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LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

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Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#71

Post by kokey »

arethuza wrote: post #29
simias wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know much about SAP besides the fact that I don't think I've ever heard anything positive about it (but then again, nobody talks about the trains that are on time). I always assumed that it was a "nobody gets fired for choosing SAP" situation. It's huge, it might be clunky but you know that if you pay for the support it'll probably end up doing mostly what you want and it'll mostly keep working. The alternati…

"you could do the same thing for 1% the cost and it'd work better etc." I used to think that - then I did some work with large scale ERP systems and realised that I was wildly wrong. Fortunately I moved into other areas while I still had some sanity.

Every few years, over the past 20 years, I look around to see if there are any open source contenders in the ERP space. There are usually a couple, but you never get to hear about them again. I think it's a difficult space to enter and succeed in and I think most efforts probably underestimate the complexity and isn't funded or run well enough to tackle that adequately.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#72

Post by detaro »

syntaxing wrote: post #68

Anyone have a good recommendation for SAP alternative for small medium businesses (SMB)? All the companies I work for use something equally convoluted like Oracle and SAP. When I worked at a startup, I debated for a long time which ERP/PDM system will be the most effective (which I never answered).

Which country, potentially which industry? This is something where from what I've seen there's often local players which are interesting, but would be a bad choice in other places.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#74

Post by nraynaud »

wenc wrote: post #55
DrinkWater wrote: post #11

SAP was, and will always stay, a mystery to me. It is ridiculously expensive and complex. I know that the problems it aims to solve are also highly complex and very specific, but reading stories like this, plus (if you live in Germany and work in the IT industry) sometimes hearing unbelievable stories from your peers, it always confuses me that companies still want so much SAP. In the late 90s/early 00s a lot of peop…

As the other commenters have noted, none of the offerings in the large-scale ERP space are "good" for most measures of good, but they tend to be good enough to keep things operational. SAP is reputedly the least bad vendor in this space (we use a competing system and it is much worse). ERPs are tedious, uninspiring, production-level software that have to deal with all manners of ill-defined business rules and variati…

Can't they split the project and try to introduce the tool or fail by pieces? I know management and sales wants big figures to compute a mass discount and be in the press, but in the nitty gritty, isn't it better to screw up only part of the company?

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#75

Post by mbesto »

nraynaud wrote: post #74
wenc wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the other commenters have noted, none of the offerings in the large-scale ERP space are "good" for most measures of good, but they tend to be good enough to keep things operational. SAP is reputedly the least bad vendor in this space (we use a competing system and it is much worse). ERPs are tedious, uninspiring, production-level software that have to deal with all manners of ill-defined business rules and variati…

Can't they split the project and try to introduce the tool or fail by pieces? I know management and sales wants big figures to compute a mass discount and be in the press, but in the nitty gritty, isn't it better to screw up only part of the company?

Yes - most roll-outs will do phase approaches (unclear if Lidl did this or not). A good strategy is to do a smaller country roll-out for example, learn all of the lessons and then roll it out elsewhere. It's however not a blanket strategy and requires context to decide which is the right way.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#76

Post by kfk »

DrinkWater wrote: post #11

SAP was, and will always stay, a mystery to me. It is ridiculously expensive and complex. I know that the problems it aims to solve are also highly complex and very specific, but reading stories like this, plus (if you live in Germany and work in the IT industry) sometimes hearing unbelievable stories from your peers, it always confuses me that companies still want so much SAP. In the late 90s/early 00s a lot of peop…

The problem is that most SAP projects are in reality change management projects. Unfortunately, change management doesn't sound sexy and everybody focuses on the software side of things. But any IT project at that scale will require a lot of change and a really deep understanding of the current and future business processes and the value you want to get from that change

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#77

Post by TurboHaskal »

Annatar wrote: post #73
_pmf_ wrote: post #33

In Germany, they could have sustained a team of 100 developers for 100 years (at 50000 EUR salary).

Sure, but that’s a small salary, even for Germany.

You'd be surprised. I don't know many devs earning >60k.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#78

Post by sseveran »

simias wrote: post #39
arethuza wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"you could do the same thing for 1% the cost and it'd work better etc." I used to think that - then I did some work with large scale ERP systems and realised that I was wildly wrong. Fortunately I moved into other areas while I still had some sanity.

Well that's an other thing, when you look at these solutions from afar you often see the core functionality and think it's not a big deal but the devil is always in the details, the millions of small functionalities hidden everywhere for specific tasks is what makes it very hard to compete. Every company has specificities, they want to interface with $external_software, they want to import $arcane_data_format etc...…

Its actually much worse than that. I have considerable experience in a similar class of system, electronic medial records. A common thread I saw in both our PeopleSoft implementation and our EMR implementation was that both are not really packaged products, but platforms to implement our organizations workflows. We were not about to adapt our workflow to some software package so really we buy the product and then spend hundreds of millions using it to encode how we want to operate. By the time you are actually inside the database you typically find a data model that is optimized for flexibility over anything else. So its not really that we need weird connectors, its that we say oh no, we actually have this functionality in this weird department that no one else has with data that is subtlety different from other organizations and a workflow that no one else has. Then repeat that thousands of times.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#79

Post by mbesto »

tluyben2 wrote: post #32
philipodonnell wrote: post #14

> Software from the Walldorf-based software company SAP was to be adapted to the needs of Lidl. So far, however, the new system has only been introduced in the small agencies in Austria, Northern Ireland and the USA. It has been shown that the SAP version developed by over one hundred IT specialists is not suitable for high-turnover countries. I realize these words are not directly from the company and I am reading t…

This is what I always said; you change your company to adapt to SAP, not the other way around. Then you chose the wrong product. SAP has everything and then a billion configuration switches which should match what you want; they say they would want you to adapt it to your needs by programming, but really it's not very good for that. On the other hand I know some consultants making millions by creating customizations…

This is exactly what happened at WM: https://www.zdnet.com/article/promises-promises-a-look-at-wa...

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#80

Post by w23j »

psihonaut wrote: post #23

www.DeepL.com/Translator of the article: Problems with new data system: Lidl blows 500 million euros The Lidl brand plate at a branch. Picture: BR/Herbert Ebner Lidl has been expanding for years. The discounter from Neckarsulm now has branches in almost all countries in Europe and is now also growing in the USA. A new merchandise management system was needed to provide an easy overview of the increasingly complex bus…

That's a golden machine mistranslation:

In a letter to the staff of the newspaper "Heilbronner Stimme" it was stated that the actual "goals" could not be achieved "with justifiable effort".

That's like management was: "What the hell, the memo gets leaked anyways. Let's send it to the newspaper directly."

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