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I worked in public accounting with some major corporations as clients. Every single company I interacted with used SAP. It is the de facto software in its field

by sotix 4y ago

I worked in public accounting with some major corporations as clients. Every single company I interacted with used SAP. It is the de facto software in its field and is deeply entrenched. Its UX is the most horribly wicked thing I’ve ever come across. We would conduct walkthroughs with process control owners that showed us what they would do in SAP to perform their job functions, and it would take multiple, intelligent people to capture all of the processes. The knowledge that the users at the client had built up was extensive and highly specialized. If something happened to that person, I don’t think you could quickly plug in a new person and have them take over. The initial learning curve felt far too high. I’m sure it gave those people a sense of job security. I feel there is a lot of room to develop better tools that are not so horrid, however, the process for replacing SAP will be long and close to impossible. SAP feels like one of those businesses that’s too big to fail because it’s so entrenched in the corporate world. Somewhat jokingly, I think it would be easier to switch the US over to the metric system. Any challenger will have to be massive, accept losses for over a decade to gain market share, and have incredible support for their clients if they ever want to takeover in the Fortune 500 world. Challenges too great for a mere startup to accomplish. It’s easier to just hire people to learn the SAP workflow and then hire external auditors to make sure the accounting policies are properly being followed.

bluGill 4y ago
>I feel there is a lot of room to develop better tools that are not so horrid It seems like it, but I don't think it is possible. Sure you can clean up SAP itself a bit, but most of the problem is custom UIs that companies develop only to the point where they are useful, but then they decide it is cheaper to train people on how to use the clumsy UI they have instead of paying developers to clean it up. They probably are not long, it only takes a few minutes to train most people on the how to find the few things they actually need, and the slow workflow costs them a couple hours per person per year (and most of them are low wage employees), while cleaning up the UI would costs several man-years of programmer effort.
hef19898 4y ago
One of the reasons why ERP systems were ao sucessful is because they replaced the majority of administrative jobs by automating them away. One of the results is that those remaining are either highly knowledgable and skilled, or working in a function that has yet to be automated away or outsourced to a cheaper country in that specific company.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  Exactly. People underestimate how much SAP is doing behind the scenes when properly configured. And beyond that, they overestimate the ergonomics of any enterprise alternative, especially ones that pre-dated SAP. For every "We had a great internal platform that we custom built" story, there are multiple "We used a small vendor's product, and it was a nightmare." Why is SAP successful? Because the general purpose tools (or worse, amalgamations of multiple single-purpose tools) that came before were absolute shit, and SAP is instead only difficult to use. Progress! (Also, a TAM that is literally every company, ever)
  - cholantesh 4y ago
    Are there really no meaningful competitors to SAP in this space?
    - nradov 4y ago
      Oracle has a whole suite of competing products. (This is not an endorsement of either vendor.) https://www.oracle.com/applications/ https://www.oracle.com/applications/
    - jjslocum3 4y ago
      Siebel is a meaningful competitor to SAP
      - spaniard89277 4y ago
        I've used a Siebel frontend and I wanted to cut my veins every time.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
SAP, Excel, and Bloomberg Terminal are applications where there such a long tail of uses that it is hard to see them being replaced in the corporate world anytime soon.
- qorrect 4y ago
  Bloomberg Terminal really ? I've never gotten to use it, what can it do ?
  - cholantesh 4y ago
    Gives you access to a bevy of financial data and news through a TUI.
    - smooc 4y ago
      Did you know it has a Jupyter Notebook interface with python support?
      - cholantesh 4y ago
        Never had a chance to play with it, but yes!
  - political12345 4y ago
    more money is traded through bloomberg termimal than the market capitalisation or SAP... per day
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- mardifoufs 4y ago
  Exactly. And I'd say that the Bloomberg Terminal user experience is pretty good especially compared to other "enterprise"/expensive applications like SAP. So the only reason you'd want to switch is cost, but that's usually not a problem for clients considering how powerful of a tool it is.
tootie 4y ago
This kind of thing is that gave rise to RPA as an industry.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  Embed a GUI toolkit that's general purpose enough, and the product inevitably devolves into a visual API.
- nradov 4y ago
  RPA isn't usually needed with SAP. They have an API and scripting support.
  - tootie 4y ago
    Sure, if you have a dedicated dev team just for SAP automations.
jl6 4y ago
> I feel there is a lot of room to develop better tools that are not so horrid, however, the process for replacing SAP will be long and close to impossible. Alternatives do exist. Well, one does - Oracle ERP. Migration is indeed long and close to impossible, and it’s very much out of the frying pan into the fire.
tenebrisalietum 4y ago
I feel like I see SAP in a US company anytime it has major business units outside of the US. I know Walmart and Honeywell use it, and they both are multinational. I have always wondered: Does SAP do something better for international finance/etc. than others or is it just an accepted standard?
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  > Does SAP do something better for international finance/etc. than others or is it just an accepted standard? Yes, it does it correctly for tax purposes everywhere and can be used in a way which conforms with how these companies want to do their accountings for shareholders reporting. Also it used by so many companies that every niche thing you want to do has probably already been done. The people here complaining about the UX for reporting their hours just have no idea of the mind boggling complexity of the problem space. There is a reason everyone use SAP and it’s not because it’s bad.
KronisLV 4y ago
> I feel there is a lot of room to develop better tools that are not so horrid, however, the process for replacing SAP will be long and close to impossible. Personally, I rather liked the approach that Oodoo takes: https://www.odoo.com/ https://www.odoo.com/ It tries to be pretty modular and even the cloud hosted plans can be mixed and matched, in addition to which the apps can be self-hosted for free: https://www.odoo.com/page/all-apps https://www.odoo.com/page/all-apps Of course, attempting to compare it to something like SAP is a bit like comparing OpenProject with Jira or something along those lines: where one of the solutions is way more popular and recognizable, even if the other could be serviceable in certain scenarios. It's pretty clear which one will be picked by most of the enterprises, though.
- zitterbewegung 4y ago
  Customizing odoo is a nightmare it is similar to "It doesn't do everything you want, but it does everything your business needs". (quote by Larry Ellison about Oracle ERP). Underneath its a mess but at least its open source.
  - Vanderson 4y ago
    We are doing an Odoo implementation right now. (a few months in) What did you find is a mess about Odoo? And why is customizing it a nightmare?
    - silvershell 4y ago
      Hi, Vanderson. I'm doing the same thing here where I work. I would be interested in sharing experiences. You can contact me via my profile if you'd like to chat more about it. I would say from my part it's been a good choice, but so much complexity to deal with.
