9 ms·

Whenever I hear german companies mention digitalisation, I get reminded that they still use pen and pencil in production environments to log data, pass those sh

• FrustratedMonky 8mo ago
  That might actually describe a pretty good implementation of an interface to SAP. I think pencil is more efficient than SAP.
  • hypeatei 8mo ago
    I agree and it's quite resilient to digital outages/downtime (at least in terms of hours, probably not more than a few days) so your manufacturing productivity won't drop to zero when the ERP system goes down. The paper logs can also be entered later when the system comes back up. As we've seen in the Iran conflict, datacenters are a target and result in extended outages.
    • jimnotgym 8mo ago
      I remember a few years ago hearing that SAP stood for Stop All Production
      • RGamma 8mo ago
        Sanduhr-Anzeige-Programm (hourglass display program)
  • fHr 8mo ago
    true absolute dogshit software
    • nom 8mo ago
      that's a feature
• monero-xmr 8mo ago
  [dead]
• kingjimmy 8mo ago
  They make connecting SAP so difficult... this is the only way
  • paffdragon 8mo ago
    It's not how it works. You suppose to contract a consulting company that contracts some offshore company to connect you to SAP.
    • jimbokun 8mo ago
      I wonder if it’s cheaper to just have an AI write the parts of SAP you actually need.
      • xarope 8mo ago
        if the AI is a certified SAP consultant, sure. But then it would probably cost you $20K/month in subscription.
    • GuestFAUniverse 8mo ago
      And the customer being cheap doesn't pay for the proper modules and thus everything gets mapped to PSP elements -- to keep the same old garbage piles that get pushed around.
    • isbvhodnvemrwvn 8mo ago
      But you can't just hire one, you have to hire functional consultants (who tell you your flow is wrong and you have to adjust that to how SAP does things) and then implementation consultants who don't know how the process works, but can actually implement that integration. And then again after the next release because the integration broke.
• dgxyz 8mo ago
  I've seen worse. For 2 years I received the results weekly, that I didn't ask for, of a $1m a year burn reporting stack. This was launched during a massive back patting ceremony like something out of Severance. So one day I stared at it randomly and noticed that the pie chart percentages on one thing didn't even add up to 100. Looked back at history and it turned out this had been the case since day one. Spent a day taking it to bits and a good 50% of it made no sense at all and people had been making business decisions on it without checking it. And to remediate it? They replaced it with some AI generated slop which is even worse.
  • fires10 8mo ago
    I have seen this way to often in other areas. That is the push here as well AI can sort through it. Too many people are held to account for not meeting what amounts to made up numbers.
  • nradov 8mo ago
    It's always funny when HN users comment that there are no more opportunities for startups and it's too hard to compete against large, wealthy corporations. The reality is that most of them are so badly managed that competing against them is easy if you're actually competent.
    • tristor 8mo ago
      > The reality is that most of them are so badly managed that competing against them is easy if you're actually competent. The world is a graveyard littered with startups that thought this way. One of the consequences of wealth concentration and monopolies is that it is insufficient to be better than your competitors because your customers are also incompetent. To find product-market fit you not only have to be better, you have to be noticed by someone that cares that you're better and upon reflection confirms you solve a valuable problem. By way of analogy, it's not enough to realize that MouseCorp makes shitty mousetraps and the local village spends $1M/yr on them. You can make a better mousetrap thinking its worth $1M/yr, or do the deeper look and realize the local village doesn't have a mouse problem but rather has a problem with too many feral cats, and has no interest in buying better mousetraps and once their attention is gained simply stops buying mousetraps altogether. Both parties lacked competence, but that didn't mean there was a market.
• drnick1 8mo ago
  > I wish I was making this stuff up. Lmao. Yes it's a pretty good summary of what happens in the corporate world, and not only in Germany.
• KnuthIsGod 8mo ago
  SAP is truly terrible.
