What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

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.<p>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.<p>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.

My mother works for a fairly large textile lab. For decades, they used an internally developed system for lab reports (they had a few programmers and admins they called the &quot;nerds&quot; that did nothing else than extend and maintain the system). The company switched to a SAP solution a few years ago. Chaos ensued. The SAP solution missed so many edge cases that a huge number of lab reports were either inaccurate or completely wrong because information was lost in SAP translation between different labs. Sometimes clients (huge international players) noticed the mistakes, which then led to costly product delays. It became so bad that communication between labs eventually had to be done on two levels - within SAP, and &quot;informally&quot; by mail, telephone, or by simply walking to the other lab, adding a huge time overhead to every report.<p>SAP removed virtually every automation advantage of the old system, and added the additional complexity of navigating the SAP GUI. Because of this additional workload and the reluctance of the company to hire more people to counter it (after all, SAP was implemented to streamline everything!), employee turnover suddenly skyrocketed. Everytime I talk with my mother, she complains about the system and tells me that another colleague has quit. She only stays because she only has 2 years until retirement.

I am an SAP developer since kind of forever, my first job after university (since 2009). First I hated it, but the deeper I am entrenched, the more I see why you choose SAP: Because there really is no alternative. The data model is so complex because it is growing iteratively since the 80s. Hacker News is valuing businesses that adjust to the customer instead of going for some kind of purity. Another complexity especially now is the different paradigm changes in between. ABAP, the programming language of SAP, is quite nice nowadays. CDSViews are a great invention, and so on. There&#x27;s really a lot of innovation buried in the bad documentation, it&#x27;s getting better. In summary as bad as it is, I don&#x27;t see an alternative for all of the backoffice work. SAP is really flexible and supports a lot of different processes. A thing that makes it so costly is a lot of time culture, no small releases, MVP, and so on. But you can be agile with SAP, especially if you move to the cloud.

This is a good time to remind everyone of the rules of SAP integration:<p>1) Your company processes MUST adapt to SAP processes.<p>That&#x27;s it.<p>You can try customising SAP to fit your processes, but you will just waste time and hundreds of millions of money and then you will fail.<p>Lidl spent almost a decade and 500M€ on its SAP project, but didn&#x27;t follow rule #1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.henricodolfing.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;05&#x2F;case-study-lidl-sap-debacle.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.henricodolfing.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;05&#x2F;case-study-lidl-sap-d...</a>

Some things you need to know:<p>SAP is sold to the C=suit, never to IT or business operations, nor any of the people that will ever come onto contact with the software.<p>SAP is priced based on your company&#x27;s revenue. In industry X typical spend on IT is y% of revenue, so SAP will charge you a project for an amount equal to y% of your revenue.<p>SAP project often fail (this is not specific to SAP but common for large projects). Making sure that in case the project fails it is the customers fault will be strategically taken into account from day 1.<p>SAP&#x27;s revenue is for the large majority based on consultancy and education revenue, not on software sales.<p>SAP&#x27;s data and business process model maturity varies extremely depending on the industry and business segment. This will not be clear in the sales trajectory and not easy to discover upfront.<p>SAP is a fairly closed ecosystem. Typically consultants are recruited straight out of school and never leave the stack as it is very different from the rest of the industry. It has it&#x27;s own cultute and habits that do not travel well outside of it&#x27;s niche.

&quot;The definition of successful SAP migration is one where the company remains solvent.&quot;<p>The company I work for maintains and has built some custom ERP solutions. While we&#x27;ve never dealt with SAP directly, almost universally the mindset of the IT departments at these businesses is that they are the last defence against the dark forces of SAP.<p>ERP migration is a terrifying thing and they seem to fall into the same pattern every time. Company has their way (workflows, processes, strategies, philosophies) of doing things. New ERP consultant promises the tool will adapt. Company spends $50M with consultant and product trying to make the tool adapt. Pain loop of &quot;Well, it can&#x27;t really do X like we said, but we can make it do Y which is close!&quot;. Company either a) bends to the opinionated process of New ERP, b) cuts their losses and runs, c) spends years and millions more trying to fight the opinionated process and then cuts their losses and runs, and&#x2F;or d) goes bankrupt.<p>It seems to me that the only way to do this right is to spend as much time as it takes nailing down your processes and workflows, being honest with your company about what you need to change, what you want to change, and what can functionally change. Then use the broadest technology possible and create a custom solution. I feel like there&#x27;s room for a broad business logic framework&#x2F;library.

