11 ms·

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, intentional

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 That project has to divert someone to first figure out the unpublished process and then contact everyone in the chain.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
    > 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. Those are birth pains as felt from inside. It's a beginning of a new sentient life; your company is acquiring its own mind. You and your coworkers are now just nodes in the network. Individual reports don't make intuitive sense for the same reason a random block of machine code doesn't tell you much about the purpose of a program, or why a random neuron doesn't know what the brain is thinking. You're part of something greater now. You're compute incarnate, the process made flesh. Welcome to the collective. Resistance is futile. (Honestly though, this applies to many corporations in general; I think SAP is a kind of parasite that thrives off corporate life forms, exploiting popularity as a reproduction vector. After infecting a corporation, SAP keeps it alive and makes it display the signs of infection, which is used to encourage other corporate life forms to get infected themselves.)
    - OldGuyInTheClub 7y ago
      > Those are birth pains as felt from inside. It's a beginning of a new sentient life; your company is acquiring its own mind. Yeah. Kind of like 'Aliens' when one bursts through a chest cavity.
    - throw0101a 7y ago
      > Those are birth pains as felt from inside. It's a beginning of a new sentient life; your company is acquiring its own mind. Kind of like the ant colony being sentient but the individual ants not (see Gödel, Escher, Bach).
  - starfallg 7y ago
    Process is king in mature industries where profits are extracted from scale and volume. Anything outside of standard process is expensive. If there is no external entity to bear the cost, then this cost is to be minimised. You and I may not agree with this approach, and the formula is somewhat different for creative industries, but numbers don't lie. It's always a compromise between agility/adaptability and cost when in a production line. A main function of an ERP system like SAP is to maximise this extraction.
- djmobley 7y ago
  > It's a real headache to use and completely confusing. You could say the same about Vim. I suspect there are workflows and shortcuts heavy SAP users have learned over time that make them highly effective, and they are now resistant to change.
  - vnorilo 7y ago
    Except vim does not take over your process and data, and is happy to sit there and wait out your tryst with nano, sublime, vs code or frigging notepad. It's fine to have an inscrutable, beginner-hostile power tool as an option.
  - Aperocky 7y ago
    Except that instead of getting high powered modal editing actions where editing text behaves like executing code, you're stuck in insert and can only move by arrow keys, one at the time.
- zxienin 7y ago
  > I don't know if good interfaces can not be built in SAP, or if it's very difficult to do, or if the developers of apps on SAP platform just don't care. Up until some 5 years back, UX really was afterthought to them. Why? Answer is in how enterprise software was (and largely still) sold. Buying was done by CIO, based on all parameters (account relationship, FOMO, $$$ discounts, functional reliability etc.) except user acceptance. SAP simply didn't have incentive and KPI to see UX as focus. Users were "trained" to use SAP after rollouts. With what is fancy termed as "consumerization of IT", SAP has been forced to change. They've been trying their best with Fiori v1, v2, v3 since then. Change takes time to get hold in SAP world, specially given large on-premise installed base, where customers take years to adopt a release upgrade.
  - dragonsh 7y ago
    SAP is designed based on priority of the requirements by people in a company who will never use it but will ask their staff to extract the data and present them in PowerPoint or excel. So the UI design of SAP is user hostile. Even by embracing modern web components and openUI toolkit SAP will continue to be user hostile design. SAP will need to change the foundations completely to change it and also re do things. But then it will put them in direct competition with modern software makers who can beat them. So I am doubtful things will change, SAP will go the path of IBM in times to come.
    - hef19898 7y ago
      While the first thing is in itself bad enough, it becomes just dangerous when these powerpoint higher-ups refuse to, and don't, understand how SAP, and thus an integral part of their business, works. Saw that more than once. Which is also one big reason why the SAP instances I worked with at multiple companies are that bad. Not necessarily bacause of SAP, but because of tech-iliterate old-guard managers trying to work with "computers" and "software".
    - lioeters 7y ago
      Not having much experience with SAP (but having dealt with frustrating enterprise software), I know what people mean by user-hostile UI/UX. It's a symptom of a systemic issue commonly seen in corporations, government, public administration, any large institution. It's what happens when the users have no choice in the matter, there is no reasonable alternative or competition - therefore no incentive to change or improve. Whether it's intentionally designed to be user-hostile, I've suspected (and doubted) that myself.. There might be a logical explanation how that's desirable or even profitable, as a kind of moat or gate-keeping. With its legacy and massive complexity, SAP would require a visionary to re-architect it from the ground up. Unfortunately, that rarely happens in enterprise software. We can only hope that scrappy startups arise to replace and evolve.
- mbesto 7y ago
  I take a very neutral position to this. Enterprise software at the scale SAP is operating (mainly its core ERP) at a Fortune 500 enterprise level. This characteristic (needs at that level) are user-hostile, not the software. Imagine this situation: - You're a F500 pipe manufacturer and a sales person needs to enter an order for 100 pipes to be manufactured and sent to a customer in the US Now imagine you need to: - Order your materials from your Brazilian plant - Procure raw materials from your Chinese plant to be sent to your Brazilian plant - Ship the raw materials from your Chinese plant to your Brazilian plant - Ship the 100 pipes from Brazil to the client's plants, 50 to their plant in the Indianapolis and 50 to their plant in Canada Now imagine from a systems perspective your software needs to: - Determine import costs for sending raw materials from China to Brazil to the USA - Integrate with a 3PL to calculate shipping across all 4 sites - etc. etc. Oh and your software needs to: - Be extensible to adapt to any modifications and user exits. - Have a beautiful interface that anyone from the age of 22-65 can use. - have full audit capabilities to adhere to local/regional compliance - have capabilities for reporting and analytics The real world is messy, especially at scale. For the record - I started my career as a millennial at SAP and was appalled that most F500 use it. I've learned a lot about the "real world" since then.
