33 ms·

What's SAP?

• eranation 7y ago
  What’s the main reason we don’t see many startups trying to disrupt that field? Is it the long sales cycle? The upfront investment? Lack of awareness?
• mac_was 7y ago
  SAP is the ultimate B2B and turning into saas, should be the wet dream of every dev who wants to build his own saas.
  • oaiey 7y ago
    Until you know the internals of SAP ;). They have/had an own programming language (ABAP) which is the worst combination of BASIC and SQL you could imagine. Do not know the status in 2020, 2007 it was still a combination of ABAP and Java. Interestingly, the source code of SAP is openly readable (once you have their software installed).
    • tibbydudeza 7y ago
      Nope still the same in 2020 ... a knowledge of German is usefull as well for the code to make any sense.
    • mschuster91 7y ago
      SAP is effectively open source, IIRC there were/still are options to install local development stacks for free... but without an army of experienced consultants it's gonna be useless for you and they won't touch a pirated/cloned system with a 10 feet pole.
      • oaiey 7y ago
        open source implies license. It is "source open".
• JackPoach 7y ago
  That's actually a very well written article. I never imagined an article about SAP or ERP would be interesting to read.
  • oaiey 7y ago
    The last paragraph is not good. Is it only me or does it leave a conclusion lurking around without saying it aloud?
    • halfnormalform 7y ago
      It doesn’t match the quality of the rest of the article and would really benefit from some fleshing out.
      • toyg 7y ago
        I bet there were extra paragraphs but an editor went “too many words already for a webpage” or “let’s not criticise them too much”.
        • oaiey 7y ago
          I also think that. They skipped making a statement about today's SAP position.
• diminish 7y ago
  Some consultant had told "Adopting an ERP (SAP, Oracle or other) is a stronger bond than marriage". So those valuations could be strong and long term.
  • AmericanChopper 7y ago
    I consulted for a company once that had made several attempts to migrate from their ERP (as well as having made several acquisitions and mergers over the decades). When I was there the state of things was 3 ERP systems that they had built, and another 2 that they had gained through mergers, all still operating and ERPing between each other. No matter how many enormous multi-year migration projects they started, they never managed to turn a single one of them off.
  • probably_wrong 7y ago
    I used SAP at work to keep track of monthly working hours. The GUI had this... feature that doesn't allow you to resize the form you're working with. And you can scroll vertically, but the first columns are frozen in place. As a result, only 15% of your screen is usable, showing 4 out of the 30 columns you need to fill at a time and requiring constant scrolling. As a user, I would have been happy to dump it and use anything else. But who am I going to complain to? I'm not the customer, my company was. And it's not like they are going to switch ERPs just because employees hate it (which we all did). Even if they wanted, the cost of switching now would probably be astronomical - not only on migration, but also on training and support. It's no surprise that SAP is worth that much, seeing as they have the perfect captive audience: the wealthy kind.
    • 72deluxe 7y ago
      Do users just accept this "feature" garbage? I get the feeling they do.
      • benhurmarcel 7y ago
        They don't have a choice. You're not going to resign because the software to submit hours has a terrible interface.
• hanniabu 7y ago
  SAP wouldn't be that disheartening to use if it weren't so damn slow and if UI/UX wasn't from the 90s.
  • spectramax 7y ago
    I love the SAP UI - yea, its the 90's when UI was far superior than today's whitespace filled, shadow-less buttons, complete lack of skeumorphic elements, magenta gradients and huge typography - See Windows 95 UI: https://twitter.com/tuomassalo/status/978717292023500805 https://twitter.com/tuomassalo/status/978717292023500805 It is dense, extremely clear and consice. I agree with the slowness though.
    • meddlepal 7y ago
      I feel like there continues to be a huge disconnect between UI designers and their users. I'm a power user so I am not the best person to ask for UX advice, but I talk to people all the time that just wish they still had the classic Windows 9x UI's and things more or less were "boring". Reminds me a little bit of a statement about how Taxi drivers can tell you what works architecturally better than an actual architect when it comes to ground floor interaction.
      • spectramax 7y ago
        That's because contemporary designers are obsessed with trends, frameworks and aesthetics. When Dieter Rams designed Braun products, he didn't have a UI framework. He deeply thought about interaction and feedback to the user. Contemporary UI trends bother me except one: websites like drewdevault.com and text.npr.com are refreshing.
      • cm2187 7y ago
        That’s the problem with software. There are two categories of software: software that their developers use themselves, and software made for other people. Visual Studio is the prime example of a software made by people who use it, it continuously improves (minus a few hiccups), it is made for the most used functionalities to be at your fingertips, it doesn’t hide stuff in layers of submenus, etc. The list is long of software made for others, and the general rule is “fuck it, good enough”. This is also why I believe the Windows 8/10 developers must be working on macs.
• dvdhsu 7y ago
  Hi! (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-0010-82c7-eda71af511fa.pdf 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" Wow!
  • john_minsk 7y ago
    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 businesses are run on SAP...
    • wrdalex 7y ago
      Every respectable ERP provides ways to export/access the data in a way that covers all national/international requirements for audits and reporting. This is not SAP-specific.
      • john_minsk 7y ago
        I didn't say that there are no other factors (like for example that CTO won't be fired when SAP/Oracle implementation fails, but will be 100% fired when ERP_X implementation fails) I only pointed out that the statistics in parent post can be skewed due to the sample of top 500 corporations which can implement SAP for reasons different to running the business.
    • fogetti 7y ago
      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.
• pojntfx 7y ago
  SAP is the worst software I've ever used in my entire life; they literally have to publish paid books on how to use it, that's how bad it is.
  • LudwigNagasena 7y ago
    Or maybe resource planning is just that hard.
  • galacticaactual 7y ago
    There are "paid books" about everything from Python to Go to Swift to whatever. That is quite frankly a bad heuristic.
    • mcv 7y ago
      Yeah, I'm not exactly surprised that modeling complex business processes is not a trivial task.
  • warpspin 7y ago
    A bit unfair. In fact most of the SAP books unfortunately are a waste of money because 99% of the content just repeats the help on their webpage. If there is something I would complain about, it is that their help pages are a convoluted mess of years of content with broken links galore, lots of duplicated content between help pages between different versions and an on site search which is just not very good. So basically you have to Google stuff, then unfortunately come out on the help pages for an edition you do not actually have and then will have trouble finding the corresponding help page for the thing you actually run.
  • Octocatty 7y ago
    Wasn't a fan of it either, although not because of the paid books.
• trollied 7y ago
  SAP is shocking. I'm so glad that I now work with NetSuite!
  • zxienin 7y ago
    what did you find better in NetSuite?
• sdan 7y ago
  Nicely written article, but I don’t see what the use of an ERP is? Can’t it just be replicated with some excel spreadsheets?
  • taneq 7y ago
    If you're a big enough organisation to need an ERP like SAP, it would cost more to manage your data with spreadsheets than it would cost to just license SAP. I mean, that's literally how you price enterprise software.
    • sdan 7y ago
      Interesting. Was thinking that some startup could exactly do this, but realized that given how deeply integrated SAP/Oracle is (as mentioned in the article) it's very hard to do. Basically: Make a really bad product + make it mission critical = a product that people are literally glued to using
      • bonzini 7y ago
        Salesforce is probably the closest that happened to "some startup that could do this", and it's almost as big and complex as SAP.
  • Manfred 7y ago
    ERP is basically a centralized hosted version of a lot of spreadsheets. So no, because Excel doesn’t facilitate cooperation very well.
    • sanxiyn 7y ago
      So Google Sheets would work?
      • ta999999171 7y ago
        If you have 400-1000 hours to reinvent the wheel, sure!
• ksahin 7y ago
  "A 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." Wow, really?
  • cromulent 7y ago
    He's conflating SAP (a company) with the ERP system, but reality is a little different. There are 133,000 tables in a system I just checked, and 40,000 are flagged as configuration.
    • 1propionyl 7y ago
      What's the breakdown of those configuration tables? I'd imagine (perhaps incorrectly) that most are just integer/enum/bool fields? If so, how many of those tables just exist to define enumeration cases?
      • 72deluxe 7y ago
        I suspect an awful lot. I worked at a place that did their own ERP software and that had thousands of database tables, many of which were simply enum fields. The entire system required magic numbers to be put into various columns in different tables, simply to modify the behaviour of the "logic" code as it resolved to a C++ enum once extracted from the database. It was horrible, and nobody knew how the entire system worked, so there was a vast disconnect between what it actually did (and the hundreds of auto-generated SQL statements it ran, very slow) and what they thought it did. As expected, this created wildly different expectations of what was possible from the internal "implementation" team versus developers. Of course, this was interpreted as the developers' fault, and there was a constant stream of new developers that would stay for a year or two, then leave. Toxic.
      • pbalau 7y ago
        Configuration is still data... If by "to define enumeration cases" you mean lookup tables, they exists to ensure data integrity.
