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What's SAP?
71–80 of 622 posts
Re: What's SAP?
#72Years ago I was involved in a project to scrape certain info out of a SAP system with a web interface. It would have been easier to do it with a API but my conversations with the SAP people at work were going nowhere (is it me or do SAP IT people have no concept of how things are done outside the world of SAP ?). Anyway I started looking through the Javascript the browser automatically downloads and found there was 1…
There are/were 5 different Web technologies over the years you could use to make Web apps for SAP. There are also standard WebService (XML SOAP) and REST interfaces over HTTP. There are also SAP native interfaces for specifically transferring data.
There are ways to do stuff in SAP, lots of implementation problems arise from the fact that people don't know how to do it right, and just try to apply whatever they do know. There is documentation and there are books.
Re: What's SAP?
#73A best case scenario looks like Cisco’s ERP implementation, which took them 9 months and $15 million. In comparison, Dow Chemical’s implementation, for example, took $1 billion and 8 years; At the last SAP site I worked at the general feeling was implementing SAP had left the company weak. This lead to them being taken over by one of their competitors.
what does this competitor run its business on?
Re: What's SAP?
#74Maybe ERPs are the ultimate test of an agile culture. Sounds weird right? But bear with me.
Most ERP projects fail. They end up over-budget and delivered really late.
Why? They are sold like custom implementations, promising the stakeholders they’ll be adapted to their specific needs. It's rarely the case. The reality requires the whole business to change: its processes, its workflows, its traditions.
Therefore, only companies flexible enough can survive such deep transformations. Companies that are agile.
Re: What's SAP?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t know if we are using the latest versions but the UI has many other sins, not the least having buttons in odd places (submit is often at the top), many many screens to get to a place, slow as you say. I don’t care so much that the UI looks from the 90s. For an internal application, a battleship grey winform is perfectly fine, as long as the workflow is simple, fast and intuitive.
Do you work in a grey office with grey carpets and grey desks? Aesthetics matter. Make software that is beautiful and a joy to use.
Beautiful visual design is not necessarily correlated with beautiful functional design (i.e. being a joy to use, or - as the parent post put it - simple, fast and intuitive). I think the latter is more important for a lot of software (especially software you use every day in your work) but often sacrificed for the former.
Re: What's SAP?
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The software is user-hostile, intentionally obscure This a million times. I don't know if good interfaces can not be built in SAP, or if it's very difficult to do, or if the developers of apps on SAP platform just don't care. It's a real headache to use and completely confusing. It's 2020 and one would hope software companies realize the value of a good, clear, effective user interface.
> It's a real headache to use and completely confusing. You could say the same about Vim. I suspect there are workflows and shortcuts heavy SAP users have learned over time that make them highly effective, and they are now resistant to change.
Except vim does not take over your process and data, and is happy to sit there and wait out your tryst with nano, sublime, vs code or frigging notepad.
It's fine to have an inscrutable, beginner-hostile power tool as an option.
Re: What's SAP?
#77All in all an interesting article, although some PR piece alarm bells just went off.
I would have loved to have additional information that might not have been provided due to the fact that Retool is a very early stage competitor in the ERP space. With all the SAP bashing that is happening, there must be some advantages that the SAP software suite has, right? I would love to hear about them.
The rigid nature of the SAP software - and the crazy costs that come with it's customization - is a known problem. I still wonder if this is the real reason why the migrations and implementation projects with big customers fail, or if these are, generally speaking, just really big projects that carry a huge risk. The truth is probably somewhere between both extremes.
What long term structural disadvantage do you see in applying the Retool software model?
Congratulations for getting your product out of the door!
(Disclaimer: I have no affiliation to SAP etc).
Re: What's SAP?
#78The best advice about SAP I've had is that when a company is starting to use SAP, the company must adjust its processes to match the SAP model - not the other way around. If you do it the other way, you'll first spend millions and millions customising SAP and then your project will fail at some point. It will also make all SAP upgrades completely impossible and they will cost millions and millions. All of the success…
This nails it. The rest is just commentary.
Re: What's SAP?
#79Hi! (I'm one of the editors of this post.) When I was researching SAP, I found a fact sheet: https://www.sap.com/docs/download/2017/04/4666ecdd-b67c-0010... , that has quite a few interesting facts: * "[SAP] customers distribute 78% of the world’s food and 82% of the world’s medical devices" * "[SAP] customers include 98% of the 100 most valued brands" * "77% of the world’s transaction revenue touches an SAP system"…
TBH SAP is almost required for big corporations as they usually are publicly traded companies, require external audits from BIG4(and these guys know how to get data from standard SAP models, not so much from you self-developed system) and have to report their financials in consistent way. For example Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google all can use SAP internally. But it would be false to state that all their business…
I would be interested to know if they are actually using SAP. These companies are so much better at software development and they are swimming in so much money that they could even implement something by themselves.
Re: What's SAP?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The software is user-hostile, intentionally obscure This a million times. I don't know if good interfaces can not be built in SAP, or if it's very difficult to do, or if the developers of apps on SAP platform just don't care. It's a real headache to use and completely confusing. It's 2020 and one would hope software companies realize the value of a good, clear, effective user interface.
> I don't know if good interfaces can not be built in SAP, or if it's very difficult to do, or if the developers of apps on SAP platform just don't care. Up until some 5 years back, UX really was afterthought to them. Why? Answer is in how enterprise software was (and largely still) sold. Buying was done by CIO, based on all parameters (account relationship, FOMO, $$$ discounts, functional reliability etc.) except us…
SAP is designed based on priority of the requirements by people in a company who will never use it but will ask their staff to extract the data and present them in PowerPoint or excel.
So the UI design of SAP is user hostile. Even by embracing modern web components and openUI toolkit SAP will continue to be user hostile design.
SAP will need to change the foundations completely to change it and also re do things. But then it will put them in direct competition with modern software makers who can beat them.
So I am doubtful things will change, SAP will go the path of IBM in times to come.