      - Vanderson 4y ago
        I actually have not touched any of the code yet as we are using a 3rd party developer to help us. (I will likely work on templates and other things down the road) My experience when evaluating Odoo was using Studio, which I have found can really mess up your Odoo instance. Are you working with Odoo code directly?
brightball 4y ago
20 years ago I was a grad assistant for a couple of professors who'd built a pretty incredible JIT supply chain platform. The US Army started using it to manage their uniform orders and it worked so well that two entire warehouses were torn down due to lack of use. A new general came in and insisted on using SAP. 6 months later, they had to rebuild both warehouses. EDIT: For some additional context, the system managed to basically eliminate the "bull whip effect" all the way down the supply chain. It's really a fascinating system. Developed by Dr. Bill Kernodle and Dr. Steve Davis from Clemson Apparel Research.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dpflan 4y ago
  Are there any documents supporting this? I ask because I am curious what official documents exist around this idea of mandated return to inefficiency -- there must've been a gain elsewhere (or is that too optimistic)? Plus there must be costs documented associated with the first and second program. Genuinely curious about this type of decision (call it "inefficiency thrash"?).
  - brightball 4y ago
    Over my career I've seen it communicated as "leadership support" where people implementing different programs know that they are only as effective as the leadership support behind it. I do some Scaled Agile Framework consulting and the implementation a good example, because it can be fantastic but if leadership at the top of the company doesn't get on board the entire process will self destruct or be bastardized. The professors who built the system knew this about every customer they talked to and it was a big learning experience for me. New leaders will come in and often insist on tools that they already know, rather than take the time to learn about better options. If you've ever read Skunk Works (fantastic book), you see lots of this in the military procurement process in the US. It's bad enough that you worry how much it's hurting US national security innovations.
    - 4y ago
agentultra 4y ago
You’re right. I used to work at a company building software that competed directly with SAP products. The IT people in our customers’ organizations were the hardest people to convince to adopt our software. The end users loved our stuff because it allowed anyone at the factory to build forms and share data. But the IT folks would always get in the way. “Nobody got fired for choosing SAP.” Competing with them is super hard because of that.
dangerboysteve 4y ago
The risk alone from a company switching ERP systems, or switching versions of the same ERP, is well documented in the press. Companies have lost tens to hundreds of millions on failed projects. So the pain points to switch to another platform must be so great even to think about going down this road. Like all ERP software, cost to implement is 2x - 3x the cost of the software. https://www.thirdstage-consulting.com/the-biggest-erp-failures-of-all-time/ https://www.thirdstage-consulting.com/the-biggest-erp-failur... Larry Ellison had a famous quote from some Oracle ERP event where he chucked every Oracle ERP consultant under the buss by saying: "It doesn't do everything you want, but it does everything your business needs". He was referring to custom workflows business take on which require massive customizations of ERP platforms, increased consulting costs and a painfully hard upgrade process.
- importantbrian 4y ago
  One of the few things I remember from my IS management class in school was learning about Nike's massive ERP failure. If I remember right between the initial cost, lost sales, and money spent fixing the issue they lost $400 million and their stock price fell 20 or 30%. Switching costs and risk are the major reasons these systems stay around forever. If you've got something that works. Even if it's sub-optimal, you're never going to move away from it. I worked at a place that used an ERP from a company that went out of business, so they would install DOS emulators for a really ancient version of DOS on every computer for people who needed access to the ERP. This was seen as a better solution than the perceived risk of switching ERPs. This was 10+ years ago, but to my knowledge they're still doing this.
  - As_You_Wish 4y ago
    Four years ago I worked at a company in the Fortune 500 that still used DOS for their main system. As you say, the switching cost is way too high and dangerous. They moved billions and billions of dollars daily through a highly complex structures and complex laws in different jurisdictions across the USA. The business logic was built over the 40 years when the world was DOS. It's not like they are dumb and don't know linux or Windows exist and all that. They brought in huge consulting companies all the time to see if they could get it upgraded, but no programming house, no consulting company would touch it. These consulotants turned down hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, because 1) it was just too f-ing complex, and 2) if they messed up, the liability would be immense because of the dollars daily transactions, and what the dollars were used for. It would be an absolute shit-show of the first order if things were to go sideways. I'm positive that these consulting companies E & O (errors and ommissions) insurance company would refuse to insure them. Doing it wrong would be catastrophic on a corporate, but also national level. It would not be a matter of some stick-it notes from 3M not getting to the stores on time, or shoes getting to the shoe stores. So, DOS in 2020.
jcpham2 4y ago
I feel this comment deeply as a child company of a parent that uses SAP and they really really really want us to use their (the same/unified) ERP system but it's really bad. 37 clicks across 7 tabs to place an order. No thanks. We've spent 3 years refining our processes and automating our ERP system, both the data structures we need and the design of the UX. No thank you SAP
marcosdumay 4y ago
This is the kind of inefficiency that used to kill companies before the "everything is a monopoly" era. Nobody will ever replace SAP on the companies that use it, and if they are safe from competition, well, nobody will replace the companies either.
- running101 4y ago
  We replaced sap
antidnan 4y ago
Sometimes this is why I think we'll end up with a refresh of the corporate world with digitally native businesses not running on SAP. I imagine at some point we'll run out of people who know SAP and are even willing to learn it.
- kornhole 4y ago
  Google recently implemented SAP. Microsoft, Apple, and many other big players are deeply entrenched in SAP with almost no chance of switching. There has always been a shortage of good SAP consultants which creates lucrative opportunities for those who want to learn it.
mikesabbagh 4y ago
I left SAP 1 year ago, they just try to add every option to their software and keep maintaining 25 years old applications that are still used by some companies. This is why their software is super bloated and a small and simple task takes so many steps to achieve. Now they are migrating to the cloud, and loosing customers as they push them off their on prem s0lutions Clayton Christensen has some nice youtubes about disruptive innovation where he predicts the death of SAP
- OOIE 4y ago
  It sounds crazy and there are some good points here regarding the difficulty of moving from SAP solutions to alternatives, but there is a lot going on and I agree that they are not as invincible as they pretend to be. Customers are growing increasingly frustrated, the company has dipped its toe into political agendas and they regularly get lit up on Twitter as a result, and Bloomberg has targeted them due to questionable moral practices (most recently, silencing rape victims). SAP is more concerned with protecting their reputation than actually developing quality software. Sooner or later that is going to catch up with them. They are constantly playing damage control. It's only a matter of time before more and more comes out (and there is plenty to come out).
