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Which is very sad, because it is the worst crap ever. Usually it works like this: Specially trained sales people approach executives of a company with stable

Which is very sad, because it is the worst crap ever. Usually it works like this: Specially trained sales people approach executives of a company with stable money flows. They tell all that nonsense about how prestigious SAP is, that all successful businesses runs SAP, that it is kind of a simbol of maturity of the company and that it having SAP installed is good for IPO. Most of execs who have no idea what crap it is just agree. For IT execs it is even better. SAP installs a ready bureaucracy system inside a company. All those meaningless titles, training, certificates, as if you really learn something valuable. Usually IT manager involved in running or supporting SAP have a guaranteed position, they say. Needless to say, that they have a ready "processes" based on paper-pushing inside a newly formed hierarchy. Now about software. It is worse crap ever. It is a mess of Java, inhouse ABAP layers, and thousands of SQL stored procedures with meaningless names. All technical and troubleshutting documentation, which is crap, available only with paid subsribtion, explaining almost nothing. What is available for free PR, success stories and use cases, which is completely meaningless lies. Software itself is a mess. There are hundreds of different version which are incompatible with each other, and only this version people know what to do. All installations usually performed by stupid drones without any background using detailed instructions with screenshots of each step. Usually typical SAP "certified professional" know nothing but a few such instructions. Support is much worse. Nobody know anything, all they do is finger-pointing. All problems usually solved with a new re-install and then import whatever data we have in last backup. Data loses are normal thing. Bugs and gliches are normal. Incompetence is rampant. But SAP bill you for each hour of each consultant involved, and each document passed through system. May be even for each transaction. After all crap is installed and organization are shaken up it is already too late and too costly to revert. This is why SAP is so "successful" - when you "invest" in it you are done for, and you just sign the bills and have your "signs of maturity". This is only quick overview. I can write a brochure what a crap it is.)