Welcome to my world:) I&#x27;m a software dev and always worked in or around sap (~13years).<p>Sap&#x27;s secret sauce was understanding that different companies have mostly the same needs. All have employees that need paying and maybe shifts to be tracked. All generate invoices. All buy stuff from suppliers, etc. So they built different solutions (HR&#x2F;FI&#x2F;etc.) For those needs. All running on the same technical platform with its own programming language: ABAP. All domain code is ABAP and everything is readable, you can even debug code that SAP wrote years ago but (generally) you&#x27;re not allowed to change it. And it&#x27;s full of comments in German so good luck :)<p>For medium to large companies it&#x27;s a no brainer to use SAP so most do. For example Sap keeps the client&#x27;s systems compliant with new laws. Say some country changes laws on how employees pay taxes, sap updates the code or tells their clients what&#x27;s needed to update the systems.<p>Companies that have been around for a few years, most likely they already have SAP so makes no sense to shift to something else.<p>SAP&#x27;s ERP code is also quite generic. Tons of configurations are possible in any module. E.g. you may have employees but no shifts. Or maybe you have 200 different shift patterns across many factories to configure. Configuration is so complex it&#x27;s a well paid profession in itself: the functional consultant.<p>When that config is not enough to implement the requirements then developers can modify the system. Either changing existing ABAP code, or building new ABAP programs or (more commonly nowadays) just building webapps with the normal tools (react&#x2F;node.js&#x2F;java etc) in the cloud and using sap ERP as a backend to read&#x2F;write data to. This last one sums up my day to day.<p>ABAP is interesting though. Syntactically it looks like COBOL and that you&#x27;ve gone back 40years plus most of the DB tables&#x2F;columns&#x2F;data types have seemingly random names like WERKS or DMBTR. They make sense <i>in German</i> after you&#x27;ve shortened the German meaning to 5chars :). So ABAP code looks very cryptic at first sight.<p>But semantically the language is ok. It is strongly typed, has some nice features for working with finance programs (e.g. fixed point arithmetic) and an OO model that feels familiar to anyone that knows Java (e.g. single inheritance).

Gartner has at least one thing down that I believe is “the way” - they call it “postmodern ERP”. [0]<p>In a postmodern ERP there is no ERP.<p>It’s a strategy where you accept that different domains and companies know their business and processes best and you integrate best of breed systems &amp; services with homegrown solutions.<p>You trade the convenience of letting SAP or Salesforce own your processes against flexibility and actual agility.<p>The cost is competence - you’ll need developers working in stable, dedicated domain teams, even within the administrative&#x2F;cost-center areas such as HR &amp; Finance. But there is a massive potential in this approach. It forces ownership of processes and allows for rapid changes of digitized processes, integrations and technology.<p>I must stress stability of the teams: agility comes from building domain knowledge and continually working on contracts between organizational units over time. This is the complete opposite to classic project management.<p>SAP caters to non-tech savvy businesses people striving for control, which is something they think is achieved through “one system”. I personally call it the “one system trap”.<p>In the end what matters is data, and that data do not have to reside in one database. In fact, it’s better for everyone if it doesn’t - this is what ELT is for.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gartner.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;information-technology&#x2F;glossary&#x2F;postmodern-erp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gartner.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;information-technology&#x2F;glossary&#x2F;p...</a>