  - donkeyd 7y ago
    > I've learned a lot about the "real world" since then. This is key. It's the make or buy decision, which is also the "adapt software to process or process to software decision". Building something custom in order to get rid of SAP is a project that would take years and probably fail because different departments spread across countries won't agree on a way of work. SAP allows C-level to say "just deal with it" and force people to adapt rather than try and get everyone happy with the software. This is the definition of use hostile, but it's also a way to get things done, in stead of just discussing what to get done.
  - simlan 7y ago
    This should be higher up. Everyone here thinks a simple shinny crud app to order materials for a fancy start up would be so much easier. In reality anything that starts like this will need to face this complexity at some point. Turns out the SAP way is a compromise between usability and extensibility that worked for a long time.
- tluyben2 7y ago
  > It's 2020 and one would hope software companies realize the value of a good, clear, effective user interface. SAP is not the only one; ever tried the enterprise software from Oracle? Or the open source ERPs/CRMs? Painful. But everything has API's these days, so lot of departmental work is done on top. Small budgets so they have small, simple LoB apps made on top which are 'idiot proof'. These apps are very localized though; they cannot translate to other verticals, or even other companies, or even other countries because they are tailored exactly to how that department works.
  - Proziam 7y ago
    I have to agree. I've had the massive misfortune to have to implement and test (almost?) every open source ERP/CRM system out there from vTiger, Odoo, SuiteCRM, Yeti, NextERP, Dolibarr, ...and more that I can't recall from the top of my head. Each and every one of these systems suck. Sometimes they suck in creative and extraordinary ways. But, one thing you can count on is that there's a real reason that they suck. It turns out that the real world of business is complicated and messy. So, as you say, businesses build their own solution on top of these systems to simplify it for their users while keeping the capabilities of the underlying system intact. Of course, nobody is ever happy with the end result - it's always just the least terrible option. On a slightly related topic since this may be seen by folks who can benefit from this information. A lot of "Open Source" systems these days are not what you could honestly call open source. Odoo is the example I'll use, but what I'm about to say applies to a lot more than just Odoo. Most of the organizations behind these solutions are predatory. I've seen features get taken out, hidden, intentionally broken, or have fixes released that are only available in the 'pay us' versions. [0-1]Odoo's accounting functions are one such example. [0]https://www.odoo.com/forum/help-1/question/is-accounting-feature-removed-from-odoo-12-141355 https://www.odoo.com/forum/help-1/question/is-accounting-fea... [1]https://github.com/odoo/odoo/issues/27386 https://github.com/odoo/odoo/issues/27386
    - bargle0 7y ago
      Which of the open source ERP systems is the least bad?
- aswanson 7y ago
  Sounds like a startup opportunity.
  - kumarvvr 7y ago
    Absolutely. I am thinking that a reasonably efficient system can be built with that 100 million put in a bank and pay the interest (4%, 4 million), to about 10 - 15 developers and use standard practices and open source systems for a custom erp system. But I guess the reason products like SAP survive is because in a corporate environment, people have the "No one was fired for buying IBM" mentality. If an SAP implementation is thrust upon the organization, then there will not be anyone particular to blame. Just the 3rd party devs perhaps.
  - danjac 7y ago
    I suspect the startup graveyard has many tombstones throughout the decades engraved with the words "We tried to disrupt SAP".
- bane 7y ago
  One way to think about it is this: if having good UI in internal enterprise tools was a competitive advantage, companies would move to having good UI.
  - kumarvvr 7y ago
    It is a competitive advantage. A good, consistent UI would make people at-least not hate their job when it comes to handling SAP systems. See, using an SAP system requires a lot of unnecessary cognitive load, so much to remember, so much to digest. So un-intuitive. I am sure people would be more productive with a UI that is not complete crap.
    - zerkten 7y ago
      Neither of these things are directly connected to the SAP relationship with your company. The people feeling the pain from the bad user experience are multiple steps removed, and generally powerless to do anything. When they complain, they get presented with an improve UI versus implement thing that auditors need argument. Normal people are going to pick the latter.
  - ta999999171 7y ago
    It's a competitive advantage in ONE category. If your business model is being a gatekeeper who requires expensive training and long adoption periods just for users to do basic shit, and then never switch because they think ALL software is that complicated to learn, then.... What I'm trying to say is, the intricacy is intentional. They thrive on their consultant/contractor money. No one will make a trillion dollars disrupting them. But they will be disrupted.
- crispyambulance 7y ago
  > It's 2020 and one would hope software companies realize the value of a good, clear, effective user interface. Nope. Forget about it! :-) I think another problem with these horrific ERP's is that their tentacles are everywhere in the org. Oracle EBS, my personal "favorite", runs PLM (product lifecycle management), inventory, order management, work orders, customer install base, finance, purchasing, AND PTO entry, F.M.L. ! We can't have nice things in, say, PLM because the whole damn system is tied up tight as "modules" in Oracle EBS. Any kind of change or request involves, at a minimum, harassing a overworked guy in India who is constantly dealing with battle-axe personalities in finance and order management. Things that SHOULD be taken for granted, like being able to create a hyperlink to the bill of materials for any part number-- that's seriously impossible, it's like a freaking moon shot for them (or so they say).