  • jimnotgym 8mo ago
    Well.... Before you say SAP is terrible, have you tried the competition? It has some data entry screens that are super efficient, cursor always goes to the right place, tab moves you to the right place etc. 15 years and lots of ERPs later I have never seen better When you are viewing a purchase invoice on the ledger you can see the PO it is matched to, click on it and it goes to the PO. Click a line on the PO you can see the GRNs related. Click on them you go to the actual GRNs Oracle ERP can't do any of that.
    • _glass 8mo ago
      SAP is much better than the home-grown stuff Tesla, Space X, or Amazon are using. One needs to compare the "new" public cloud solution, rather than the outdated soon not supported ECC system.
  • tirant 8mo ago
    SAP is just a skeleton and a library. How processes are implemented on it depends on the company consulting and adapting it to the business using it. A merge between Palantir and SAP would dominate the market in a way there wouldn’t be any competitor left.
• wenc 8mo ago
  I used to work for the US side of a German multinational (one of the largest in the world) and discovered the same thing when it came to software. The German side always had slick presentations (they always had good visual marketing) and impressive claims, but whenever I tried to work with their products, I always found the claims overstated and that they hadn't really executed deeply. This despite my German counterparts working hard (I visited HQ in Germany and when they work, they really work and clock the hours, no idle chitchat)... yet it doesn't translate to impact. A lot of their products had impressive front-ends but half-baked back-ends (on the American side, it's the reverse -- our interfaces looked like crap, but our stuff actually worked and often delivered in less time). A lot of their designs were also non-human friendly (if you've ever driven a German car, you'll realize that the car was built for engineers and not for end users -- weird little user-hostile features pop up everywhere). I don't understand why this is -- this is a nation that produced Dieter Rams. Tobi Lutke (CEO Shopify) likes to talk about how Germans grew up surrounded by good design, yet that design culture never permeated many German products. I own a Bosch in-unit washer/dryer and it's frustratingly unintuitive and has a "my (the engineer's) way or the highway" philosophy. I went to a BMW talk once about the infotainment system (it was built on the latest Azure tech), but came away feeling that the work was not deep. It was skin deep. I wonder what has happened to the German builder/tinkerer culture that made German manufacturing great. In the 1980s and 1990s, Germany was synonymous with excellence. But in the 2000s-present, not so much (except maybe in very narrow mittelstand verticals, e.g. Zeiss).
  • vjvjvjvjghv 8mo ago
    I think Germany got infected by the shareholder value and privatization virus but doesn't really understand it.
    • RobRivera 8mo ago
      Whats funny is when its privatized by publicly traded companies it becomes this weird nationalized-kinda but not really thing that turns the economy into a bifercated class of first class citizens and second class citizens.
    • 8mo ago
• estearum 8mo ago
  This describes large companies everywhere I encountered oil wells essentially controlled by post-it notes passed around an office.
  • jimbokun 8mo ago
    Maybe they found the PostIt notes worked better than whatever software they tried.
    • estearum 8mo ago
      Many such cases
  • SoftTalker 8mo ago
    I distinctly remember reading that the entire bill of materials for building a Boeing 747 was managed in Excel. I have not been able to find that claim since then but it was so amazing to me that I remember it. It doesn't really make sense as I think about it now, because the 747 design predates Excel by many years so maybe it was BS.
    • throwaway2037 8mo ago
      Assume that later models of the 747 were managed in Excel. No trolling: What is wrong with that? You can write insanely powerful software using (1) formulas on the sheet (which are essentially functional programming) and (2) imperative logic in VBA (HTTP calls, database calls, file system, etc.). For years, I used this model and wrote pretty powerful software. Sometimes, I miss it for the encapsulated system. These days, in "biz dev" (internal software), it seems like the Excel model was replaced with an Electron front-end (HTML/CSS/JS) with Java back-end.
      • nradov 8mo ago
        There's nothing particularly wrong with it, Excel works great. But almost any complex Excel file is riddled with obscure bugs and the nature of the tool makes it impractical to apply some of the most effective quality control techniques. Like you can't easily do code reviews or write an automated test suite.