I&#x27;m glad I&#x27;m seeing some SAP post on HN frontpage. Why?<p>When my sister started to working at SAP working on documentation, I had to look at some of those. I noticed something like SAPUI5 and thought: hey, this looks pretty modern and nice and something that competes with Microsoft offerings! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sapui5.hana.ondemand.com&#x2F;#&#x2F;topic&#x2F;8b49fc198bf04b2d9800fc37fecbb218" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sapui5.hana.ondemand.com&#x2F;#&#x2F;topic&#x2F;8b49fc198bf04b2d980...</a><p>Then I see them documenting&#x2F;pushing people in CI&#x2F;CD direction (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.sap.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;BTP&#x2F;65de2977205c403bbc107264b8eccf4b&#x2F;fe74df55b0f54e99bf6e13a3b53e1db0.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.sap.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;BTP&#x2F;65de2977205c403bbc107264b8eccf...</a>) involving Docker, Kubernetes, github and stuff like that. Pretty modern.<p>I went onto HN to learn how people feel about the development tools they provide and found... nothing. I was like: what? How can they have slick documentation, processes, tools, frameworks, cloud offerings, database (SAP HANA?). So basically I thought - so much competitiveness for Microsoft there. How come HNers don&#x27;t mention this? What are the people working with this tech? Germans mostly or what? But navigating their documentation, tutorials feels something that could be evaluated as a modern development platform.

You can copy off my homework, but just this once<p>1) They do Enterprise Resources Planning.<p>2) Because ERP is immensely complicated, and encompasses features that would be useful for almost anyone coordinating any organization, and ERP systems are really hard to change, so they have acquired a user base with lots of zeroes and a thick moat to keep them in.

Whenever I read about SAP (which I hate, so don&#x27;t mistake this for an objective take) it reminds me of the discussion about self-hosting your email: &quot;Oh, no, it&#x27;s too complicated, you are better off paying someone else to do it for you&quot;. The problem being, I host my own email and it works <i>fine</i>, which makes me suspicious of the common takes about ERP too.<p>Now, I get it, once you have to deal with taxes and payroll in multiple countries it gets messy, but why wouldn&#x27;t you consider that a core part of your business worth investing into? You may not be paying with accountant salaries, but you are still paying with yearly contracts you can never get away from and with a horrible user experience for every employee that has to interact with it (oh, P69, how much I hate you).<p>Some people dream of being a superhero. I dream of being one day big enough to have an SAP salesman come to me so I can tell them &quot;no&quot;.

ERP industry is so hard(painful) that I wouldnt want to work in it unless they paid top of the top<p>Good luck competing in that industry<p>&gt; 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>Gotta be fun :)

In effect, SAP is like a franchise system for running certain industries.<p>SAP sells you a software system that includes ready-made workflows and battle-tested instruction manuals. Plus they can synchronize your purchasing and sales departments with everyone else that also uses their software. So if you want to start a small company working with the big car manufacturers, you buy SAP and suddenly you can send quotes in precisely the format that VW expects, because you and VW now both use the SAP specification. In that regard, signing up for SAP is quite similar to signing up to be a Subways location.

SAP plays the long game. Friend of mine worked in Uganda to introduce a mobile coffee-farmers-(over-lots-in-between-steps)-national-(to-international)-markets app.<p>the goal was to create some transparency for the producers and to fight coffee-loss (every step taking a bit coffee away and sells it otherwise).<p>the project was a huge success. With fast adoption and immidiate benefit for the farmers and village collection centers.<p>the software behind it is SAP! and they do not even charge for it, they sponsor it - together with Deutsche Entwicklungszusammenarbeit.<p>Why?<p>Even though Uganda is not yet a profitable market for SAP.<p>And not in 10 years. And not in 20 years.<p>In 30 they might.

&gt; <i>ERP isn’t cheap. A large multinational company may spend $100 million to $500 million in total on implementation: $30 million in software license fees, $200 million in consulting fees, millions for hardware, and millions more to train managers and employees. A full implementation takes four to six years. A CEO of a large chemical firm was quoted as saying, &quot;competitive advantage in this industry might just come from doing the best and cheapest job at implementing SAP.”</i><p>At these kinds of numbers, I&#x27;ve got to ask a genuine question here: what&#x27;s the benefit of using SAP as opposed to rolling your own solution?<p>From reading some of the other comments here, it sounds like getting your business to integrate with SAP involves trying to fit a lot of square pegs in round holes and doesn&#x27;t always succeed in the end anyways.<p>At these levels of stratospheric costs, it seems like it would often be cheaper and less risky to simply use your standard software stack of choice and build a custom web app over a database that mirrors your existing business processes perfectly, and then transform&#x2F;integrate those processes over time as needed for increased efficiency.