jerf 4y ago
"I feel there is a lot of room to develop better tools that are not so horrid" Probably not. SAP is an everything-to-everyone product. Using Fred Brook's terminology for essential versus accidental, the problem with everything boxes is that even just the essential complexity of such a product is so insanely large that they are sufficient to produce a "horrid" product. Of course they don't have just the essential complexity and add a healthy dose of accidental complexity, but so would any putative "less horrid" replacement by the time it successfully solved the same essential problems as SAP. Closer to home, "bug tracking" is an example of an everything-to-everyone product. I can't even count the number of times I've seen a "simpler, less horrid" bug tracker get started due to the perceived horribleness of the current bug tracker, but the new bug tracker simply became the old one once it tried to grow into the same niche. This may sound strange to 2022 ears, but I remember when JIRA was being pitched as the simpler solution and developers were pretty keen on it. There will never be a mature bug tracker that is any fun to use, because by the time it's everything to everyone it'll just be the same morass of being everything to everyone again. It turns out that the "less horrid" bug tracker wasn't actually intrinsically less horrid... it just wasn't everything to everyone. Instead it was a bug tracker for developers, so developers love it. But then if developers are going to be allowed to use it everywhere, it has to satisfy all the other stakeholders too, and it inevitably mutates into an everything for everyone product. (See also: Salesforce. Letting users configure custom DB schemas is a key indicator of being an everything to everyone product. To some extent, programming languages too; there's a lot of people who pine for something simpler (such as the people who think that if we just went to visual languages, or tried to jam everything into "no code") and don't understand that by the time you have a general purpose language that is truly general purpose you've got a large amount of irreducible essential complexity whether you like it or not.)
- FredPret 4y ago
  Spot on. Also, SAP’s “everything” really does cover everything a big business is likely to encounter, which is a lot of things that all have to be interconnected
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  Yes. Reminds me of the ol' classic, "Things You Should Never Do, Part I" by Joel. However, I do believe a (slightly) better competitor could be created, with better technology, better workflow, etc. If well-capitalized. If it had well-factored plugins. If you had a top-notch team to design all that and then build it. That's a lot of ifs. Joel says it isn't guaranteed a brand new team will even do better than the old on the essential angle. It's risky and costly enough to prevent it from happening.
rbanffy 4y ago
> however, the process for replacing SAP will be long and close to impossible. True. Making something with a less sadistic and convoluted UI is the easy part. Migrating the data is the hard part. Many companies died from updating ERPs.
P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
SAP and it's ilk provide a real service. They protect and take care of a lot of problems, the issue is they're so flexible that sometimes people build ad-hoc things on top of them and over time it becomes a ridiculous monstrosity similar to any other system in a company with major legacy. There is no inherent solution to this problem other than disciple (or control, which has it's own productivity issues). A lot of things developers must build in, and decisions developers make, are built in already for these systems.
derefr 4y ago
Sounds kind of like the old mainframes that airlines use. And I would think the same solution applies: rather than replacing it per se, why not wrap the SAP data model by creating bespoke "gateways" that expose a more business-domain-oriented UX — where each thing people want to do is just one obvious button, but drives all those same complex SAP processes underneath?
wmeredith 4y ago
> It is the de facto software in its field and is deeply entrenched. Its UX is the most horribly wicked thing I’ve ever come across. These go hand in hand
purpleblue 4y ago
There are two major ERP software out there right now: SAP and Peoplesoft. SAP is the "European" way of doing things, which means there's one right way and you need to align your business to SAP's way of doing things. If you do that, things work very well. Peoplesoft is the "American" way of doing it, which means that you make your software fit around you. This means a lot of customizations. This makes integrations much more challenging if you're too far off kilter, and things like upgrading is much much harder, because there's too many customizations. That's the information I had about 10 years old and not sure how much SAP has evolved since then. Smaller companies these days have a lot more options, like Netsuite is already there for small businesses and Workday is moving in that direction. Startups come and go every day. Rippling appears to be one that is headed in this direction as well.
- suggala 4y ago
  PeopleSoft is now replaced by Workday.
  - rjtavares 4y ago
    PeopleSoft became part of Oracle (and now uses the Oracle brand) and some of their people left and founded Workday.
    - nps1 4y ago
      What I meant is most of the Large Organizations are now using Workday which is a SaaS based solution and generally considered modern version of PeopleSoft on the HR solutions side. Many large companies are also moving away from SAP and Oracle on ERP side of things to Workday Financials too but at a slower pace.
- kornhole 4y ago
  You mean SAP and Oracle. Oracle acquired Peoplesoft and Netsuite long ago. Oracle has its Fusion product where it attempts to fuse their acquisitions into one platform. Some call it Confusion. SAP has built most of its product to work seamlessly together, but they have acquired a few such as Ariba and Concur.
MattRix 4y ago
What about some sort of tool that hooks into SA directly? Something that acts as a more user friendly front end and allows people to automate common tasks etc?
- Arwill 4y ago
  Its not called "hooking into", building your own UI's is the expected and proper way of working with SAP now. SAP even provides the tools for building your own HTML based (simplified functionality) GUIs. There will always be power users who will fix data in the backend directly, but working with custom GUIs is the way to work with SAP.
hedora 4y ago
Salesforce carved off a big chunk of SAP's business, and is currently valued at $155B. I'm sure their goal was to eventually replace SAP. Instead, I think they ended up with an 80% solution that requires the customers to invest 20% as much time as a full SAP setup. For instance, Salesforce spends a lot of effort on sales and customer facing things. SAP does that too, but it also does logistics. Logistics infrastructure is much harder to reuse across industries than sales and customer support.
- intuxikated 4y ago
  Salesforce is great, but heavily focussed on Sales / CRM part of the equasion. I'm not sure if salesforce is able to replace other parts of ERP systems like Purchasing, Inventory management, Manufacturing etc... ERP systems are much more vast than Salesforce (which I agree, is great in what it does, but it's not ERP)
ransom1538 4y ago
You can also replace SAP with Salesforce in this parent comment ^
kornhole 4y ago
SAP has developed much better HTML5 UI's, but It is very difficult to change UX on these professional users who are accustomed to and actually have come to like the old stuff which has been around since the 90's.
hosh 4y ago
