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That is fascinating to me, because virtually all my friends have heard of SAP outside of IT - as users or recipients. My engineer friend uses it for supply chai

That is fascinating to me, because virtually all my friends have heard of SAP outside of IT - as users or recipients. My engineer friend uses it for supply chain management, a beer store hq clerk helped implement it, construction accountant has used it, etc. At the same time, I guess you have to be at a company of a certain size for it to be relevant to your life... But that perhaps proves the point - HN is very starup focused, and occasionally in a bit of a bubble (which is fine - I come here to get away from my daily mainstream IT grind and see excited people talk about cool things:), yet a hundred reasonably successful startups won't employ or touch near as many people as a single "quietly" successful traditional behemoth.

NikolaNovak 6y ago
And if it helps understand the ecosystem and its seeking oddness, this is the crucial part of article: "Implementing ERP isn’t just a purchasing decision: it’s committing to redoing how you handle operations. Installing the software is the easy part; adjusting the whole company’s workflow is the most of the work." Don't think of erp and implementing it as a software development challenge. Sure, Developers can fscrew up*, an erp implementation but they cannot make it succeed - it is fundamentally a business transformation endeavour and must be undertaken as such to have a chance.
- sq_ 6y ago
  This reminds me of something I read while helping a business major friend with a case study a while back. One of the readings she had as background mentioned that companies like SAP that sell ERP are almost selling the process/workflow more than the actual software. Part of me wonders if these things are more of a "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" thing than anything else. Are people buying the workflow because it's what they really need, or are they buying it because everyone else uses it?
  - shavingspiders 6y ago
    Another view of this - if the true purchase is of a group of workflows, are they purchasing for the things they know they need or the assurance that behemoth IBM/SAP/whatever has a process for whatever they didn't think about? Purchasing to minimise some future operational risk.
    - pc86 6y ago
      This is probably an understated benefit a lot of us in tech don't think about. If you're selling widgets, and selling 100 units a month, there are growing pains on the path to 100 units a day and 100 units a minute that you can't anticipate, and that billion-dollar retailers have already figured out. So I think to the extent that physical B2C sales is pretty constant across industries, you know that if you're big enough to justify the investment in SAP or a similar ERP platform, there exists a process that you'll need 0.5, 1, or 5 years from now that they have and you can't really articulate today.
  - ezconnect 6y ago
    Some industries need your system to be certified for a software system to consume their data/services. You don't have much choice.
  - satvikpendem 6y ago
    Sounds like Agile to me.
  - NikolaNovak 6y ago
    1. You're absolutely right - you're buying software, a set of best practices, workflows, and a proven way to implement and use them. 2. HR, Finance, all the backoffice stuff - that's not your competitive advantage. It's not your core business. You just want to do it as efficiently and quietly as possible. 3. Therefore, in ideal case, a company realizes it is not a special snowflake, buys an ERP, implements it as vanilla as possible, and quietly goes on focusing on what IS their competitive advantage / core business... rather than spending years, millions of dollars, and tremendous risk, by trying to customize ERP to some obscure different process they just "must" have :-/
    - chasd00 6y ago
      that happens a lot with enterprise software, too much customization and you end up painting yourself in a corner or run into roadblock after roadblock of platform gotchas. I do SF implementations these days and have seen it go great and have seen it turn into a total nightmare. however, not once have I ever heard of an SAP implementation going well. It's a massive undertaking and takes total commitment from so many different people and roles in an enterprise. You need genius PMs and BAs along with a genius client team before you even talk about the actual technical people.
      - NikolaNovak 6y ago
        >>not once have I ever heard of an SAP implementation going well. Sometimes it depends who you ask; I found that hands-on people on the ground and SMEs tend to be very negative about it, for personally valid reasons - it's a lot of work, it doesn't go smoothly, and it disrupts and changes what and how they do it. However, there are quite a few ERP implementations where the top-level stakeholders feel the results are worthwhile the disruption and pain, and from that perspective it "went well" - the business objectives were overall met, whether it be capabilities or speed or reporting or integration/centralization or headcount or complexity reduction, all of it ultimately boiling to money at some level...
