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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)

#621

Post by crftr »

purpleblue wrote: post #493
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…

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…

Oracle/Netsuite has an interesting approach to upgrades--they force them on you twice a year.

Upgrade windows aside, it's ok. I imagine that the sweet-spot for Netsuite are businesses that do 5MM to 100MM ARR. Possibly less if there's a heavy need for EDI, volumetric shipping, etc.

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

#622

Post by bumby »

lfpeb8b45ez wrote: post #607
bumby wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then we're no longer making evidence-based policy. That's just hypothesis-based policy. And unfortunately, humans are reallllly good at rationalizing whatever hypothesis suits their biases.

I’ll need evidence for that claim.

In academia, behavioral psychology is rife with examples if you want to dig deeper. In culture, so is religion.

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

#623

Post by paphillips »

zxienin wrote: post #598
paphillips wrote: post #517

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…

who made decision to at Tesla to build own ERP? Would like to hear of cost/focus tradeoffs after so many years of use. Anyone at Tesla thought of open sourcing it?

I should have clarified: the project required careful re-architecting of system interactions and flows to split the responsibilities. The commercial ERP system that I led the implementation of assumed only the responsibilities and functions of the top layer financial modules. The higher-volume operations transaction processing was fully assumed at go-live by the in-house developed ERP system you refer to. Prior to and during this implementation I was a contributing member of the in-house ERP development team but that project was envisioned and led by others. The in-house ERP system has been mentioned previously by others on HN and other sites. I consider it a success and was proud to be part of that team.

I left a number of years ago and I'm certain things have evolved since, but the cost/benefit calculus is similar to any make vs buy decision.

In my opinion the primary benefit of an in-house developed ERP system (or any purpose-built system) is that it does only what it needs to do and nothing else. Thus, some types of accidental complexity are reduced, business user cognitive load can be lower, and performance and scalability can potentially be higher. Also of course there is no application licensing cost and hence user count is constrained only by infrastructure and code quality.

Now the difficult part: you spread the cost and risk of development over one customer, and ERP software is not a simple matter to build: essential complexity inherent in modeling business processes in software remains unchanged. You also have challenges finding subject matter experts as most of the folks who understand the internals of ERP systems are already working for one of the commercial vendors and will scoff at your audacity.

To be successful it requires leadership with vision, commitment, and patience; as well as a team of talented analysts and engineers.

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

#624

Post by anotheracctfo »

purpleblue wrote: post #495
brightball wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It doesn't make sense for the Army to be in the business of developing software. They should be outsourcing this, and having a well-known vendor like SAP means there's a lot of different avenues to get bids to lower prices.

Why not? They need digital soldiers. They farm spec-ops from the best grunts, so this would give them a pool to recruit their information warefare people from.

The Army isn't a business and should never be run as one.

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

#625

Post by jacobr1 »

bumby wrote: post #564
tmpz22 wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Another thing is requiring continuity clauses in the contract. Such as, in the case of going out of business or otherwise deciding to discontinue the project, the IP and source code needs to be turned over.

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

#626

Post by jacobr1 »

danenania wrote: post #593
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…

While it's true that there's a huge amount of essential complexity in this kind of software, there's also a lot of completely unnecessary bad UX and user-hostile design. This is caused by lock-in and not selling to the end-user. If they don't think bad UX will lose them any customers, no effort will be put into it. It can work for a long time, but eventually it does create opportunities for competitors. You're absolu…

Yes, the platforms essentially get locked-in the UX level that existed when they were initially built. Small incremental changes can be made, or they can be "reskinned" but total rewrites are basically impossibly once there are tens of thousands of customers in hundreds of distinct niches.

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

#628

Post by belfalas »

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…

> Somewhat jokingly, I think it would be easier to switch the US over to the metric system.

Sorry friend, that is not a joke - at least this was attempted once! :)

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

#629

Post by jacobr1 »

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…

Cross-functional workflows within enterprises. Developers can have their own nice, but what about working with tech-writers, oh now we need to have approval processes for third-party systems and idea-gathering from customers for pms, and integration with internal case-management for Customer support escalations and some acquisition uses a different methodology so now we merge on a single platform that contains slight variants or what really are the same states for status. And marketing needs support for the product launches, and we now integrating security scanning tools automatically filing bugs ... oh security has new process steps because we all are doing DevSecOps. And for this special process we need 3 layers of managerial approval. First it was email based, then Slack, then MS-Teams, then back to Slack. And the Old-school QA team for the hardware component has different metadata requirements and internal IT-bug tracking has different requirements than the product-engineering group. And now we want to track cloud spend so every ticket has to have a cost estimate.

The requirements change, merge, flow. In theory each department within the enterprise could have their own optimized, silo'd tool ... but then you need "enterprise integration platforms" to glue together all the workflows between them.

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

#630

Post by ghaff »

rad_gruchalski wrote: post #557
joegahona wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the real pain was paying vendors or freelancers. They all had to be input as an additional vendor, which is reasonable, but there were dozens of fields within each vendor, many of which were esoteric in they're labeling (likely a fault of implementation on our side). Then I would get a rejection via email that a particular field wasn't filled out (why wasn't it a required field?), and it was often hard to find…

> purchase order is what I think of when doing something like ordering printer paper, not getting an invoice paid How can you pay an invoice for a service / item you haven’t purchased? If you buy a service from a supplier, you raise a po, you pay an invoice based on the po. As a supplier, I always ask for a po.

And there's often also an approved vendor process as well. Big companies are mostly not OK with just expensing some random new supplier.

And yeah, there's a lot of paperwork but maybe you're hiring this gal because she's your sister. Maybe she's really good. Or maybe you're just funneling some money to a family member. As companies scale up they need controls for a lot of things even if they're legit 95% of the time.

And, again, not a software issue. It's a perhaps necessary bigco process issue.

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