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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)

#681

Post by selfmodruntime »

starik36 wrote: post #573
progfix wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ABAP, the programming language of SAP, is quite nice nowadays I took a brief look at the ABAP wikipedia article and this insanity [1] stood out to me. I think after a decade of SAP you are too brain-washed to give an objective opinion anymore. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABAP#Spaces

Wow. That is pretty insane. I hope there is a tooling to surface a warning when it detects this. But lots of domain specific languages have idiosyncrasies. The Apex language used to program Salesforce is a half-implemented clone of Java from a decade ago. And they didn't cherry pick the best parts.

Some companies will be forever scarred by the past trend to create an entirely new programming language for their product when an existing one could‘ve been entirely sufficient

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

#682

Post by selfmodruntime »

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…

Complacency, top heavy companies with aged decision makers and the immense difficulties and bureaucracy and risk to personal assets that come with founding a company in Germany are largely to blame.

Software is seen as a necessary evil in Germany, not as the main focus for profit. You can directly see this in most medium to large companies which sell ERP or management software (like Scheer) pay their sales reps a lot more than their developers, even though the latter produce their value.

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

#683

Post by [deleted] »

brightball wrote: post #387
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…

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…

[deleted]

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

#684

Post by pbourke »

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…

If you think about it, all of those niches were naturally unbundled. The people who were looking for vacation rentals had no need to also look for gig work within the same product. The same isn’t true of enterprise transactions - everything is always related, with cross-function impact. There is always a GL that needs to be updated, you need a common vendor list, budget allocation constrains procurement, and on and on.

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

#685

Post by pbourke »

redhale wrote: post #647
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…

You (and maybe GP) seem to be assuming that a SINGLE competitor would theoretically try to replace SAP and fail. But the most likely scenario, I think, is that built-for-purpose competitors will build products that peel away small pockets of SAP's customer base over time. The irony of course is that a product like SAP is the end result of similar built-for-purpose products being hoovered up and merged together in the…

Wasn’t SAP mostly grown through development instead of acquisition? Oracle was the one hovering up companies.

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

#686

Post by owenm »

wildzzz wrote: post #584
wcfields wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sharepoint is similarly entrenched at DOE when I worked with them in 2009. Any project that gets a bid contract can't say specifically that it must use Sharepoint, but the requirements will be written in such a way that Sharepoint is literally the only system that fits all of them.

While SharePoint is not the best choice for many applications, it has enough features to make it work. Since there are plenty of SharePoint experts already in the organization, it could be cheaper to just leverage them to build some SharePoint site that just barely works well enough for whatever application. It would cost a lot more to bring in some consultant that knows how to setup the proper software to do whateve…

Of course, Teams uses SharePoint for file storage, so it’s basically the same thing for Microsoft, build on the things you have already.

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

#687

Post by hef19898 »

Aeolun wrote: post #288
hef19898 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SAP checks most of the boxes of almost all industries you need to run a modern business. Some specifc domains better than others, sure, but none are actually bad or unusable. And all tjose functions are integrated with each other. That alone is tremendous value.

> Some specifc domains better than others, sure, but none are actually bad or unusable. I’m fairly certain most of them are bad. You don’t make an everything monster and have things be good. They’re likely at best adequate.

Some weaknesses I see with SAP compared to dedicated solutions are in logistics and warehouse management, process industries (e.g. continious chemicals production, SAP is way better for discrete products and still it works just fine for the pricess industry), aerospace MRO (SAPs aerospace and defence package is more geared towards production) and eCommerce (eCommerce as a business is not that complex).

Basically, if you are a manufacturing company SAP is easily among the best solutions out there. Added benefit of using an ERP that litterally everone else is usong as well: you have a way larger pool of people to recruit from that know the system. The less market pebetration an ERP has, the harder it is to get people who prwviously worked with it. That means higher training efforts, more need for external cobsultants and performance issues until your emoloyees adapted to whatever ERP you have.

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

#688

Post by silvershell »

Vanderson wrote: post #561
silvershell wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, Vanderson. I'm doing the same thing here where I work. I would be interested in sharing experiences. You can contact me via my profile if you'd like to chat more about it. I would say from my part it's been a good choice, but so much complexity to deal with.

I actually have not touched any of the code yet as we are using a 3rd party developer to help us. (I will likely work on templates and other things down the road) My experience when evaluating Odoo was using Studio, which I have found can really mess up your Odoo instance. Are you working with Odoo code directly?

No. We are using a 3rd party developer, too. But I'm interested in eventually becoming a developer/consultant for the product. I already do python programming at my current job, too.

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

#689

Post by aprdm »

jonhohle wrote: post #449
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…

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…

That's not very different from big corporations also.

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

#690

Post by ksec »

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 is the de facto software in its field and is deeply entrenched

And yet somehow last time we had this discussion on HN, more of than half of the developers have never heard of SAP.

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