Former SAP employee here. The ERP market is ridiculously complex. Legislation, TAX, complex organisational structures and a million things to get wrong. One of SAPs hidden superpowers in my opinion was and probably still is ABAP and the GUI Builder. The combination of the two enabled consultants to create dynamic internal applications with little effort smoothly integrated into the whole system. So they were doing low-code way before it was a thing in our industry. As you can see the blog authors (retool) try to achieve something similar 40 years later and it is still a challenge.

All of these <i>kinds</i> of systems are the same, from financial systems, like SAP and Oracle, to things engineering systems, like Teamworks and Integrity&#x2F;Windchill. (I&#x27;ve worked on Oracle and SDRC.) Their size makes them impervious to change, and their complexity leads to ridiculous workflows.<p>I&#x27;ve made a living writing custom software for engineering, embedded with engineers, that fixes problems with these monstrous systems, and which IT could never implement in 100 years.<p>So, yes, companies with CIO&#x27;s who want to make a name for themselves (and probably collect a kickback in the process): PLEASE continue to implement these hundred-million dollar IT systems. You MAKE a lot of extra work in the process, guaranteeing job security for everyone who has to use them, and work around them.<p>You&#x27;d <i>think</i> that Fortune 100 companies would put people into positions like the CIO or CTO who are sharp enough to understand how this REALLY works out, but I guess those kinds of people aren&#x27;t politically savvy enough to reach that position.

I was a parts department manager in the early 00&#x27;s when Mercedes USA decided to switch all their systems over to SAP. It was an absolute nightmare for 6 months. The entire UX (at that time) was unfathomable. Even our regional representative couldn&#x27;t figure out how to use the software when he was trying to train us.<p>At the end of that year, Mercedes hosted a &quot;we&#x27;re sorry&quot; conference in San Diego and paid for all parts and service managers across the nation to travel and drink at the open bars for a week. I guess that part was okay.

Curious: does SAP have modules for illegal activities, both dealing with it e.g, official bribes, internal corruption, employee theft, cyber ransoms etc, and for actual illegal stuff like money laundering, or for &quot;off the books accounting&quot;, special operations etc.

I don&#x27;t know what SAP is and I don&#x27;t really care.<p>What I do remember is that it seems to be down a lot. I started working in 1997 and about twice a week we would get emails from IT saying &quot;SAP is down&quot; and then a few hours later &quot;SAP is back up&quot;<p>After a few months of this spam I set up an email filter.<p>I was on the engineering side. I still don&#x27;t know what SAP is and I&#x27;ve never needed to learn but it doesn&#x27;t seem like a great product for how unreliable it seemed to be.

When software becomes popular enough, it begins to have its own gravity, and rather than only being shaped by its users&#x27; needs, it starts to shape its users&#x27; needs.<p>Let&#x27;s say there is some common business task that needs to be done. Maybe it&#x27;s a legal filing with the local government, or tracking how many people at the company are using a particular piece of software for licensing purposes, or records-keeping for equal opportunity employment questionnaire responses. There are many ways to accomplish each of these goals, but most people will be familiar with the SAP way. The laws on the books will be written by people who have used SAP before, and public comments on the law will be made by people who have used SAP before. Ancillary tools to do niche features that SAP doesn&#x27;t cover will work best if you&#x27;ve adopted the SAP way.<p>And so, SAP becomes enshrined into the law and society in a way that&#x27;s impossible to duplicate. Even if you mimicked SAP&#x27;s features 1:1, there would still be obscure quirks and bugs that you didn&#x27;t capture but are nonetheless somehow beneficial to users&#x27; workflow, because those quirks and bugs have been imprinted onto the standard business practices in our world.