        tripzilch 6y ago
- bluedino 6y ago
  A good way for your organization to completely botch an ERP implementation is to fight the system every step of the way because your business is 'special'. Many people end up abusing customizations to the point of trying to emulate their old system in the new one, and nobody wins.
  - encloser 6y ago
    I feel like you could replace "ERP implementation" with "business transformation project involving vendor software" and have a new Law. The same with the parent commenter's thoughts, "Sure, developers can screw up [business transformation projects], but they cannot make them succeed."
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    This is why it's important to tackle this from both ends: - From the ERP end: you want it to be as flexible as possible so that it can reflect how the business actually operates and should operate in the future - From the organization's end: you want to identify not only how the business currently operates, but how you would want it to operate in an ideal world
  - H1Supreme 6y ago
    You just brought back some painful memories. At an old company of mine, I helped migrate a legacy system to SAP (of all things!), and they fought it every step of the way. Well, management did. Every other phrase they uttered was "The old system did it this way" or "I used to just press F2". The pushback to learning something new was unreal. Nevermind the fact that multi-step processes were reduced to a simple button click. Or that inventory and customer management were orders of magnitude better. The old system!! The old system did it another way!
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > A good way for your organization to completely botch an ERP implementation is to fight the system every step of the way because your business is 'special'. More generally, a good way to botch a business transformation project is to select technical solutions without a keen grasp of how they fit your business need, and to bullheadedly stick with those solutions as friction is revealed with the business needs. Both distorting the business around vendor software and ending up continuously fighting with the vendor software throughout th effort (both of which are commonly cited “how to fail” routes) are clear (though superficially opposite) symptoms of that same failure occurring upstream in the process.
ivalm 6y ago
> At the same time, I guess you have to be at a company of a certain size for it to be relevant to your life... But that perhaps proves the point - HN is very starup focused That’s pretty dismissive. I work at a company with ~80B in revenue, I never interacted or heard of SAP in work context. In fact it is only incidentally that I’ve heard of them previously. There are hundred of thousands of engineers working in companies with 10-11 digit capitalizations that will never interact or hear about SAP. Edit: to clarify because I am getting a bunch of downvotes. My point is not about SAP’s penetration, it is that lots of engineers (even in companies that use SAP) might not encounter SAP products. The perspective “of you haven’t worked with SAP you are in a small org” is wrong.
- _bxg1 6y ago
  And was that a FAAMNG? Presumably the larger, "new-wave" tech companies roll their own solutions of some kind
  - ivalm 6y ago
    I work for a large healthcare company. My point is not whether we use it (as another poster pointed out we apparently use a product that was acquired by SAP), it’s that lots of people might not know all of the business software that is used for various reasons.
  - realityking 6y ago
    While Microsoft does sell their own SAP competitor they actually use SAP for their main accounting. https://www.erpsoftwareblog.com/2012/11/why-does-microsoft-hq-use-sap-instead-of-microsoft-dynamics-erp/ https://www.erpsoftwareblog.com/2012/11/why-does-microsoft-h...
  - arethuza 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure I've seen job adverts from Google for people with experience of Oracle Hyperion. What would be the point of Google writing their own financial consolidation software?
  - NikolaNovak 6y ago
brundolf 6y ago
To add some context (for your curiosity), I'm not in The Valley and I'd never worked at a true "startup" until very recently, but I have only ever worked at small (<100 people) companies. Except, that is, for the summer I interned at Hewlett-Packard. Not sure how it never came up there; maybe they just have their own equivalent system. I had actually heard the name SAP come up in passing at my last company, who had lots of ginormous clients. But all I'd really gathered before reading the article was "it's some kind of database, or something".
- ohazi 6y ago
  > Except, that is, for the summer I interned at Hewlett-Packard. Not sure how it never came up there; maybe they just have their own equivalent system. When was this? Leo Apotheker became CEO of HP in 2010, after 22 years at SAP (two as CEO). He then presided over a sequence of colossal fuck-ups, lost 40% market cap, and was fired less than a year later. HP definitely knows about SAP, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're not big fans. Correction: 22 years at SAP, not as CEO.