    • 7y ago
• pferde 7y ago
  What the HN crowd might find interesting is that SAP does not support any kind of containerization technology to run their products in, despite the fact that certain components, like the dialog instance or saprouter, are prime candidates for just that. Let's give them a few more decades, they'll get it. (From randomly perusing their help portal, it seems that there are one or two modern - and quite exotic - software products from SAP that do support Docker and I think also LXC, so it looks like they're slowly moving ahead in this regard. :) )
  • indemnity 7y ago
    There are pockets in various parts of the company that are on more modern stacks (building on K8s/part of CNCF), but the old stuff is still the bread + butter, and the first thing anyone thinks of when they hear SAP.
• godelmachine 7y ago
  Warning - very very vague question Would someone kindly differentiate between the ERP vs ITSM (IT Service Management) industry in perspective for me? I would in ITSM and often wonder if I would had been better off staying in ERP like SAP? Secondly, how does ERP fare in terms of complexity between game development vs ERP Software development? I understand the target base is totally different (Gamers vs Enterprise clients) Let me know if I am too vague
  • john_minsk 7y ago
    SAP has a separate product for ITSM: Solution Manager. Everything else is beyond that scope. What is important to understand is that SAP is standardized way to do business for ALL departments in big corporation. You probably can't be "expert is SAP". You can be expert in SAP treasury system, SAP data warehouse, SAP ITSM, SAP data analysis, SAP call center etc. I heard that SAP consultants are paid very well and I think it will stay that way. But I guess this thread sums it up perfectly: it is due to the complexity that these implementations bring to organisation and lack of elegant solutions from modern software development world. So in terms of money it is good, but the trade offs are quite big.
  • warpspin 7y ago
    Regarding the second question, it is not comparable at all. ERPs are still "standard" software, despite what the article implies. The difficulty is not so much on the software side, but on getting the software actually agree with the business processes and often the fault is less the software, more a convoluted business process which is simply not truly automatable. Then you run against the whole organizational inertia while implementing. I can only speak from a bit of SAP experience: So usually, implementing an ERP, at least SAP, first means "customizing" it, that means adapting the thousands of configuration parameters to the organization. This is no programming task, in fact you "just" operate a GUI. The difficulty is more in finding the proper the option. True development tasks are often very restricted in scope - most often it is just the development of a new report or custom data export (one of the annoying things of SAP ECC always was, that it really really really loves to keep its data to itself. While theoretically everything is open - you can even browse the underlying the database directly from the UI, with appropriate rights, and can also quite comfortable run even DDL statements against it - often you are back to ABAP very soon for any kind of interfacing tasks simply because SAP likes to live in its own world with its own standards for data import/export (Idocs for example or its proprietary RFC interface). Things might have gotten better recently with e.g. the OData support, but I haven't yet worked with a system which had that.
• OldGuyInTheClub 7y ago
  SAP has enabled/mandated an army of people at my company who manage it and ruthlessly control even read access to it. The software is user-hostile, intentionally obscure, and all requests for slightly customized reports have to go through a multilayered approval process - often up to corporate - where it competes for funding against other survivors. Needing something custom invites constant questions of why the standard process is not enough. It was sprung essentially overnight with no training and expectations to show immediate positive results with no criticism tolerated. The rollout was preceded by a couple of years of secretive process reworking where the business was modified to the way SAP said it ought to be done. We expand it to "Stop All Progress" because it marked the formal transition from a technology influenced company to an integrator focusing on acquiring tech from others.
  • kumarvvr 7y ago
    > 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.
    • OldGuyInTheClub 7y ago
      It brought the "swim lane" mentality to my outfit. There is a "process is king" mindset where people exist to run some report or the other with a completely impenetrable abbreviation and set of unmarked mandatory fields also with no intuitive signifcance. Grab the next item on the work list, do your thing, and mark it complete. If some project asks what's required on either end or how to move their need forward, that's not your problem. That project has to divert someone to first figure out the unpublished process and then contact everyone in the chain. If you can't run reports yourself, you're at the mercy of others. And the first rule of SAP is that there is no mercy.
      • TeMPOraL 7y ago
• Tomte 7y ago
  ERP software is a monster. There have been several high-profile cases of German companies migrating to SAP (from their home-grown zoo of different software for different purposes) that have gone spectacularly wrong. They are way over budget, way over time, and sometimes abandoned completely, like with Lidl: https://www.consultancy.uk/news/18243/lidl-cancels-sap-introduction-having-sunk-500-million-into-it https://www.consultancy.uk/news/18243/lidl-cancels-sap-intro... I have heard (anecdotally, and third-hand) that the only way to successfully introduce SAP (or Oracle, for that matter) is to completely succumb to it and restructure your business along the lines that SAP assumes as default. You try to keep your little company-specific process for buying christmas gifts to employees? Fine, but it'll cost you several hours with an SAP consultant. You try to keep your non-standard terms with one supplier? Fine, another bag of money. You do that more than just a very few times? Your migration has failed.
• theshrike79 7y ago
  The 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 successful SAP stories have been about companies who either match the SAP model already or reconfigure themselves to match it. All failures are the opposite.
  • nsoonhui 7y ago
    This nails it. The rest is just commentary.
  • warpspin 7y ago
    While I share your general notion that companies better adjust to the process of SAP, I still want to comment on the "impossible to upgrade" part, as that is simply not true. First off, in SAP speech, "customization" is the act of simply adjusting the vast configuration options. This does not affect your upgrade possibilities at all. Even if you go so far as to add custom programming, as long as you (lowest complexity) just have programmed additional "transactions"/reports, you will usually not run into a problem. The system also provides various mechanisms to extend standard transactions via hooks or to extend standard tables and still be able to upgrade without additional effort. I was actually astonished how much customization SAP allows in that regard while still staying compatible to the standard codebase - probably one of the reasons everything is so damn resource hungry, because there are multiple layers of indirection at work to allow this. From a development point of view, the major annoyance here is there are so many different options to extend stuff from different decades, so for some use cases you will use BADIs (https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=133758980 https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=1...), for others "exits" (https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=189893877 https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=1...) and it is all a pain to lookup and locate. The one thing which will get you into trouble is if you manually patch standard programs - which you are able to, the whole business logic comes with sourcecode - and which is usually not necessary.
• greatartiste 7y ago
  Years 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 10s of MBs of un optimised code only a tiny percentage of which was being used. It was horrific and it was easy to understand why the system was so mind blowingly slow.
  • OldGuyInTheClub 7y ago
    We figured out how to get at least some reports to export into Excel. Some others implemented MS Access dbs to postprocess exported SAP data. Browser tricks were also part of the mix. Then the directives came down that working outside of SAP was not acceptable and amounted to criticizing SAP. I think SAP views APIs as a threat. That COBOL-like ABAP language is part of their lock in.
    • zxienin 7y ago
      > I think SAP views APIs as a threat. That COBOL-like ABAP language is part of their lock in. This bit is changing now. They're still not there, but internal engineering teams are slowly getting it. There are high priority API first development projects underway.
    • tastroder 7y ago
      While I get that sentiment I don't really see the ecosystem much worse than vendor lockin at any of the modern PaaS providers from a tech perspective. They always allowed integrators relatively extensive API access to their table model, last time I had to integrate that years ago the only hurdle was a bit of interfacing between the report / ABAP world and exposing it as a web service. Even management / security facilities were, albeit usually clunky, what you expect from a modern ecosystem. These days they seem to offer relatively modern and off the shelf APIs for quite a few of these tasks, especially for their cloud based offerings. I'm not sure that they see it as a threat, rather they want to be the single point of truth and lots of projects (completely separated from any tech aspect) would circumvent that. Now was that a pain? Yes, sure. Especially the whole legal/certification/consultant crap you need to buy into alongside the software. But honestly, at least here in Germany, SAP ABAP/Java developers and consultants are easy to come by. Most of the problems I've seen in SAP related integrations are process related, not as much tech. If you're dealing with a customer that's already up and running in that ecosystem chances are that they already know their pain points, it's not really any different than any other large B2B integration in the space.
• tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  A 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.
  • zxienin 7y ago
    what does this competitor run its business on?
    • tonyedgecombe 7y ago
      I have no idea, it was a long time ago.
    • swarnie_ 7y ago
      Could well be SAP just deployed by a different consultancy team, in fact it wouldn't surprise me.
• kriro 7y ago
  I used to work in a research project where I went to some UX conferences in Germany (not really my field). The big irony/running gag is that SAP seems pretty good in UX-research, Hasso Plattner Institute is fairly recognized for their UX work and yet SAP-UX is a nightmare. They just can't/won't roll out new things.
  • fr1tkot 7y ago
    The HPI is not run by SAP the corporation in any way. It's "just" Hasso Plattners money funding it.
  • dr_dshiv 7y ago
    Yeah, what is that about? Do you have more insights on this?
    • lexs 7y ago
      The HPI is a faculty of the public University of Potsdam, it is not a research unit of SAP or anything similar. They have projects with Oracle just as they do with SAP and a ton of other companies.
