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> SAP can do can be done at the local level using intuitive software No they cannot. ERP's are beasts of expert domain knowledge hidden in shitty codebases, bu

> SAP can do can be done at the local level using intuitive software No they cannot. ERP's are beasts of expert domain knowledge hidden in shitty codebases, but don't be confused for an even a moment to think you can do it yourself. It's a fools errand, and I'd fire or not hire anyone that tried to intentionally do this rather than just build something basic to hedge time until you have to implement something more serious - be it SAP, Sage, Dynamix, BlueCherry, NetSuite etc. Also good luck passing an accounting audit with your vastly inadequate internal tools. Did you implement GAAP? FIFO for inventory? Tools to provide receipt of goods scanning and reconciliation vs the original invoice? How about split shipments of PO's? Landed costs? Accrual accounts? How about providing your accounting, finance, planning, and merchandising teams with the tools they need to get their jobs done? I'm sure you'll be super happy you spent a year building those internal tools only to discover no one likes them because your team lacked the context and domain expertise to understand all the nuances of how things come together and the business processes the tools and ERP modules supported. The problems that ERP's solve are incredibly esoteric and require incredible expertise across a number of fields to appreciate why things are done the way they are (horrible code/APIs aside).

endymi0n 7y ago
The correct answer here is "it depends". SAP isn't (just) a giant pile of steaming data model mess because of the thousands of people involved building that software, but really because it can model every tax case in every country in the world. Thought you had a great model for your sales tax that covered US and the EU? Well, enter Brazil and think again, with four slightly different taxes, some of which are applied on the net and some on the gross amount. Then again, if your plan does not include entering Brazil, you might actually be better off using smaller or your own software, as configuring SAP to do what you want it to do is often on par with writing your own system from scratch. There's a slight shortcut to that, which is using industry templates, but these only fit established business models like Telcos or Ad Agencies. As our business model in the movie marketing industry was sufficiently different to everything existing, it was clear we would have to bend the limits of any COTS ERP so much that building it ourselves seemed like the saner option. So we've dared to build our own multinational and fully integrated CRM and ERP system specifically for our industry and business model and so far, we really love the results (biggest client just saw our tooling stack and told us we're 10 years ahead of the ad agencies working in the same space). But make no mistake, if you don't know exactly what you're doing (I have a slight background in finance, accounting and two failed SAP integrations), you're probably screwed one way or the other. I would recommend almost anyone to not build this kind of system from scratch.
- tomnipotent 7y ago
  > configuring SAP to do what you want it to do is often on par with writing your own system from scratch. Hyperbole. A lot of working with an ERP is developing middleware or custom modules that implement business-specific logic on top of an existing API and schema. It's like saying building a Facebook App is equivalent to rebuilding the entire Facebook Platform. > So we've dared to build our own multinational and fully integrated CRM and ERP I hear this all the time, and it's almost always wrong. Engineers and businesses are always convinced they're special and don't fit the mold. That's rarely the case, and the money used on these initiatives was probably better spent elsewhere. Usually when someone thinks they have some sort of special edge case or unique business, it's more often than not they don't understand GAAP/IFRS/IAS etc and how their finances can be modeled. At the end of the day it's about capital investment. Either you believe you can do it better and you're willing to back it with money, or you realize it's not core to your business and buy something off the shelf because it delivers the best bang for the buck and more importantly lets you focus on other projects that are actually aligned with your business model. > if you don't know exactly what you're doing There's the caveat. You either find someone that's worked with ERP's for at least 20+ years, or you build your own over a decade and gain it 1st hand.
  - zamalek 7y ago
    > A lot of working with an ERP is developing middleware or custom modules that implement business-specific logic Indeed. It does, however, seem that these are developed on a system that isn't designed to intuitively express the degree of logic required - or even trivial logic. There are poor souls slogging through whichever level of hell uses SAP for customer relations, purely because that's the way it's done. That attitude worked out poorly for taxis, who's shitty UX was replaced by Uber. I predict that millennials, who increasingly refuse to interact with anything below "app quality," won't bother with this horseshit. There will be fewer and fewer willing to subject themselves to that awful software, as developers, and everyone will build their own faulty but usable ERP systems. ERP will be a unicorn in the next decade. The industry is ridden with complacent dinosaurs.
    - 7y ago
appleiigs 7y ago
What if you were given a budget of $100 million to $500 million - just for 1 company? What about $1 billion like Dow Chemical and the US Navy?
- SergeAx 7y ago
  My thought is that you will spend first year hiring talents.