• jimnotgym 8mo ago
  Or even more likely gets emailed around daily to a bunch of people, half of which don't work there anymore, most of which don't read it, and one that is looking to haul people over the coals over a KPI that is against the companies best interests, but is powerful enough to command this wasting of time
• kensai 8mo ago
  They are improving, though, given the international pressures. I've seen it at least in the organisation I am working (a university hospital).
• _glass 8mo ago
  I worked with several multinationals, and the Germans always had very complex processes, but cannot at all confirm that they were the least digitised. The Americans were always behind in integrations (lots of file-based stuff), using outdated software, etc. I think the US has this problem that in Germany working for a bigger company is attracting talent, vs. the US where the talent goes to tech, while the rest is really far behind, i.e., Fortune500.
• nicbou 8mo ago
  Germany is desperately wishing for a wonder weapon that will help them catch up and overtake other nations technologically. They constantly talk about smart cities and AI pie-in-the-sky projects while their administration is paper-based, risk-averse and parsimonious. They would not recognise not use such a breakthrough solution if it was handed to them. Berlin's Chief Digitalization Officer's Twitter account was pure black comedy, until he was replaced by someone who - to my knowledge - has been AWOL for years.
• formerly_proven 8mo ago
  I've only seen pen and paper at work in connection with things where real paper signed with actual pens was required by law in such unambiguous terms that nobody felt like taking the risk of PDFs or a boolean database column. So, less than once per year. I've never printed anything for work and I'm not really sure how I would correctly print something. I think there is one printer in my branch office, somewhere? I haven't seen any production process in automotive involve hand-written paper and I doubt it exists. Automotive supply chains have always been under massive cost pressure and therefore were always at the forefront of the most deeply digitized and automated supply chains.
• Xylakant 8mo ago
  > I get reminded that they still use pen and pencil in production environments to log data, That's the fundamental reason they're using humanoid robots - industrial robots have a hard time holding pencils.
• mr_toad 8mo ago
  > someone downloads an xls file and uploads it to Tableau Sometimes this is because of red tape and not because of software. I’ve run into many situations where you can log into the system and download a spreadsheet from the web interface, but the equivalent API hasn’t been configured (or has been deliberately disabled).
• lqet 8mo ago
  > has an integration with SAP There is your problem right there. A family member worked for a large German company which used in-house developed software for exchanging and preparing lab reports for customers. The software worked well since the 90ies, was perfectly tailored to the company, and the people writing it were in the same building and could ship bug fixes within hours. Everyone was happy. Around 2015, someone in management had the idea to move the entire process to a customized off-the-shelf SAP product because of <buzzwords>. The software engineers were in effect degraded to administrators. The new system missed so many edge cases of the lab process that they had to fall back to pen, paper and phone. Customer complaints and employee turnover started to skyrocket immediately afterwards.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 8mo ago
    But did the manager get promoted?
• samiv 8mo ago
  In many cases in Germany "digitalization" means there's a PDF which you can download, print, fill out sign and scan and send copy of.
  • dizhn 8mo ago
    Then wait for the one person in the org that deals with those documents to come back from their 3 week vacation.
  • rixed 8mo ago
    Yes, and email is just a way to exchange phone numbers.
  • lexszero_ 7mo ago
    Seamless integration with fax-based workflows!
• airstrike 8mo ago
  > Someone else downloads it as an xls and manually writes (not copy pastes) the numbers into a power point presentation and makes graphs by drawing shapes. This is then presented at some bi-monthly meeting. I made an app that fixes this part of the problem. The rest is cultural.
• any1 8mo ago
  That reminds me. I worked for a company where we punched in using an iButton (it's a pretty neat 1-wire thing that fits on a key chain). The punch clock system was logged and then at the end of the month, they printed out a single A4 sheet for every employee for us to make corrections and sign. Of course, someone had the unenviable job of going over all those and applying the corrections. We also had to write down hours spent on different projects in a completely different system that wasn't at all integrated with the punch clock system. At some point in the last couple of years that I worked there, they switched to Workday. That was not an improvement.
  • loic-joachim 8mo ago
    Wow, how is that an improvement over something like timeclock.kiwi?