    • somesortofsystm 7y ago
      Academia is easily bought, especially in Germany. Also, HN is a hacker crowd with a particular axe to grind re: UI, since all the cool new UI shit makes insta-billionaires, or at least thats the dream. Whereas with a SAP-using business, the computer isn't the product - the products that the computer allows the company to manufacture/distribute are the only thing that matters - and the SAP UI is intentionally set up by bean-counters. Once you go SAP, like get into the SAP Zone, you can be quite productive - but like another poster said, SAP is like vim. :wq
      • epr 7y ago
        :x
• tibbydudeza 7y ago
  ABAP developer ... after looking at some of the code it is amazing that it actually works. I recently did something called a BDC since the API call did not work so you resort to stuffing values into some internal tables and replaying keystrokes to enter the data into the system.
• fefe23 7y ago
  People complaining about how user-unfriendly SAP is or how companies adapt to SAP instead of the other way around are missing the point of SAP. The point of SAP is that the module for your type of business is being implemented at the market leader in your area, because they are the only ones who can afford it. SAP will come to the market leader and put their processes into software. Then everybody else adapts to SAP not because adapting SAP is impossible but because SAP implements the processes that made the market leader successful (at least that's the idea). So it is very intentional that you adapt to SAP and not the other way around. You do it to emulate the market leader. And the user friendliness is also on purpose. If you go visit a company using SAP, you will find that you have a certain job in the company and it needs two or three things from SAP. Jobs are very specialized, so SAP is, too. Nobody is supposed to just wing it with SAP. You are supposed to learn how to do your transaction with SAP, and that transaction is then meant to be super efficient. If you actually go visit a somebody from an enterprise environment interact with SAP, you will be astounded how quickly they can do what they are supposed to do. It's almost as if the software was optimized for frictionless efficiency. Also note that user friendliness is a subjective and mysterious area. If you go look at an airplane cockpit, where actual research was done into how to optimize user interfaces so that the pilot will not be confused under stress, you will see that there is a separate button for everything. There is no "shift key", no different modes. If you need to use it, there is a button for it. To someone who has not learned how to use that UI, it appears alien and unfriendly. But the the trained pilot it is the pinnacle of perfection.
  • shrimpx 7y ago
    It seems super strange to adopt the market leader’s processes. You’d think the spirit should be that you can outdo/outcompete then instead of adopting what they’re doing...
    • deelly 7y ago
      Yes, Its really super strange to adopt Google, Microsoft, Apple processes.. Yes?
      • 7y ago
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• kdeldycke 7y ago
  Maybe 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.
  • commoner 7y ago
    That judgment is based on the premise that the processes mandated by the ERP software are more effective than the company's current processes. If a company terminates its adoption of an ERP solution, it does not necessarily mean that the company is not "agile" enough. The company's leadership may simply be concluding that changing its processes to the ones mandated by the ERP would make the company run less efficiently, a consideration that could outweigh the benefits of using a centralized piece of software to manage its operations.
    • kdeldycke 7y ago
      Good point, and thanks for demonstrating how compromise needs to be pondered at the executive level too.
• wuschel 7y ago
  All 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).
  • unnouinceput 7y ago
    "<...although some PR..."> Some? It's 100% PR. Nothing else. 1st ad I see this year, courtesy of HN, cause otherwise uBlock Origin would've stop it.
• mitjam 7y ago
  SAPs magic is the integration: A company I worked for rolled out SAP for a Production and supply chain distributed across about a dozen countries in Europe and went from 3+ weeks order commitment time (Not lead time) to immediediate including sourcing from external suppliers, logistics Partners and Production facility allocation.
  • wuschel 7y ago
    Thanks, that what I was looking for. Would you have a link for non-PR project reports?
  • Aeolun 7y ago
    But any integrated system would do this. It isn’t unique to SAP.
• chid 7y ago
  Did anyone see the news around extension of ECC6 support? To me it seemed like the logical decision.
• olavgg 7y ago
  Tesla decided a few years ago to replace SAP with something they built themself https://www.mendix.com/blog/tesla-cio-builds-erp-house-4-months-says-time-erp-upgrades/ https://www.mendix.com/blog/tesla-cio-builds-erp-house-4-mon... I love this story, it really isn't that hard to replace SAP once you know the requirements.
  • kamaal 7y ago
    A lot of this is just plain pointless bravado. Eventually a lot of people have to outsource their payroll and other admin work, it's just cheaper that way. Then you just discover your are doing many things unique to your company so you kind of have to retrain a lot of finance and office management staff. And keep retraining them. Then also maintain teams of programmers to do maintain your software. You don't want a car company to focus its resources on payroll software.
    • olavgg 7y ago
      Payroll software is an example which is easy to outsource. What I mean is that I think that Tesla is more of a software company, than a car company.
    • hef19898 7y ago
      So Tesla is again loosing focus? man, if they would just focus on a) developing EVs and b) mass-produce them traditional car makers wouldn't stand a chance by know. That hybris can kill them one day...
    • modo_mario 7y ago
      Not necessarily true. The place I work at does the payroll with some cheaper payroll ERP. Most other things...well let's just say a programmer to make the entire thing was cheaper and more effective. The ERP has to interface with various NFC and barcode scanners, ticket printers, etc other companies appliance interfaces, the consultancy costs to adapt and existing erp and make it keep track of the entire production process and it's unique quirks would be trough the roof and make any subsequent version upgrade unmanageable cost and time wise.
  • 7y ago
• new_here 7y ago
  SAP today are just plainly incompetent and ripe for disruption. I've had quite a bit of interaction with SAP over the last few years, here are some examples: - Almost all meetings I've been in start with prospective clients mentioning to SAP consultants that SAP has a 'certain reputation'. The SAP consultants acknowledge this. - Some of the solution pitch ideas they come up with signal they have almost zero knowledge of how some technologies actually work. - Services we rely on with SAP frequently fail for no apparent reason. - They are slow and uncooperative with setting up demo environments and responding to support requests. - Their licences and consulting fees are outrageously expensive considering the lack of quality and performance when compared to alternatives. - Tech leads in our own company frequently talk about how bad SAP solutions are. - Their poor UIs are what they are known for in the market. They've tried to address this with things like UI5, Fiori and Fundamentals which feel like too little too late. - Their attempts at acquiring startups (AI, chatbots, analytics etc) to stay on the edge provide hardly any real value besides propping up the credibility of the buzzwords they cram into their presentations. Yet SAP remain entrenched in the market and companies still get into bed with them despite knowing the pain they're in for. A lot of system integration companies have tried to attack this market with open source solutions and have failed to make any real dent. The only major player that has started to eat SAPs lunch recently is Salesforce. Perhaps I'm missing something but surely it would be better for an organisation to have a solution that can be maintained by more than one company so that the company can be replaced if they aren't performing? The only example I can think of where this is being addressed is the UK's GDS Service Standard which mandates that all government projects should use open source tools to avoid vendor lock-in. It really is perplexing how SAP still maintains its position in today's market.
  • 9dev 7y ago
    I suspect the only reason for their continued relevance is that they're too big to fail. So many huge enterprises rely on SAP, and its way too integrated into their core business processes to move off it at that point. Management elsewhere follows the larger players, and from what I've heard, SAP consultants are great at luring. Kind of like lemmings jumping the cliff.
    • 7y ago
• lucasverra 7y ago
  Can please a decision maker regarding SAP buying/implementing tell us how on earth SAP is that mainstream (in corporate) ? I've had to use it at EU big corp, and it to this day the worst experience I had. I've seen at techcrunch Berlin 2019 that there is something called SAP.io, somewhat opening its plateform ?
  • deelly 7y ago
    Can you name good alternative that supports all SAP features?
    • ProstetnicJeltz 7y ago
      'More modern' these days appears to be the 'thousand papercuts' approach - many SaaS products that collectively provide the same feature set. It's still hell, just a different kind of hell. Bespoke is a genuine competitor. In the UK it's not uncommon for SAP implementations to cost several million £s, this could be used to build bespoke software. There's a massive risk here though - there are thousands of ways bespoke ERP can go wrong. Underfunding the project causes problems, but arguably the worst projects were overfunded. Then there's recruiting the right people and developing the right culture - archaic business hierarchies are almost mutually exclusive with good software teams. In other words, there isn't really a very good option. You can understand why business leaders, who are often not technology experts, would go with something that has 'worked' for them in the past.
      • julienfr112 7y ago
        I know of a French Organic retailer that took that road ( postgres / java / angular). The story ends well. May be an exception. Or not.
        • mbesto 7y ago
          Amazon is mostly bespoke and from what I've been told, its basically hell.
• zxienin 7y ago
  Why not develop your own ERP if SAP forces one to change its processes? AFAIK, Tesla is the only company I've heard to have done it. Would be useful to hear their experiences on this road.
• kabes 7y ago
  I don't know any decent CS/software engineering student that would want to work on SAP. As a result, all the SAP consultancies I know are filled with business graduates that happened to know a bit about software. I wonder how much that contributes to the SAP clusterfuck.