  - tinco 6y ago
    He ran sales arms of SAP for 20 years, not SAP itself. After he became CEO of SAP itself he was fired after 2 years, then he joined HP amd he was fired from that after one year. Pretty rough end to his career there..
    - Aloha 6y ago
      Promoted to the level of his incompetence perhaps.
      - ido 6y ago
        Both hp and SAP are absolutely gargantuan companies (try guessing how many employees each had by the end of his tenure- unless you actually know I'll bet you'll underestimate it). They are also old (for computer related companies at least) and have lots of products for lots of clients. Not to say he wasn't bad at it (I honestly don't know) but it's a hard job to get right.
piokoch 6y ago
"My engineer friend uses it for supply chain management, a beer store hq clerk helped implement it, construction accountant has used it, etc." Is SAP something that can be somehow scaled down? if this is used for a beer store, it has to be really large store, if that's what is written in the cited article is true: "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. And that’s why SAP Configuration Specialist is an actual job title!"
- NikolaNovak 6y ago
  Ah,I guess context would help - "The Beer Store" is Ontario's [Corrected From "Canada"] monopoly province-wide beer retail chain. You are absolutely right, a single retail store would not use such an ERP :)
  - bregma 6y ago
    Er, an Ontario-wide beer retail chain, owned by the province-wide beer wholesale monopoly, in turn owned by a cartel of foreign breweries. Let me guess, you live in Toronto?
    - NikolaNovak 6y ago
      Corrected! Thx :)
    - tripzilch 6y ago
      > an Ontario-wide beer retail chain, owned by the province-wide beer wholesale monopoly, in turn owned by a cartel of foreign breweries. good thing we have SAP to facilitate the development of large scale business, such as monopolies and cartels.
      - perl4ever 6y ago
        I don't think the existence of SAP is particularly relevant to a monopoly that exists because of statute. Although I don't live in such a state, I know there are places in the US where all the liquor stores are government run.
Jestar342 6y ago
I worked for EDS from late 90s to early 00s and SAP was _everywhere_. Projects were scoped and framed as "how can we fit this into SAP?" - and not "how can SAP help this project?" SAP is/was virulent in nature. If you used it for one thing it damn near forced you to use it for everything. A significant chunk of the work EDS were undertaking (as IT outsource) was migrating to SAP. Our timesheets, project plans, data, hell even a huge chunk of our app development was done in SAP. We were paying through the nose for SAP contractors too.
- ebiester 6y ago
  That... explains a bit of the herding cats commercial.
ehnto 6y ago
A lot of HN topics are about tooling for startups. Those tools are sometimes startups themselves, which can can make HN feel like a bit of a bubble I think. Software for software developers can be a huge focus here, but it's just scratching the surface of software for the rest of the world. I was startled when I applied for a job at a company in my city, and they told me their product was entirely API connectors for the local banks. In fact all of the companies I've worked for here have been making software for local industries! From solar installers, energy efficient lighting manufacturers, local commerce and POS systems, mechanics software, creative market places, local lead generation. I think if you want to start a business from scratch and you're not in SV, it's worth targeting those problems instead of problems that SV/startups have. You might not get sexy VC capital, but you might be able to jumpstart with some clients up front.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  You won't need sexy VC capital if you can build a business that runs a good profit. Honestly I'm getting more and more cynical of the SF bubble that doesn't seem to be about making great software, but about getting a lot of investor money and going public - prioritizing short-term profits at the expense of the consumer and employees.
  - hckr_news 6y ago
    Agreed. Running a company with a sustainable business model and healthy profits, not being propped up by VC money would probably do the local economy of one such a city perhaps more good.
  - economicslol 6y ago
    But my Blockchain Deep Learning Dog Walking app is going to change the world!! I went to Stanford so I must be right! /s
    - lowdose 6y ago
      Dog walking is not a viable matchmaking platform business model because successful matches cut out the matchmaker, you didn't get the memo?
jjeaff 6y ago
I have heard of sap in tons of contexts in undergrad business classes, news articles, and things like that. Though I have never come across an implementation in the wild. Though my experience in large enterprise is limited.