jsmith99 7y ago
As a financial auditor, if a client uses SAP or some other standard ERP we can just ask for a general ledger report and get to work. If they are using something bespoke I would probably put my head in my hands and send an urgent email to our dreaded IT systems audit team, at major expense to the client.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- qubex 7y ago
  Yeah... when my family business installed SAP the auditors were delighted. But... here’s the thing: standardised ledgers that make a company easy to audit have no positive correlation with corporate effectiveness and competitive advantage. It’s great that your work is simplified, but frankly, it’s totally irrelevant. I’d rather my auditors had to hail their dreaded IT departments than having the whole firm rendered essentially paralysed by Satan’s Accounting Package.
  - tomnipotent 7y ago
    > It’s great that your work is simplified, but frankly, it’s totally irrelevant It's the other way around. It's totally irrelevant to re-invent the wheel and do something in a non-standard way. > I’d rather my auditors had to hail their dreaded IT departments That's not how auditing works. The point of GAAP is that things are done a certain way, and if you do things differently you need to provide that it isn't bullshit. Otherwise Enron & WorldCom all over again.
    - qubex 7y ago
      > That’s not how auditing works. The point of GAAP... Hate to break it to you, but there’s other countries and other regimens out there.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
gt_grc 7y ago
"Beasts of expert domain knowledge hidden in shitty codebases" is a great way to describe most of the enterprise software I've spent my career configuring and administering. And it highlights what most users of enterprise software don't fully grasp: You don't buy it because it's user-friendly or because it's the most modern technology; you buy it for the battle-tested built-in domain knowledge.
- tomnipotent 7y ago
  > you buy it for the battle-tested built-in domain knowledge. This was my hardest lesson to learn. Code is only as good as the domain knowledge going into it. I love games because the domain is more often than not in the realm of fellow programmers and erudites like mathematicians and 3D animators that capture their domain knowledge in physics, sound effects, motion capture, fluid dynamics, FSM AI, or combining geometric and linear algebra to improve gimbal lock. An ERP on the other hand captures the domain of accounting, finance, procurement, manufacturing (bills of material), order management, taxes, product lifecycle management, and other considerably less sexy but equally important subjects.
  - buonzz 7y ago
    captured a bunch of "domain knowledge" of which only 20-30% is relevant to your business. let me guess, they did not captured/predicted the domain knowledge required to run the following business huh: - search engine (google) - marketplace for arranging or offering lodging ( airbnb ) - ride sharing ( uber ) - social networks (twitter/facebook) if all businesses does everything the same way (because some german company thinks it is), all end-products will look all the same. The same way if all chefs is following the same recipe. IMHO the tools/choices to send invoice, manage orders, product lifecycle can also be a differentiator for your business.
    - tomnipotent 7y ago
      > The same way if all chefs is following the same recipe. It's more like chefs using the same kitchen appliances, pots, pans and equipment as everyone else. And they do. You use a Salamander Broiler because it does the job.
Sherl 7y ago
Tesla doesn't have SAP and it's home grown. SAP is ymmv thing. Not all businesses fit in their framework.
- QuinnyPig 7y ago
  With respect, Tesla isn’t exactly the poster child of “well run companies with excellent corporate governance.”
  - jirir 7y ago
    Splendid joke:-) Tesla makes hell of a great cars. “excellent corporate governance” could be rather irrelevant.
    - lawtalkinghuman 7y ago
      They might make even more of them—and do so more effectively—if they didn't have to spend as much time arguing with the government, investors, or lawyers about who or what Elon Musk defamed/tweeted/accidentally said on a podcast/whatever.
tripzilch 7y ago
Your tone sounds a bit insulted, what's the matter? Is it because they called SAP hideous? I don't know what many of the terms mean you name, and I severely doubt that every business (or most) does. Doesn't mean they're not important, but most definitely just firing off a bunch of random terms fully expecting people not to understand most of them, is a weak way to prove a point. I have seen however on the consumer side what happens when businesses "changes the business" to fit a particular piece of business planning software that is "Hideous. hideous". You're working with nice people, well-meaning people, doing their best for you the customer. And it everything well for a while and you place your trust in them. But then walls appear. And appointments get rescheduled. And they want to help you but they can't. Some people leave, a particular kind of person stays. Communication between peers grinds to a halt. If something goes wrong, they can't pick it up so it falls on you the customer to deal with or reschedule (or other inconvenience), every time. You want to get angry at the people, but you also see they are so very much doing their best, but something is holding them back. A particular kind of person is particularly good at merely keeping their head above water and not suffer the burnout many of their ex-colleagues did. I'm not saying that it can't work well. I bet it's great when it works well. But when it doesn't it's a silent killer.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