The blog post is written by Retool, and it is something that we (early stage startup) is adopting for internal operations. I was hoping to see Retool talk about what they see their market opportunity is, and what they think Retool is doing different, but the post only sketches out a few things on how things have changed. I don't know about SAP, but one of the main reasons we're adopting Retool internally is because our engineering team keeps deprioritizing writing internal operational tools in favor of adding features for out customers, yet our operations are becoming increasingly more complex. Something like Retool lets our end users (our own staff) be able to work with it. In a lot of ways, Retool is more like an MS Access, only it is a cloud native SAAS and from the get go, work with integrating existing databases. Writing about SAS, I think it's clear Retool has been thinking about how to grow with the organization, possibly where organizations can stay with Retool instead of trying to implement SAP. I'm also curious about how they are going to work with the increasing shift from "data lakes" to "data mesh".
miragecraft 4y ago
> I feel there is a lot of room to develop better tools that are not so horrid Most organizations have horribly convoluted organizational structures and processes, and SAP has been shaped by those customers over the years to cater to those clusterfucks. A clean, sensible ERP system can only work if the organization it serves is also sensibly organized. It is much easier (and less risky) for a company to choose an ERP system that caters to them, warts and all, rather than overhaul the way it conducts business. As the old saying goes, SAP and its customers deserves each other.
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  "As the old saying goes, SAP and its customers deserves each other." Now what does this say, about LIDL, a discounter who dumped 500 m with SAP? https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252446965/Lidl-dumps-500m-SAP-project https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252446965/Lidl-dumps-500... Basically, if your buisness process match that of SAP, everything is fine, if not, good riddance. Or in the words of a former SAP manager about Lidl: “They don’t have the right level of business engagement” Meaning they did not adapt to SAP enough.
khendron 4y ago
> I feel there is a lot of room to develop better tools that are not so horrid Isn't that where Salesforce came from? At least in the CRM space. It is not as horrid, though that is not saying much :P
cosmodisk 4y ago
I think what's often being overlooked is the complexity of the business ( or underlying processes) that SAP supports. There's this strong,yet often unsupported argument that something complex can somehow be made super simple. I work with Salesforce, which on its own approaching the complexities SAP supports, only in different areas. So we have a system,which supports a nonlinear process with tons of inputs, multiple supply chains, etc. The system is designed to support it. It takes users a few weeks to be at least somewhat comfortable with it. Can it be simplified? A little bit, but the underlying business complexities won't change because of it.
- politician 4y ago
  While the business problems are complex, there are precious few affordances given to the humans operating SAP user interfaces and even fewer capabilities provided to integrators. Indeed, while it may void your warranty, it's often simpler to query the underlying database directly -- and many vendors do -- than to use the trash interfaces provided by the software. SAP will fall from a thousand cuts of the facade pattern.
  - donnythecroc 4y ago
    To find a project on our SAP system you had to know a code. If you did a search for the name of the project you had to put a * at the start and end of the search otherwise it would show no results. What is this the 1980s? Now that's one simple process imagine that on every single step. SAP is worst software I've ever used.
at-fates-hands 4y ago
>> Its UX is the most horribly wicked thing I’ve ever come across. A few years ago, I was working for a small, family owned industrial company. They were in the process of moving all of their ERP stuff over to SAP. Things were slow with some of the UI/UX stuff I was working on and someone asked me if I wanted to learn how to be an ERP developer. Before I was shown anything, the SAP guy pulled me to the side and told me, "Fates, I know you could probably write a DB program significantly faster than what you're about to learn, but this is just the way the software was written." Cue several of their SAP people dropping random stuff in my lap and me taking days and sometimes weeks to discern how to do it in their UI. It was the most maddening thing I've ever tried to learn. I just remember this graph paper like grid and having to line everything up perfectly or the program wouldn't run at all. I felt like I was working with something from the 1970's, it felt that out of date. I finally told my boss I couldn't do it anymore, it was driving me mad. On the flip side, I play hockey with a guy who is an SAP sales person and makes hella money selling their software and thinks its the greatest thing ever.
ren_engineer 4y ago
>SAP feels like one of those businesses that’s too big to fail because it’s so entrenched in the corporate world more likely situation would be the companies stuck on SAP themselves dying and SAP eventually dying as a result of that. Obviously that's on a long term timescale, but smaller companies not burdened by legacy technologies winning is pretty much the story of modern business
waylandsmithers 4y ago
> Challenges too great for a mere startup to accomplish. It's probably also too boring for any tech entrepreneur to even try, but disrupting the space would seem to be the white whale of startups. You never know. At one point in time nobody had a computer on their desk either.
akudha 4y ago
I worked for a much smaller SAP competitor, long time ago. Our software was horrible too, but it was good in certain departments in certain markets. So it had decent market share and revenue. Fresh out of college, with a full two week (!!!) training on the product, I was sent to a customer place, to build some forms for them. Apparently they were not important or big enough for senior people, so I had the privilege (!!!) of building forms using our software for this client. I spent two days building the perfect form, then suddenly all the layout was lost. I couldn’t recover the layout, I call my team. They casually say our layout engine can be finicky sometimes and will refuse to work if you annoy it too much. No one told me though. Thankfully I found another job soon. Many of these so called enterprise products are terrible. But they’re so entrenched that it is next to impossible to beat them. They’re also expensive and their business practices dubious.
belfalas 4y ago
> Somewhat jokingly, I think it would be easier to switch the US over to the metric system. Sorry friend, that is not a joke - at least this was attempted once! :)
m-p-3 4y ago
It's basically the new JDEdwards with a coat of shitty GUI on top.
to11mtm 4y ago
> It’s easier to just hire people to learn the SAP workflow and then hire external auditors to make sure the accounting policies are properly being followed. I have a family member who has had enough professional success with SAP; when I mention projects there is a specific response he has that relates to this. tl;dr- If you change your processes to follow the SAP happy path where they don't you are OK. The more you go out of bounds the more problems you have (be they problems of kafkaesque workflows, or paying the bills to customize it while the scope of customization keeps changing.) I don't know how true that is, but it's there.
mathattack 4y ago
I’ve heard a few CIOs say “The surest way to get fired is a security breech or replacing your ERP.” For many companies it would be easier to do an asset sale of all their IP than to replace the ERP. Since most ERP implementations are horrendously overdue and over budget, they are usually declared Done before they’re actually finished. That leaves a lot of crud and manual processes in their wake. In addition, so many of these systems are on prem using hardware, operating systems and databases that haven’t been supported in decades. I’m getting nightmares just thinking about it!
ksec 4y ago
>It is the de facto software in its field and is deeply entrenched And yet somehow last time we had this discussion on HN, more of than half of the developers have never heard of SAP.
plankers 4y ago
sounds like the devs over at SAP need to unionize if they want to stop pushing user-unfriendly software

