TE
TechEcho
Home24h TopNewestBestAskShowJobs
GitHubTwitter
Home

TechEcho

A tech news platform built with Next.js, providing global tech news and discussions.

GitHubTwitter

Home

HomeNewestBestAskShowJobs

Resources

HackerNews APIOriginal HackerNewsNext.js

© 2025 TechEcho. All rights reserved.

What's SAP?

1221 pointsby dvdhsuover 5 years ago

94 comments

mr_gibbinsover 5 years ago
I teach enterprise systems at a university, with emphasis on SAP.<p>It&#x27;s hideous. Hideous. My students complain it is unusable (agree), doesn&#x27;t make sense (agree), that they can&#x27;t see the point (agree).<p>When you look at the underlying database &#x27;schema&#x27; (inverted commas deliberate) you&#x27;ll find it&#x27;s a massive, denormalised mess.<p>Much of what SAP can do can be done at the local level using intuitive software. Reports, for example, against a well-designed schema or data warehouse are easy. Power BI, Tableau, whatever your poison. You can even aggregate and present data in raw SQL if you like. Each technique is far easier than trying to achieve the same in SAP.<p>What SAP does do well is multinational, enterprise-wide integration. Are you a company comprised of many mergers and acquisitions? You can do HR one way, universally, across your organisation. Credit control? Replace your spreadsheets and custom apps you have deployed across your many siloed finance departments with the FI&#x2F;CO modules.<p>I (am actually told to) teach that changing the business to fit SAP is preferable to changing SAP to fit the business. And it&#x27;s accurate advice. It shouldn&#x27;t be, but it is. SAP is SAP. It doesn&#x27;t care about your USP. Or your custom approach to business. As far as SAP is concerned all businesses are the same, they do the same things, and all must conform. Resistance is futile.
评论 #22248507 未加载
评论 #22247597 未加载
评论 #22248503 未加载
评论 #22246434 未加载
评论 #22246909 未加载
评论 #22250665 未加载
评论 #22246687 未加载
评论 #22251298 未加载
评论 #22250997 未加载
评论 #22246499 未加载
评论 #22249030 未加载
评论 #22246816 未加载
评论 #22246612 未加载
评论 #22246818 未加载
评论 #22251623 未加载
评论 #22247708 未加载
评论 #22253710 未加载
评论 #22246904 未加载
评论 #22246853 未加载
评论 #22248157 未加载
评论 #22260003 未加载
评论 #22250832 未加载
评论 #22246487 未加载
评论 #22250810 未加载
评论 #22247093 未加载
评论 #22246822 未加载
OldGuyInTheClubover 5 years ago
SAP has enabled&#x2F;mandated an army of people at my company who manage it and ruthlessly control even read access to it. The software is user-hostile, intentionally obscure, and all requests for slightly customized reports have to go through a multilayered approval process - often up to corporate - where it competes for funding against other survivors. Needing something custom invites constant questions of why the standard process is not enough.<p>It was sprung essentially overnight with no training and expectations to show immediate positive results with no criticism tolerated. The rollout was preceded by a couple of years of secretive process reworking where the business was modified to the way SAP said it ought to be done. We expand it to &quot;Stop All Progress&quot; because it marked the formal transition from a technology influenced company to an integrator focusing on acquiring tech from others.
评论 #22245037 未加载
评论 #22245902 未加载
评论 #22245566 未加载
评论 #22245538 未加载
评论 #22245359 未加载
评论 #22245481 未加载
评论 #22245949 未加载
评论 #22246358 未加载
评论 #22245946 未加载
评论 #22248580 未加载
评论 #22251820 未加载
fefe23over 5 years ago
People complaining about how user-unfriendly SAP is or how companies adapt to SAP instead of the other way around are missing the point of SAP.<p>The point of SAP is that the module for your type of business is being implemented at the market leader in your area, because they are the only ones who can afford it. SAP will come to the market leader and put their processes into software.<p>Then everybody else adapts to SAP not because adapting SAP is impossible but because SAP implements the processes that made the market leader successful (at least that&#x27;s the idea).<p>So it is very intentional that you adapt to SAP and not the other way around. You do it to emulate the market leader.<p>And the user friendliness is also on purpose. If you go visit a company using SAP, you will find that you have a certain job in the company and it needs two or three things from SAP. Jobs are very specialized, so SAP is, too. Nobody is supposed to just wing it with SAP. You are supposed to learn how to do your transaction with SAP, and that transaction is then meant to be super efficient.<p>If you actually go visit a somebody from an enterprise environment interact with SAP, you will be astounded how quickly they can do what they are supposed to do. It&#x27;s almost as if the software was optimized for frictionless efficiency.<p>Also note that user friendliness is a subjective and mysterious area. If you go look at an airplane cockpit, where actual research was done into how to optimize user interfaces so that the pilot will not be confused under stress, you will see that there is a separate button for everything. There is no &quot;shift key&quot;, no different modes. If you need to use it, there is a button for it. To someone who has not learned how to use that UI, it appears alien and unfriendly. But the the trained pilot it is the pinnacle of perfection.
评论 #22245294 未加载
评论 #22245423 未加载
评论 #22251487 未加载
评论 #22306418 未加载
评论 #22276517 未加载
评论 #22246192 未加载
评论 #22246447 未加载
npace12over 5 years ago
I was an ABAP developer around 10 years ago, wrote a bunch of Planning &amp; Scheduling apps&#x2F;&quot;screens&quot; running in SAPGUI R&#x2F;3 and APO for a (brand new) manufacturing plant with a new SAP implementation.<p>I learned ABAP in a literally one weekend and was able to make stuff really quickly. For the most part, you could just &quot;loop at &lt;giant_table_name&gt;&quot; extract what you want and show it on a screen using one of their existing ui components. There was not much UI to worry about and you know the user is getting a proper input box (for example) with a working typeahead. Honestly, I thought it was a very decent developer experience. I could focus on what I needed to do and not worry about how pretty the thing looks or if I&#x27;m querying the database optimally. I ended up writing a very complex genetic algorithm implementation to calculate optimal schedules and it was a joy.<p>Yes, the table names were basically in german, and abbreviated, and most things were only 8 chars long for some legacy reasons, but it really wasn&#x27;t that hard to learn that VBAK was sales_orders and VBAP was sales_order_items and move on.<p>For the most part, the users were totally fine with SAP. It was hyper-focused for the tasks they needed. It was consistent and easily documentable. It didn&#x27;t crash, it loaded super fast, it didn&#x27;t eat up gigs of memory. You just load up the gui application and you don&#x27;t even need a mouse once you know the shortcuts.<p>Having spent the last 10 years building web and mobile apps, working with salesforce and others, I miss ABAP very often.