  • lex0r 7y ago
    I can't say anything about the consulting companies, but the developers in Walldorf that I got to know were all competent. I can only talk about my experiences and there are many in my social circle (computer science students at KIT) who are capable developers and either work for SAP as working students or would like to join SAP in the course of their professional life. As a first job, SAP is actually not that popular. But that's due to the fact that many don't want to join Big Corporate directly, but want to work at startups first. Disclaimer: I am a working student at SAP
  • tastroder 7y ago
    I do, especially at SAP itself there was and is lots of interesting work hidden under all the crud. For the rest, relative wages and job security seem to be the driving factors for young graduates to join the space these days. The day to day there isn't really worse or more or less boring than any other B2B integration gig. Consultancies and working at the larger ones also suck for their very own reasons. That'd be the case with SAP or without. They hire business type people because the technical challenge of these projects is minimal compared to other aspects. Sure, most of these projects could often use a bit more of technical seniority, expertise, and overall strategy. But I think it's too easy to attribute failures solely to that, it's a mixture of problems, just like any large scale failure in the space.
• shrimpx 7y ago
  I live and work in USA but spend time in Europe. I noticed that in Europe SAP is wildly popular and a large percentage of “software engineers” are “SAP/ABAP programmers”. I have some engineer friends in Eastern Europe and they’re taking about how their employers are in the process of, or considering moving to SAP and away from in-house programming. These are not massive enterprises, mind you. Just small to mid size companies. In the US, on the other hand, I’ve never met a SAP engineer and in-house systems are the norm. What’s the deal with this disparity?
  • kokey 7y ago
    Having worked for many multinationals, I've also noticed such a difference. If it's a US company it would often have a group of in house developed systems that are integrated with each other to some degree, and a team that maintains it, that would manage various things like inventory and lifecycle of systems and products and even sales and customer service. European companies, including those in the UK, would often shy away from such efforts and lean more heavily on enterprise vendors and consultants to attempt to deliver this or try operate with nothing at all. I'm generalising, there are exceptions, but I got the impression that there is a certain kind of engineering culture in the US that is willing to take the risk on such in house projects and realise the value of managing it in house and they also have something that makes them able to execute it successfully.
    • blattimwind 7y ago
      In-house software development is very rare in the EU if the main business is not software. And every other company that has in-house software tries to migrate from their "legacy in-house solution" to a "industry-standard solution".
• asmosoinio 7y ago
  Should have (2019) in the title? Couldn't fine a date in the post, but it does say: > It’s 2019, and SAP is ...
• brnt 7y ago
  SAP is how Lucifer interacts with our world.
• 72deluxe 7y ago
  SAP own Crystal Reports. It's buggy slow garbage, IMHO. Wildly popular for unknown reasons but I found that it threw internal C# exceptions all the time in its own DLLs and was slow and buggy. Awful. Oddly others thought it was great and accepted it taking 30 seconds to load a report (yes, it's just a few database queries with the output put onto a canvas...) but I think that was because they didn't understand how basic it should be, and knew no alternative (of which there was none!). I ended up writing my own report system as I detested this so much.
• Angostura 7y ago
  I really, really like this style of article. What a fantastic introduction
• gadders 7y ago
  I recently worked on SAP as a PM, having never worked on it before. In some ways it reminds me of Lotus Notes, in that all data and "code" is stored in the underlying database.
• pinky07 7y ago
  My company is doing an open source alternative to SAP (and replace several SAP implementations already): https://www.odoo.com https://www.odoo.com
  • zxienin 7y ago
    > and replace several SAP implementations already Can you clear up on „several“? Are these SME or LEs? Names?
    • pinky07 7y ago
      We do both SMEs, and large corporate, with 5.5M users in total. I would say we sign a 1000+ employee corporationn every month. Example, in Portugal we replaced 150 legacy proprietary software in 3 years: https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observatory-osor/news/portugals-annual-school-teac https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observato... More case studies here:
• leto_ii 7y ago
  Going through the comments here I notice the recurrent theme that it's your company that has to adapt to SAP and not the other way around. To me this raises two key questions: 1. Isn't this harmful/limiting for your enterprise in the long run? 2. How can you at some point migrate away from SAP once you adapted to it? Given these issues and the huge costs, why would it make sense to adopt it in the first place? At least in the year 2020 (maybe the situation was different decades ago).
  • swarnie_ 7y ago
    I can answer number 2. The closer you stick to "out the box" ERP the more chance you actually have of moving off of it in the future. Any ERP consulting house worth their fee will know how to move customers from one standard ERP system to their own/another. The difficulties come when you heavily modify your ERP solution to fit your business rather then follow the advice given. This is where the tender process and requirements will bog down, developers need to be hired or entire business processes need to be rediscovered and rewitten. Since an ERP move might only happen once every 10/15/20 years a lot of business will use the project as an opportunity to reshape business processes, removing a lot of legacy stuff which no longer makes sense.
    • leto_ii 7y ago
      > The closer you stick to "out the box" ERP the more chance you actually have of moving off of it in the future. Interesting. But it still limits you to moving from ERP to another I guess.
• lewisjoe 7y ago
  SAP always is an interesting case. It gets close to zero love from HN, yet the platform has some interesting engineering. For example, they had their own language that abstracts and operates directly over a database. They had their own drag and drop UI builder, that compiles down to a HTML page or a desktop widget - which is again not an ordinary feat. They view code as data, as in even the UI is stored as a configuration and not as some Java code. They had their own VCS back when Git didn’t exist. Of course, all these weren’t best of their class, but they sure did get there ideas right. All these must have been interesting engineering concepts back during its time, yet there hasn’t been much tech literature on how they accomplished it or what inspired them to. At least not that I know of. Now that open source is on fire, of course a single company cannot catch up with the pace these open source softwares are racing ahead. Companies like Zoho and Salesforce are able to catch up because they do two things right. #1. Cloud #2. Adopting open-source and making a clever mix of proprietary engineering The next SAP or Oracle will certainly be companies that get those two things right.
  • asc_jiji 7y ago
    I agree with everything you said, they did some pretty neat stuff! the problem is that they started getting things wrong(from the development perspective) somewhere along the way, not sure if due to backwards compatibility or due to massive lock-in's with their own technology. SAP right now is making a move on cloud using SCP and as open source goes, openUI5 exists. I don't have much to say about SCP, just that the company I'm on decided to not use it, basically because we don't see advantages and to avoid future lock-ins About openUI5, I honestly dislike it, the most useful features of that framework are locked inside SAPUI5(a supersetof openUI5) and pull requests are managed by a branch of the company itself and they are pretty harsh on it. SAP documentation on it can be bad and is entirely biased towards deploying things inside SAP or SCP, which is pretty annoying
    • strictnein 7y ago
      Worked at SAP. We had to use SAPUI5. Felt like it was created by a cadre of bitter enterprise Java (yes, Java, not JS) devs.
• bass3l 7y ago
  A side question, anyone knows how the illustrations on Retool homepage are made? The animated ones
  • syogi 7y ago
    They're made with react-spring
• adeel_siddiqui 7y ago
  Well, SAP has for long been a money making blackbox for consulting firms. Think IBM, Accenture and the likes. They rake boatloads of money for multi-year contracts to implement SAP systems for companies wanting ERP solutions. The system is outdated and obscure with both technical and non-technical people having a tough time understanding it. Last time I worked with some interfacing systems to some SAP modules, it still relied on web services, XML and SOAP. No REST support. Salesforce is on the same road. In a few years, they will spin up more modules apart from CRM, like manufacturing and payroll.
  • Mandatum 7y ago
    Billing is the #1 growing package YoY here in Australia for our consulting firm. Nobody knows what they're doing. It's great.
• codingdave 7y ago
  > ...and most engineers probably haven’t seen them in the wild. This is quite a limited view of our industry. I'd agree that young coders focused on the startup community may not have seen it. But it is pervasive in the enterprise world. By all means, pick it apart, analyze its strengths and weaknesses, and compete/disrupt. But pretending it is some unknown thing shows a lack of understanding of a significant market segment.
• iso1210 7y ago
  It's a program built to prevent corporations from spending money
• lowdose 7y ago
  After Amazon clearly stated they are off Oracle Larry Ellison has been touting that SAP lunch is up for the grab and all SAP customers are moving to a legit Larry setup. Sap denies any migration taking place. When Larry starts to mention a market it is a signal is innovation can be expected from his competitors. AWS Aurora, Google Cloud Spanner that are competing with Oracle legacy solutions.
• Vaslo 7y ago
  SAP is Germany’s revenge for WW1 and WW2
• buzzkillington 7y ago
  I wanted to be angry at it. But I couldn't. It's so bad it's reached greatness. A piece of software that plays (at least) one sound on every user action, and the sounds are completely arbitrary and 8bit at best. Where you have to press 5 buttons in a row to do the one thing it's meant to do. Where you have an angry fruit salad in a time sheet. A piece of software that takes 30 minutes to enter your worksheet time. And lets you enter a special opex code for using it. I felt the anger and hate of the man who coded it and every Friday I felt I knew that man better than anyone else I have ever known.
