651–660 of 703 posts
I've had the pleasure(?) of doing some elearning work for some clients that used SAP... I feel sorry for anyone who has to interact with their software on a daily basis.
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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.
They had evidently selected one approved hotel to demonstrate the process and never bothered to go further.
The hotel was some four-star facility 40km from the office and twice the price of the economy tourist-tier hotels 5km away (which also featured free wi-fi and breakfast). So the remote workers continued to stay at those hotels and had to waste effort poking the system to do an override.
Fortunately, they still did it as "pay with your own account and we'll reimburse you" so you weren't stuck waiting for someone to approve a "can I pretty please spend less money and avoid an extra two hours of travel time per day?" request.
At my prior job, we were trying to do marketing for a SAP consultancy firm, and it was just surreal trying to get a grasp on it. How will potential customers know they're ready for SAP, or ready for your services in particular? Where do you reach out to potential buyers? What sort of messaging are you trying to target? I never got anything resembling an answer. I think they basically just wanted us to write the HTML for the terrible email blasts they sent to their existing lead pool.
After a thought, I suspect there's a particular corner of the C*O universe that treats Gartner reports as some sort of Death Note: a supernatural document where once someone's name appears in it, their entire destiny and fate is fully programmed out. I think they pretty much believed they could ride being in the Magic Quadrant for Nasal Hair Removal Advisory Services in 2006 into golden retirement.
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Over my career I've seen it communicated as "leadership support" where people implementing different programs know that they are only as effective as the leadership support behind it. I do some Scaled Agile Framework consulting and the implementation a good example, because it can be fantastic but if leadership at the top of the company doesn't get on board the entire process will self destruct or be bastardized. The…
> New leaders will come in and often insist on tools that they already know, rather than take the time to learn about better options. I've seen this with developers. Newly joining developers, particularly junior and mid career developers, tend to insist on using the languages, libraries, and techniques they are familiar with. Senior Developers don't seem to do it as much. Either because they are familiar with many th…
I do care about using the right abstractions and high-level interactions, not as much about the language or frameworks. I’ll let others put in their political weight on that, so that I can do it in the areas I believe will really make an impact to the business goals.
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The government funding mechanism doesn’t incentivize cost optimization, and in my experience, does the opposite. Money is allocated to be spent and if not spent is “lost” and may be cut from subsequent budget years. This leads to massive end of year purchases to use remaining funds or starting unnecessary projects just because money was allocated, regardless of whether needs have changed. It’s a really broken system…
When I lived in the USSR we had the this system where money must be spent no matter what or the next year budget will be cut. I thought it is insane and borderline crime and thing like these are impossible in free Western world. Boy was I in for a surprise when I emigrated.
A market economy does not really help, that just means you don't have a budget to cut in the first place.
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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…
The government funding mechanism doesn’t incentivize cost optimization, and in my experience, does the opposite. Money is allocated to be spent and if not spent is “lost” and may be cut from subsequent budget years. This leads to massive end of year purchases to use remaining funds or starting unnecessary projects just because money was allocated, regardless of whether needs have changed. It’s a really broken system…
It’s more the opposite, that many people have a strong financial interest in maintaining the system.
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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.
It does not make sense for Amazon to run there own shipping fleet... until it does.
The other point is that armed forces tend to have a mandate to control the supply chain, this might be a case of that.
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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…
I haven't, but some of my colleagues have been in the space for 20+ years.
>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.
Wrong. Upgrades almost never break your customizations, because in the ERP space backwards compatibility is verry much a thing with the exception of a few extreme cases now and then. I've migrated customizations from a 2004 version of NAV to a 2022 version of Business Central - even the name of the software changed, and the language in which it is written, but the customizations were almost plug and play after running the code migration tool provided by Microsoft.
>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.
I never said employees wishes should be blindly followed, you still have to do the consulting part of the job...
>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.
Wrong. The benefit you get on the accounting side, and the all data being in one place side(reporting) outweighs almost any customization that needs to be done - because, good luck making those 2 things from scratch. And good luck living without those 2 things if you're a mid/big company.
Many of those systems might be somewhat standard, covering account receivables, payables, inventory, sales, production, planning, supply chains, payroll/hr, relationship management and general accounting. Many may be versions of these customized to a specific industry or business. Others are unique and require a customizable platform to implement a custom system.
SAP offers such software that scales to the worlds largest corporations and organizations. How well it does that is of course contentious. That reflects its market worth.
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Again, as I noted elsewhere in the thread, I worked in R&D at SAP for 4 years (16 years ago), but I have no deep love for it. But I do have some understanding of where it fits in the landscape. What you've said is absolutely true, but it's mostly a feature, not a bug. Once you get big enough to need SAP, it's actually useful to put your business processes on a standardized platform. It's painful, always mind bendingl…
I have to disagree here strongly. You are just saying, that a company that became big enough, so it can afford SAP, should drop their way of doing business, drop the processes that made it big in the first place and go through a painful and expensive process where it will become just another SAP shop, with zero competitive advantage. Telling that losing your uniqueness and being like “everyone else” will actually bec…
Standardise the mundane (with an ERP, with minimal customisation) business processes so your company can focus on innovating where they have true competitive advantage. This is the recipe for a successful ERP implementation.