评论 #22248439 未加载
评论 #22250150 未加载
评论 #22247371 未加载
评论 #22249360 未加载
buzzkillingtonover 5 years ago
I wanted to be angry at it. But I couldn&#x27;t. It&#x27;s so bad it&#x27;s reached greatness.<p>A piece of software that plays (at least) one sound on every user action, and the sounds are completely arbitrary and 8bit <i>at best</i>.<p>Where you have to press 5 buttons in a row to do the one thing it&#x27;s meant to do.<p>Where you have an angry fruit salad in a time sheet.<p>A piece of software that takes 30 minutes to enter your worksheet time. And lets you enter a special opex code for using it.<p>I felt the anger and hate of the man who coded it and every Friday I felt I knew that man better than anyone else I have ever known.
评论 #22246472 未加载
评论 #22246235 未加载
评论 #22246961 未加载
theshrike79over 5 years ago
The best advice about SAP I&#x27;ve had is that when a company is starting to use SAP, the company must adjust its processes to match the SAP model - not the other way around.<p>If you do it the other way, you&#x27;ll first spend millions and millions customising SAP and then your project will fail at some point. It will also make all SAP upgrades completely impossible and they will cost millions and millions.<p>All of the successful SAP stories have been about companies who either match the SAP model already or reconfigure themselves to match it.<p>All failures are the opposite.
评论 #22245789 未加载
评论 #22245403 未加载
评论 #22245733 未加载
评论 #22245452 未加载
评论 #22245231 未加载
new_hereover 5 years ago
SAP today are just plainly incompetent and ripe for disruption. I&#x27;ve had quite a bit of interaction with SAP over the last few years, here are some examples:<p>- Almost all meetings I&#x27;ve been in start with prospective clients mentioning to SAP consultants that SAP has a &#x27;certain reputation&#x27;. The SAP consultants acknowledge this.<p>- Some of the solution pitch ideas they come up with signal they have almost zero knowledge of how some technologies actually work.<p>- Services we rely on with SAP frequently fail for no apparent reason.<p>- They are slow and uncooperative with setting up demo environments and responding to support requests.<p>- Their licences and consulting fees are outrageously expensive considering the lack of quality and performance when compared to alternatives.<p>- Tech leads in our own company frequently talk about how bad SAP solutions are.<p>- Their poor UIs are what they are known for in the market. They&#x27;ve tried to address this with things like UI5, Fiori and Fundamentals which feel like too little too late.<p>- Their attempts at acquiring startups (AI, chatbots, analytics etc) to stay on the edge provide hardly any real value besides propping up the credibility of the buzzwords they cram into their presentations.<p>Yet SAP remain entrenched in the market and companies still get into bed with them despite knowing the pain they&#x27;re in for. A lot of system integration companies have tried to attack this market with open source solutions and have failed to make any real dent. The only major player that has started to eat SAPs lunch recently is Salesforce.<p>Perhaps I&#x27;m missing something but surely it would be better for an organisation to have a solution that can be maintained by more than one company so that the company can be replaced if they aren&#x27;t performing?<p>The only example I can think of where this is being addressed is the UK&#x27;s GDS Service Standard which mandates that all government projects should use open source tools to avoid vendor lock-in. It really is perplexing how SAP still maintains its position in today&#x27;s market.
评论 #22245497 未加载
评论 #22245360 未加载
评论 #22247014 未加载
评论 #22245612 未加载
lewisjoeover 5 years ago
SAP always is an interesting case. It gets close to zero love from HN, yet the platform has some interesting engineering.<p>For example, they had their own language that abstracts and operates directly over a database. They had their own drag and drop UI builder, that compiles down to a HTML page or a desktop widget - which is again not an ordinary feat. They view code as data, as in even the UI is stored as a configuration and not as some Java code. They had their own VCS back when Git didn’t exist. Of course, all these weren’t best of their class, but they sure did get there ideas right.<p>All these must have been interesting engineering concepts back during its time, yet there hasn’t been much tech literature on how they accomplished it or what inspired them to. At least not that I know of.<p>Now that open source is on fire, of course a single company cannot catch up with the pace these open source softwares are racing ahead.<p>Companies like Zoho and Salesforce are able to catch up because they do two things right.<p>#1. Cloud<p>#2. Adopting open-source and making a clever mix of proprietary engineering<p>The next SAP or Oracle will certainly be companies that get those two things right.
评论 #22246750 未加载
评论 #22246046 未加载
评论 #22246646 未加载
patjaover 5 years ago
In the 90&#x27;s I was one of the project leaders on the internal SAP R&#x2F;3 deployment at Microsoft. It was one of the most successful IT projects I ever participated in, mostly due to the remarkably strong business leadership the project enjoyed.<p>It was the third time the company tried to implement SAP&#x27;s products. I think I may have been one of the very few people who worked on all three attempts. The winning recipe was having a business owner who threw up his hands at the failed efforts to get a larger scoped company-wide project underway and &quot;selfishly&quot; declared that the finance dept would do it for its own benefits. And he tooks his best people out of their day jobs, put them on the project team, and made them move offices to sit in the same open plan war-rooms as the IT staff (which took some doing...Microsoft was pretty much all unshared private offices at that time) I think we reduced the time it took to &quot;close the books&quot; each month from something like 3 weeks to under one week.<p>And we absolutely changed the business to meet the way the software worked, that&#x27;s one of the key success factors for implementing any ERP software. Your &quot;unique requirements&quot; for fixed assets accounting and accounts payable processes are not what makes your company successful, but they are what will tank your ERP implementation if you let them.<p>It was a fascinating project. I especially enjoyed some of the travel to implement it in the subsidiaries, where the really big business wins were. Most of the subs didn&#x27;t even have a &quot;purchase order&quot; process (they just paid invoices, and had no idea of their outstanding commitments) or any automation around things like employee expense reports. And we got to come up with some decent creative solutions to things like Brazil&#x27;s requirements for hyperinflationary accounting, without breaking the software.<p>Fun fact, Concur&#x27;s expense reporting business was borne out of the Microsoft R&#x2F;3 implementation -- some of the best consultants and developers took what they built for Microsoft&#x27;s internal expense reporting and turned it into Concur&#x27;s expense reporting product.
评论 #22247981 未加载
dvdhsuover 5 years ago
Hi! (I&#x27;m one of the editors of this post.) When I was researching SAP, I found a fact sheet: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sap.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;download&#x2F;2017&#x2F;04&#x2F;4666ecdd-b67c-0010-82c7-eda71af511fa.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sap.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;download&#x2F;2017&#x2F;04&#x2F;4666ecdd-b67c-0010...</a>, that has quite a few interesting facts:<p>* &quot;[SAP] customers distribute 78% of the world’s food and 82% of the world’s medical devices&quot;<p>* &quot;[SAP] customers include 98% of the 100 most valued brands&quot;<p>* &quot;77% of the world’s transaction revenue touches an SAP system&quot;<p>Wow!