  - kumarvvr 7y ago
    > Things that SHOULD be taken for granted, like being able to create a hyperlink to the bill of materials for any part number-- that's seriously impossible, it's like a freaking moon shot for them (or so they say). One of pain points I was talking about. I'm not sure how a screen/module is developed in SAP, but there are huge inconsistencies in various interactions I come across. I am inclined to believe that the third party developer of the screen ought to do some wiring to, say enable hyperlinks, or do logical linked screens but somehow the QA is so bad that it's frustrating. For example, in our company, when I search for a Material code, there is no way / menu / system to automatically list all Purchase Orders, that contain that Material Code, sorted by date / department. I am guessing that the 3rd party developer ought to have built that functionality, but then what would be the point? After so many years in the ERP domain, shouldn't SAP have an automated system to do that?
    - dfox 7y ago
      If you think, that SAP's UI is inconsistent then you haven't seen the above mentioned EBS ;) Input boxes behaving as buttons, tabs either changing behavior of UI components that are clearly drawn as being outside of the tab, or outright behaving as buttons that cause random actions, loads and loads of nested modal dialogs...
- golover721 7y ago
  One important factor is that folks who use SAP (or other enterprise software) get really good and fast at using it. Any changes to the UI and you have a major revolt on your hands. Not with SAP but having been a part of a project to modernize the UI an enterprise software solution, it usually isn't worth it. Users don't care about how it looks, they just want to get their jobs done as quickly and efficiently as possible. Any changes to what is displayed on what screen or location of buttons etc. causes a major disruption to the way they work.
- agentultra 7y ago
  This is what we hear from our customers all the time. Our product has been so successful, I think, because people on the floor of the factories like using it. Our developers visit the sites, talk to users, and we take everything into account in the design of our UX. I talk with a lot of our users and their biggest frustration is SAP. It's only available on particular work stations, you have to manually enter your forms from the paper ones (data entry in 2020 is still a job), and the interface is arcane and painful. When it doesn't work nobody knows how to fix it and it can lock down the release of millions of dollars worth of product. You can't get any reporting out of it without IT approval and it can take years and millions of dollars to get anything done with it. Our stuff is mobile-first, easy to use, and we deployed it in months instead of years. We met resistance from our customers' IT departments who were irate that the factories weren't waiting for their SAP solution to roll out (it had been several years by the time we came into the picture). So, there's a big win there in UX alone. We do more than UX but it's still such an important part of software.
  - lolftw 7y ago
    Care to share what you product is?
    - unixhero 7y ago
      Yeah. Kind of an integral part of the story.
sdan 7y ago
Make a really bad product + make it mission critical = a product that people are literally glued to using
bliss 7y ago
HR data is necessarily controlled though, there are pretty stingent controls in law around that. I understand the pain of not being able to report on stuff, but there is probably a sound reason. However, the delivery you describe sounds like a broken organisation tbh
- rbrtl 7y ago
  No, this is the SAP business model. If people think that Apple, Sony, or Microsoft try to lock you in to their 'walled garden' then these people have never seen an SAP installation/integration. It's almost its own industry. There are fleets of consultants charging ~$1000 a day just to install the system. Then, as the OP said, they charge by the hour for customised reports which means that businesses have to choose their report very carefully, and will probably need several more hours consulting when one aspect didn't work quite how they thought. I would be surprised if the commenter here was someone who didn't already have access to the data. They are being frustrated by consultants who want to keep their billable hours up, and extraneously restricting access under guises such as "this person doesn't have enough training to touch the system," because it keeps them in paid work. Source: Friend of mine. Man on the inside.
  - tastroder 7y ago
    I'm not sure comparing walled gardens is that benefitial here. Most larger firms will either have consultancies on retainer or in-house personnel that can generate these reports anyway. > They are being frustrated by consultants who want to keep their billable hours up, and extraneously restricting access under guises such as "this person doesn't have enough training to touch the system," because it keeps them in paid work. I'm not sure why there's quite a few people pointing these aspects out in here. As opposed to the person using that data to keep their own billables up? "this person doesn't have enough training to touch the system," seems like a perfectly valid thing to say given what these systems do and is certainly not unique to SAP. The learning curve might be steep, the documentation looks ancient, the ecosystem might seem unapproachable, but at the end of the day this isn't that different to similarly scaled products from players like AWS or MS for example. They might have more approachable lower tiers and are nicer in quite a few technical aspects but other than that? It's often consultants and "certification or gtfo" as well. It's not like the consultant costs come as a surprise to anybody in these industries. Sure, it's their own little sub industry but you could say the same about these other ecosystems as well, that's not special - it is just how a few of these sub sectors are structured.
mayankkaizen 7y ago
