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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

#91

Post by rushabh »

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…

ERP is probably the slowest moving market in software. Trying to sell ERPs for almost a decade now here is what I learned

1. The first reason for this is compliance. Most large companies are worried about compliance and trust only comes with many years of successful deployments. For a new entrant to be recognized can take upto 10 years and for clients to accept the solution as a solid one.

2. The second reason is complexity. When you consider the scale and complexity of an implementation, most new ERP companies do not understand the effort goes into pre-sales and going through hundreds of pages of RFPs. There are system integrators, consultancies and entire ecosystems locked in to this duo-poly.

But things are changing. We run an open source product (https://erpnext.org) and we have seen people are looking to move away from the SAP-Oracle duopoly. Innovative companies where the CTO has as much as a say as a CIO in such decisions are willing to look outside at Open Source. It is still very early days, but this space looks exciting right now.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#92

Post by alistairSH »

netinmate wrote: post #86

Customization is key, you CAN't customize. I worked on an SAP implementation, a Fortune 500 company, complexity like crazy, sub-companies, of sub-companies, of sub-companies, federal, state and local compliance for what the company did, operating in 50 states, with an International supply chain, and our integrator was nothing special. We held firm to the NO CUSTOMIZATION rule, we re-engineered our processes to fit SA…

I wish you worked for my customers.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#93

Post by manmal »

netinmate wrote: post #86

Customization is key, you CAN't customize. I worked on an SAP implementation, a Fortune 500 company, complexity like crazy, sub-companies, of sub-companies, of sub-companies, federal, state and local compliance for what the company did, operating in 50 states, with an International supply chain, and our integrator was nothing special. We held firm to the NO CUSTOMIZATION rule, we re-engineered our processes to fit SA…

Do you think enterprises can even profit from adapting to SAP‘s structure (streamlining etc), or do you think this does not matter anyway?

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#94

Post by lagadu »

mieseratte wrote: post #84
philipodonnell wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. The bar we always tried to hit was whether the process we were being asked to change was represented a fundamental way in which this company was intentionally different from other large companies, or whether it was just the way it was before they saw what the SAP version looked like. 90% of back-office stuff is exactly the same between very large companies no matter the industry or history, but that is ve…

> Then they can say "Yeah man, SAP sucks, soooo inflexible, I argued against it but what are you gonna do, changing it is really expensive, I guess we'll just have to do it their way" and message boards fill up with complaints about how inflexible and expensive SAP is. Funny how that works! Scapegoat as a Service. I wonder just how common this is in practice.

> Scapegoat as a Service. I wonder just how common this is in practice.

Common enough that they made a book and show (kinda) about it: House of Lies :)

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#96

Post by brohee »

sparkling wrote: post #54
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…

I have not yet seen a SAP software that could not be replaced with a homemade Django/Rails web app (90% CRUD) and some external API integrations to other services that may exist in the company such HR, invoicing etc. Of course, at the fraction of the the cost of the SAP solution.

OpenERP is not Django based IIRC, but they basically thought the same thing and went at it with some good success.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#97

Post by lagadu »

Annatar wrote: post #67

The article says that in the end, “Lidl” decided to ditch “SAP” and continue developing their own, internal solution. From my own experience: good on them; it’ll certainly cost them an order of magnitude less, on the order of five million, to get it going again and then maybe 750 grand a year for the staff salaries. Good on “Lidl” for going back to classic IT.

> and then maybe 750 grand a year for the staff salaries.

That is completely unrealistic, it arguably won't even cover the operations teams that you need to have in place for keeping it running and the teams for maintaining and updating the software are going to be a lot more than that.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#98

Post by baxtr »

mbesto wrote: post #69
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…

Former SAP employee here, who btw, is very critical of SAP. I also happen to have worked in Escalation Management at SAP, who's prime responsibility was to take SAP projects that were about to go south and put them into "escalation" before they the hit newspapers. Let me try to explain the mystery around SAP. 1. Most of the situations where SAP projects go haywire is largely due to (a) incorrect implementation by the…

Thanks for sharing, great insights there!

How do you see the chance for classical “low-end disruption” like Christensen described? i.e. small players buy small solutions because they’re cheaper and have less scope. Then larger companies start using the low-cost software etc.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#99

Post by rwallace »

misja111 wrote: post #56
arbitrary_name wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite. I have worked with sap at many different clients. Some Reasons for buying SAP ( by that i mean their ERP as well as funxtional or industry specific tools and applications.) are as follows Scale: at this size, you pick SAP or Oracle. There's very little else out there in the market. Proven implementation: speaking for most clients, you cannot get a major ERP implementation done without outside help. You wil…

What SAP and Oracle have in common is that they have a very capable sales force, that is able to convince companies that their business case will fit nicely into their model. Then, once the implementation is ongoing and it turns out that there are some corner cases which were overlooked and that don't fit into the SAP model at all, SAP has another option available: hire their expensive consultants. Depending on how l…

Do you know of any case studies of companies being completely destroyed by this process? I have certainly heard of such projects getting into trouble, would be interested to know of any cases where it went as far as the customer going bankrupt.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#100

Post by laythea »

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…

Is this situation not produced by the "nobody got fired for using IBM" mentality.

Supply chain may be complex but for heavens sake, 500M euros! and not complete. I can do it for half :)

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