评论 #22244969 未加载
评论 #22246070 未加载
评论 #22244994 未加载
评论 #22245261 未加载
评论 #22254781 未加载
try-perforateover 5 years ago
It sounds like HN readers could stand to spend a little time studying microeconomics.<p>I would love to see a Valley solution to the problem of sourcing raw materials including energy, storing raw materials, sourcing packaging, storing packaging, sourcing machine parts, storing machine parts, keeping track of vendors, machine maintenance labor, machine maintenance scheduling, cost accounting for the inputs, manufacturing and machine schedule management, demand forecasting, supply &amp; replenishment planning, WIP inventory management, finished goods inventory management, inventory accounting, sourcing shipping, planning shipping, actually shipping, invoicing, printing invoices, printing all documents (manifest, bills of lading), extending credit, managing credit lines.....<p>oh yeah accepting purchase orders, making to order, promising inventory, managing inventory allocation in tight markets, managing in transit inventory, collecting payment, transferring cash, reporting all of this to the SEC and IRS so you don&#x27;t get sued, remitting taxes, managing headcount, paying employees....<p>I probably forgot a lot of stuff and this is only for domestic sales. Export has so many other problems to solve like tariffs and duties, container management on the dock, steamship management, etc.<p>I&#x27;m not being sarcastic either, I would LOVE to see a solution that has a better UX than SAP that solves all of these problems.
评论 #22249855 未加载
评论 #22247595 未加载
kthejoker2over 5 years ago
A whole sea of comments, balmost all focused on the tech stack, reporting, UX, integration ..<p>SAP&#x27;s selling point is regulatory compliance and financial control. It doesn&#x27;t matter if you have a great UX or lightweight extensible third party API ecosystem, what matters is &quot;When the IRS &#x2F; SEC &#x2F; Congress &#x2F; Interpol comes calling, am I clear?&quot;<p>Government regulation is the ultimate &quot;vendor lock-in&quot; and SAP exploits that fact.
评论 #22247128 未加载
评论 #22251172 未加载
评论 #22254255 未加载
greatartisteover 5 years ago
Years ago I was involved in a project to scrape certain info out of a SAP system with a web interface. It would have been easier to do it with a API but my conversations with the SAP people at work were going nowhere (is it me or do SAP IT people have no concept of how things are done outside the world of SAP ?).<p>Anyway I started looking through the Javascript the browser automatically downloads and found there was 10s of MBs of un optimised code only a tiny percentage of which was being used. It was horrific and it was easy to understand why the system was so mind blowingly slow.
评论 #22245155 未加载
评论 #22245204 未加载
评论 #22245117 未加载
eftpotrmover 5 years ago
I once worked on a project that only existed because the end users had seen the SAP web UI and rebelled, hard. In fairness I don&#x27;t blame them; when we dug down it was easily the worst HTML I&#x27;ve ever seen and some impressively weird behaviour. I can&#x27;t quite imagine which team at SAP thought it was appropriate to release as a tool.<p>So, we spent 6 months or so building a front-end that the users wouldn&#x27;t refuse to touch. HTML5, responsive, attractive, flexible. I mostly worked on the toolkit side of the project to try and keep UIs vaguely standard across the multitude of screens.<p>And alongside us, the two highest paid contractors I&#x27;ve ever worked with (who seemed to be earning their money), were building what amounted to SQL stored procedures that went into a tool that let them be interfaced as REST APIs. The article talks about the amount to which businesses have to mash themselves around how SAP works - from what I saw and heard, that was even after they&#x27;d spent more customising SAP than I would expect to bill to have built very large parts of it from scratch.<p>So yes. I&#x27;m sure that, at a really large corporate scale, SAP has its advantages to organisations. But in a 20 year career it&#x27;s probably my least favourite technology, including the email server which you could misconfigure so receiving an email would bring down the whole machine. I wouldn&#x27;t be remotely surprised to see SAP disrupted into oblivion, and a bit of me would love to be part of the disruption.
olavggover 5 years ago
Tesla decided a few years ago to replace SAP with something they built themself <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mendix.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;tesla-cio-builds-erp-house-4-months-says-time-erp-upgrades&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mendix.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;tesla-cio-builds-erp-house-4-mon...</a><p>I love this story, it really isn&#x27;t that hard to replace SAP once you know the requirements.
评论 #22245759 未加载
评论 #22252305 未加载
评论 #22246720 未加载
mitjamover 5 years ago
SAPs magic is the integration: A company I worked for rolled out SAP for a Production and supply chain distributed across about a dozen countries in Europe and went from 3+ weeks order commitment time (Not lead time) to immediediate including sourcing from external suppliers, logistics Partners and Production facility allocation.
评论 #22246741 未加载
评论 #22245440 未加载
JackPoachover 5 years ago
That&#x27;s actually a very well written article. I never imagined an article about SAP or ERP would be interesting to read.
评论 #22244952 未加载
Tomteover 5 years ago
ERP software is a monster.<p>There have been several high-profile cases of German companies migrating to SAP (from their home-grown zoo of different software for different purposes) that have gone spectacularly wrong. They are way over budget, way over time, and sometimes abandoned completely, like with Lidl: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.consultancy.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;18243&#x2F;lidl-cancels-sap-introduction-having-sunk-500-million-into-it" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.consultancy.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;18243&#x2F;lidl-cancels-sap-intro...</a><p>I have heard (anecdotally, and third-hand) that the only way to successfully introduce SAP (or Oracle, for that matter) is to completely succumb to it and restructure your business along the lines that SAP assumes as default.<p>You try to keep your little company-specific process for buying christmas gifts to employees? Fine, but it&#x27;ll cost you several hours with an SAP consultant. You try to keep your non-standard terms with one supplier? Fine, another bag of money.<p>You do that more than just a very few times? Your migration has failed.
monkeynotesover 5 years ago
SAP implementation basically sunk Target&#x27;s huge investment into operations in Canada<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.canadianbusiness.com&#x2F;the-last-days-of-target-canada&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.canadianbusiness.com&#x2F;the-last-days-of-target-can...</a><p>Seems to me SAP is ripe for disruption, but it would be a very challenging throne to unseat.
评论 #22246770 未加载
评论 #22246786 未加载
评论 #22248561 未加载
评论 #22250462 未加载
评论 #22248228 未加载
评论 #22248595 未加载
评论 #22249632 未加载
lucasverraover 5 years ago
Can please a decision maker regarding SAP buying&#x2F;implementing tell us how on earth SAP is that mainstream (in corporate) ?<p>I&#x27;ve had to use it at EU big corp, and it to this day the worst experience I had.<p>I&#x27;ve seen at techcrunch Berlin 2019 that there is something called SAP.io, somewhat opening its plateform ?