It exactly feels like you are telling the story of my previous company. Although they started using SAP because company was going public and it E&Y advised company to implement SAP. Implementation was never successful. Day to day productivity greatly suffered. You had to do things SAP way, regardless of it being right or wrong. There were training sessions every weekend. Even trainers were confused. Everyone was mad. Soon after our company went public, we gave up on SAP and started doing things old ways.
- disiplus 7y ago
  my friend works ata company that is an sap partner and they are required to use some sap software (i think some helpdesk component) and they use some external software and import stuff into sap later. afaik the reason is partly how bad it is and how the licensing does not make sense.
erikbye 7y ago
When my organization (20k+ employees) started its process to migrate many systems to SAP, this project filled a seven-story building. Cost: 2 billion NOK, so far.
- bargle0 7y ago
  $220m Wow.
  - blaser-waffle 7y ago
    Total cost means nothing. What was forecast? What was the original budget? If the original was billed at 1.3 billion NOK and we're at 2 that's still very high, but it's a different discussion from a 400K NOK estimate. "Take whatever you think you need and double it" comes to mind.
    - erikbye 7y ago
      Of course TCO means something. You have an expected ROI when you go into an ERP. In this specific situation TCO far exceeded possible ROI.
- pletnes 7y ago
  Which company? 20k+ employees is one of a handful norwegian companies.
hef19898 7y ago
The last paragraph is the core issue, IMHO. SAP, while as software is cumbersome, user hostile and the opposite of intuitive, has some really great standard processes. Stick to them and SAP as an ERP system will run, almost, like a charm . When your company has the scale to benefit from it. And sticks to 90% of the standard processes. Try to implement it without the necessary scale of operations, with sticking to standards and without training at your own peril. That being said, without any production going on I would never even consider SAP. When don't have any use for their MRP-functions, forming the very core of SAP, you are better of with different solutions. And their licensing schemes are just aweful, not to even to talking about pricing yet...
- nachteilig 7y ago
  What would you say is the right scale for something like SAP? We are only at a few million right bald and around 250 people and are starting to think about it.
  - drunkpotato 7y ago
    I would not recommend it at that scale. You’ll grind your sales people down for no good reason, and flush several million dollars down the toilet on a project that will most likely get canceled and several people fired (gotta have fall guys at that level...). The right time to implement an ERP is at the last possible second that you are legally or contractually obligated to, or a make or break $50-100M sales contract is in play. And in the latter case, losing the contract and flushing the SAP project down the toilet are real risks. I’ve lived this project at a company the size you describe and it ended very poorly.
  - hef19898 7y ago
    As the other comment stated, I would say you're not there yet, sclae-wise. Hard to tell without further details, so. If you decide to the SAP-route in the future I would advise the following (no complete list by far, so): - Stick to the standard, the smaller you are the less customization you do. ususally I'd say 90% standard, if you're small aim for 100%. makes it faster and easier to implement. And cheaper, because you need less external resources. - Wait. SAP is deprecating SAP APO by 2023 (IIRC, something like that). So implementing before that could be a problem. Either you end with a legacy system and have your first release change right after, or during, implementation. And release changes are unique kind of hell themselves. or you end up with a new system that is yet untested. I wouldn't want either of that. - Try to model your business already now along SAP-processes. First, these processes aren't that bad. especailly for the back office side of things as other pointed out already. Plus, it makes and future SAP implementation a lot easier. Same should be true for other ERP-systems, but I have not that much experience with those. Aside Odoo, which I wouldn't touch with a ten feet pole ever again in my life. - get external consultants. Really, get them. get the good ones. A lot of hours. At least one for every module of SAP you want to implement. And have one of your own devs sitt on the consultants lap during the project. One per consultant. It's expensive, sure. But less expensive than an aborted SAP-project. - Invest hours, days, weeks and months in user training. From day one, ideally as soon as you have a test envioronment. Start with key-users, experienced, smart peolple open for change. And work from ther to every singel user of the system. You need their buy in, without even the best SAP-project will fail. These people are alos the backbone for the future, trea them well and listen to them. In case you want to hear more of my rambling, just shoot me a mail, adress is in my profile.
mathattack 7y ago
On prem software is notoriously hard to keep modern. Every customization makes upgrades that much harder. SAP’s approach is “We know best.” Oracle is even worse. At least with SAP if they say the App does something, they aren’t lying.
holri 7y ago
All big ERP Software is like this. SAP is not unique in this regard, it is just everywhere in this market segment. Studies show that ERP user dissatisfaction grows exponentially with project / company size for all systems / implementation partners.
igetspam 7y ago
As an employer, it felt equally as hostile. Every process was riddled with more process. Approvals were miles deep. Getting appropriate hardware and software that wasn't on The List was nearly impossible. Good times were had by all.
- bumby 7y ago
  How industry dependent is this? Is this an artifact of the needs of a particular industry (aerospace, automotive) that has a lot of process to cover supplier quality concerns?
  - blaser-waffle 7y ago
    I've been in the ISP, MSP, Fed'Gov, and Manufacturing sectors in one way or another, and dealt with SAP in most/all of them. Some were worse than others about this, but it was a universal problem. "CYA is SOP", hence millions of layers of approvals, QA, and change controls. Feddy'Gov was actually the fastest moving, in my experience, but they also didn't have to worry about manufacturing defects or breaking BGP nationwide.
bagacrap 7y ago
The army of SAP trained technicians and extreme sunk-cost based lock-in sounds a lot like Epic.
- ta999999171 7y ago
  Same biz model.
commandlinefan 7y ago
> intentionally obscure Never attribute to malice what can equally be explained by stupidity.