NikolaNovak 6y ago

And if it helps understand the ecosystem and its seeking oddness, this is the crucial part of article: "Implementing ERP isn’t just a purchasing decision: it’s committing to redoing how you handle operations. Installing the software is the easy part; adjusting the whole company’s workflow is the most of the work." Don't think of erp and implementing it as a software development challenge. Sure, Developers can fscrew up*, an erp implementation but they cannot make it succeed - it is fundamentally a business transformation endeavour and must be undertaken as such to have a chance.

sq_ 6y ago
This reminds me of something I read while helping a business major friend with a case study a while back. One of the readings she had as background mentioned that companies like SAP that sell ERP are almost selling the process/workflow more than the actual software. Part of me wonders if these things are more of a "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" thing than anything else. Are people buying the workflow because it's what they really need, or are they buying it because everyone else uses it?
- shavingspiders 6y ago
  Another view of this - if the true purchase is of a group of workflows, are they purchasing for the things they know they need or the assurance that behemoth IBM/SAP/whatever has a process for whatever they didn't think about? Purchasing to minimise some future operational risk.
  - pc86 6y ago
    This is probably an understated benefit a lot of us in tech don't think about. If you're selling widgets, and selling 100 units a month, there are growing pains on the path to 100 units a day and 100 units a minute that you can't anticipate, and that billion-dollar retailers have already figured out. So I think to the extent that physical B2C sales is pretty constant across industries, you know that if you're big enough to justify the investment in SAP or a similar ERP platform, there exists a process that you'll need 0.5, 1, or 5 years from now that they have and you can't really articulate today.
- ezconnect 6y ago
  Some industries need your system to be certified for a software system to consume their data/services. You don't have much choice.
- satvikpendem 6y ago
  Sounds like Agile to me.
- NikolaNovak 6y ago
  1. You're absolutely right - you're buying software, a set of best practices, workflows, and a proven way to implement and use them. 2. HR, Finance, all the backoffice stuff - that's not your competitive advantage. It's not your core business. You just want to do it as efficiently and quietly as possible. 3. Therefore, in ideal case, a company realizes it is not a special snowflake, buys an ERP, implements it as vanilla as possible, and quietly goes on focusing on what IS their competitive advantage / core business... rather than spending years, millions of dollars, and tremendous risk, by trying to customize ERP to some obscure different process they just "must" have :-/
  - chasd00 6y ago
    that happens a lot with enterprise software, too much customization and you end up painting yourself in a corner or run into roadblock after roadblock of platform gotchas. I do SF implementations these days and have seen it go great and have seen it turn into a total nightmare. however, not once have I ever heard of an SAP implementation going well. It's a massive undertaking and takes total commitment from so many different people and roles in an enterprise. You need genius PMs and BAs along with a genius client team before you even talk about the actual technical people.
    - NikolaNovak 6y ago
      >>not once have I ever heard of an SAP implementation going well. Sometimes it depends who you ask; I found that hands-on people on the ground and SMEs tend to be very negative about it, for personally valid reasons - it's a lot of work, it doesn't go smoothly, and it disrupts and changes what and how they do it. However, there are quite a few ERP implementations where the top-level stakeholders feel the results are worthwhile the disruption and pain, and from that perspective it "went well" - the business objectives were overall met, whether it be capabilities or speed or reporting or integration/centralization or headcount or complexity reduction, all of it ultimately boiling to money at some level...
      - tripzilch 6y ago
bluedino 6y ago
A good way for your organization to completely botch an ERP implementation is to fight the system every step of the way because your business is 'special'. Many people end up abusing customizations to the point of trying to emulate their old system in the new one, and nobody wins.
- encloser 6y ago
  I feel like you could replace "ERP implementation" with "business transformation project involving vendor software" and have a new Law. The same with the parent commenter's thoughts, "Sure, developers can screw up [business transformation projects], but they cannot make them succeed."
- yellowapple 6y ago
  This is why it's important to tackle this from both ends: - From the ERP end: you want it to be as flexible as possible so that it can reflect how the business actually operates and should operate in the future - From the organization's end: you want to identify not only how the business currently operates, but how you would want it to operate in an ideal world
- H1Supreme 6y ago
  You just brought back some painful memories. At an old company of mine, I helped migrate a legacy system to SAP (of all things!), and they fought it every step of the way. Well, management did. Every other phrase they uttered was "The old system did it this way" or "I used to just press F2". The pushback to learning something new was unreal. Nevermind the fact that multi-step processes were reduced to a simple button click. Or that inventory and customer management were orders of magnitude better. The old system!! The old system did it another way!
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > A good way for your organization to completely botch an ERP implementation is to fight the system every step of the way because your business is 'special'. More generally, a good way to botch a business transformation project is to select technical solutions without a keen grasp of how they fit your business need, and to bullheadedly stick with those solutions as friction is revealed with the business needs. Both distorting the business around vendor software and ending up continuously fighting with the vendor software throughout th effort (both of which are commonly cited “how to fail” routes) are clear (though superficially opposite) symptoms of that same failure occurring upstream in the process.