by sotix 4y ago

bluGill 4y ago

>I feel there is a lot of room to develop better tools that are not so horrid It seems like it, but I don't think it is possible. Sure you can clean up SAP itself a bit, but most of the problem is custom UIs that companies develop only to the point where they are useful, but then they decide it is cheaper to train people on how to use the clumsy UI they have instead of paying developers to clean it up. They probably are not long, it only takes a few minutes to train most people on the how to find the few things they actually need, and the slow workflow costs them a couple hours per person per year (and most of them are low wage employees), while cleaning up the UI would costs several man-years of programmer effort.

hef19898 4y ago

One of the reasons why ERP systems were ao sucessful is because they replaced the majority of administrative jobs by automating them away. One of the results is that those remaining are either highly knowledgable and skilled, or working in a function that has yet to be automated away or outsourced to a cheaper country in that specific company.

ethbr0 4y ago
Exactly. People underestimate how much SAP is doing behind the scenes when properly configured. And beyond that, they overestimate the ergonomics of any enterprise alternative, especially ones that pre-dated SAP. For every "We had a great internal platform that we custom built" story, there are multiple "We used a small vendor's product, and it was a nightmare." Why is SAP successful? Because the general purpose tools (or worse, amalgamations of multiple single-purpose tools) that came before were absolute shit, and SAP is instead only difficult to use. Progress! (Also, a TAM that is literally every company, ever)
- cholantesh 4y ago
  Are there really no meaningful competitors to SAP in this space?
  - nradov 4y ago
    Oracle has a whole suite of competing products. (This is not an endorsement of either vendor.) https://www.oracle.com/applications/ https://www.oracle.com/applications/
  - jjslocum3 4y ago
    Siebel is a meaningful competitor to SAP
    - spaniard89277 4y ago
      I've used a Siebel frontend and I wanted to cut my veins every time.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

SAP, Excel, and Bloomberg Terminal are applications where there such a long tail of uses that it is hard to see them being replaced in the corporate world anytime soon.

qorrect 4y ago
Bloomberg Terminal really ? I've never gotten to use it, what can it do ?
- cholantesh 4y ago
  Gives you access to a bevy of financial data and news through a TUI.
  - smooc 4y ago
    Did you know it has a Jupyter Notebook interface with python support?
    - cholantesh 4y ago
      Never had a chance to play with it, but yes!
- political12345 4y ago
  more money is traded through bloomberg termimal than the market capitalisation or SAP... per day
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
mardifoufs 4y ago
Exactly. And I'd say that the Bloomberg Terminal user experience is pretty good especially compared to other "enterprise"/expensive applications like SAP. So the only reason you'd want to switch is cost, but that's usually not a problem for clients considering how powerful of a tool it is.

tootie 4y ago

This kind of thing is that gave rise to RPA as an industry.

ethbr0 4y ago
Embed a GUI toolkit that's general purpose enough, and the product inevitably devolves into a visual API.
nradov 4y ago
RPA isn't usually needed with SAP. They have an API and scripting support.
- tootie 4y ago
  Sure, if you have a dedicated dev team just for SAP automations.

jl6 4y ago

> I feel there is a lot of room to develop better tools that are not so horrid, however, the process for replacing SAP will be long and close to impossible. Alternatives do exist. Well, one does - Oracle ERP. Migration is indeed long and close to impossible, and it’s very much out of the frying pan into the fire.

tenebrisalietum 4y ago

I feel like I see SAP in a US company anytime it has major business units outside of the US. I know Walmart and Honeywell use it, and they both are multinational. I have always wondered: Does SAP do something better for international finance/etc. than others or is it just an accepted standard?

WastingMyTime89 4y ago
> Does SAP do something better for international finance/etc. than others or is it just an accepted standard? Yes, it does it correctly for tax purposes everywhere and can be used in a way which conforms with how these companies want to do their accountings for shareholders reporting. Also it used by so many companies that every niche thing you want to do has probably already been done. The people here complaining about the UX for reporting their hours just have no idea of the mind boggling complexity of the problem space. There is a reason everyone use SAP and it’s not because it’s bad.

KronisLV 4y ago

> I feel there is a lot of room to develop better tools that are not so horrid, however, the process for replacing SAP will be long and close to impossible. Personally, I rather liked the approach that Oodoo takes: https://www.odoo.com/ https://www.odoo.com/ It tries to be pretty modular and even the cloud hosted plans can be mixed and matched, in addition to which the apps can be self-hosted for free: https://www.odoo.com/page/all-apps https://www.odoo.com/page/all-apps Of course, attempting to compare it to something like SAP is a bit like comparing OpenProject with Jira or something along those lines: where one of the solutions is way more popular and recognizable, even if the other could be serviceable in certain scenarios. It's pretty clear which one will be picked by most of the enterprises, though.

zitterbewegung 4y ago
Customizing odoo is a nightmare it is similar to "It doesn't do everything you want, but it does everything your business needs". (quote by Larry Ellison about Oracle ERP). Underneath its a mess but at least its open source.
- Vanderson 4y ago
  We are doing an Odoo implementation right now. (a few months in) What did you find is a mess about Odoo? And why is customizing it a nightmare?
  - silvershell 4y ago
    Hi, Vanderson. I'm doing the same thing here where I work. I would be interested in sharing experiences. You can contact me via my profile if you'd like to chat more about it. I would say from my part it's been a good choice, but so much complexity to deal with.
    - Vanderson 4y ago
      I actually have not touched any of the code yet as we are using a 3rd party developer to help us. (I will likely work on templates and other things down the road) My experience when evaluating Odoo was using Studio, which I have found can really mess up your Odoo instance. Are you working with Odoo code directly?