评论 #22245412 未加载
评论 #22245604 未加载
评论 #22245393 未加载
评论 #22246469 未加载
评论 #22246376 未加载
ksahinover 5 years ago
&quot;A basic installation of SAP has 20,000 database tables, 3,000 of which are configuration tables. In those tables, there are ~8,000 configuration decisions you need before even getting started.&quot;<p>Wow, really?
评论 #22245133 未加载
widforssover 5 years ago
I worked one summer (2014) manufacturing emergency stop buttons for ABB.<p>We used SAP for our incoming orders. Each order was printed on paper as some kind of report from SAP and put in our physical inbox. When we had manufactured buttons for an order, we would go to a desk with two computers, both logged in to SAP. With the first computer we would scan a barcode from the order to find it in the system, mark the order as done, and print a second paper containing the order.<p>Then we would proceed to the next computer, scanning a barcode from the second paper, and produce a freight order for the outgoing warehouse. This was printed to a third paper, and attached to the buttons, before they went to the outgoing warehouse.<p>Note that the freight order did not work as a waybill, so the process of shifting paper was probably conducted a couple of more times before the order reached the customer.<p>For someone really used to working with computers and not against them, it seemed rather innovative to print a paper to transfer an order to another computer two feet away. It was a learning experience and greatly motivated me to go get some higher education.
评论 #22249071 未加载
diminishover 5 years ago
Some consultant had told &quot;Adopting an ERP (SAP, Oracle or other) is a stronger bond than marriage&quot;. So those valuations could be strong and long term.
评论 #22244960 未加载
评论 #22244939 未加载
评论 #22245286 未加载
greatartisteover 5 years ago
This is an interesting thread as despite working for many many years in IT I know next to nothing about SAP. I have worked with people from all parts of the IT ecosystem over the years but not SAP. It appears to be its own little closed world that some people enter but then never leave.<p>That observation aside does anyone know who writes or customises the SAP NetWeaver for Windows programs ? Is that the function of a highly paid consultant somewhere ? I have seen a few of these in different places and the common factor is they always look like they were written in Visual Basic circa 1992. The one I use makes the same beeping sound if a transaction fails as it does if it succeeds. If the transaction fails this is signalled by status box text saying so in a green font but if it succeeds then text says that in a red font. It takes a special mind to come up with that !
tonyedgecombeover 5 years ago
<i>A best case scenario looks like Cisco’s ERP implementation, which took them 9 months and $15 million. In comparison, Dow Chemical’s implementation, for example, took $1 billion and 8 years;</i><p>At the last SAP site I worked at the general feeling was implementing SAP had left the company weak. This lead to them being taken over by one of their competitors.
评论 #22245208 未加载
cognaitivover 5 years ago
Attunity (now Qlik) Replicate [1] has an SAP ABAP change data capture connector. Replicate directly from SAP to Kafka, AWS&#x2F;Azure, HDFS, etc., in real-time. I am surprised that more SAP shops are not doing this to separate operational ERP concerns from agility in the rest of the business.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.qlik.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;sap-analytics&#x2F;sap-data-replication" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.qlik.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;sap-analytics&#x2F;sap-data-replication</a>
评论 #22246877 未加载
usuiover 5 years ago
Thank you for this link. It is highly informative for someone who is not familiar with SAP or enterprise management.<p>I searched on Google, &quot;What is SAP?&quot; Here are the top three links as of today:<p>1) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sap.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sap.com</a> 2) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.guru99.com&#x2F;what-is-sap-definition-of-sap-erp-software.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.guru99.com&#x2F;what-is-sap-definition-of-sap-erp-sof...</a> 3) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;SAP_ERP" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;SAP_ERP</a><p>What do you notice among the top three links? All of them are mostly talking from business-speak perspective. For a software engineer learning about SAP for the first time, all I want to know is what does SAP literally do? The top three links do not have screenshots of the software, do not simply explain the technical capabilities of SAP, and do not explain how SAP differs from competing products.<p>Although I never interact with SAP daily, I have always been curious about what it does, but did not want to waste a lot of time on Google searching for a real explanation. Hence, to have a section like &quot;What ERP software actually looks like&quot; in the parent link fulfills a certain desire to know SAP that I have had in the back of my mind.<p>To some extent, I can blame laziness on my part—in that I have not researched enough about SAP, but why should it be this hard for a software engineer to learn about another piece of software? This is why sometimes, it is better to have a neutral party (non-SAP affiliated) to explain a product, rather than SAP itself.
ubermonkeyover 5 years ago
In the late 90s (say, 97-98), I was a partner in a custom software firm focused on helping companies use &quot;Internet technologies&quot; internally -- early intranets, delivering things via the browser, that sort of thing. It was novel at the time, and we could make money doing it! Wheee!<p>Anyway, we needed to integrate with SAP on occasion, partly because one of our biggest clients was in the middle of a HUGE SAP rollout, employing a small army of Arthur Andersen MBAs, etc.<p>So I went to the SAP technical education conference in Atlanta, to gather info and whatnot. I heard Hasso Platner brag from the stage in the keynote that complaints about SAP&#x27;s complexity and expense were entirely overblown because &quot;80% of our implementations now take less than 18 months, and come in under $100 million.&quot;<p>Y I K E S.<p>(Oh, and the company with the SAP rollout we were working with? Eventually, the combined cancer of SAP and AA billing destabilized them enough that agreed to be acquired by their biggest competitor. Yay SAP!)
wuschelover 5 years ago
All in all an interesting article, although some PR piece alarm bells just went off.<p>I would have loved to have additional information that might not have been provided due to the fact that <i>Retool</i> is a very early stage competitor in the ERP space. With all the SAP bashing that is happening, there must be some advantages that the SAP software suite has, right? I would love to hear about them.<p>The rigid nature of the SAP software - and the crazy costs that come with it&#x27;s customization - is a known problem. I still wonder if this is the real reason why the migrations and implementation projects with big customers fail, or if these are, generally speaking, just really big projects that carry a huge risk. The truth is probably somewhere between both extremes.<p>What long term structural disadvantage do you see in applying the <i>Retool</i> software model?<p>Congratulations for getting your product out of the door!<p>(Disclaimer: I have no affiliation to SAP etc).
评论 #22245576 未加载
kriroover 5 years ago
I used to work in a research project where I went to some UX conferences in Germany (not really my field). The big irony&#x2F;running gag is that SAP seems pretty good in UX-research, Hasso Plattner Institute is fairly recognized for their UX work and yet SAP-UX is a nightmare.<p>They just can&#x27;t&#x2F;won&#x27;t roll out new things.
