591–600 of 703 posts
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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.
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…
It can work for a long time, but eventually it does create opportunities for competitors.
You're absolutely right that there's a floor for how simple these products can be, but most of the incumbents aren't anywhere close to that.
Where it's truly east to store data, create business units and UI interfaces and pro 'implementers' can do it quickly.
Then you have a company automated system for 'everything' that can just replace a lot of things like SAP, Salesforce.
Way in the future though.
It'll start small, in one area, and just make it's way to others.
Also, it will be it's own giant mess as 'implementers' screw things up and requirements from management change weekly.
Even better is that it's written in some bullshit language that nobody else uses.
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Yes. Reminds me of the ol' classic, "Things You Should Never Do, Part I" by Joel. However, I do believe a (slightly) better competitor could be created, with better technology, better workflow, etc. If well-capitalized. If it had well-factored plugins. If you had a top-notch team to design all that and then build it. That's a lot of ifs . Joel says it isn't guaranteed a brand new team will even do better than the old…
Good read, thanks! https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
Experience probably has already taught you some of these ideas, but you hadn’t invested the time to reason about them and putting them together. Then you read an old blog post, from two decades ago, putting all those ideas into words and it simply clicks in your mind.
Thanks for sharing the link.
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This is the very definition of enterprise software - the people who buy it are not the same people who use it.
Same with kid's toys, the difference being that feedback for kid's toys to the purchaser is immediate and painful if the wrong option is selected
I led the project that replaced SAP at Tesla in 2012 (as an internal IT employee). Explaining that in detail warrants a full article, book, or movie, but in summary the project was successful, took 13 months start to finish, and took a few years off my life. Prior to that I was an ERP technical consultant. I've had the opportunity to work with many ERP systems at a deep technical level, on both sides of an implementa…
Would like to hear of cost/focus tradeoffs after so many years of use.
Anyone at Tesla thought of open sourcing it?
I'm glad I'm seeing some SAP post on HN frontpage. Why? When my sister started to working at SAP working on documentation, I had to look at some of those. I noticed something like SAPUI5 and thought: hey, this looks pretty modern and nice and something that competes with Microsoft offerings! https://sapui5.hana.ondemand.com/#/topic/8b49fc198bf04b2d980... Then I see them documenting/pushing people in CI/CD direction (…
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The competition is generally worse. I tell it as someone who saw few different products offered by the competition. This doesn't mean that SAP is good. Also this doesn't mean that there isn't space for someone who could do it better by starting with a clean state (what sounds easy, but is actually very, very hard to pull off). First you should know that the market for ERP systems is very wide. There are LOTS of vario…
> table and column names are German abbreviations too). This was the craziest part of doing SAP development. (I'll admit this is an America-centric viewpoint.) But the codes to get to various screens were (to me) totally random. e.g. to create a purchase order, the code is ME21N. Only after 6 months, did my German boss let me in on the secret that all the codes "made sense" if you knew the German phrase for "purchase…
But the table and column names are literal german abbreviations. E.g. table AUFK - "SAP Order master data" is named after "Auftrag" (=order).
Column "AUFART" = auftrag art = order type. And often more
When you go into the actual ABAP code of some transactions, it can have comments in German, made by programmers many years ago.