is somewhat different for creative industries, but numbers don't lie. It's always a compromise between agility/adaptability and cost when…

And now you have a company incapable of evolving in any meaningful way. The company will die with its current line of products.

Unless incumbents are not susceptible to shakeups, like when that business is within for instance extraction of oil

Or a hospital

Or a drug manufacturer

Re: What's SAP?

#592

Post by unixhero »

Proziam wrote: post #214
bargle0 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which of the open source ERP systems is the least bad?

If forced, I'd say Dolibarr is probably the best for 'real' ERP use-cases. I say 'real' because ERP is a buzzword that has been beaten to death to describe things that don't even approach what it's intended to mean. A close second is Vienna Advantage. IIRC the development actually came from former SAP devs who have real-world exposure to the problems ERP is supposed to solve.

There is also https://www.axelor.com/ It seems very promising. I will test it next week for my business.

Re: What's SAP?

#593

Post by unixhero »

lolftw wrote: post #582
agentultra wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what we hear from our customers all the time. Our product has been so successful, I think, because people on the floor of the factories like using it. Our developers visit the sites, talk to users, and we take everything into account in the design of our UX. I talk with a lot of our users and their biggest frustration is SAP. It's only available on particular work stations, you have to manually enter your for…

Care to share what you product is?

Yeah. Kind of an integral part of the story.

Re: What's SAP?

#594

Post by makapuf »

jboy55 wrote: post #476
endymi0n wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The correct answer here is "it depends". SAP isn't (just) a giant pile of steaming data model mess because of the thousands of people involved building that software, but really because it can model every tax case in every country in the world. Thought you had a great model for your sales tax that covered US and the EU? Well, enter Brazil and think again, with four slightly different taxes, some of which are applied…

The key insight in what you wrote here, "(biggest client just saw our tooling stack and told us we're 10 years ahead of the ad agencies working in the same space)", is the word client. If you are going to build your own ERP software, make sure that is the product your company is selling. The same goes for building a new 'web framework' for your web company. Never build a complex product from scratch if that isn't goi…

Well, Django is a success and was done by a newspaper.

Re: What's SAP?

#595

Post by VladimirIvanov »

antaviana wrote: post #514
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.

This reminds me an interview to Eric Schmidt [1]. Here is the interesting excerpt on Google decision to buy Oracle instead of building their own ERP. "__ How did you convince them that you needed to do this? __ Well, it was actually very interesting. Larry and Sergey suggested that we should build our own, because most of the existing accounting systems weren't any good. And I said, "I'm sure that's true, but you'll…

That's just a lie though. Custom software can be audited. I have first hand experience with this

Re: What's SAP?

#596

Post by [deleted] »

healsjnr1 wrote: post #569
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…

> I hear this all the time, and it's almost always wrong. Engineers and businesses are always convinced they're special and don't fit the mold. That's rarely the case, and the money used on these initiatives was probably better spent elsewhere. That seems like big statement given you have no context about the person making it. I also work on a team that has built large potions of this intentionally and willingly. And…

[deleted]

Re: What's SAP?

#597

Post by tomnipotent »

buonzz wrote: post #585
tomnipotent wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you buy it for the battle-tested built-in domain knowledge. This was my hardest lesson to learn. Code is only as good as the domain knowledge going into it. I love games because the domain is more often than not in the realm of fellow programmers and erudites like mathematicians and 3D animators that capture their domain knowledge in physics, sound effects, motion capture, fluid dynamics, FSM AI, or combining geome…

captured a bunch of "domain knowledge" of which only 20-30% is relevant to your business. let me guess, they did not captured/predicted the domain knowledge required to run the following business huh: - search engine (google) - marketplace for arranging or offering lodging ( airbnb ) - ride sharing ( uber ) - social networks (twitter/facebook) if all businesses does everything the same way (because some german compan…

> The same way if all chefs is following the same recipe.

It's more like chefs using the same kitchen appliances, pots, pans and equipment as everyone else. And they do. You use a Salamander Broiler because it does the job.

Re: What's SAP?

#599

Post by oblio »

makapuf wrote: post #594
jboy55 wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key insight in what you wrote here, "(biggest client just saw our tooling stack and told us we're 10 years ahead of the ad agencies working in the same space)", is the word client. If you are going to build your own ERP software, make sure that is the product your company is selling. The same goes for building a new 'web framework' for your web company. Never build a complex product from scratch if that isn't goi…

Well, Django is a success and was done by a newspaper.

And how many dead and moribund frameworks are out there for each Django? I'd say probably something between 10 000 and 100 000...

Re: What's SAP?

#600

Post by Proziam »

unixhero wrote: post #592
Proziam wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If forced, I'd say Dolibarr is probably the best for 'real' ERP use-cases. I say 'real' because ERP is a buzzword that has been beaten to death to describe things that don't even approach what it's intended to mean. A close second is Vienna Advantage. IIRC the development actually came from former SAP devs who have real-world exposure to the problems ERP is supposed to solve.

There is also https://www.axelor.com/ It seems very promising. I will test it next week for my business.

We actually tested Axelor as well! At the time, their documentation was quite lacking (in English at least) to the point that their installation instructions didn't result in a working system. (We got it working using a windows system and an older version, but weren't able to do so on a Debian?? system with the latest version at the time) I would be very happy to hear that things have improved because Axelor is probably the most 'user-friendly' and 'pretty' system we tested - assuming it's functioning.
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