评论 #22245307 未加载
评论 #22246491 未加载
lizknopeover 5 years ago
I worked in the IT department in 1996. Every other day I would hear a bunch of people say &quot;SAP is down!&quot; and scramble to fix it.<p>I started working as an engineer in 1997. Every other day I would receive an email saying &quot;SAP is down, IT is working to resolve the issue.&quot;<p>This continued at my job in 2005.<p>Last week I got an email from IT saying &quot;SAP is down.&quot;<p>I still don&#x27;t know what it does or really care but it sure is down a lot.
shrimpxover 5 years ago
I live and work in USA but spend time in Europe. I noticed that in Europe SAP is wildly popular and a large percentage of “software engineers” are “SAP&#x2F;ABAP programmers”. I have some engineer friends in Eastern Europe and they’re taking about how their employers are in the process of, or considering moving to SAP and away from in-house programming. These are not massive enterprises, mind you. Just small to mid size companies. In the US, on the other hand, I’ve never met a SAP engineer and in-house systems are the norm. What’s the deal with this disparity?
评论 #22245421 未加载
danzig13over 5 years ago
I have been working for YEARS on an ERP implementation in a custom manufacturing operation practically by myself.<p>As bad as I&#x27;m sure SAP is to deal with, I crave it or anything else (Salesforce?) that has any sort of easy customization, automation API and fosters some sort of community.<p>A large part of my particular ERP&#x27;s business model seems to be to make the data model so esoteric that you are forced to go to them for any type of customization at all. Unfortunately, they make a habit of firing any of their halfway decent employees every time they get acquired (4 or 5 times so far).
评论 #22256121 未加载
davidwover 5 years ago
I went to the town where SAP is located, once, for work. It&#x27;s bizarre - it&#x27;s this fairly average little German town. Next to it, it has an &#x27;industrial area&#x27; about the same size as the town, and it&#x27;s all about SAP:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;place&#x2F;49%C2%B018&#x27;00.0%22N+8%C2%B039&#x27;00.0%22E&#x2F;@49.2981602,8.6427025,2955m&#x2F;data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x0!8m2!3d49.3!4d8.65?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;place&#x2F;49%C2%B018&#x27;00.0%22N+8%C2%B...</a>
72deluxeover 5 years ago
SAP own Crystal Reports. It&#x27;s buggy slow garbage, IMHO. Wildly popular for unknown reasons but I found that it threw internal C# exceptions all the time in its own DLLs and was slow and buggy. Awful.<p>Oddly others thought it was great and accepted it taking 30 seconds to load a report (yes, it&#x27;s just a few database queries with the output put onto a canvas...) but I think that was because they didn&#x27;t understand how basic it should be, and knew no alternative (of which there was none!).<p>I ended up writing my own report system as I detested this so much.
pinky07over 5 years ago
My company is doing an open source alternative to SAP (and replace several SAP implementations already): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.odoo.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.odoo.com</a>
评论 #22246644 未加载
bitcurationover 5 years ago
&gt;&gt;&quot;But most importantly, SAP’s software was designed to be extensible from the start. For SAP’s original contract with ICI, SAP didn’t build software from scratch, as was the norm at the time, and instead built on top of a previous project. When SAP released their financial accounting software in 1974, their intention was to build additional software modules on top of it and sell them in the future. This extensibility was SAP’s defining feature. The interoperability across client contexts was considered radical at the time because other approaches started from scratch for every client.&quot;<p>SAP&#x27;s success can be attributed to something similar to what Facebook and Google did, locking the data and knowledge base to itself. The much bragged &quot;extensibility&quot; is limited to SAP own software modules or will be acquired.<p>Therefore the extensibility is both the strength and the weakest point of SAP. Unlike most of modern software system, there isn&#x27;t an open ecosystem for competition at its periphery, resulted in a lackluster UI and unfair challenges to non-SAP software to take advantage of those domain knowledge buried inside the SAP.<p>SAP&#x27;s integration doctrine is originated from 1960-1970s. With limit evolution this doctrine has largely ignored the changes in computing for several decades, yet it&#x27;s still growing its dominance.
dcolkittover 5 years ago
Question for those in the know. Do the major Silicon Valley tech giants (i.e. Google, Apple, Amazon) use SAP or even ERP?<p>I say this as someone who has no experience whatsoever with ERP. But the entire concept seems like an anti-pattern. A kludge that&#x27;s only necessary when your org lacks basic technical competence.<p>Why does everything need to be in a single monolithic system? Does HR really need to run on the same database and software as the manufacturing plant? Haven&#x27;t we learned that small modular, independent systems with well-defined interfaces at the system boundary work. If for some reason manufacturing needs to talk to purchasing, why can&#x27;t they just do so over JSON&#x2F;HTTP endpoints or a Kafka message bus or even direct SQL connections? Trying to integrate by just locking everyone together into a single system that tries to be all things to all people sounds like a recipe for disaster.<p>But, again I don&#x27;t really have any direct experience with ERP. So that&#x27;s why I&#x27;m really curious what orgs that are actually technically competent do. If Google or Amazon or Netflix was using ERP, despite having the engineering firepower to build alternative systems, then I&#x27;d really think that there&#x27;s something important to the concept that I&#x27;m missing.
评论 #22252429 未加载
评论 #22248444 未加载
ericalexander3over 5 years ago
Technology can bring benefits if, and only if, it diminishes a limitation. -Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt<p>Goldratt was critical of ERP systems, not because they couldn&#x27;t bring benefit; rather, because many businesses adopted through a cargo cult mentality and viewed them as magical silver bullets. Many companies never understood where their bottlenecks were (Theory of Constraints) and would make things worse with an ERP system, with some going bankrupt.
nateburkeover 5 years ago
One reason why SAP perhaps has remained relatively unscathed by competition, beyond the obvious upfront development and implementation cost barriers, is the sales angle.<p>An ERP is usually sold directly into the office of the CEO. Any ERP startup hoping to get a foothold must have a founder or head of sales with a rolodex full of CEOs. Folks with CEOs in their rolodexes tend to not have the type of risk-tolerance required to go all-in on a startup.
leto_iiover 5 years ago
Going through the comments here I notice the recurrent theme that it&#x27;s your company that has to adapt to SAP and not the other way around.<p>To me this raises two key questions:<p>1. Isn&#x27;t this harmful&#x2F;limiting for your enterprise in the long run?<p>2. How can you at some point migrate away from SAP once you adapted to it?<p>Given these issues and the huge costs, why would it make sense to adopt it in the first place? At least in the year 2020 (maybe the situation was different decades ago).
评论 #22245757 未加载
hanniabuover 5 years ago
SAP wouldn&#x27;t be that disheartening to use if it weren&#x27;t so damn slow and if UI&#x2F;UX wasn&#x27;t from the 90s.
评论 #22244990 未加载
评论 #22244959 未加载
评论 #22244907 未加载
kabesover 5 years ago
I don&#x27;t know any decent CS&#x2F;software engineering student that would want to work on SAP. As a result, all the SAP consultancies I know are filled with business graduates that happened to know a bit about software. I wonder how much that contributes to the SAP clusterfuck.