endymi0n 7y ago

The correct answer here is "it depends". SAP isn't (just) a giant pile of steaming data model mess because of the thousands of people involved building that software, but really because it can model every tax case in every country in the world. Thought you had a great model for your sales tax that covered US and the EU? Well, enter Brazil and think again, with four slightly different taxes, some of which are applied on the net and some on the gross amount. Then again, if your plan does not include entering Brazil, you might actually be better off using smaller or your own software, as configuring SAP to do what you want it to do is often on par with writing your own system from scratch. There's a slight shortcut to that, which is using industry templates, but these only fit established business models like Telcos or Ad Agencies. As our business model in the movie marketing industry was sufficiently different to everything existing, it was clear we would have to bend the limits of any COTS ERP so much that building it ourselves seemed like the saner option. So we've dared to build our own multinational and fully integrated CRM and ERP system specifically for our industry and business model and so far, we really love the results (biggest client just saw our tooling stack and told us we're 10 years ahead of the ad agencies working in the same space). But make no mistake, if you don't know exactly what you're doing (I have a slight background in finance, accounting and two failed SAP integrations), you're probably screwed one way or the other. I would recommend almost anyone to not build this kind of system from scratch.

tomnipotent 7y ago
> configuring SAP to do what you want it to do is often on par with writing your own system from scratch. Hyperbole. A lot of working with an ERP is developing middleware or custom modules that implement business-specific logic on top of an existing API and schema. It's like saying building a Facebook App is equivalent to rebuilding the entire Facebook Platform. > So we've dared to build our own multinational and fully integrated CRM and ERP I hear this all the time, and it's almost always wrong. Engineers and businesses are always convinced they're special and don't fit the mold. That's rarely the case, and the money used on these initiatives was probably better spent elsewhere. Usually when someone thinks they have some sort of special edge case or unique business, it's more often than not they don't understand GAAP/IFRS/IAS etc and how their finances can be modeled. At the end of the day it's about capital investment. Either you believe you can do it better and you're willing to back it with money, or you realize it's not core to your business and buy something off the shelf because it delivers the best bang for the buck and more importantly lets you focus on other projects that are actually aligned with your business model. > if you don't know exactly what you're doing There's the caveat. You either find someone that's worked with ERP's for at least 20+ years, or you build your own over a decade and gain it 1st hand.
- zamalek 7y ago
  > A lot of working with an ERP is developing middleware or custom modules that implement business-specific logic Indeed. It does, however, seem that these are developed on a system that isn't designed to intuitively express the degree of logic required - or even trivial logic. There are poor souls slogging through whichever level of hell uses SAP for customer relations, purely because that's the way it's done. That attitude worked out poorly for taxis, who's shitty UX was replaced by Uber. I predict that millennials, who increasingly refuse to interact with anything below "app quality," won't bother with this horseshit. There will be fewer and fewer willing to subject themselves to that awful software, as developers, and everyone will build their own faulty but usable ERP systems. ERP will be a unicorn in the next decade. The industry is ridden with complacent dinosaurs.
  - 7y ago

appleiigs 7y ago

What if you were given a budget of $100 million to $500 million - just for 1 company? What about $1 billion like Dow Chemical and the US Navy?