ivalm 6y ago

> At the same time, I guess you have to be at a company of a certain size for it to be relevant to your life... But that perhaps proves the point - HN is very starup focused That’s pretty dismissive. I work at a company with ~80B in revenue, I never interacted or heard of SAP in work context. In fact it is only incidentally that I’ve heard of them previously. There are hundred of thousands of engineers working in companies with 10-11 digit capitalizations that will never interact or hear about SAP. Edit: to clarify because I am getting a bunch of downvotes. My point is not about SAP’s penetration, it is that lots of engineers (even in companies that use SAP) might not encounter SAP products. The perspective “of you haven’t worked with SAP you are in a small org” is wrong.

_bxg1 6y ago
And was that a FAAMNG? Presumably the larger, "new-wave" tech companies roll their own solutions of some kind
- ivalm 6y ago
  I work for a large healthcare company. My point is not whether we use it (as another poster pointed out we apparently use a product that was acquired by SAP), it’s that lots of people might not know all of the business software that is used for various reasons.
- realityking 6y ago
  While Microsoft does sell their own SAP competitor they actually use SAP for their main accounting. https://www.erpsoftwareblog.com/2012/11/why-does-microsoft-hq-use-sap-instead-of-microsoft-dynamics-erp/ https://www.erpsoftwareblog.com/2012/11/why-does-microsoft-h...
- arethuza 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure I've seen job adverts from Google for people with experience of Oracle Hyperion. What would be the point of Google writing their own financial consolidation software?
- NikolaNovak 6y ago

brundolf 6y ago

To add some context (for your curiosity), I'm not in The Valley and I'd never worked at a true "startup" until very recently, but I have only ever worked at small (<100 people) companies. Except, that is, for the summer I interned at Hewlett-Packard. Not sure how it never came up there; maybe they just have their own equivalent system. I had actually heard the name SAP come up in passing at my last company, who had lots of ginormous clients. But all I'd really gathered before reading the article was "it's some kind of database, or something".

ohazi 6y ago
> Except, that is, for the summer I interned at Hewlett-Packard. Not sure how it never came up there; maybe they just have their own equivalent system. When was this? Leo Apotheker became CEO of HP in 2010, after 22 years at SAP (two as CEO). He then presided over a sequence of colossal fuck-ups, lost 40% market cap, and was fired less than a year later. HP definitely knows about SAP, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're not big fans. Correction: 22 years at SAP, not as CEO.
- tinco 6y ago
  He ran sales arms of SAP for 20 years, not SAP itself. After he became CEO of SAP itself he was fired after 2 years, then he joined HP amd he was fired from that after one year. Pretty rough end to his career there..
  - Aloha 6y ago
    Promoted to the level of his incompetence perhaps.
    - ido 6y ago
      Both hp and SAP are absolutely gargantuan companies (try guessing how many employees each had by the end of his tenure- unless you actually know I'll bet you'll underestimate it). They are also old (for computer related companies at least) and have lots of products for lots of clients. Not to say he wasn't bad at it (I honestly don't know) but it's a hard job to get right.