评论 #22245471 未加载
评论 #22245447 未加载
rbosingerover 5 years ago
In the last couple years I&#x27;ve been more and more interested in this world of &quot;big enterprise software that seems to be a complex mess but has seemingly unstoppable momentum and makes billions&quot;. That whole world seems to be hidden to many of us developers who often see a few lines of code we don&#x27;t like and assume a whole product will die because of it. Meanwhile there are these giants out there dragging along this weight that companies still spend billions to implement. I see some of this in my day to day but it&#x27;s not often I find an article that frames it the way this one did. Good stuff!
评论 #22253613 未加载
pferdeover 5 years ago
What the HN crowd might find interesting is that SAP does not support any kind of containerization technology to run their products in, despite the fact that certain components, like the dialog instance or saprouter, are prime candidates for just that. Let&#x27;s give them a few more decades, they&#x27;ll get it.<p>(From randomly perusing their help portal, it seems that there are one or two modern - and quite exotic - software products from SAP that do support Docker and I think also LXC, so it looks like they&#x27;re slowly moving ahead in this regard. :) )
评论 #22245173 未加载
codingdaveover 5 years ago
&gt; ...and most engineers probably haven’t seen them in the wild.<p>This is quite a limited view of our industry. I&#x27;d agree that young coders focused on the startup community may not have seen it. But it is pervasive in the enterprise world. By all means, pick it apart, analyze its strengths and weaknesses, and compete&#x2F;disrupt. But pretending it is some unknown thing shows a lack of understanding of a significant market segment.
Angosturaover 5 years ago
I really, really like this style of article. What a fantastic introduction
CameronBarreover 5 years ago
I worked as a PeopleSoft developer in college. It&#x27;s a competitor to SAP. Working with esoteric software taught me how to properly read documents with hundreds of pages. It also showed me how to get by in a less than ideal circumstances.<p>I am a bit of a maverick in that sort of environment, though. I wrote a JSON encoder [1] to ship PeopleCode objects to the browser via these webscript endpoints you could make in order to use modern web technologies. PeopleSoft actually moved in that exact same direction years later with better JSON support, &#x27;FluidUI&#x27;, and better html5&#x2F;javascript support.<p>ERP systems are hell to work with. It was fun, but ultimately I was glad to get back to the real world. I got back to my main interest C#, but then went fully into the Clojure world :).<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitbucket.org&#x2F;cjbarre&#x2F;jsoft.json&#x2F;src&#x2F;master&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitbucket.org&#x2F;cjbarre&#x2F;jsoft.json&#x2F;src&#x2F;master&#x2F;</a>
brntover 5 years ago
SAP is how Lucifer interacts with our world.
nrclarkover 5 years ago
SAP is Germany&#x27;s revenge for WWII.
tibbydudezaover 5 years ago
ABAP developer ... after looking at some of the code it is amazing that it actually works.<p>I recently did something called a BDC since the API call did not work so you resort to stuffing values into some internal tables and replaying keystrokes to enter the data into the system.
adeel_siddiquiover 5 years ago
Well, SAP has for long been a money making blackbox for consulting firms. Think IBM, Accenture and the likes. They rake boatloads of money for multi-year contracts to implement SAP systems for companies wanting ERP solutions. The system is outdated and obscure with both technical and non-technical people having a tough time understanding it. Last time I worked with some interfacing systems to some SAP modules, it still relied on web services, XML and SOAP. No REST support. Salesforce is on the same road. In a few years, they will spin up more modules apart from CRM, like manufacturing and payroll.
评论 #22252804 未加载
jbogganover 5 years ago
I&#x27;ve been working on exporting SAP data to a new data lake and it&#x27;s a tortuous process, though amazing when you finally get the data out and can finally do something with it. SAP works within its own sandbox but woe unto you if you want to integrate data from Google Analytics or third party APIs to do forecasting or more sophisticated business models. The RFC libraries for pulling report data out of SAP are . . . finicky . . . and I spend too much time manually formatting output tables which look like something pretty-printed in J.
tarsingeover 5 years ago
At it’s core SAP as it is used in most companies nowadays is mostly just a database of clients, vendors, invoices, purchase orders, and inventory, with a UI for CRUD operations.<p>Business decisions are usually made on exports in third party tools (Excel, Tableau...). Why is not disrupted yet then? For me it’s the same as Oracle for database engines and IBM mainframes: enterprise sales process and trust in proved decades solutions when you you bet your whole business in a software or hardware solution.
kdeldyckeover 5 years ago
Maybe ERPs are the ultimate test of an agile culture. Sounds weird right? But bear with me.<p>Most ERP projects fail. They end up over-budget and delivered really late.<p>Why? They are sold like custom implementations, promising the stakeholders they’ll be adapted to their specific needs. It&#x27;s rarely the case. The reality requires the whole business to change: its processes, its workflows, its traditions.<p>Therefore, only companies flexible enough can survive such deep transformations. Companies that are agile.
评论 #22245464 未加载
godelmachineover 5 years ago
Warning - very very vague question<p>Would someone kindly differentiate between the ERP vs ITSM (IT Service Management) industry in perspective for me? I would in ITSM and often wonder if I would had been better off staying in ERP like SAP?<p>Secondly, how does ERP fare in terms of complexity between game development vs ERP Software development? I understand the target base is totally different (Gamers vs Enterprise clients)<p>Let me know if I am too vague
评论 #22245050 未加载
评论 #22245143 未加载
评论 #22254156 未加载
评论 #22245062 未加载
totololoover 5 years ago
Do &quot;high innovation velocity&quot; companies like Tesla or SpaceX use any ERP? If so, do they develop in house? Use a modern equivalent to SAP?
评论 #22246522 未加载
bilekasover 5 years ago
Wow, its a little bit crazy how much SAP actually does, but it does seem like it&#x27;s been around so long and has embedded itself into so much that people just take it for granted that their stuck with it. I would love to see some case studies of replacing SAP with even an in-house product.<p>Infact in certain cases I would imagine that an in-house solution with maintenance etc would be more cost efficient.
lowdoseover 5 years ago
After Amazon clearly stated they are off Oracle Larry Ellison has been touting that SAP lunch is up for the grab and all SAP customers are moving to a legit Larry setup. Sap denies any migration taking place.<p>When Larry starts to mention a market it is a signal is innovation can be expected from his competitors. AWS Aurora, Google Cloud Spanner that are competing with Oracle legacy solutions.
RobertRobertsover 5 years ago
I have a company that runs Filemaker Pro databases for managing some parts. And they have considered using SAP recently.<p>How much product&#x2F;inventory&#x2F;sales&#x2F;etc... processes is required before you should move from FMP to something like SAP?<p>Is it number of users, client accounts, employees, products? What is the break point for needing ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software?
trolliedover 5 years ago
SAP is shocking.<p>I&#x27;m so glad that I now work with NetSuite!