SergeAx 7y ago
My thought is that you will spend first year hiring talents.

jsmith99 7y ago

As a financial auditor, if a client uses SAP or some other standard ERP we can just ask for a general ledger report and get to work. If they are using something bespoke I would probably put my head in my hands and send an urgent email to our dreaded IT systems audit team, at major expense to the client.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
qubex 7y ago
Yeah... when my family business installed SAP the auditors were delighted. But... here’s the thing: standardised ledgers that make a company easy to audit have no positive correlation with corporate effectiveness and competitive advantage. It’s great that your work is simplified, but frankly, it’s totally irrelevant. I’d rather my auditors had to hail their dreaded IT departments than having the whole firm rendered essentially paralysed by Satan’s Accounting Package.
- tomnipotent 7y ago
  > It’s great that your work is simplified, but frankly, it’s totally irrelevant It's the other way around. It's totally irrelevant to re-invent the wheel and do something in a non-standard way. > I’d rather my auditors had to hail their dreaded IT departments That's not how auditing works. The point of GAAP is that things are done a certain way, and if you do things differently you need to provide that it isn't bullshit. Otherwise Enron & WorldCom all over again.
  - qubex 7y ago
    > That’s not how auditing works. The point of GAAP... Hate to break it to you, but there’s other countries and other regimens out there.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]

gt_grc 7y ago

"Beasts of expert domain knowledge hidden in shitty codebases" is a great way to describe most of the enterprise software I've spent my career configuring and administering. And it highlights what most users of enterprise software don't fully grasp: You don't buy it because it's user-friendly or because it's the most modern technology; you buy it for the battle-tested built-in domain knowledge.

tomnipotent 7y ago
> you buy it for the battle-tested built-in domain knowledge. This was my hardest lesson to learn. Code is only as good as the domain knowledge going into it. I love games because the domain is more often than not in the realm of fellow programmers and erudites like mathematicians and 3D animators that capture their domain knowledge in physics, sound effects, motion capture, fluid dynamics, FSM AI, or combining geometric and linear algebra to improve gimbal lock. An ERP on the other hand captures the domain of accounting, finance, procurement, manufacturing (bills of material), order management, taxes, product lifecycle management, and other considerably less sexy but equally important subjects.
- buonzz 7y ago
  captured a bunch of "domain knowledge" of which only 20-30% is relevant to your business. let me guess, they did not captured/predicted the domain knowledge required to run the following business huh: - search engine (google) - marketplace for arranging or offering lodging ( airbnb ) - ride sharing ( uber ) - social networks (twitter/facebook) if all businesses does everything the same way (because some german company thinks it is), all end-products will look all the same. The same way if all chefs is following the same recipe. IMHO the tools/choices to send invoice, manage orders, product lifecycle can also be a differentiator for your business.
  - tomnipotent 7y ago
    > The same way if all chefs is following the same recipe. It's more like chefs using the same kitchen appliances, pots, pans and equipment as everyone else. And they do. You use a Salamander Broiler because it does the job.

Sherl 7y ago

Tesla doesn't have SAP and it's home grown. SAP is ymmv thing. Not all businesses fit in their framework.

QuinnyPig 7y ago
With respect, Tesla isn’t exactly the poster child of “well run companies with excellent corporate governance.”
- jirir 7y ago
  Splendid joke:-) Tesla makes hell of a great cars. “excellent corporate governance” could be rather irrelevant.
  - lawtalkinghuman 7y ago
    They might make even more of them—and do so more effectively—if they didn't have to spend as much time arguing with the government, investors, or lawyers about who or what Elon Musk defamed/tweeted/accidentally said on a podcast/whatever.

tripzilch 7y ago

Your tone sounds a bit insulted, what's the matter? Is it because they called SAP hideous? I don't know what many of the terms mean you name, and I severely doubt that every business (or most) does. Doesn't mean they're not important, but most definitely just firing off a bunch of random terms fully expecting people not to understand most of them, is a weak way to prove a point. I have seen however on the consumer side what happens when businesses "changes the business" to fit a particular piece of business planning software that is "Hideous. hideous". You're working with nice people, well-meaning people, doing their best for you the customer. And it everything well for a while and you place your trust in them. But then walls appear. And appointments get rescheduled. And they want to help you but they can't. Some people leave, a particular kind of person stays. Communication between peers grinds to a halt. If something goes wrong, they can't pick it up so it falls on you the customer to deal with or reschedule (or other inconvenience), every time. You want to get angry at the people, but you also see they are so very much doing their best, but something is holding them back. A particular kind of person is particularly good at merely keeping their head above water and not suffer the burnout many of their ex-colleagues did. I'm not saying that it can't work well. I bet it's great when it works well. But when it doesn't it's a silent killer.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]