brightball 4y ago

20 years ago I was a grad assistant for a couple of professors who'd built a pretty incredible JIT supply chain platform. The US Army started using it to manage their uniform orders and it worked so well that two entire warehouses were torn down due to lack of use. A new general came in and insisted on using SAP. 6 months later, they had to rebuild both warehouses. EDIT: For some additional context, the system managed to basically eliminate the "bull whip effect" all the way down the supply chain. It's really a fascinating system. Developed by Dr. Bill Kernodle and Dr. Steve Davis from Clemson Apparel Research.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dpflan 4y ago
Are there any documents supporting this? I ask because I am curious what official documents exist around this idea of mandated return to inefficiency -- there must've been a gain elsewhere (or is that too optimistic)? Plus there must be costs documented associated with the first and second program. Genuinely curious about this type of decision (call it "inefficiency thrash"?).
- brightball 4y ago
  Over my career I've seen it communicated as "leadership support" where people implementing different programs know that they are only as effective as the leadership support behind it. I do some Scaled Agile Framework consulting and the implementation a good example, because it can be fantastic but if leadership at the top of the company doesn't get on board the entire process will self destruct or be bastardized. The professors who built the system knew this about every customer they talked to and it was a big learning experience for me. New leaders will come in and often insist on tools that they already know, rather than take the time to learn about better options. If you've ever read Skunk Works (fantastic book), you see lots of this in the military procurement process in the US. It's bad enough that you worry how much it's hurting US national security innovations.
  - 4y ago

agentultra 4y ago

You’re right. I used to work at a company building software that competed directly with SAP products. The IT people in our customers’ organizations were the hardest people to convince to adopt our software. The end users loved our stuff because it allowed anyone at the factory to build forms and share data. But the IT folks would always get in the way. “Nobody got fired for choosing SAP.” Competing with them is super hard because of that.

dangerboysteve 4y ago

The risk alone from a company switching ERP systems, or switching versions of the same ERP, is well documented in the press. Companies have lost tens to hundreds of millions on failed projects. So the pain points to switch to another platform must be so great even to think about going down this road. Like all ERP software, cost to implement is 2x - 3x the cost of the software. https://www.thirdstage-consulting.com/the-biggest-erp-failures-of-all-time/ https://www.thirdstage-consulting.com/the-biggest-erp-failur... Larry Ellison had a famous quote from some Oracle ERP event where he chucked every Oracle ERP consultant under the buss by saying: "It doesn't do everything you want, but it does everything your business needs". He was referring to custom workflows business take on which require massive customizations of ERP platforms, increased consulting costs and a painfully hard upgrade process.

importantbrian 4y ago
One of the few things I remember from my IS management class in school was learning about Nike's massive ERP failure. If I remember right between the initial cost, lost sales, and money spent fixing the issue they lost $400 million and their stock price fell 20 or 30%. Switching costs and risk are the major reasons these systems stay around forever. If you've got something that works. Even if it's sub-optimal, you're never going to move away from it. I worked at a place that used an ERP from a company that went out of business, so they would install DOS emulators for a really ancient version of DOS on every computer for people who needed access to the ERP. This was seen as a better solution than the perceived risk of switching ERPs. This was 10+ years ago, but to my knowledge they're still doing this.
- As_You_Wish 4y ago
  Four years ago I worked at a company in the Fortune 500 that still used DOS for their main system. As you say, the switching cost is way too high and dangerous. They moved billions and billions of dollars daily through a highly complex structures and complex laws in different jurisdictions across the USA. The business logic was built over the 40 years when the world was DOS. It's not like they are dumb and don't know linux or Windows exist and all that. They brought in huge consulting companies all the time to see if they could get it upgraded, but no programming house, no consulting company would touch it. These consulotants turned down hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, because 1) it was just too f-ing complex, and 2) if they messed up, the liability would be immense because of the dollars daily transactions, and what the dollars were used for. It would be an absolute shit-show of the first order if things were to go sideways. I'm positive that these consulting companies E & O (errors and ommissions) insurance company would refuse to insure them. Doing it wrong would be catastrophic on a corporate, but also national level. It would not be a matter of some stick-it notes from 3M not getting to the stores on time, or shoes getting to the shoe stores. So, DOS in 2020.

jcpham2 4y ago

I feel this comment deeply as a child company of a parent that uses SAP and they really really really want us to use their (the same/unified) ERP system but it's really bad. 37 clicks across 7 tabs to place an order. No thanks. We've spent 3 years refining our processes and automating our ERP system, both the data structures we need and the design of the UX. No thank you SAP

marcosdumay 4y ago

This is the kind of inefficiency that used to kill companies before the "everything is a monopoly" era. Nobody will ever replace SAP on the companies that use it, and if they are safe from competition, well, nobody will replace the companies either.

running101 4y ago
We replaced sap

antidnan 4y ago

Sometimes this is why I think we'll end up with a refresh of the corporate world with digitally native businesses not running on SAP. I imagine at some point we'll run out of people who know SAP and are even willing to learn it.

kornhole 4y ago
Google recently implemented SAP. Microsoft, Apple, and many other big players are deeply entrenched in SAP with almost no chance of switching. There has always been a shortage of good SAP consultants which creates lucrative opportunities for those who want to learn it.

mikesabbagh 4y ago

I left SAP 1 year ago, they just try to add every option to their software and keep maintaining 25 years old applications that are still used by some companies. This is why their software is super bloated and a small and simple task takes so many steps to achieve. Now they are migrating to the cloud, and loosing customers as they push them off their on prem s0lutions Clayton Christensen has some nice youtubes about disruptive innovation where he predicts the death of SAP

OOIE 4y ago
It sounds crazy and there are some good points here regarding the difficulty of moving from SAP solutions to alternatives, but there is a lot going on and I agree that they are not as invincible as they pretend to be. Customers are growing increasingly frustrated, the company has dipped its toe into political agendas and they regularly get lit up on Twitter as a result, and Bloomberg has targeted them due to questionable moral practices (most recently, silencing rape victims). SAP is more concerned with protecting their reputation than actually developing quality software. Sooner or later that is going to catch up with them. They are constantly playing damage control. It's only a matter of time before more and more comes out (and there is plenty to come out).