tluyben2 14y ago
Indeed big ERP is like you describe; Oracle is no different there. I don't know why their users accept this, but then I don't know how it is to run a billion $ brick & mortar company which is the traditional bread & butter for large ERP companies. And for consultants it's a definitely a great, stable and future proof moneymaker; if you are a freelancer with real-world experience (you worked on SAP in a biggish utility company for instance) then you can get hired whenever you want for insane amounts of money; E150-200 / hour, even in the current climate, is not an exception.
cromulent 14y ago
Everything that you have said is accurate. From a historical perspective though, 20-odd years ago large companies had their own massive in-house "concrete-ware" that ran on hugely expensive locked-in proprietary hardware with proprietary OS and DB, and huge cost and complexity of operation and changes. SAP then offered R/3 which ran on whatever DB/OS/hardware brand you wanted. The other big difference was that it was multi-lingual and multi-currency and quite adaptable - and it had a GUI. It was so desirable - there was basically no competitors. All the bad points you mention were trivial in comparison to the benefits for a multi-national. Now of course things are different. For starters, Mosaic and the web came along. SAP have tried to keep up with the amazing changes in ICT in the last 20 years but of course if you want to do that and remain profitable and look after your massive and diverse user base then things get complex. They haven't left anyone behind - there's been an upgrade path the whole time since the 70's and that's one thing at least that is admirable.
Argorak 14y ago
While all you say is pretty much true, you have to see it in the context of the service that SAP provides. SAP implements the workflow of their costumers (the process is called "tailoring"), not the other way around. As every customer has a different workflow, the maintenance nightmare you describe is always looming, especially as the systems are built to run for decades. SAP knows this, but sadly, there is no good solution for this problem. Full disclosure: I worked for SAP Research, but not on ERP systems.
- skrebbel 14y ago
  That's not a reason for the core tooling and docs to be crap, though. (I don't know whether they are, but this thread gives me the impression that they are)
  - Argorak 14y ago
    Thats true and I don't want to defend this in any way. But its a way to understand why SAP is like it is: the "core" you speak of is already fragmented and by chance, it can even happen that this core knowledge is invalidated by something further down the stack. Documentation of 100 edge cases wouldn't help you much in that regard. As others have stated, the oracle world is not much better in that respect. Its a way to understand why anyone would even buy such "crap". Because thats the crap that solves the customers problem somehow and there is no competing company that would even come close to offering a similar service. I don't mean to imply that no one could ;).
cnvogel 14y ago
{The message I wanted to reply to, the single line quoted below, apparently was deleted while I typed it, so... sorry for the missing context and the long rambling rant. } > SAP implements the workflow of their costumers (the process is called "tailoring"), No. It implements workflows that one of the consultancy layers comes up with after having meetings with the wrong-inhouse people, because in big corporations there's politics involved about who gets to be responsible for the future processes to be implemented, by newly formed departments, with managers and budget and so on. I'd be the first guy to endorse the point that a central accounting, order, inventory-managing, ... system is indispensable for any big shop, but the current way of getting this kind of "mission critical" software into big corporations is just a huge clusterfuck. Office politics more or less guarantee that the system will sabotage the work of the majority of employees, and I cannot even blame SAP for that ;-). I worked in a >10'000 people engineering company (huge industrial plants) for three years which matches roughly the timeframe that SAP was introduced. I've witnessed pretty hillarious in-house advertising campaigns (video clips, posters, giveaways, mascots) to raise acceptance of the new software and meaningless presentations justifying millions of wasted $ (€) offset by future increase of efficiency. There were funny titles given to specially trained ("power user", I'm not kidding you) colleagues and in the end, complete confusion about how to work with what was given and a inhouse support staff no longer able to cope with all the problems after the hive of consultants, trainers and specialists went to assault the next company. We had it all: Three digit months-entry fields, to be able to cope with future expansions (not kidding), thousands of people trained in creating multi-billion-dollar-project structures inside SAP, yet unable to order a €10 part. Billable-hour forms with a complicated permission hierarchy, that nevertheless did not detect people charge other random accounts, sometimes by accident. In the end people developed mitigation strategies, so work can continue with only minor handicaps, inhouse departments get praised for "successful" implementation of the systems, rewards are paid out, but a lot of the promised advantages fail to materialize.
VMG 14y ago
My little short gem from being forced to take a course on ABAP (the SAP "programming language") at Uni: If you have an error in your program, your editor crashes. You have to start a new editor instance by wrangling through a dozen submenus and entering cryptic commands. The guy overseeing the course said "Yeah, just open a few backup instances of the editor beforehand."
- cromulent 14y ago
  What's actually happening there is you are executing the program directly from your editor, in the same work process. So if you get a runtime error, then you get the stack trace (dump) and you have lost your whole context so you are back to the menu. Just run the program in another session.
  - VMG 14y ago
    I'll try to remember that the next time I'm programming ABAP (hopefully never) The point is that even the instructor didn't know how solve the problem and that the default behavior is not exactly developer friendly.

tluyben2 14y ago

Indeed big ERP is like you describe; Oracle is no different there. I don't know why their users accept this, but then I don't know how it is to run a billion $ brick & mortar company which is the traditional bread & butter for large ERP companies. And for consultants it's a definitely a great, stable and future proof moneymaker; if you are a freelancer with real-world experience (you worked on SAP in a biggish utility company for instance) then you can get hired whenever you want for insane amounts of money; E150-200 / hour, even in the current climate, is not an exception.

cromulent 14y ago

Everything that you have said is accurate. From a historical perspective though, 20-odd years ago large companies had their own massive in-house "concrete-ware" that ran on hugely expensive locked-in proprietary hardware with proprietary OS and DB, and huge cost and complexity of operation and changes. SAP then offered R/3 which ran on whatever DB/OS/hardware brand you wanted. The other big difference was that it was multi-lingual and multi-currency and quite adaptable - and it had a GUI. It was so desirable - there was basically no competitors. All the bad points you mention were trivial in comparison to the benefits for a multi-national. Now of course things are different. For starters, Mosaic and the web came along. SAP have tried to keep up with the amazing changes in ICT in the last 20 years but of course if you want to do that and remain profitable and look after your massive and diverse user base then things get complex. They haven't left anyone behind - there's been an upgrade path the whole time since the 70's and that's one thing at least that is admirable.