I&#x27;ve worked as SAP consultant and Developer for around 10 years. Past couple of years Ive moved to Microsoft ERP&#x27;s and enjoy them better since theres more SMB&#x27;s using Microsoft products which makes work more variable.<p>But I&#x27;ve written my thoughts about what ERP is:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.integrated.ee&#x2F;posts&#x2F;the-erp-software&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.integrated.ee&#x2F;posts&#x2F;the-erp-software&#x2F;</a>

(2020) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22244750" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22244750</a>

I worked on a SAP project for a Legal Entity Creation&#x2F;Staff Migration in the HR piece.<p>Technology wise, it&#x27;s weird. It reminds me a bit of Lotus Notes, in that everything including the screen layouts are stored in the database.

for anyone wondering, erpnext.com is a good &quot;alternative&quot; and it is very active on github with lots of people working on it each and every day.<p>they have hosted plans as well as allowing users to selfhost and only pay for &quot;support and customization&quot; for anyone needing which works out pretty well for many....<p>SAP is well and good but you have good alternatives

My very first job when I was 16 was helping Canada Post move data from their old VAX mainframe system into SAP. This was over 21 years ago. The answer to the second part of the title question is: because it is now so deeply entrenched in huge corporate infrastructure.

Aaah yes, SAP, also often called Satan&#x27;s Accounting Package by the people who are forced to use it.<p>I&#x27;ve had the pleasure(?) of doing some elearning work for some clients that used SAP... I feel sorry for anyone who has to interact with their software on a daily basis.

A vendor lock-in nightmare. Once you are in it would financially destroy you to get out in most cases.

SAP software is the Jira for non-IT software. A slow corporate mess nobody wants to log in to until your boss complains you haven&#x27;t fill out the SAP thing, so you sigh and try to accept the fact, go in there and try to get it done before life becomes totally dark and unbearable.<p>Most are only exposed to SAP software for time allocations, travel arrangements and expense management, but I imagine there&#x27;s some poor souls in the account department who have to spend a large part of their day suffering it. It&#x27;s something you probably won&#x27;t encounter in small companies, but seems inevitable in large companies and organisations at least in Europe.

SAP is the German&#x27;s revenge on the world for losing WW2... :P

Is that as in &quot;Why is it worth <i>only</i> $163B?&quot;

&quot;Everyone&quot; is on SAP or Oracle. And yet...<p>They send you PDF invoices with no consistent formatting.<p>There&#x27;s never a decent way to get an electronic invoice.<p>Any electronic files you do get, such as lists of invoices, are in a completely different format from all the others.<p>There&#x27;s no way to place an electronic order without using their website (manually or by scraping)<p>At best, stuff comes by email. Often, you get emails that say you can go to the website to manually download the PDF.

My primary datapoint on SAP is that Google has a class of high memory instances designed for SAP: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;compute&#x2F;docs&#x2F;memory-optimized-machines#m2_machine_types" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;compute&#x2F;docs&#x2F;memory-optimized-machi...</a><p>The come in ~6TB and ~12TB.<p>Somehow, that tells so much about SAP and the institutions that depend on it.

Just wanted to say there are Opensource alternatives to SAP that are used by organizations with large velocity not just in transactions but also in business process changes. For example, Zerodha one of the leading stock brokers in India seems to be using ERPNext. This is just from advertising data, but their CTO is frequently on HN and could probably provide more details.

My father worked for a company that had its own in-house system and migrated to SAP as their CTO made them. Everyone views it as vastly inferior as apparently SAP doesn&#x27;t do anything out of the box and requires a zillion customs to do anything. At the end of the day you get locked into a very expensive system that has to replicate everything you were doing before.

SAP, Oracle, Salesforce. They all have absolutely awful UX. They dominated their spaces because they bought tons of companies and bolted crap onto their main offering. Then they have the snakiest and most aggressive sales teams. They are just AWFUL and it’s a real shame that no startups have been able to challenge their dominance.