  • zxienin 7y ago
    almost a unique poetry, this is
  • froindt 7y ago
    >A piece of software that plays (at least) one sound on every user action, and the sounds are completely arbitrary and 8bit at best. I've worked places that have SAP, Oracle, and one place that had both. I've never personally used SAP, and rarely dealt with Oracle. I would be curious though, if it makes that many sounds - how much error checking is done because something "didn't sound right"? Does doing business tasks sort of turn into a song, with an expected sequence of sounds which feels wrong when not executed correctly? If I'm typing and talking to someone at the same time, I intuitively know "I typed f rather than g, quick backspace and keep going". Do people internalize the pattern of noises they should hear while completing their work?
    • dfox 7y ago
      I assume that the sound refers to fact that about half of Windows SAPgui components are implemented by embedding MSHTML, which by default makes "click" sound for every onload event.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • joshuaissac 7y ago
    That sounds like a great feature for making software accessible to blind people. Even for sighted people, I can see how it could be useful. The next step should be to have a database of standardised, free and open source sounds that can be used by any program, so that the same sound means roughly the same thing across all of them (assuming that this feature is not patent-encumbered).
• nojvek 7y ago
  I love this. I am obsessed with back office admin systems (software that helps an org run and their various workflows). Quit my job last month to take a stab at it. Working on boomadmin.com. (Still working on landing page and an MVP)
• littlejohnny 7y ago
  Does anyone else think that over a period of years products like SAP provide diminishing returns for the efforts and money put in, over software built from scratch in house ? Yes, software built form scratch can also be messy, but which is the lesser evil?
• unixhero 7y ago
  ERP and SAP is a goldmine if you know how to provide consulting for it.
• totololo 7y ago
  Do "high innovation velocity" companies like Tesla or SpaceX use any ERP? If so, do they develop in house? Use a modern equivalent to SAP?
  • zxienin 7y ago
    Tesla built their ERP. Unclear, to what extent. I hope an (ex) insider can share facts.
    • totololo 7y ago
      Interesting, thanks. Amazon is known for having built an API for all departments to share information right?
• cognaitiv 7y ago
  Attunity (now Qlik) Replicate [1] has an SAP ABAP change data capture connector. Replicate directly from SAP to Kafka, AWS/Azure, HDFS, etc., in real-time. I am surprised that more SAP shops are not doing this to separate operational ERP concerns from agility in the rest of the business. [1] https://www.qlik.com/us/sap-analytics/sap-data-replication https://www.qlik.com/us/sap-analytics/sap-data-replication
  • kthejoker2 7y ago
    This is what SAP's HANA platform is for, a microbatched CDC framework to an in memory operational data store with a standard SQL engine for traditional reporting and analytics (in theory .... being SAP, it's also weirdly engineered on the backend)
    • hef19898 7y ago
      Hey, over-engineering is a German core competency! And we germans are thourough!
    • cognaitiv 7y ago
      I’m impressed with core HANA performance for reporting, but it comes with a very dear price tag. Multi-tier architecture concept, I’m not sure..? Kafka can be useful for more than staging reporting data. This pattern is more about separation from core ERP (and core ERP bureaucracy) vs. ERP reporting.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• thomasedwards 7y ago
  One implementation of SAP I’ve used marked items requiring attention in green, and completed/finished items as yellow/red.
• lizknope 7y ago
  I worked in the IT department in 1996. Every other day I would hear a bunch of people say "SAP is down!" and scramble to fix it. I started working as an engineer in 1997. Every other day I would receive an email saying "SAP is down, IT is working to resolve the issue." This continued at my job in 2005. Last week I got an email from IT saying "SAP is down." I still don't know what it does or really care but it sure is down a lot.
• tarsinge 7y ago
  At it’s core SAP as it is used in most companies nowadays is mostly just a database of clients, vendors, invoices, purchase orders, and inventory, with a UI for CRUD operations. Business decisions are usually made on exports in third party tools (Excel, Tableau...). Why is not disrupted yet then? For me it’s the same as Oracle for database engines and IBM mainframes: enterprise sales process and trust in proved decades solutions when you you bet your whole business in a software or hardware solution.
• mr_gibbins 7y ago
  I teach enterprise systems at a university, with emphasis on SAP. It's hideous. Hideous. My students complain it is unusable (agree), doesn't make sense (agree), that they can't see the point (agree). When you look at the underlying database 'schema' (inverted commas deliberate) you'll find it's a massive, denormalised mess. Much of what SAP can do can be done at the local level using intuitive software. Reports, for example, against a well-designed schema or data warehouse are easy. Power BI, Tableau, whatever your poison. You can even aggregate and present data in raw SQL if you like. Each technique is far easier than trying to achieve the same in SAP. What SAP does do well is multinational, enterprise-wide integration. Are you a company comprised of many mergers and acquisitions? You can do HR one way, universally, across your organisation. Credit control? Replace your spreadsheets and custom apps you have deployed across your many siloed finance departments with the FI/CO modules. I (am actually told to) teach that changing the business to fit SAP is preferable to changing SAP to fit the business. And it's accurate advice. It shouldn't be, but it is. SAP is SAP. It doesn't care about your USP. Or your custom approach to business. As far as SAP is concerned all businesses are the same, they do the same things, and all must conform. Resistance is futile.
  • kmarc 7y ago
    Sounds like my experience with the Avaloq core banking system. Lowest quality crap I ever had to touch.
  • organsnyder 7y ago
    That's similar to Epic's value proposition in the healthcare space. Sure, their software is above average (with "average" being barely functional or vaporware), but their main selling point is their ability to assist leadership in strongarming an organization to adopt standardized workflows.
    • swampthinker 7y ago
      As someone working in healthcare, I can attest to the value in getting an healthcare org to adopt standardized workflows. I'll take an org that follows process over better software that isn't used in a consistent manner. There is too much operational and human complexity to solve healthcare with software alone.
• bilekas 7y ago
  Wow, its a little bit crazy how much SAP actually does, but it does seem like it's been around so long and has embedded itself into so much that people just take it for granted that their stuck with it. I would love to see some case studies of replacing SAP with even an in-house product. Infact in certain cases I would imagine that an in-house solution with maintenance etc would be more cost efficient.
• ericalexander3 7y ago
  Technology can bring benefits if, and only if, it diminishes a limitation. -Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt Goldratt was critical of ERP systems, not because they couldn't bring benefit; rather, because many businesses adopted through a cargo cult mentality and viewed them as magical silver bullets. Many companies never understood where their bottlenecks were (Theory of Constraints) and would make things worse with an ERP system, with some going bankrupt.
• monkeynotes 7y ago
  SAP implementation basically sunk Target's huge investment into operations in Canada https://www.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target-canada/ https://www.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target-can... Seems to me SAP is ripe for disruption, but it would be a very challenging throne to unseat.
  • delfinom 7y ago
    The problem nobody wants to admit is that any competitor to SAP will just become SAP. SAP grew to what it is because it was made to fit everybody's workflow to make sales to businesses wanting ERPs. Business is a wild world of so many ways to structure the org down from workflows to departments which is basically the only thing that differentiates a large majority of businesses these days. Sure, you could enforce a single cookie cutter approach for everyone, but then, how is corp A any different B anymore when everything is identical besides the people itself, heck their costs should equalize as they should in theory have the same workflow optimizations and inefficiencies.
    • jerf 7y ago
      "The problem nobody wants to admit is that any competitor to SAP will just become SAP." This is an entire category of software. Closer to most of our homes, see "bug tracking software", "web frameworks" (frontend or backend), or "programming languages". Countless examples of someone getting frustrated and starting a "lightweight alternative", gets lots of attention, gets lots of customers who find various issues and features get added to address them, and before you know it, 5-10 years later, the "lightweight alternative" has become the monster the next generation of "lightweight alternatives" are being started up against. I'm actually at the point where I consider advertising something as a "lightweight alternative" to be nearly a strike against one of those things; it likely means the author doesn't understand how the previous things got to where they are and are just going to follow them down the same road. If you've got a coherent story on how to address that, talk directly to that. Of course, if you're a new bug tracker/framework/language author, you'd probably rather get the numbers you can get from advertising "lightweight!" rather than the smaller numbers you'll get from advertising "we're going to contain complexity by an aggressive modularization system based on the principles of ...".
• throwaway8291 7y ago
  In Germany there is a saying that translates to something like: "SAP sucks the blood out of the Mittelstand" - Mittelstand being the SMB up to 50M revenue p.a. There has to be yet a moment, where I hear someone emphatically speaking about the mess that SAP is.
• ubermonkey 7y ago
  In the late 90s (say, 97-98), I was a partner in a custom software firm focused on helping companies use "Internet technologies" internally -- early intranets, delivering things via the browser, that sort of thing. It was novel at the time, and we could make money doing it! Wheee! Anyway, we needed to integrate with SAP on occasion, partly because one of our biggest clients was in the middle of a HUGE SAP rollout, employing a small army of Arthur Andersen MBAs, etc. So I went to the SAP technical education conference in Atlanta, to gather info and whatnot. I heard Hasso Platner brag from the stage in the keynote that complaints about SAP's complexity and expense were entirely overblown because "80% of our implementations now take less than 18 months, and come in under $100 million." Y I K E S. (Oh, and the company with the SAP rollout we were working with? Eventually, the combined cancer of SAP and AA billing destabilized them enough that agreed to be acquired by their biggest competitor. Yay SAP!)