评论 #22245243 未加载
ab_testingover 5 years ago
Having worked in the ERP space for close to 15 years, I have seen no other software even come close to the features of SAP &amp; Oracle. A lot of next gen software even lacked basic features like revenue splitting or multi-currency or multi-org that are pivotal to any company that has any more than 500M in revenue.
throwaway8291over 5 years ago
In Germany there is a saying that translates to something like: &quot;SAP sucks the blood out of the Mittelstand&quot; - Mittelstand being the SMB up to 50M revenue p.a. There has to be yet a moment, where I hear someone emphatically speaking about the mess that SAP is.
cr0shover 5 years ago
SAP is a company (and software system) that exists to buy up other company&#x27;s software, business, and services and then integrate that all into SAP&#x27;s &quot;core&quot; systems, and do so in such a poor manner that their name and the system has almost become synonymous with the words and phrases &quot;nasty&quot;, &quot;unreliable&quot;, &quot;run away now&quot;, &quot;if you know what&#x27;s good for ya&quot; and a host of others.<p>However, due to their entrenchment in various other markets (and who knows if there is any graft or other under-the-table business going on), they continue to manage to exist, and scary enough sell their products to new victims (ahem - customers).<p>SAP is the old-is-new-again-we&#x27;re-IBM type of business; nobody ever got fired for buying SAP (but the golden parachute was nice)?<p>Ok - hyperbole and I don&#x27;t really know what I&#x27;m talking about, so the above should probably be ignored...<p>...that said - I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;m too far off, either.
floppiploppover 5 years ago
SAP is a test suite to determine the resilience of a company against the highest form of software bullshittery. If a company actually survives a SAP rollout, it&#x27;s pretty solidly positioned. The downside is, those tests cost a shitload of budget.
littlejohnnyover 5 years ago
Does anyone else think that over a period of years products like SAP provide diminishing returns for the efforts and money put in, over software built from scratch in house ?<p>Yes, software built form scratch can also be messy, but which is the lesser evil?
nojvekover 5 years ago
I love this. I am obsessed with back office admin systems (software that helps an org run and their various workflows). Quit my job last month to take a stab at it. Working on boomadmin.com. (Still working on landing page and an MVP)
belinderover 5 years ago
&gt; A basic installation of SAP has 20,000 database tables, 3,000 of which are configuration tables. In those tables, there are ~8,000 configuration decisions you need before even getting started.<p>Hard to imagine even getting to that point
mdipover 5 years ago
We had this at a telecom I worked at in the early 2000s. It&#x27;s easy to sit back and bitch about &quot;the things you have to use at work&quot;, so I usually avoid it. However, short of whatever-the-heck-is-used-for time tracking&#x2F;time sheets[0], this application was the single largest software cause of <i>rage</i> at the company that I&#x27;ve ever been exposed to in my entire working life.<p>My experience with the application was limited mostly to expense report submissions and for that simple task, it was abysmal. It was <i>so</i> bad that it was hard not to conclude that it was chosen <i>due to its horribleness</i>: making employees think twice about sending in expense reports. And we did. If it was a small dollar amount, the time cost exceeded the monetary cost.<p>The UI, at the time (2005...ish), actually looked pretty slick compared to most web-based tools. It stopped there. Date fields, upon clicking, reloaded the <i>whole page</i> (which you waited for), to display a pop-up calendar, which when the date was clicked, reloaded the <i>whole page</i>. At least once while filling in the expense reports myriad of screens, the page would fail to load and you&#x27;d have to hit the refresh button, or you&#x27;d make a mistake and need to go back. Clicking <i>any</i> of the usual buttons in the browser for those functions invariably lead to an account DoS feature.<p>I don&#x27;t remember the details, but it basically caused the system to get confused into thinking there were two of you and it gave priority to the &quot;you&quot; living in the alternate universe where you didn&#x27;t click &quot;Back&quot; or &quot;Refresh&quot; and were still filling out your expense report. You had to wait for the first session to time out before you could continue, and the error message you received was placed in the &quot;status bar&quot; and appeared to be the name of a const variable &quot;APP_BOWEL_MVMT_ERR&quot; that gave no hint as to what the <i>fsck</i> was wrong. There was admin &quot;unlock&quot; feature (help desk calls were met with &quot;just sit tight&quot;). So you would give up and forget to return 3 hours later. A few days of this and the expense deadline passed.<p>There wasn&#x27;t a more <i>hated</i> &quot;enterprise tool&quot; in our shop and we ran <i>every single one</i> of Microsoft&#x27;s early attempts at web-ifying the world (early Sharepoint is the only I recall, but we had others).<p>It was decided to shelve it after a last-ditch effort was made to fix it. We&#x27;d put a job opening up to get a solid SAP developer and got ... someone ... after bumping the salary up several times. The rumor is that the gentleman we hired was the highest paid developer at the company. He lasted 3 months before taking a job at IBM at a substantially higher salary. A look at his job history and the circumstances surrounding it made it not unreasonable to conclude that we weren&#x27;t the job he was ever interested in and talking to other SAP folks ... this sounded <i>extremely common</i>. The joke was &quot;if you have to work with that crap, it better pay well&quot;.<p>We finally ditched it when we were acquired by another telecom; while most of the choices &quot;our side&quot;&#x27;s IT made were fought for, <i>nobody</i> advocated for keeping SAP ... even having no idea of what the acquiring company was using -- we knew if it <i>wasn&#x27;t</i> SAP, it <i>had</i> to be better. It was Oracle; and it might be the only time I&#x27;ve heard a colleague speak positively about &quot;Oracle&quot; outside of The Matrix[1].<p>[0] Time sheet software always comes to mind. Nobody likes doing &quot;time sheets&quot; at any job I&#x27;ve ever had, but at every company I&#x27;ve ever worked for, we&#x27;ve had a home-grown time tracking tool. 30,000 employees to 100 employees. Every. Single. Company. It&#x27;s such a necessary &quot;evil&quot; that even at those places where executives had known deadly-allergic reactions to building anything in-house, somehow a case was able to be made to build a completely custom time tracking tool tailored precisely to the businesses perceived needs. Death, taxes and time sheets, I guess.<p>[1] My experience with Oracle up to that point was Sun&#x27;s acquisition and a perception-backed-by-coincidence that when the Oracle sales guys couldn&#x27;t land a deal, their software auditors would step in to give the necessary motivation.
unixheroover 5 years ago
ERP and SAP is a goldmine if you know how to provide consulting for it.
pcmooreover 5 years ago
One early forerunner was LEO <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;LEO_(computer)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;LEO_(computer)</a>
gaddersover 5 years ago
I recently worked on SAP as a PM, having never worked on it before. In some ways it reminds me of Lotus Notes, in that all data and &quot;code&quot; is stored in the underlying database.