I think the mistake with SAP, as with that other article about a modelling pyramid at Ikea, is assuming that it is possible to create one system to rule them all without it being extremely inefficient and expensive.<p>It mirrors a dysfunctional business run on command-and-control rather than, like AWS, you have a large set of loosely affiliated teams and although you risk some duplication, it makes for much more agile work.<p>Imagine you have a supplier who supplies &quot;products&quot; but your system calls them &quot;items&quot;, SAP would say that you have to standardise the nomenclature. Agile says, let them call them whatever works for them and lets build small systems with just the interfaces we need.<p>Sure, the senior management don&#x27;t get their dashboards but it is still possible to get metrics from disparate systems and form pretty basic cashflow and inventory reports.

My SAP experience in a nutshell (working for two large organization who has deeply entrenched SAP software)<p>1. It is extremely challenging to integrate with. Your basic option is to overhaul your existing software to at least match the available integration options.<p>2. It requires constant care. SAP Expert Consultants hired by the companies initially for two years, which was supposed to be the timeline when SAP would have been fully adopted (and turned over), still works as the complexity and evolution of updating the software itself is tantamount to a new system adoption.<p>3. Users (Majority I would say) hate it. The only reason they live up with it is because someone higher up the decision and authority chain imposed the software after being sold to the premise that it is a game changer to the organization.

Perhaps one problem is the term “ERP” software. Its an opaque and to some degree confusing description. Consider instead that we are simply talking about the business software key to an endeavor.<p>Many of those systems might be somewhat standard, covering account receivables, payables, inventory, sales, production, planning, supply chains, payroll&#x2F;hr, relationship management and general accounting. Many may be versions of these customized to a specific industry or business. Others are unique and require a customizable platform to implement a custom system.<p>SAP offers such software that scales to the worlds largest corporations and organizations. How well it does that is of course contentious. That reflects its market worth.

I work in the SAP industry as a consultant, but I hardly ever work directly with SAP. In fact, I work in a dept. whose primary purpose is to do all the non-SAP work, so 99% of the time I&#x27;m working with your typical modern stack(that I get to pick myself, usually), like nodejs&#x2F;graphql&#x2F;typescript, etc.<p>I do however often work adjacent to SAP or have to integrate with it, and since I&#x27;ve been at this for a few years now, I&#x27;ve gotten to try a bunch of their stuff.<p>SAP&#x27;s biggest problem is honestly just that they are absolutely terrible engineers, while they suffer from the worst Not Invented Here syndrome I&#x27;ve ever seen. They nearly always want to build their own thing instead of using something that already exists.<p>Do you want to build web applications that interact with SAP systems? Well, SAP uses OData almost exclusively for all of its backend stuff, and practically no one else uses it. This means all developer tooling, like libraries and such, are almost non-existent. So what do you do? You use SAP&#x27;s UI5.. which is easily the worst-made UI library out there that anyone has ever built. It&#x27;s technical debt personified.<p>No one knows UI5 except people who work in this business, so companies are forced to hire consultancies like mine, because no normal web developer has ever worked with it(nor would they want to look at it in their spare time). I can scarcely begin to imagine how many man-hours SAP has wasted on building out this gigantic turd, or how many hours they could have saved by going with, say, React, and instead building libraries and tooling around that.<p>This sort of thing permeates everything SAP does. Everything they do is some of the worst stuff I&#x27;ve ever seen.<p>But hey, it pays great money, and the company I work for has great benefits and lots of freedom. All other things equal, I don&#x27;t think there are many tech companies out there that could offer me a more rewarding job. But that doesn&#x27;t change the fact that observing SAP from close-up is like watching an on-going technical trainwreck that never ends.