• mdip 7y ago
  We had this at a telecom I worked at in the early 2000s. It's easy to sit back and bitch about "the things you have to use at work", so I usually avoid it. However, short of whatever-the-heck-is-used-for time tracking/time sheets[0], this application was the single largest software cause of rage at the company that I've ever been exposed to in my entire working life. My experience with the application was limited mostly to expense report submissions and for that simple task, it was abysmal. It was so bad that it was hard not to conclude that it was chosen due to its horribleness: making employees think twice about sending in expense reports. And we did. If it was a small dollar amount, the time cost exceeded the monetary cost. The UI, at the time (2005...ish), actually looked pretty slick compared to most web-based tools. It stopped there. Date fields, upon clicking, reloaded the whole page (which you waited for), to display a pop-up calendar, which when the date was clicked, reloaded the whole page. At least once while filling in the expense reports myriad of screens, the page would fail to load and you'd have to hit the refresh button, or you'd make a mistake and need to go back. Clicking any of the usual buttons in the browser for those functions invariably lead to an account DoS feature. I don't remember the details, but it basically caused the system to get confused into thinking there were two of you and it gave priority to the "you" living in the alternate universe where you didn't click "Back" or "Refresh" and were still filling out your expense report. You had to wait for the first session to time out before you could continue, and the error message you received was placed in the "status bar" and appeared to be the name of a const variable "APP_BOWEL_MVMT_ERR" that gave no hint as to what the fsck was wrong. There was admin "unlock" feature (help desk calls were met with "just sit tight"). So you would give up and forget to return 3 hours later. A few days of this and the expense deadline passed. There wasn't a more hated "enterprise tool" in our shop and we ran every single one of Microsoft's early attempts at web-ifying the world (early Sharepoint is the only I recall, but we had others). It was decided to shelve it after a last-ditch effort was made to fix it. We'd put a job opening up to get a solid SAP developer and got ... someone ... after bumping the salary up several times. The rumor is that the gentleman we hired was the highest paid developer at the company. He lasted 3 months before taking a job at IBM at a substantially higher salary. A look at his job history and the circumstances surrounding it made it not unreasonable to conclude that we weren't the job he was ever interested in and talking to other SAP folks ... this sounded extremely common. The joke was "if you have to work with that crap, it better pay well". We finally ditched it when we were acquired by another telecom; while most of the choices "our side"'s IT made were fought for, nobody advocated for keeping SAP ... even having no idea of what the acquiring company was using -- we knew if it wasn't SAP, it had to be better. It was Oracle; and it might be the only time I've heard a colleague speak positively about "Oracle" outside of The Matrix[1]. [0] Time sheet software always comes to mind. Nobody likes doing "time sheets" at any job I've ever had, but at every company I've ever worked for, we've had a home-grown time tracking tool. 30,000 employees to 100 employees. Every. Single. Company. It's such a necessary "evil" that even at those places where executives had known deadly-allergic reactions to building anything in-house, somehow a case was able to be made to build a completely custom time tracking tool tailored precisely to the businesses perceived needs. Death, taxes and time sheets, I guess. [1] My experience with Oracle up to that point was Sun's acquisition and a perception-backed-by-coincidence that when the Oracle sales guys couldn't land a deal, their software auditors would step in to give the necessary motivation.
• znpy 7y ago
  I can't wait to see this article commented on a certain website that doesn't want to be named.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• andyjpb 7y ago
  The author spends a whole section on "The importance of integration", the value being sold as "...the two [SAP] modules were able to seamlessly interact with each other since they shared the same database." and "because these [other] systems don’t interact, they needed to be synced regularly, and that often meant having a human manually move data around." ... "Integrated software solves this by facilitating communication". In the very last paragraph of the article they then say "...on the back-end, most modern enterprise software (e.g. Salesforce, Jira, etc.) now have good APIs for exporting data. ETL + data lakes are on the rise...". This is a mistake I see made a lot; not because of naivete tho': usually because the concerns cut across each other so much. The economic and efficiency incentives around integration are very delicate. SAP is so complex that (assuming you can hire great engineers, which isn't necessarily a given outside the tech sector) you can probably build most of what you need with a small team that's much cheaper than SAP. However, you can't successfully (even with good access to great tech sector talent) grow that software as quickly or as broadly as what you'd get from SAP. You also carry a lot more risk. ...and that's risk outside of the core focus of your business. The article even includes one quote, "competitive advantage in this industry might just come from doing the best and cheapest job at implementing SAP." which recognises this as an operational rather than capital problem. ...but even if you can accomplish it, it's the integration that gives you the value. You're always going to have higher operational costs for your thing if you build it out of something like Salesforce and Jira sewn together with APIs. ETL is hard to do well for anything other than reporting (and even then it's not easy). Data lakes are the epitome of loosely integrated data structures. Most of the time they're a collection of files full of data in weakly-or-stringly typed formats such as CSV, JSON and XML. Getting at the domain models of the producing software is always a pain. For all these things, your talent pool for effective support is small and gets smaller as you add more products to the mix. So the three options are: 1) Buy (+ professional services) 2) Build 3) Integrate (e.g. "Salesforce + Jira") 3 (Integrate) is the mistake because it's less than the sum of it's parts. You carry all the risk of "Build" and don't get the brand stability and integration of "Buy". Multiple vendors gives you more risk than a single one in this scenario because you're buying different things from different vendors. So now you have more chances for failure: failure or withdrawal of one of the vendors, API changes that you don't control, etc, etc. As the SaaS markets become more mature I'd hope to see consortiums of vendors who had products that they would certify as working together. I don't think we're quite there yet tho'. 2 (Build) is the Big Bet because you're taking a capital expenditure approach to an operational problem. You're investing in intellectual property outside of your core business. ...and you own all the risk. 1 (Buy) is difficult because it is expensive and loads of things you want are still only sold on a professional services basis, rather than as a product. It's also a market designed for the large companies with between 6 and 9 figures to spend. It's also one of those infrastructure projects that is usually shaped as something that doesn't deliver any value until it has been rolled out everywhere. However, this is the option where you hold the least technical risk and most of the risk you do hold is related to abilities that are hopefully aligned with your existing skills of management and operational delivery.
• nateburke 7y ago
  One reason why SAP perhaps has remained relatively unscathed by competition, beyond the obvious upfront development and implementation cost barriers, is the sales angle. An ERP is usually sold directly into the office of the CEO. Any ERP startup hoping to get a foothold must have a founder or head of sales with a rolodex full of CEOs. Folks with CEOs in their rolodexes tend to not have the type of risk-tolerance required to go all-in on a startup.
• james-imitative 7y ago
  Stupid Asshole Projection
• kthejoker2 7y ago
  A whole sea of comments, balmost all focused on the tech stack, reporting, UX, integration .. SAP's selling point is regulatory compliance and financial control. It doesn't matter if you have a great UX or lightweight extensible third party API ecosystem, what matters is "When the IRS / SEC / Congress / Interpol comes calling, am I clear?" Government regulation is the ultimate "vendor lock-in" and SAP exploits that fact.
  • kradroy 7y ago
    I work for an SAP subsidiary and this is the correct answer. You buy SAP software to 1) reduce your chance of getting audited and 2) get through expensive audits quickly. The everyday end-user of SAP software isn't the one it's designed for. It's designed for lawyers and accountants who need to organize data quickly when the shit hits the fan.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • BlobRunner 7y ago
    But even on this field (compliance) is it bullet proof ?
• belinder 7y ago
  > A 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. Hard to imagine even getting to that point
• lonelappde 7y ago
  As hinted in the article, SAP is bad because anyone who could do it better would dominate their industry and not sell it to the public.
• patja 7y ago
  In the 90's I was one of the project leaders on the internal SAP R/3 deployment at Microsoft. It was one of the most successful IT projects I ever participated in, mostly due to the remarkably strong business leadership the project enjoyed. It was the third time the company tried to implement SAP's products. I think I may have been one of the very few people who worked on all three attempts. The winning recipe was having a business owner who threw up his hands at the failed efforts to get a larger scoped company-wide project underway and "selfishly" declared that the finance dept would do it for its own benefits. And he tooks his best people out of their day jobs, put them on the project team, and made them move offices to sit in the same open plan war-rooms as the IT staff (which took some doing...Microsoft was pretty much all unshared private offices at that time) I think we reduced the time it took to "close the books" each month from something like 3 weeks to under one week. And we absolutely changed the business to meet the way the software worked, that's one of the key success factors for implementing any ERP software. Your "unique requirements" for fixed assets accounting and accounts payable processes are not what makes your company successful, but they are what will tank your ERP implementation if you let them. It was a fascinating project. I especially enjoyed some of the travel to implement it in the subsidiaries, where the really big business wins were. Most of the subs didn't even have a "purchase order" process (they just paid invoices, and had no idea of their outstanding commitments) or any automation around things like employee expense reports. And we got to come up with some decent creative solutions to things like Brazil's requirements for hyperinflationary accounting, without breaking the software. Fun fact, Concur's expense reporting business was borne out of the Microsoft R/3 implementation -- some of the best consultants and developers took what they built for Microsoft's internal expense reporting and turned it into Concur's expense reporting product.