gbasinover 5 years ago
After reading all these comments, I think the market opportunity is building lightweight SaaSy UIs on top of SAP to make it easier to work with. Someone write me a check
eranationover 5 years ago
What’s the main reason we don’t see many startups trying to disrupt that field? Is it the long sales cycle? The upfront investment? Lack of awareness?
thomasedwardsover 5 years ago
One implementation of SAP I’ve used marked items requiring attention in green, and completed&#x2F;finished items as yellow&#x2F;red.
znpyover 5 years ago
I can&#x27;t wait to see this article commented on a certain website that doesn&#x27;t want to be named.
chidover 5 years ago
Did anyone see the news around extension of ECC6 support? To me it seemed like the logical decision.
bass3lover 5 years ago
A side question, anyone knows how the illustrations on Retool homepage are made? The animated ones
评论 #22254604 未加载
anvarikover 5 years ago
&gt; 77% of the world’s transaction revenue touches an SAP system<p>wonder how they have calculated that
asmosoinioover 5 years ago
Should have (2019) in the title?<p>Couldn&#x27;t fine a date in the post, but it does say:<p>&gt; It’s 2019, and SAP is ...
fnord77over 5 years ago
SAP demonstrates the power of sales relationships and corruption over utility.
andyjpbover 5 years ago
The author spends a whole section on &quot;The importance of integration&quot;, the value being sold as &quot;...the two [SAP] modules were able to seamlessly interact with each other since they shared the same database.&quot; and &quot;because these [other] systems don’t interact, they needed to be synced regularly, and that often meant having a human manually move data around.&quot; ... &quot;Integrated software solves this by facilitating communication&quot;.<p>In the very last paragraph of the article they then say &quot;...on the back-end, most modern enterprise software (e.g. Salesforce, Jira, etc.) now have good APIs for exporting data. ETL + data lakes are on the rise...&quot;.<p>This is a mistake I see made a lot; not because of naivete tho&#x27;: usually because the concerns cut across each other so much.<p>The economic and efficiency incentives around integration are very delicate. SAP is so complex that (assuming you can hire great engineers, which isn&#x27;t necessarily a given outside the tech sector) you can probably build most of what you need with a small team that&#x27;s much cheaper than SAP. However, you can&#x27;t successfully (even with good access to great tech sector talent) grow that software as quickly or as broadly as what you&#x27;d get from SAP. You also carry a lot more risk. ...and that&#x27;s risk outside of the core focus of your business. The article even includes one quote, &quot;competitive advantage in this industry might just come from doing the best and cheapest job at implementing SAP.&quot; which recognises this as an operational rather than capital problem.<p>...but even if you can accomplish it, it&#x27;s the <i>integration</i> that gives you the value. You&#x27;re always going to have higher operational costs for your thing if you build it out of something like Salesforce and Jira sewn together with APIs. ETL is hard to do well for anything other than reporting (and even then it&#x27;s not easy). Data lakes are the epitome of loosely integrated data structures. Most of the time they&#x27;re a collection of files full of data in weakly-or-stringly typed formats such as CSV, JSON and XML. Getting at the domain models of the producing software is always a pain. For all these things, your talent pool for effective support is small and gets smaller as you add more products to the mix.<p>So the three options are:<p>1) Buy (+ professional services)<p>2) Build<p>3) Integrate (e.g. &quot;Salesforce + Jira&quot;)<p>3 (Integrate) is the mistake because it&#x27;s less than the sum of it&#x27;s parts. You carry all the risk of &quot;Build&quot; and don&#x27;t get the brand stability and integration of &quot;Buy&quot;. Multiple vendors gives you more risk than a single one in this scenario because you&#x27;re buying different things from different vendors. So now you have more chances for failure: failure or withdrawal of one of the vendors, API changes that you don&#x27;t control, etc, etc.<p>As the SaaS markets become more mature I&#x27;d hope to see consortiums of vendors who had products that they would certify as working together. I don&#x27;t think we&#x27;re quite there yet tho&#x27;.<p>2 (Build) is the Big Bet because you&#x27;re taking a capital expenditure approach to an operational problem. You&#x27;re investing in intellectual property outside of your core business. ...and you own all the risk.<p>1 (Buy) is difficult because it is expensive and loads of things you want are still only sold on a professional services basis, rather than as a product. It&#x27;s also a market designed for the large companies with between 6 and 9 figures to spend. It&#x27;s also one of those infrastructure projects that is usually shaped as something that doesn&#x27;t deliver any value until it has been rolled out everywhere. However, this is the option where you hold the least technical risk and most of the risk you do hold is related to abilities that are hopefully aligned with your existing skills of management and operational delivery.
iso1210over 5 years ago
It&#x27;s a program built to prevent corporations from spending money
arendtioover 5 years ago
Does someone know a good place to start learning SAP CAR?
vangelisover 5 years ago
What isn&#x27;t SAP?
zxieninover 5 years ago
Why not develop your own ERP if SAP forces one to change its processes?<p>AFAIK, Tesla is the only company I&#x27;ve heard to have done it. Would be useful to hear their experiences on this road.
wackgetover 5 years ago
&gt; Article is titled &quot;What’s SAP?&quot;<p>&gt; Doesn&#x27;t actually tell you what SAP is, or stands for, until halfway through the article.
sparker72678over 5 years ago
This thread is depressing.
lonelappdeover 5 years ago
As hinted in the article, SAP is bad because anyone who could do it better would dominate their industry and not sell it to the public.
0xff00ffeeover 5 years ago
Having brought up an ERP solution with a team, this is no joke. A company with payroll, inventory, contracts, and logistics (to name a few), needs an ENORMOUS infrastructure of software to keep things running. There&#x27;s a reason ERP is so expensive. In fact, I&#x27;m surprised it is only a US$41B industry. I would expect 10x that.
marta_morenaover 5 years ago
SAP is the one of the few software companies who manages to consistently produce the worst possible user experience. They actually made it into an art form. There is nothing about an SAP product that is usable. Its a big steaming pile of shit. I don&#x27;t even want to know how the code looks like.
pojntfxover 5 years ago
SAP is the worst software I&#x27;ve ever used in my entire life; they literally have to publish paid books on how to use it, that&#x27;s how bad it is.
评论 #22244937 未加载
评论 #22245018 未加载
评论 #22245126 未加载
评论 #22244927 未加载
mac_wasover 5 years ago
SAP is the ultimate B2B and turning into saas, should be the wet dream of every dev who wants to build his own saas.
评论 #22244895 未加载
sdanover 5 years ago
Nicely written article, but I don’t see what the use of an ERP is? Can’t it just be replicated with some excel spreadsheets?
评论 #22244923 未加载
评论 #22245127 未加载
评论 #22245057 未加载
评论 #22244941 未加载