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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)

#61

Post by shankr »

qikInNdOutReply wrote: post #12
hardware2win wrote: post #4

ERP industry is so hard(painful) that I wouldnt want to work in it unless they paid top of the top Good luck competing in that industry > basic installation of SAP has 20,000 database tables, 3,000 of which are configuration tables. In those tables, there are ~8,000 configuration decisions you need before even getting started. Gotta be fun :)

The only field german software could compete. [ ] Digital Bureaucracy [ ] All of the above [ ] None of the above My little pet theory is that the old "Do as you told" buisness-culture is to blame for germanys inability to produce great software. Software needs developers with agency, who refuse "idiotic" tasks and fight back to improve the product. Know an israeli who complained about "endless arguing" in israeli sof…

> My little pet theory is that the old "Do as you told" buisness-culture is to blame for germanys inability to produce great software. Software needs developers with agency, who refuse "idiotic" tasks and fight back to improve the product.

This I have experienced first hand where this junior product manager who wrote some ticket whose requirements when got challenged says "it's mentioned here so you have to do it and you don't have to challenge it". I lost it and I said, "everything needs to be challenged, we are not just going to follow it like a machine". I did apologize to him for my tone. But it bothered me so much.

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

#62

Post by _glass »

meibo wrote: post #59
_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…

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.

I think it's mostly the culture surrounding SAP. SAP developers are a lot of times slow to adapt to new technology. For the UI you can use react components https://sap.github.io/ui5-webcomponents-react/?path=/story/g... or you can just generate OData services from CDS Views that are then integrated into your frontend https://blogs.sap.com/2022/02/24/sap-cds-for-new-and-experie.... The problem is that a lot of people use SAP as a front end, which is wrong in my experience.

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

#63

Post by wheels »

meibo wrote: post #59
_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…

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.

Answer from former SAP employee (may have changed in the last 15 years):

Two main reasons:

- It's actually terminal software, that's translated into a GUI from a text interface on the fly.

- The people that buy SAP never have to use SAP. Its interface is not a selling point.

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

#64

Post by fabfabfab »

_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…

Speaking of purity, the first thing Hacker News would do is try to run SAP on a Kubernetes cluster, refactor crucial bits in Rust and shard the database into sqlite3.db files on per user basis. We'd also recommend you restructure your office for a more open space, bring down the cubicles and make sure the conference rooms are glasswalled and have funny names. Bringing pets to work is mandatory.

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

#65

Post by bbarn »

skissane wrote: post #50
cm2187 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft at one point wanted to become a full featured IT department for companies. From managing their infrastructures, active directory, issuing laptops, but also providing basic erp, kind of salesforce like. I am not sure where they went with that but it certainly an idea that has merit. A small or medium size company should probably outsource its IT department except for the parts that are specific to their busi…

> but also providing basic erp, kind of salesforce like. I am not sure where they went with that but it certainly an idea that has merit Microsoft has a suite of ERP software – Microsoft Dynamics. They got it by acquiring a bunch of companies – Great Plains, Navision, Solomon, Axapta. Originally on-premise, now they encourage SaaS but some of it is still available on-premise for those who prefer that. Generally focus…

Dynamics developer at my current job now. Can confirm, working with it is just as bad as SAP or Oracle development.

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

#66

Post by jumpifzero »

Welcome to my world:) I'm a software dev and always worked in or around sap (~13years).

Sap's secret sauce was understanding that different companies have mostly the same needs. All have employees that need paying and maybe shifts to be tracked. All generate invoices. All buy stuff from suppliers, etc. So they built different solutions (HR/FI/etc.) For those needs. All running on the same technical platform with its own programming language: ABAP. All domain code is ABAP and everything is readable, you can even debug code that SAP wrote years ago but (generally) you're not allowed to change it. And it's full of comments in German so good luck :)

For medium to large companies it's a no brainer to use SAP so most do. For example Sap keeps the client's systems compliant with new laws. Say some country changes laws on how employees pay taxes, sap updates the code or tells their clients what's needed to update the systems.

Companies that have been around for a few years, most likely they already have SAP so makes no sense to shift to something else.

SAP's ERP code is also quite generic. Tons of configurations are possible in any module. E.g. you may have employees but no shifts. Or maybe you have 200 different shift patterns across many factories to configure. Configuration is so complex it's a well paid profession in itself: the functional consultant.

When that config is not enough to implement the requirements then developers can modify the system. Either changing existing ABAP code, or building new ABAP programs or (more commonly nowadays) just building webapps with the normal tools (react/node.js/java etc) in the cloud and using sap ERP as a backend to read/write data to. This last one sums up my day to day.

ABAP is interesting though. Syntactically it looks like COBOL and that you've gone back 40years plus most of the DB tables/columns/data types have seemingly random names like WERKS or DMBTR. They make sense in German after you've shortened the German meaning to 5chars :). So ABAP code looks very cryptic at first sight.

But semantically the language is ok. It is strongly typed, has some nice features for working with finance programs (e.g. fixed point arithmetic) and an OO model that feels familiar to anyone that knows Java (e.g. single inheritance).

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

#70

Post by zxienin »

_glass wrote: post #57
zxienin wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But you can be agile with SAP, especially if you move to the cloud. Does SAP even have ERP in the „real“ cloud?

Yes, sure https://www.sap.com/products/erp/s4hana.html It's quite nice, even though they do some crazy (also cool) stuff with it https://blogs.sap.com/2021/09/30/steampunk-is-going-all-in/

No, S4HANA is marketed as cloud. Reality is different.

How common is „three system landscape“ in cloud, like S4HANA? Elastic scaling? No. TCO footprint of an new tenant? Sigh.

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