  • solarkraft 7y ago
    Thanks for sharing that! Do you happen to know how MS feels about that implementation nowadays?
    • patja 7y ago
      No idea...I left in 2008. At that time, it was still being promoted as a big success story externally. It was turned into a "IT showcase" case study to show customers that SAP could successfully run on SQL Server and Windows. I did maybe 30 presentations of that case study to different customers at Redmond and South America. Internally, we did what we could to soften the hard edges of the SAP UX for the casual user by putting web app front ends on top of things like purchase orders expense reports.
• greatartiste 7y ago
  This is an interesting thread as despite working for many many years in IT I know next to nothing about SAP. I have worked with people from all parts of the IT ecosystem over the years but not SAP. It appears to be its own little closed world that some people enter but then never leave. That observation aside does anyone know who writes or customises the SAP NetWeaver for Windows programs ? Is that the function of a highly paid consultant somewhere ? I have seen a few of these in different places and the common factor is they always look like they were written in Visual Basic circa 1992. The one I use makes the same beeping sound if a transaction fails as it does if it succeeds. If the transaction fails this is signalled by status box text saying so in a green font but if it succeeds then text says that in a red font. It takes a special mind to come up with that !
• npace12 7y ago
  I was an ABAP developer around 10 years ago, wrote a bunch of Planning & Scheduling apps/"screens" running in SAPGUI R/3 and APO for a (brand new) manufacturing plant with a new SAP implementation. I learned ABAP in a literally one weekend and was able to make stuff really quickly. For the most part, you could just "loop at <giant_table_name>" extract what you want and show it on a screen using one of their existing ui components. There was not much UI to worry about and you know the user is getting a proper input box (for example) with a working typeahead. Honestly, I thought it was a very decent developer experience. I could focus on what I needed to do and not worry about how pretty the thing looks or if I'm querying the database optimally. I ended up writing a very complex genetic algorithm implementation to calculate optimal schedules and it was a joy. Yes, the table names were basically in german, and abbreviated, and most things were only 8 chars long for some legacy reasons, but it really wasn't that hard to learn that VBAK was sales_orders and VBAP was sales_order_items and move on. For the most part, the users were totally fine with SAP. It was hyper-focused for the tasks they needed. It was consistent and easily documentable. It didn't crash, it loaded super fast, it didn't eat up gigs of memory. You just load up the gui application and you don't even need a mouse once you know the shortcuts. Having spent the last 10 years building web and mobile apps, working with salesforce and others, I miss ABAP very often.
  • TheHypnotist 7y ago
    My biggest complains is running queries against tables in german. Most of my time is searching tables for fields i actually need. But i'm a complete SAP novice, i understand it gets easier with experience.
    • npace12 7y ago
      One thing I found helpful was to find a "native" transaction that does something similar to what I want then debug it. It was nice to be able to read and debug the existing "SAP" code. Also, that was the only way I remember to find the "user exits" where you can extend an existing transactions.
  • tubbs 7y ago
    It's funny - I spend years as an SAP ABAP developer and the very day I start my new position apart from SAP, it's on the front page of HN. ABAP will always hold a special, quirky little place in my heart. It's very powerful, but also totally frustrating. The language is a COBOL-like language made by Germans with a keyword graveyard as big as Berlin. The ABAP community (in my experience, online and offline) is totally unacademic: algorithmic complexity is a foreign concept, "code clarity" meant "hitting the Pretty Printer button every few years" (which was a nice feature), and there's no remote concept of best practices. On the bright side, it makes for a good income, and the debugger is a gem.
• davidw 7y ago
  I went to the town where SAP is located, once, for work. It's bizarre - it's this fairly average little German town. Next to it, it has an 'industrial area' about the same size as the town, and it's all about SAP: https://www.google.com/maps/place/49%C2%B018'00.0%22N+8%C2%B039'00.0%22E/@49.2981602,8.6427025,2955m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x0!8m2!3d49.3!4d8.65?hl=en https://www.google.com/maps/place/49%C2%B018'00.0%22N+8%C2%B...
• zebrafish 7y ago
  It sounds like HN readers could stand to spend a little time studying microeconomics. I would love to see a Valley solution to the problem of sourcing raw materials including energy, storing raw materials, sourcing packaging, storing packaging, sourcing machine parts, storing machine parts, keeping track of vendors, machine maintenance labor, machine maintenance scheduling, cost accounting for the inputs, manufacturing and machine schedule management, demand forecasting, supply & replenishment planning, WIP inventory management, finished goods inventory management, inventory accounting, sourcing shipping, planning shipping, actually shipping, invoicing, printing invoices, printing all documents (manifest, bills of lading), extending credit, managing credit lines..... oh yeah accepting purchase orders, making to order, promising inventory, managing inventory allocation in tight markets, managing in transit inventory, collecting payment, transferring cash, reporting all of this to the SEC and IRS so you don't get sued, remitting taxes, managing headcount, paying employees.... I probably forgot a lot of stuff and this is only for domestic sales. Export has so many other problems to solve like tariffs and duties, container management on the dock, steamship management, etc. I'm not being sarcastic either, I would LOVE to see a solution that has a better UX than SAP that solves all of these problems.
  • ulucs 7y ago
    If the answer you get is this terrible, then maybe you're asking the wrong question. For example, I know the tale of a large multinational consumer goods company who bought their supplier for X. Coincidentally, the X supplier was also the largest exporter of X goods to the world and had a team of twelve who managed operations. The multinational company, in their great wisdom, decided to move the operations from what we Turks call "bakkal defteri" (basically pen and paper) to SAP. It turns out that twelve people were not enough to run the system over SAP, and they basically had to tenfold the number of operations people just to get it running.
  • aneutron 7y ago
    Everyone used to say the same about every product ever created. Until the new market player came into town and proved it could be done. The answer is pretty simple actually. You make a couple of billions a year. Invest a single billion in a full UX revamp for 5 years down the line, and see how it all works out. Throwing money at problems doesn't always work, but when you have a lot of money, and a very specific problem, it tends to work.
• eftpotrm 7y ago
  I once worked on a project that only existed because the end users had seen the SAP web UI and rebelled, hard. In fairness I don't blame them; when we dug down it was easily the worst HTML I've ever seen and some impressively weird behaviour. I can't quite imagine which team at SAP thought it was appropriate to release as a tool. So, we spent 6 months or so building a front-end that the users wouldn't refuse to touch. HTML5, responsive, attractive, flexible. I mostly worked on the toolkit side of the project to try and keep UIs vaguely standard across the multitude of screens. And alongside us, the two highest paid contractors I've ever worked with (who seemed to be earning their money), were building what amounted to SQL stored procedures that went into a tool that let them be interfaced as REST APIs. The article talks about the amount to which businesses have to mash themselves around how SAP works - from what I saw and heard, that was even after they'd spent more customising SAP than I would expect to bill to have built very large parts of it from scratch. So yes. I'm sure that, at a really large corporate scale, SAP has its advantages to organisations. But in a 20 year career it's probably my least favourite technology, including the email server which you could misconfigure so receiving an email would bring down the whole machine. I wouldn't be remotely surprised to see SAP disrupted into oblivion, and a bit of me would love to be part of the disruption.
• CameronBarre 7y ago
  I worked as a PeopleSoft developer in college. It's a competitor to SAP. Working with esoteric software taught me how to properly read documents with hundreds of pages. It also showed me how to get by in a less than ideal circumstances. I am a bit of a maverick in that sort of environment, though. I wrote a JSON encoder [1] to ship PeopleCode objects to the browser via these webscript endpoints you could make in order to use modern web technologies. PeopleSoft actually moved in that exact same direction years later with better JSON support, 'FluidUI', and better html5/javascript support. ERP systems are hell to work with. It was fun, but ultimately I was glad to get back to the real world. I got back to my main interest C#, but then went fully into the Clojure world :). [1] https://bitbucket.org/cjbarre/jsoft.json/src/master/ https://bitbucket.org/cjbarre/jsoft.json/src/master/
• pcmoore 7y ago
  One early forerunner was LEO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEO_(computer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEO_(computer)
• sparker72678 7y ago
  This thread is depressing.
• wackget 7y ago
  > Article is titled "What’s SAP?" > Doesn't actually tell you what SAP is, or stands for, until halfway through the article.
• fnord77 7y ago
  SAP demonstrates the power of sales relationships and corruption over utility.
• ab_testing 7y ago
  Having worked in the ERP space for close to 15 years, I have seen no other software even come close to the features of SAP & Oracle. A lot of next gen software even lacked basic features like revenue splitting or multi-currency or multi-org that are pivotal to any company that has any more than 500M in revenue.
