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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)

#691

Post by plankers »

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…

sounds like the devs over at SAP need to unionize if they want to stop pushing user-unfriendly software

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

#692

Post by cholantesh »

smooc wrote: post #538
cholantesh wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gives you access to a bevy of financial data and news through a TUI.

Did you know it has a Jupyter Notebook interface with python support?

Never had a chance to play with it, but yes!

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

#693

Post by cholantesh »

giva wrote: post #436
cholantesh wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there really no meaningful competitors to SAP in this space?

Microsoft offers Dynamics 365 F&O (previously known as Dynamics AX) for medium to large companies. (Microsoft uses SAP as an ERP).

So that's what Dynamics is...thanks for that; I feel like I never hear about any ERP software other than SAP which I found weird, though not as weird as the fact that I've never met a developer at SAP, only implementation consultants...

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

#694

Post by eatYourFood »

NohatCoder wrote: post #668
vain_cain wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I can only speak for Microsoft's ERP, but everything that is impossible or hard to extended within the ERP itself can easily be extended through an outside application. And by doing so, you can probably even make the employees job easier by keeping the process the same, but giving him an UI that isn't overwhelming. But then, did you really gain anything by using an ERP instead of just a dumb database, which would h…

No post body was provided.

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

#695

Post by itchyjunk »

pbourke wrote: post #685
redhale wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bit of both. Their (SAP) Convergent Charging module, to which a lot of legacy Sales and Distribution solutions are trying to move to, was acquired. I think they even have patents on the decision trees used in this module?

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

#696

Post by zitterbewegung »

Vanderson wrote: post #483
zitterbewegung wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Customizing odoo is a nightmare it is similar to "It doesn't do everything you want, but it does everything your business needs". (quote by Larry Ellison about Oracle ERP). Underneath its a mess but at least its open source.

We are doing an Odoo implementation right now. (a few months in) What did you find is a mess about Odoo? And why is customizing it a nightmare?

SQL database was a large amount of tables alike and if you try to add a feature that it doesn't implement yet (such as drop shipping capabilities) I couldn't figure it out because its not as simple as creating a new set of forms like in Django you basically have to understand the whole system and I think the task would take a year.

It would have been better to integrate an existing system instead.

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

#697

Post by jwr »

FlyingSnake wrote: post #321
jwr wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so true! As the author of a (small) ERP/MRP SaaS, I am often amused when I read HN and observe the thundering herds of fashion followers — today it's Kubernetes and Rust, Postgres and sqlite have a longer lifespan, but tomorrow it's going to be something else entirely, and you necessarily need to use those :-)

Meanwhile people are spinning up profitable SaaS based on PHP and making it to the bank.

Yep. If I ever read an article/post about my competition using Kubernetes to run microservices, I'll be quite happy, because it will mean I don't have to worry about them.

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

#699

Post by dang »

crubier wrote: post #204
tut-urut-utut wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With 100 mildly competent developers on staff (although not with SAP developers) a company can develop in house everything they need to run a business in a period of time that is shorter than what is needed for a typical "SAP adjustment".

[flagged]

I understand the intention behind the comment, but please edit swipes out of your posts here.

Adding "respectfully" is a no-op. We need you to be respectful, not just use that word.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#700

Post by dang »

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

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Please don't respond to such a comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes everything worse, and "shut the fuck up" is the kind of thing we ban accounts for. Please don't post like this again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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