jerf 4y ago

"I feel there is a lot of room to develop better tools that are not so horrid" Probably not. SAP is an everything-to-everyone product. Using Fred Brook's terminology for essential versus accidental, the problem with everything boxes is that even just the essential complexity of such a product is so insanely large that they are sufficient to produce a "horrid" product. Of course they don't have just the essential complexity and add a healthy dose of accidental complexity, but so would any putative "less horrid" replacement by the time it successfully solved the same essential problems as SAP. Closer to home, "bug tracking" is an example of an everything-to-everyone product. I can't even count the number of times I've seen a "simpler, less horrid" bug tracker get started due to the perceived horribleness of the current bug tracker, but the new bug tracker simply became the old one once it tried to grow into the same niche. This may sound strange to 2022 ears, but I remember when JIRA was being pitched as the simpler solution and developers were pretty keen on it. There will never be a mature bug tracker that is any fun to use, because by the time it's everything to everyone it'll just be the same morass of being everything to everyone again. It turns out that the "less horrid" bug tracker wasn't actually intrinsically less horrid... it just wasn't everything to everyone. Instead it was a bug tracker for developers, so developers love it. But then if developers are going to be allowed to use it everywhere, it has to satisfy all the other stakeholders too, and it inevitably mutates into an everything for everyone product. (See also: Salesforce. Letting users configure custom DB schemas is a key indicator of being an everything to everyone product. To some extent, programming languages too; there's a lot of people who pine for something simpler (such as the people who think that if we just went to visual languages, or tried to jam everything into "no code") and don't understand that by the time you have a general purpose language that is truly general purpose you've got a large amount of irreducible essential complexity whether you like it or not.)

FredPret 4y ago
Spot on. Also, SAP’s “everything” really does cover everything a big business is likely to encounter, which is a lot of things that all have to be interconnected
mixmastamyk 4y ago
Yes. Reminds me of the ol' classic, "Things You Should Never Do, Part I" by Joel. However, I do believe a (slightly) better competitor could be created, with better technology, better workflow, etc. If well-capitalized. If it had well-factored plugins. If you had a top-notch team to design all that and then build it. That's a lot of ifs. Joel says it isn't guaranteed a brand new team will even do better than the old on the essential angle. It's risky and costly enough to prevent it from happening.

rbanffy 4y ago

> however, the process for replacing SAP will be long and close to impossible. True. Making something with a less sadistic and convoluted UI is the easy part. Migrating the data is the hard part. Many companies died from updating ERPs.

P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago

SAP and it's ilk provide a real service. They protect and take care of a lot of problems, the issue is they're so flexible that sometimes people build ad-hoc things on top of them and over time it becomes a ridiculous monstrosity similar to any other system in a company with major legacy. There is no inherent solution to this problem other than disciple (or control, which has it's own productivity issues). A lot of things developers must build in, and decisions developers make, are built in already for these systems.

derefr 4y ago

Sounds kind of like the old mainframes that airlines use. And I would think the same solution applies: rather than replacing it per se, why not wrap the SAP data model by creating bespoke "gateways" that expose a more business-domain-oriented UX — where each thing people want to do is just one obvious button, but drives all those same complex SAP processes underneath?

wmeredith 4y ago

> It is the de facto software in its field and is deeply entrenched. Its UX is the most horribly wicked thing I’ve ever come across. These go hand in hand

purpleblue 4y ago

There are two major ERP software out there right now: SAP and Peoplesoft. SAP is the "European" way of doing things, which means there's one right way and you need to align your business to SAP's way of doing things. If you do that, things work very well. Peoplesoft is the "American" way of doing it, which means that you make your software fit around you. This means a lot of customizations. This makes integrations much more challenging if you're too far off kilter, and things like upgrading is much much harder, because there's too many customizations. That's the information I had about 10 years old and not sure how much SAP has evolved since then. Smaller companies these days have a lot more options, like Netsuite is already there for small businesses and Workday is moving in that direction. Startups come and go every day. Rippling appears to be one that is headed in this direction as well.

suggala 4y ago
PeopleSoft is now replaced by Workday.
- rjtavares 4y ago
  PeopleSoft became part of Oracle (and now uses the Oracle brand) and some of their people left and founded Workday.
  - nps1 4y ago
    What I meant is most of the Large Organizations are now using Workday which is a SaaS based solution and generally considered modern version of PeopleSoft on the HR solutions side. Many large companies are also moving away from SAP and Oracle on ERP side of things to Workday Financials too but at a slower pace.
kornhole 4y ago
You mean SAP and Oracle. Oracle acquired Peoplesoft and Netsuite long ago. Oracle has its Fusion product where it attempts to fuse their acquisitions into one platform. Some call it Confusion. SAP has built most of its product to work seamlessly together, but they have acquired a few such as Ariba and Concur.

MattRix 4y ago

What about some sort of tool that hooks into SA directly? Something that acts as a more user friendly front end and allows people to automate common tasks etc?

Arwill 4y ago
Its not called "hooking into", building your own UI's is the expected and proper way of working with SAP now. SAP even provides the tools for building your own HTML based (simplified functionality) GUIs. There will always be power users who will fix data in the backend directly, but working with custom GUIs is the way to work with SAP.

hedora 4y ago

Salesforce carved off a big chunk of SAP's business, and is currently valued at $155B. I'm sure their goal was to eventually replace SAP. Instead, I think they ended up with an 80% solution that requires the customers to invest 20% as much time as a full SAP setup. For instance, Salesforce spends a lot of effort on sales and customer facing things. SAP does that too, but it also does logistics. Logistics infrastructure is much harder to reuse across industries than sales and customer support.

intuxikated 4y ago
Salesforce is great, but heavily focussed on Sales / CRM part of the equasion. I'm not sure if salesforce is able to replace other parts of ERP systems like Purchasing, Inventory management, Manufacturing etc... ERP systems are much more vast than Salesforce (which I agree, is great in what it does, but it's not ERP)

ransom1538 4y ago

You can also replace SAP with Salesforce in this parent comment ^

kornhole 4y ago

SAP has developed much better HTML5 UI's, but It is very difficult to change UX on these professional users who are accustomed to and actually have come to like the old stuff which has been around since the 90's.

hosh 4y ago

The blog post is written by Retool, and it is something that we (early stage startup) is adopting for internal operations. I was hoping to see Retool talk about what they see their market opportunity is, and what they think Retool is doing different, but the post only sketches out a few things on how things have changed. I don't know about SAP, but one of the main reasons we're adopting Retool internally is because our engineering team keeps deprioritizing writing internal operational tools in favor of adding features for out customers, yet our operations are becoming increasingly more complex. Something like Retool lets our end users (our own staff) be able to work with it. In a lot of ways, Retool is more like an MS Access, only it is a cloud native SAAS and from the get go, work with integrating existing databases. Writing about SAS, I think it's clear Retool has been thinking about how to grow with the organization, possibly where organizations can stay with Retool instead of trying to implement SAP. I'm also curious about how they are going to work with the increasing shift from "data lakes" to "data mesh".