• rbosinger 7y ago
  In the last couple years I've been more and more interested in this world of "big enterprise software that seems to be a complex mess but has seemingly unstoppable momentum and makes billions". That whole world seems to be hidden to many of us developers who often see a few lines of code we don't like and assume a whole product will die because of it. Meanwhile there are these giants out there dragging along this weight that companies still spend billions to implement. I see some of this in my day to day but it's not often I find an article that frames it the way this one did. Good stuff!
  • Noumenon72 7y ago
    This whole thread has made me feel like my life writing clean Java and Postgres has been charmed and the future is working on behemoths that are too big to fail.
• vangelis 7y ago
  What isn't SAP?
• cr0sh 7y ago
  SAP is a company (and software system) that exists to buy up other company's software, business, and services and then integrate that all into SAP's "core" systems, and do so in such a poor manner that their name and the system has almost become synonymous with the words and phrases "nasty", "unreliable", "run away now", "if you know what's good for ya" and a host of others. However, due to their entrenchment in various other markets (and who knows if there is any graft or other under-the-table business going on), they continue to manage to exist, and scary enough sell their products to new victims (ahem - customers). SAP is the old-is-new-again-we're-IBM type of business; nobody ever got fired for buying SAP (but the golden parachute was nice)? Ok - hyperbole and I don't really know what I'm talking about, so the above should probably be ignored... ...that said - I don't think I'm too far off, either.
• dcolkitt 7y ago
  Question for those in the know. Do the major Silicon Valley tech giants (i.e. Google, Apple, Amazon) use SAP or even ERP? I say this as someone who has no experience whatsoever with ERP. But the entire concept seems like an anti-pattern. A kludge that's only necessary when your org lacks basic technical competence. Why does everything need to be in a single monolithic system? Does HR really need to run on the same database and software as the manufacturing plant? Haven't we learned that small modular, independent systems with well-defined interfaces at the system boundary work. If for some reason manufacturing needs to talk to purchasing, why can't they just do so over JSON/HTTP endpoints or a Kafka message bus or even direct SQL connections? Trying to integrate by just locking everyone together into a single system that tries to be all things to all people sounds like a recipe for disaster. But, again I don't really have any direct experience with ERP. So that's why I'm really curious what orgs that are actually technically competent do. If Google or Amazon or Netflix was using ERP, despite having the engineering firepower to build alternative systems, then I'd really think that there's something important to the concept that I'm missing.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • lorenzfx 7y ago
    Most of them are, as you can easily find out by putting SAP in their careers search, e.g., https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/?company=Google&company=Google%20Fiber&company=YouTube&employment_type=FULL_TIME&hl=en_US&jlo=en_US&q=SAP&sort_by=relevance https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/?company=Google&comp...
• jboggan 7y ago
  I've been working on exporting SAP data to a new data lake and it's a tortuous process, though amazing when you finally get the data out and can finally do something with it. SAP works within its own sandbox but woe unto you if you want to integrate data from Google Analytics or third party APIs to do forecasting or more sophisticated business models. The RFC libraries for pulling report data out of SAP are . . . finicky . . . and I spend too much time manually formatting output tables which look like something pretty-printed in J.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• gbasin 7y ago
  After reading all these comments, I think the market opportunity is building lightweight SaaSy UIs on top of SAP to make it easier to work with. Someone write me a check
• widforss 7y ago
  I worked one summer (2014) manufacturing emergency stop buttons for ABB. We used SAP for our incoming orders. Each order was printed on paper as some kind of report from SAP and put in our physical inbox. When we had manufactured buttons for an order, we would go to a desk with two computers, both logged in to SAP. With the first computer we would scan a barcode from the order to find it in the system, mark the order as done, and print a second paper containing the order. Then we would proceed to the next computer, scanning a barcode from the second paper, and produce a freight order for the outgoing warehouse. This was printed to a third paper, and attached to the buttons, before they went to the outgoing warehouse. Note that the freight order did not work as a waybill, so the process of shifting paper was probably conducted a couple of more times before the order reached the customer. For someone really used to working with computers and not against them, it seemed rather innovative to print a paper to transfer an order to another computer two feet away. It was a learning experience and greatly motivated me to go get some higher education.
  • jedberg 7y ago
    What did you do with the paper you used between the two computers? Did you toss it or was it filed somewhere? If it was filed, my guess was that it was an internal control measure. They wanted to make sure there was a paper copy of every transaction for audit purposes, and what better way to make sure of that then requiring the paper to move the order forward? If you tossed it, then it sounds like they were just too lazy to implement something other than the default config. :)
    • widforss 7y ago
      We had a giant garbage bin beside the table, everything was tossed.
      • jedberg 7y ago
        All those poor trees...
        • 7y ago
• anvarik 7y ago
  > 77% of the world’s transaction revenue touches an SAP system wonder how they have calculated that
• usui 7y ago
  Thank you for this link. It is highly informative for someone who is not familiar with SAP or enterprise management. I searched on Google, "What is SAP?" Here are the top three links as of today: 1) https://www.sap.com https://www.sap.com 2) https://www.guru99.com/what-is-sap-definition-of-sap-erp-software.html https://www.guru99.com/what-is-sap-definition-of-sap-erp-sof... 3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_ERP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_ERP What do you notice among the top three links? All of them are mostly talking from business-speak perspective. For a software engineer learning about SAP for the first time, all I want to know is what does SAP literally do? The top three links do not have screenshots of the software, do not simply explain the technical capabilities of SAP, and do not explain how SAP differs from competing products. Although I never interact with SAP daily, I have always been curious about what it does, but did not want to waste a lot of time on Google searching for a real explanation. Hence, to have a section like "What ERP software actually looks like" in the parent link fulfills a certain desire to know SAP that I have had in the back of my mind. To some extent, I can blame laziness on my part—in that I have not researched enough about SAP, but why should it be this hard for a software engineer to learn about another piece of software? This is why sometimes, it is better to have a neutral party (non-SAP affiliated) to explain a product, rather than SAP itself.
• marta_morena 7y ago
  SAP is the one of the few software companies who manages to consistently produce the worst possible user experience. They actually made it into an art form. There is nothing about an SAP product that is usable. Its a big steaming pile of shit. I don't even want to know how the code looks like.
• bitcuration 7y ago
  >>"But most importantly, SAP’s software was designed to be extensible from the start. For SAP’s original contract with ICI, SAP didn’t build software from scratch, as was the norm at the time, and instead built on top of a previous project. When SAP released their financial accounting software in 1974, their intention was to build additional software modules on top of it and sell them in the future. This extensibility was SAP’s defining feature. The interoperability across client contexts was considered radical at the time because other approaches started from scratch for every client." SAP's success can be attributed to something similar to what Facebook and Google did, locking the data and knowledge base to itself. The much bragged "extensibility" is limited to SAP own software modules or will be acquired. Therefore the extensibility is both the strength and the weakest point of SAP. Unlike most of modern software system, there isn't an open ecosystem for competition at its periphery, resulted in a lackluster UI and unfair challenges to non-SAP software to take advantage of those domain knowledge buried inside the SAP. SAP's integration doctrine is originated from 1960-1970s. With limit evolution this doctrine has largely ignored the changes in computing for several decades, yet it's still growing its dominance.
• arendtio 7y ago
  Does someone know a good place to start learning SAP CAR?
• danzig13 7y ago
  I have been working for YEARS on an ERP implementation in a custom manufacturing operation practically by myself. As bad as I'm sure SAP is to deal with, I crave it or anything else (Salesforce?) that has any sort of easy customization, automation API and fosters some sort of community. A large part of my particular ERP's business model seems to be to make the data model so esoteric that you are forced to go to them for any type of customization at all. Unfortunately, they make a habit of firing any of their halfway decent employees every time they get acquired (4 or 5 times so far).
  • danzig13 7y ago
    I will say, even with all the problems, even our ERP is capable of quite a few things, and I couldn't fathom rolling my own. They just don't want you to plug anything of your own into it.
• RobertRoberts 7y ago
  I have a company that runs Filemaker Pro databases for managing some parts. And they have considered using SAP recently. How much product/inventory/sales/etc... processes is required before you should move from FMP to something like SAP? Is it number of users, client accounts, employees, products? What is the break point for needing ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software?
• nrclark 7y ago
  SAP is Germany's revenge for WWII.
• 0xff00ffee 7y ago
  Having brought up an ERP solution with a team, this is no joke. A company with payroll, inventory, contracts, and logistics (to name a few), needs an ENORMOUS infrastructure of software to keep things running. There's a reason ERP is so expensive. In fact, I'm surprised it is only a US$41B industry. I would expect 10x that.
• floppiplopp 7y ago
  SAP is a test suite to determine the resilience of a company against the highest form of software bullshittery. If a company actually survives a SAP rollout, it's pretty solidly positioned. The downside is, those tests cost a shitload of budget.
• pajeetLord666 7y ago
  Useless enterprise bullshit lmao