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
  > 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. Those are birth pains as felt from inside. It's a beginning of a new sentient life; your company is acquiring its own mind. You and your coworkers are now just nodes in the network. Individual reports don't make intuitive sense for the same reason a random block of machine code doesn't tell you much about the purpose of a program, or why a random neuron doesn't know what the brain is thinking. You're part of something greater now. You're compute incarnate, the process made flesh. Welcome to the collective. Resistance is futile. (Honestly though, this applies to many corporations in general; I think SAP is a kind of parasite that thrives off corporate life forms, exploiting popularity as a reproduction vector. After infecting a corporation, SAP keeps it alive and makes it display the signs of infection, which is used to encourage other corporate life forms to get infected themselves.)
  - OldGuyInTheClub 7y ago
    > Those are birth pains as felt from inside. It's a beginning of a new sentient life; your company is acquiring its own mind. Yeah. Kind of like 'Aliens' when one bursts through a chest cavity.
  - throw0101a 7y ago
    > Those are birth pains as felt from inside. It's a beginning of a new sentient life; your company is acquiring its own mind. Kind of like the ant colony being sentient but the individual ants not (see Gödel, Escher, Bach).
- starfallg 7y ago
  Process is king in mature industries where profits are extracted from scale and volume. Anything outside of standard process is expensive. If there is no external entity to bear the cost, then this cost is to be minimised. You and I may not agree with this approach, and the formula is somewhat different for creative industries, but numbers don't lie. It's always a compromise between agility/adaptability and cost when in a production line. A main function of an ERP system like SAP is to maximise this extraction.
djmobley 7y ago
> It's a real headache to use and completely confusing. You could say the same about Vim. I suspect there are workflows and shortcuts heavy SAP users have learned over time that make them highly effective, and they are now resistant to change.
- vnorilo 7y ago
  Except vim does not take over your process and data, and is happy to sit there and wait out your tryst with nano, sublime, vs code or frigging notepad. It's fine to have an inscrutable, beginner-hostile power tool as an option.
- Aperocky 7y ago
  Except that instead of getting high powered modal editing actions where editing text behaves like executing code, you're stuck in insert and can only move by arrow keys, one at the time.
zxienin 7y ago
> I don't know if good interfaces can not be built in SAP, or if it's very difficult to do, or if the developers of apps on SAP platform just don't care. Up until some 5 years back, UX really was afterthought to them. Why? Answer is in how enterprise software was (and largely still) sold. Buying was done by CIO, based on all parameters (account relationship, FOMO, $$$ discounts, functional reliability etc.) except user acceptance. SAP simply didn't have incentive and KPI to see UX as focus. Users were "trained" to use SAP after rollouts. With what is fancy termed as "consumerization of IT", SAP has been forced to change. They've been trying their best with Fiori v1, v2, v3 since then. Change takes time to get hold in SAP world, specially given large on-premise installed base, where customers take years to adopt a release upgrade.
- dragonsh 7y ago
  SAP is designed based on priority of the requirements by people in a company who will never use it but will ask their staff to extract the data and present them in PowerPoint or excel. So the UI design of SAP is user hostile. Even by embracing modern web components and openUI toolkit SAP will continue to be user hostile design. SAP will need to change the foundations completely to change it and also re do things. But then it will put them in direct competition with modern software makers who can beat them. So I am doubtful things will change, SAP will go the path of IBM in times to come.
  - hef19898 7y ago
    While the first thing is in itself bad enough, it becomes just dangerous when these powerpoint higher-ups refuse to, and don't, understand how SAP, and thus an integral part of their business, works. Saw that more than once. Which is also one big reason why the SAP instances I worked with at multiple companies are that bad. Not necessarily bacause of SAP, but because of tech-iliterate old-guard managers trying to work with "computers" and "software".
  - lioeters 7y ago
    Not having much experience with SAP (but having dealt with frustrating enterprise software), I know what people mean by user-hostile UI/UX. It's a symptom of a systemic issue commonly seen in corporations, government, public administration, any large institution. It's what happens when the users have no choice in the matter, there is no reasonable alternative or competition - therefore no incentive to change or improve. Whether it's intentionally designed to be user-hostile, I've suspected (and doubted) that myself.. There might be a logical explanation how that's desirable or even profitable, as a kind of moat or gate-keeping. With its legacy and massive complexity, SAP would require a visionary to re-architect it from the ground up. Unfortunately, that rarely happens in enterprise software. We can only hope that scrappy startups arise to replace and evolve.
mbesto 7y ago
I take a very neutral position to this. Enterprise software at the scale SAP is operating (mainly its core ERP) at a Fortune 500 enterprise level. This characteristic (needs at that level) are user-hostile, not the software. Imagine this situation: - You're a F500 pipe manufacturer and a sales person needs to enter an order for 100 pipes to be manufactured and sent to a customer in the US Now imagine you need to: - Order your materials from your Brazilian plant - Procure raw materials from your Chinese plant to be sent to your Brazilian plant - Ship the raw materials from your Chinese plant to your Brazilian plant - Ship the 100 pipes from Brazil to the client's plants, 50 to their plant in the Indianapolis and 50 to their plant in Canada Now imagine from a systems perspective your software needs to: - Determine import costs for sending raw materials from China to Brazil to the USA - Integrate with a 3PL to calculate shipping across all 4 sites - etc. etc. Oh and your software needs to: - Be extensible to adapt to any modifications and user exits. - Have a beautiful interface that anyone from the age of 22-65 can use. - have full audit capabilities to adhere to local/regional compliance - have capabilities for reporting and analytics The real world is messy, especially at scale. For the record - I started my career as a millennial at SAP and was appalled that most F500 use it. I've learned a lot about the "real world" since then.
- donkeyd 7y ago
  > I've learned a lot about the "real world" since then. This is key. It's the make or buy decision, which is also the "adapt software to process or process to software decision". Building something custom in order to get rid of SAP is a project that would take years and probably fail because different departments spread across countries won't agree on a way of work. SAP allows C-level to say "just deal with it" and force people to adapt rather than try and get everyone happy with the software. This is the definition of use hostile, but it's also a way to get things done, in stead of just discussing what to get done.
- simlan 7y ago
  This should be higher up. Everyone here thinks a simple shinny crud app to order materials for a fancy start up would be so much easier. In reality anything that starts like this will need to face this complexity at some point. Turns out the SAP way is a compromise between usability and extensibility that worked for a long time.
tluyben2 7y ago
