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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)

#631

Post by NikolaNovak »

vain_cain wrote: post #286
lqet wrote: post #171

My mother works for a fairly large textile lab. For decades, they used an internally developed system for lab reports (they had a few programmers and admins they called the "nerds" that did nothing else than extend and maintain the system). The company switched to a SAP solution a few years ago. Chaos ensued. The SAP solution missed so many edge cases that a huge number of lab reports were either inaccurate or comple…

I see a lot of comments here saying a company should adapt their business processes to their ERP, and in my experience they are wrong - with the exception of accounting(Good luck trying to customize accounting modules within ERPs to fit your process). I don't work with SAP, but I've been working with Microsoft's ERP(Dynamics NAV/Business Central) my whole professional career(almost 5 years). When it comes to shipping…

It's possible you might not have worked in erp space, especially sustainment / maintenance (as opposed to implementation) long enough to see true customization price. I certainly didn't my first 5 years - to mis paraphrase, I was excited at all the things I could do, so I didn't bother to truly consider whether I should :). ERP's lifetime at large company is frequently decades, and their roi vs cost is similarly long.

Every. Single. Customization. You make, which makes so much sense to seemingly eagerly satisfy the user during implementation, will be a massive pain, forever, with every patch and upgrade and new functionality released by vendor in perpetuity, and will inevitably cause performance and failure issues eventually. And will only be getting more expensive and painful to maintain exponentially over many years.

Yes, you should customize erp for your very specific edge cases that you a absolutely need. But:

A) number of processes Bob from accounting or Fatima from HR believe are absolutely crucial and immutable and special and unicorn and mandatory, is way way higher than processes which actually are special and must be preserved. Personal inertia is huge. More often than not, special ways of doing things which are not your core business are an unnecessary cost, whether through erp or not.

This may seem like I'm a traditional grognard IT head who disregards users and their needs, but it's quite the opposite so let me clarify with

B) The threshold of customization at which erp no longer makes sense is in fact very very low.

If you actually, really properly are a special snowflake of a company and your convoluted hr or finance or pay processes are your key immutable competitive advantage, then don't get an erp. Other name for erp is cots, commercial off the shelf, which strongly hints as to how its meant to be used. With erp, customizations should be fought tooth and nail on every level,and that's a largely accepted industry wisdom.

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

#632

Post by lawkwok »

achr2 wrote: post #602

My very first job when I was 16 was helping Canada Post move data from their old VAX mainframe system into SAP. This was over 21 years ago. The answer to the second part of the title question is: because it is now so deeply entrenched in huge corporate infrastructure.

Your legacy continues. Their internal systems and employee service pages are still SAP. Small fonts and timeout errors and all.

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

#633

Post by jslaby »

ska wrote: post #556
endtime wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems more like an incentive problem. I'd be interested to see what happens if you give the deciders X% of any unused budget as an EOY bonus.

> 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.

I think we have a real world test case with the Russian military

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

#634

Post by paulclinger »

rossdavidh wrote: post #384
ethbr0 wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. People underestimate how much SAP is doing behind the scenes when properly configured. And beyond that, they overestimate the ergonomics of any enterprise alternative , especially ones that pre-dated SAP. For every "We had a great internal platform that we custom built" story, there are multiple "We used a small vendor's product, and it was a nightmare." Why is SAP successful? Because the general purpose too…

Having worked at companies that switched from non-SAP to SAP, I can say with confidence that this statement is false. SAP is successful because the transition is so mind-bogglingly expensive that it is impossible to admit that it was a mistake afterwards.

Not only that, but given the price tag, the organization itself will adjust its own processes to adapt even to a highly customizable SAP product, which may not be the case for smaller, cheaper, and better scoped other products.

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

#635

Post by m-p-3 »

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…

It's basically the new JDEdwards with a coat of shitty GUI on top.

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

#636

Post by achr2 »

lawkwok wrote: post #632
achr2 wrote: post #602

My very first job when I was 16 was helping Canada Post move data from their old VAX mainframe system into SAP. This was over 21 years ago. The answer to the second part of the title question is: because it is now so deeply entrenched in huge corporate infrastructure.

Your legacy continues. Their internal systems and employee service pages are still SAP. Small fonts and timeout errors and all.

That is pretty amazing, thanks. It makes me oddly nostalgic for a summer sitting in front of the orange glow of that terminal computer.

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

#637

Post by to11mtm »

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…

> It’s easier to just hire people to learn the SAP workflow and then hire external auditors to make sure the accounting policies are properly being followed.

I have a family member who has had enough professional success with SAP; when I mention projects there is a specific response he has that relates to this.

tl;dr- If you change your processes to follow the SAP happy path where they don't you are OK. The more you go out of bounds the more problems you have (be they problems of kafkaesque workflows, or paying the bills to customize it while the scope of customization keeps changing.)

I don't know how true that is, but it's there.

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

#638

Post by mjcl »

ghaff wrote: post #467
tristor wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sad thing is that Concur used to be great. It was acquired by SAP and then "SAPified", now it's a nightmare. But it does /exactly/ what the bean counters want, which is to mindlessly and stupidly apply policies against business travelers who are just trying to get their job done.

Concur the software is OK though not great. What is distinctly often not OK is the mandatory fields that companies want, often arbitrary travel policies, and often needlessly nit-picky auditing. If putting in an expense report into Concur typically sailed through unless something was clearly wrong, missing reasonable documentation, or was significantly out of policy, Concur would mostly be fine.

Yup! A previous company starting using Concur (with a shitty, minimal effort setup) around 2011. It would push employees to book a train + bus to go from LA to Palo Alto because it was some % cheaper than a Southwest flight. Thankfully we still had p-cards and accounts payable didn't have a spine, so our department ended up ignoring Concur and booking travel directly on the carrier sites.

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

#639

Post by crubier »

tut-urut-utut wrote: post #385
crubier wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Saying that you seem to be a novice in a certain field is not an insult. I myself don't know much about SAP and that's fine. But I don't have the pretention of saying with confidence that all the customers of a $100B+ company are idiots for paying millions when they could hire 100 developers for a year and be done with it.

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

#640

Post by greedo »

marcosdumay wrote: post #439
greedo wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a certain level, managers have to delegate broadly. I think this is best illustrated by the US Army. In an ideal situation, the commander general guidance about his intent. Then his subordinates plan how to accomplish it. I wouldn't expect a Colonel to remember how to fire a mortar properly, and it's the same in IT. My manager expects a well run, secure and efficient datacenter. He expects his SMEs to take care of…

If you are delegating broadly, you don't get to mandate the important decisions. Trying to do those two is a clear signal of incompetence.

Eisenhower was in charge of D-Day, arguably one of the most complex human endeavors. He made the majority of the decisions surrounding it, of course influenced by outside factors (De Gaulle, Churchill). He chose Normandy, he decided which units would go where, who would lead the campaign on the ground. Incredibly important decisions, yet he left the tactical decisions to those on the ground. Delegating broadly, as a good commander should.

General Marshall, Eisenhower's superior also delegated broadly, while making key decisions as to the timing of the invasion, which units would be involved, and making sure all the disparate organizations involved were used to the best effect. Again, delegating broadly, as a good commander should.

This goes on and on up to Roosevelt himself, the Commander in Chief at the time. Does he know jack about the tide tables on Omaha beach? The range of a German 105mm howitzer? Of course not. Yet he clearly mandated the important decisions.

All three of these leaders were clearly EXTREMELY competent.

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