piokoch 6y ago

"My engineer friend uses it for supply chain management, a beer store hq clerk helped implement it, construction accountant has used it, etc." Is SAP something that can be somehow scaled down? if this is used for a beer store, it has to be really large store, if that's what is written in the cited article is true: "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. And that’s why SAP Configuration Specialist is an actual job title!"

NikolaNovak 6y ago
Ah,I guess context would help - "The Beer Store" is Ontario's [Corrected From "Canada"] monopoly province-wide beer retail chain. You are absolutely right, a single retail store would not use such an ERP :)
- bregma 6y ago
  Er, an Ontario-wide beer retail chain, owned by the province-wide beer wholesale monopoly, in turn owned by a cartel of foreign breweries. Let me guess, you live in Toronto?
  - NikolaNovak 6y ago
    Corrected! Thx :)
  - tripzilch 6y ago
    > an Ontario-wide beer retail chain, owned by the province-wide beer wholesale monopoly, in turn owned by a cartel of foreign breweries. good thing we have SAP to facilitate the development of large scale business, such as monopolies and cartels.
    - perl4ever 6y ago
      I don't think the existence of SAP is particularly relevant to a monopoly that exists because of statute. Although I don't live in such a state, I know there are places in the US where all the liquor stores are government run.

Jestar342 6y ago

I worked for EDS from late 90s to early 00s and SAP was _everywhere_. Projects were scoped and framed as "how can we fit this into SAP?" - and not "how can SAP help this project?" SAP is/was virulent in nature. If you used it for one thing it damn near forced you to use it for everything. A significant chunk of the work EDS were undertaking (as IT outsource) was migrating to SAP. Our timesheets, project plans, data, hell even a huge chunk of our app development was done in SAP. We were paying through the nose for SAP contractors too.

ebiester 6y ago
That... explains a bit of the herding cats commercial.

ehnto 6y ago

A lot of HN topics are about tooling for startups. Those tools are sometimes startups themselves, which can can make HN feel like a bit of a bubble I think. Software for software developers can be a huge focus here, but it's just scratching the surface of software for the rest of the world. I was startled when I applied for a job at a company in my city, and they told me their product was entirely API connectors for the local banks. In fact all of the companies I've worked for here have been making software for local industries! From solar installers, energy efficient lighting manufacturers, local commerce and POS systems, mechanics software, creative market places, local lead generation. I think if you want to start a business from scratch and you're not in SV, it's worth targeting those problems instead of problems that SV/startups have. You might not get sexy VC capital, but you might be able to jumpstart with some clients up front.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
You won't need sexy VC capital if you can build a business that runs a good profit. Honestly I'm getting more and more cynical of the SF bubble that doesn't seem to be about making great software, but about getting a lot of investor money and going public - prioritizing short-term profits at the expense of the consumer and employees.
- hckr_news 6y ago
  Agreed. Running a company with a sustainable business model and healthy profits, not being propped up by VC money would probably do the local economy of one such a city perhaps more good.
- economicslol 6y ago
  But my Blockchain Deep Learning Dog Walking app is going to change the world!! I went to Stanford so I must be right! /s
  - lowdose 6y ago
    Dog walking is not a viable matchmaking platform business model because successful matches cut out the matchmaker, you didn't get the memo?

jjeaff 6y ago

I have heard of sap in tons of contexts in undergrad business classes, news articles, and things like that. Though I have never come across an implementation in the wild. Though my experience in large enterprise is limited.