> It's 2020 and one would hope software companies realize the value of a good, clear, effective user interface. SAP is not the only one; ever tried the enterprise software from Oracle? Or the open source ERPs/CRMs? Painful. But everything has API's these days, so lot of departmental work is done on top. Small budgets so they have small, simple LoB apps made on top which are 'idiot proof'. These apps are very localized though; they cannot translate to other verticals, or even other companies, or even other countries because they are tailored exactly to how that department works.
- Proziam 7y ago
  I have to agree. I've had the massive misfortune to have to implement and test (almost?) every open source ERP/CRM system out there from vTiger, Odoo, SuiteCRM, Yeti, NextERP, Dolibarr, ...and more that I can't recall from the top of my head. Each and every one of these systems suck. Sometimes they suck in creative and extraordinary ways. But, one thing you can count on is that there's a real reason that they suck. It turns out that the real world of business is complicated and messy. So, as you say, businesses build their own solution on top of these systems to simplify it for their users while keeping the capabilities of the underlying system intact. Of course, nobody is ever happy with the end result - it's always just the least terrible option. On a slightly related topic since this may be seen by folks who can benefit from this information. A lot of "Open Source" systems these days are not what you could honestly call open source. Odoo is the example I'll use, but what I'm about to say applies to a lot more than just Odoo. Most of the organizations behind these solutions are predatory. I've seen features get taken out, hidden, intentionally broken, or have fixes released that are only available in the 'pay us' versions. [0-1]Odoo's accounting functions are one such example. [0]https://www.odoo.com/forum/help-1/question/is-accounting-feature-removed-from-odoo-12-141355 https://www.odoo.com/forum/help-1/question/is-accounting-fea... [1]https://github.com/odoo/odoo/issues/27386 https://github.com/odoo/odoo/issues/27386
  - bargle0 7y ago
    Which of the open source ERP systems is the least bad?
aswanson 7y ago
Sounds like a startup opportunity.
- kumarvvr 7y ago
  Absolutely. I am thinking that a reasonably efficient system can be built with that 100 million put in a bank and pay the interest (4%, 4 million), to about 10 - 15 developers and use standard practices and open source systems for a custom erp system. But I guess the reason products like SAP survive is because in a corporate environment, people have the "No one was fired for buying IBM" mentality. If an SAP implementation is thrust upon the organization, then there will not be anyone particular to blame. Just the 3rd party devs perhaps.
- danjac 7y ago
  I suspect the startup graveyard has many tombstones throughout the decades engraved with the words "We tried to disrupt SAP".
bane 7y ago
One way to think about it is this: if having good UI in internal enterprise tools was a competitive advantage, companies would move to having good UI.
- kumarvvr 7y ago
  It is a competitive advantage. A good, consistent UI would make people at-least not hate their job when it comes to handling SAP systems. See, using an SAP system requires a lot of unnecessary cognitive load, so much to remember, so much to digest. So un-intuitive. I am sure people would be more productive with a UI that is not complete crap.
  - zerkten 7y ago
    Neither of these things are directly connected to the SAP relationship with your company. The people feeling the pain from the bad user experience are multiple steps removed, and generally powerless to do anything. When they complain, they get presented with an improve UI versus implement thing that auditors need argument. Normal people are going to pick the latter.
- ta999999171 7y ago
  It's a competitive advantage in ONE category. If your business model is being a gatekeeper who requires expensive training and long adoption periods just for users to do basic shit, and then never switch because they think ALL software is that complicated to learn, then.... What I'm trying to say is, the intricacy is intentional. They thrive on their consultant/contractor money. No one will make a trillion dollars disrupting them. But they will be disrupted.
crispyambulance 7y ago
> It's 2020 and one would hope software companies realize the value of a good, clear, effective user interface. Nope. Forget about it! :-) I think another problem with these horrific ERP's is that their tentacles are everywhere in the org. Oracle EBS, my personal "favorite", runs PLM (product lifecycle management), inventory, order management, work orders, customer install base, finance, purchasing, AND PTO entry, F.M.L. ! We can't have nice things in, say, PLM because the whole damn system is tied up tight as "modules" in Oracle EBS. Any kind of change or request involves, at a minimum, harassing a overworked guy in India who is constantly dealing with battle-axe personalities in finance and order management. Things that SHOULD be taken for granted, like being able to create a hyperlink to the bill of materials for any part number-- that's seriously impossible, it's like a freaking moon shot for them (or so they say).
- kumarvvr 7y ago
  > Things that SHOULD be taken for granted, like being able to create a hyperlink to the bill of materials for any part number-- that's seriously impossible, it's like a freaking moon shot for them (or so they say). One of pain points I was talking about. I'm not sure how a screen/module is developed in SAP, but there are huge inconsistencies in various interactions I come across. I am inclined to believe that the third party developer of the screen ought to do some wiring to, say enable hyperlinks, or do logical linked screens but somehow the QA is so bad that it's frustrating. For example, in our company, when I search for a Material code, there is no way / menu / system to automatically list all Purchase Orders, that contain that Material Code, sorted by date / department. I am guessing that the 3rd party developer ought to have built that functionality, but then what would be the point? After so many years in the ERP domain, shouldn't SAP have an automated system to do that?
  - dfox 7y ago
    If you think, that SAP's UI is inconsistent then you haven't seen the above mentioned EBS ;) Input boxes behaving as buttons, tabs either changing behavior of UI components that are clearly drawn as being outside of the tab, or outright behaving as buttons that cause random actions, loads and loads of nested modal dialogs...
golover721 7y ago
One important factor is that folks who use SAP (or other enterprise software) get really good and fast at using it. Any changes to the UI and you have a major revolt on your hands. Not with SAP but having been a part of a project to modernize the UI an enterprise software solution, it usually isn't worth it. Users don't care about how it looks, they just want to get their jobs done as quickly and efficiently as possible. Any changes to what is displayed on what screen or location of buttons etc. causes a major disruption to the way they work.
agentultra 7y ago
This is what we hear from our customers all the time. Our product has been so successful, I think, because people on the floor of the factories like using it. Our developers visit the sites, talk to users, and we take everything into account in the design of our UX. I talk with a lot of our users and their biggest frustration is SAP. It's only available on particular work stations, you have to manually enter your forms from the paper ones (data entry in 2020 is still a job), and the interface is arcane and painful. When it doesn't work nobody knows how to fix it and it can lock down the release of millions of dollars worth of product. You can't get any reporting out of it without IT approval and it can take years and millions of dollars to get anything done with it. Our stuff is mobile-first, easy to use, and we deployed it in months instead of years. We met resistance from our customers' IT departments who were irate that the factories weren't waiting for their SAP solution to roll out (it had been several years by the time we came into the picture). So, there's a big win there in UX alone. We do more than UX but it's still such an important part of software.
- lolftw 7y ago
  Care to share what you product is?
  - unixhero 7y ago
    Yeah. Kind of an integral part of the story.