Argorak 14y ago

While all you say is pretty much true, you have to see it in the context of the service that SAP provides. SAP implements the workflow of their costumers (the process is called "tailoring"), not the other way around. As every customer has a different workflow, the maintenance nightmare you describe is always looming, especially as the systems are built to run for decades. SAP knows this, but sadly, there is no good solution for this problem. Full disclosure: I worked for SAP Research, but not on ERP systems.

skrebbel 14y ago
That's not a reason for the core tooling and docs to be crap, though. (I don't know whether they are, but this thread gives me the impression that they are)
- Argorak 14y ago
  Thats true and I don't want to defend this in any way. But its a way to understand why SAP is like it is: the "core" you speak of is already fragmented and by chance, it can even happen that this core knowledge is invalidated by something further down the stack. Documentation of 100 edge cases wouldn't help you much in that regard. As others have stated, the oracle world is not much better in that respect. Its a way to understand why anyone would even buy such "crap". Because thats the crap that solves the customers problem somehow and there is no competing company that would even come close to offering a similar service. I don't mean to imply that no one could ;).

cnvogel 14y ago

{The message I wanted to reply to, the single line quoted below, apparently was deleted while I typed it, so... sorry for the missing context and the long rambling rant. } > SAP implements the workflow of their costumers (the process is called "tailoring"), No. It implements workflows that one of the consultancy layers comes up with after having meetings with the wrong-inhouse people, because in big corporations there's politics involved about who gets to be responsible for the future processes to be implemented, by newly formed departments, with managers and budget and so on. I'd be the first guy to endorse the point that a central accounting, order, inventory-managing, ... system is indispensable for any big shop, but the current way of getting this kind of "mission critical" software into big corporations is just a huge clusterfuck. Office politics more or less guarantee that the system will sabotage the work of the majority of employees, and I cannot even blame SAP for that ;-). I worked in a >10'000 people engineering company (huge industrial plants) for three years which matches roughly the timeframe that SAP was introduced. I've witnessed pretty hillarious in-house advertising campaigns (video clips, posters, giveaways, mascots) to raise acceptance of the new software and meaningless presentations justifying millions of wasted $ (€) offset by future increase of efficiency. There were funny titles given to specially trained ("power user", I'm not kidding you) colleagues and in the end, complete confusion about how to work with what was given and a inhouse support staff no longer able to cope with all the problems after the hive of consultants, trainers and specialists went to assault the next company. We had it all: Three digit months-entry fields, to be able to cope with future expansions (not kidding), thousands of people trained in creating multi-billion-dollar-project structures inside SAP, yet unable to order a €10 part. Billable-hour forms with a complicated permission hierarchy, that nevertheless did not detect people charge other random accounts, sometimes by accident. In the end people developed mitigation strategies, so work can continue with only minor handicaps, inhouse departments get praised for "successful" implementation of the systems, rewards are paid out, but a lot of the promised advantages fail to materialize.

VMG 14y ago

My little short gem from being forced to take a course on ABAP (the SAP "programming language") at Uni: If you have an error in your program, your editor crashes. You have to start a new editor instance by wrangling through a dozen submenus and entering cryptic commands. The guy overseeing the course said "Yeah, just open a few backup instances of the editor beforehand."

cromulent 14y ago
What's actually happening there is you are executing the program directly from your editor, in the same work process. So if you get a runtime error, then you get the stack trace (dump) and you have lost your whole context so you are back to the menu. Just run the program in another session.
- VMG 14y ago
  I'll try to remember that the next time I'm programming ABAP (hopefully never) The point is that even the instructor didn't know how solve the problem and that the default behavior is not exactly developer friendly.