miragecraft 4y ago

> I feel there is a lot of room to develop better tools that are not so horrid Most organizations have horribly convoluted organizational structures and processes, and SAP has been shaped by those customers over the years to cater to those clusterfucks. A clean, sensible ERP system can only work if the organization it serves is also sensibly organized. It is much easier (and less risky) for a company to choose an ERP system that caters to them, warts and all, rather than overhaul the way it conducts business. As the old saying goes, SAP and its customers deserves each other.

hutzlibu 4y ago
"As the old saying goes, SAP and its customers deserves each other." Now what does this say, about LIDL, a discounter who dumped 500 m with SAP? https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252446965/Lidl-dumps-500m-SAP-project https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252446965/Lidl-dumps-500... Basically, if your buisness process match that of SAP, everything is fine, if not, good riddance. Or in the words of a former SAP manager about Lidl: “They don’t have the right level of business engagement” Meaning they did not adapt to SAP enough.

khendron 4y ago

> I feel there is a lot of room to develop better tools that are not so horrid Isn't that where Salesforce came from? At least in the CRM space. It is not as horrid, though that is not saying much :P

cosmodisk 4y ago

I think what's often being overlooked is the complexity of the business ( or underlying processes) that SAP supports. There's this strong,yet often unsupported argument that something complex can somehow be made super simple. I work with Salesforce, which on its own approaching the complexities SAP supports, only in different areas. So we have a system,which supports a nonlinear process with tons of inputs, multiple supply chains, etc. The system is designed to support it. It takes users a few weeks to be at least somewhat comfortable with it. Can it be simplified? A little bit, but the underlying business complexities won't change because of it.

politician 4y ago
While the business problems are complex, there are precious few affordances given to the humans operating SAP user interfaces and even fewer capabilities provided to integrators. Indeed, while it may void your warranty, it's often simpler to query the underlying database directly -- and many vendors do -- than to use the trash interfaces provided by the software. SAP will fall from a thousand cuts of the facade pattern.
- donnythecroc 4y ago
  To find a project on our SAP system you had to know a code. If you did a search for the name of the project you had to put a * at the start and end of the search otherwise it would show no results. What is this the 1980s? Now that's one simple process imagine that on every single step. SAP is worst software I've ever used.

at-fates-hands 4y ago

>> Its UX is the most horribly wicked thing I’ve ever come across. A few years ago, I was working for a small, family owned industrial company. They were in the process of moving all of their ERP stuff over to SAP. Things were slow with some of the UI/UX stuff I was working on and someone asked me if I wanted to learn how to be an ERP developer. Before I was shown anything, the SAP guy pulled me to the side and told me, "Fates, I know you could probably write a DB program significantly faster than what you're about to learn, but this is just the way the software was written." Cue several of their SAP people dropping random stuff in my lap and me taking days and sometimes weeks to discern how to do it in their UI. It was the most maddening thing I've ever tried to learn. I just remember this graph paper like grid and having to line everything up perfectly or the program wouldn't run at all. I felt like I was working with something from the 1970's, it felt that out of date. I finally told my boss I couldn't do it anymore, it was driving me mad. On the flip side, I play hockey with a guy who is an SAP sales person and makes hella money selling their software and thinks its the greatest thing ever.

ren_engineer 4y ago

>SAP feels like one of those businesses that’s too big to fail because it’s so entrenched in the corporate world more likely situation would be the companies stuck on SAP themselves dying and SAP eventually dying as a result of that. Obviously that's on a long term timescale, but smaller companies not burdened by legacy technologies winning is pretty much the story of modern business

waylandsmithers 4y ago

> Challenges too great for a mere startup to accomplish. It's probably also too boring for any tech entrepreneur to even try, but disrupting the space would seem to be the white whale of startups. You never know. At one point in time nobody had a computer on their desk either.

akudha 4y ago

I worked for a much smaller SAP competitor, long time ago. Our software was horrible too, but it was good in certain departments in certain markets. So it had decent market share and revenue. Fresh out of college, with a full two week (!!!) training on the product, I was sent to a customer place, to build some forms for them. Apparently they were not important or big enough for senior people, so I had the privilege (!!!) of building forms using our software for this client. I spent two days building the perfect form, then suddenly all the layout was lost. I couldn’t recover the layout, I call my team. They casually say our layout engine can be finicky sometimes and will refuse to work if you annoy it too much. No one told me though. Thankfully I found another job soon. Many of these so called enterprise products are terrible. But they’re so entrenched that it is next to impossible to beat them. They’re also expensive and their business practices dubious.

belfalas 4y ago

> Somewhat jokingly, I think it would be easier to switch the US over to the metric system. Sorry friend, that is not a joke - at least this was attempted once! :)

m-p-3 4y ago

It's basically the new JDEdwards with a coat of shitty GUI on top.

to11mtm 4y ago

> It’s easier to just hire people to learn the SAP workflow and then hire external auditors to make sure the accounting policies are properly being followed. I have a family member who has had enough professional success with SAP; when I mention projects there is a specific response he has that relates to this. tl;dr- If you change your processes to follow the SAP happy path where they don't you are OK. The more you go out of bounds the more problems you have (be they problems of kafkaesque workflows, or paying the bills to customize it while the scope of customization keeps changing.) I don't know how true that is, but it's there.

mathattack 4y ago

I’ve heard a few CIOs say “The surest way to get fired is a security breech or replacing your ERP.” For many companies it would be easier to do an asset sale of all their IP than to replace the ERP. Since most ERP implementations are horrendously overdue and over budget, they are usually declared Done before they’re actually finished. That leaves a lot of crud and manual processes in their wake. In addition, so many of these systems are on prem using hardware, operating systems and databases that haven’t been supported in decades. I’m getting nightmares just thinking about it!

ksec 4y ago

>It is the de facto software in its field and is deeply entrenched And yet somehow last time we had this discussion on HN, more of than half of the developers have never heard of SAP.

plankers 4y ago

sounds like the devs over at SAP need to unionize if they want to stop pushing user-unfriendly software