sdan 7y ago

Make a really bad product + make it mission critical = a product that people are literally glued to using

bliss 7y ago

HR data is necessarily controlled though, there are pretty stingent controls in law around that. I understand the pain of not being able to report on stuff, but there is probably a sound reason. However, the delivery you describe sounds like a broken organisation tbh

rbrtl 7y ago
No, this is the SAP business model. If people think that Apple, Sony, or Microsoft try to lock you in to their 'walled garden' then these people have never seen an SAP installation/integration. It's almost its own industry. There are fleets of consultants charging ~$1000 a day just to install the system. Then, as the OP said, they charge by the hour for customised reports which means that businesses have to choose their report very carefully, and will probably need several more hours consulting when one aspect didn't work quite how they thought. I would be surprised if the commenter here was someone who didn't already have access to the data. They are being frustrated by consultants who want to keep their billable hours up, and extraneously restricting access under guises such as "this person doesn't have enough training to touch the system," because it keeps them in paid work. Source: Friend of mine. Man on the inside.
- tastroder 7y ago
  I'm not sure comparing walled gardens is that benefitial here. Most larger firms will either have consultancies on retainer or in-house personnel that can generate these reports anyway. > They are being frustrated by consultants who want to keep their billable hours up, and extraneously restricting access under guises such as "this person doesn't have enough training to touch the system," because it keeps them in paid work. I'm not sure why there's quite a few people pointing these aspects out in here. As opposed to the person using that data to keep their own billables up? "this person doesn't have enough training to touch the system," seems like a perfectly valid thing to say given what these systems do and is certainly not unique to SAP. The learning curve might be steep, the documentation looks ancient, the ecosystem might seem unapproachable, but at the end of the day this isn't that different to similarly scaled products from players like AWS or MS for example. They might have more approachable lower tiers and are nicer in quite a few technical aspects but other than that? It's often consultants and "certification or gtfo" as well. It's not like the consultant costs come as a surprise to anybody in these industries. Sure, it's their own little sub industry but you could say the same about these other ecosystems as well, that's not special - it is just how a few of these sub sectors are structured.

mayankkaizen 7y ago

It exactly feels like you are telling the story of my previous company. Although they started using SAP because company was going public and it E&Y advised company to implement SAP. Implementation was never successful. Day to day productivity greatly suffered. You had to do things SAP way, regardless of it being right or wrong. There were training sessions every weekend. Even trainers were confused. Everyone was mad. Soon after our company went public, we gave up on SAP and started doing things old ways.

disiplus 7y ago
my friend works ata company that is an sap partner and they are required to use some sap software (i think some helpdesk component) and they use some external software and import stuff into sap later. afaik the reason is partly how bad it is and how the licensing does not make sense.

erikbye 7y ago

When my organization (20k+ employees) started its process to migrate many systems to SAP, this project filled a seven-story building. Cost: 2 billion NOK, so far.

bargle0 7y ago
$220m Wow.
- blaser-waffle 7y ago
  Total cost means nothing. What was forecast? What was the original budget? If the original was billed at 1.3 billion NOK and we're at 2 that's still very high, but it's a different discussion from a 400K NOK estimate. "Take whatever you think you need and double it" comes to mind.
  - erikbye 7y ago
    Of course TCO means something. You have an expected ROI when you go into an ERP. In this specific situation TCO far exceeded possible ROI.
pletnes 7y ago
Which company? 20k+ employees is one of a handful norwegian companies.

hef19898 7y ago

The last paragraph is the core issue, IMHO. SAP, while as software is cumbersome, user hostile and the opposite of intuitive, has some really great standard processes. Stick to them and SAP as an ERP system will run, almost, like a charm . When your company has the scale to benefit from it. And sticks to 90% of the standard processes. Try to implement it without the necessary scale of operations, with sticking to standards and without training at your own peril. That being said, without any production going on I would never even consider SAP. When don't have any use for their MRP-functions, forming the very core of SAP, you are better of with different solutions. And their licensing schemes are just aweful, not to even to talking about pricing yet...

nachteilig 7y ago
What would you say is the right scale for something like SAP? We are only at a few million right bald and around 250 people and are starting to think about it.
- drunkpotato 7y ago
  I would not recommend it at that scale. You’ll grind your sales people down for no good reason, and flush several million dollars down the toilet on a project that will most likely get canceled and several people fired (gotta have fall guys at that level...). The right time to implement an ERP is at the last possible second that you are legally or contractually obligated to, or a make or break $50-100M sales contract is in play. And in the latter case, losing the contract and flushing the SAP project down the toilet are real risks. I’ve lived this project at a company the size you describe and it ended very poorly.
- hef19898 7y ago
  As the other comment stated, I would say you're not there yet, sclae-wise. Hard to tell without further details, so. If you decide to the SAP-route in the future I would advise the following (no complete list by far, so): - Stick to the standard, the smaller you are the less customization you do. ususally I'd say 90% standard, if you're small aim for 100%. makes it faster and easier to implement. And cheaper, because you need less external resources. - Wait. SAP is deprecating SAP APO by 2023 (IIRC, something like that). So implementing before that could be a problem. Either you end with a legacy system and have your first release change right after, or during, implementation. And release changes are unique kind of hell themselves. or you end up with a new system that is yet untested. I wouldn't want either of that. - Try to model your business already now along SAP-processes. First, these processes aren't that bad. especailly for the back office side of things as other pointed out already. Plus, it makes and future SAP implementation a lot easier. Same should be true for other ERP-systems, but I have not that much experience with those. Aside Odoo, which I wouldn't touch with a ten feet pole ever again in my life. - get external consultants. Really, get them. get the good ones. A lot of hours. At least one for every module of SAP you want to implement. And have one of your own devs sitt on the consultants lap during the project. One per consultant. It's expensive, sure. But less expensive than an aborted SAP-project. - Invest hours, days, weeks and months in user training. From day one, ideally as soon as you have a test envioronment. Start with key-users, experienced, smart peolple open for change. And work from ther to every singel user of the system. You need their buy in, without even the best SAP-project will fail. These people are alos the backbone for the future, trea them well and listen to them. In case you want to hear more of my rambling, just shoot me a mail, adress is in my profile.

mathattack 7y ago

On prem software is notoriously hard to keep modern. Every customization makes upgrades that much harder. SAP’s approach is “We know best.” Oracle is even worse. At least with SAP if they say the App does something, they aren’t lying.

holri 7y ago

All big ERP Software is like this. SAP is not unique in this regard, it is just everywhere in this market segment. Studies show that ERP user dissatisfaction grows exponentially with project / company size for all systems / implementation partners.

igetspam 7y ago

As an employer, it felt equally as hostile. Every process was riddled with more process. Approvals were miles deep. Getting appropriate hardware and software that wasn't on The List was nearly impossible. Good times were had by all.

bumby 7y ago
How industry dependent is this? Is this an artifact of the needs of a particular industry (aerospace, automotive) that has a lot of process to cover supplier quality concerns?
- blaser-waffle 7y ago
  I've been in the ISP, MSP, Fed'Gov, and Manufacturing sectors in one way or another, and dealt with SAP in most/all of them. Some were worse than others about this, but it was a universal problem. "CYA is SOP", hence millions of layers of approvals, QA, and change controls. Feddy'Gov was actually the fastest moving, in my experience, but they also didn't have to worry about manufacturing defects or breaking BGP nationwide.

bagacrap 7y ago

The army of SAP trained technicians and extreme sunk-cost based lock-in sounds a lot like Epic.

ta999999171 7y ago
Same biz model.

commandlinefan 7y ago

> intentionally obscure Never attribute to malice what can equally be explained by stupidity.