&gt; <i>Data processing – an outdated term whose lasting legacy is Automatic Data Processing, Inc’s name – is what we’d call IT today.</i><p>Ha!<p>&quot;This International Standard does not specify — the mechanism by which C programs are transformed for use by a data-processing system;&quot; [ISO C, every version]

SAP is successful because they&#x27;ve spent over 50 years learning how businesses work and somewhat successfully implemented reasonably configurable processes within their software. You need to handle MRP? Check. Multi-country payroll with complete integration to finance? Check. Even things as esoteric as downstream oil production (think ARAMCO). Check.<p>I&#x27;m not sure why in the early days they were more succesful than the competitors (JD Edwards, BAAN, etc) - all of the others were doing something similar but SAP overtook them all. Perhaps it was because the system was very flexible - if you needed to enhance the SAP-delivered functionality or build your own to integrated with SAP, they delivered tooling to do so (very crude in the early days, a lot better now).<p>Related to this is that almost all application souce is available to customers (not open source, but available to view and modify if required). For those who&#x27;ve never worked with SAP, the majority of the application code in their on-premise systems is written in a proprietary COBOL-like 4GL called ABAP. One of SAP&#x27;s key differentiators in the early years was that customers had access to all of this code and, with the required access, could extend&#x2F;modify as needed. A masterstroke IMHO.<p>Source: I&#x27;ve worked as an SAP consultant for 20+ years (including a fair number of those working for SAP) and I&#x27;m no fan of any of their products. For the number of extremely intelligent people who work there (and I mean that sincerely - a lot of their employees are &#x2F;extremely&#x2F; smart and forward thinking), the code quality and quality control of their products is abysmal. It&#x27;s like the majority of the code is written by people who did a training course last week and they &#x2F;love&#x2F; overengineering things, reinventing the wheel or backing the wrong horse. SAP went all in on Silverlight at one point and these days they love OData, which NO-ONE really uses. It also took them years and years to officially support a browser other than IE.<p>At times they have done some pretty forward-thinking things though. In the late 80s they adopted three-tier before most (R&#x2F;3, the first three-tier release came out in 1992) and they cleverly have a very portable application. Back in the days of the Unix wars SAP ran on pretty much every OS and all the major databases (heck, Microsoft had to convince them to port to NT and SQL Server, primarily so that Microsoft could run SAP on NT in their own back office).<p>Rambling a bit here but SAP still pays my bills (and fairly well at that), but I&#x27;m no fan and I&#x27;m always looking for a way out. Unfortunately, for me the situation is like many SAP customers - once you&#x27;ve checked in, it&#x27;s hard to leave (apologies to The Eagles).

ERP lockin is enormous.<p>Most companies stick with a single ERP provider for 20-30 years. And 80% of attempts to swap in one ERP for another fail. Usually after customers waste millions of dollars and years of engineering work.<p>The underlying complexity of the physical processes managed by ERP is enormous. ERP systems are digital models of a company&#x27;s physical operations.<p>Platform lockin and platform innovation are inversely proportional. Companies like SAP in ERP, and Epic in EHR, simply don&#x27;t have to innovate to make lots of money.<p>That&#x27;s one reason why technological change in those industries is so slow.

I remember when the company I worked for, switched to SAP. It was a <i>huge</i> pain, and a lot of folks lost their jobs, or had their duties drastically changed.<p>In our case, it was, basically a &quot;success.&quot; I don&#x27;t think that our customers saw too much of a change. I have heard nightmare stories of organizations, basically grinding to a halt, for months (I think HP lost about $400M when they switched).<p>It did result in the company hiring a bunch of programmers. Most were women, and they drove <i>nice</i> cars.

What could replace SAP is maybe a different paradigm of software dev.<p>Where it&#x27;s truly east to store data, create business units and UI interfaces and pro &#x27;implementers&#x27; can do it quickly.<p>Then you have a company automated system for &#x27;everything&#x27; that can just replace a lot of things like SAP, Salesforce.<p>Way in the future though.<p>It&#x27;ll start small, in one area, and just make it&#x27;s way to others.<p>Also, it will be it&#x27;s own giant mess as &#x27;implementers&#x27; screw things up and requirements from management change weekly.

&gt; the automation of white collar work (often via the computer!) began in the 1960s.<p>The Lyons Electronic Office would beg to disagree. <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><p>The first business application to be run on LEO was Bakery Valuations, which computed the costs of ingredients used in bread and cakes [and] LEO took over Bakery Valuations calculations completely on 29–30 November 1951

Excellent content strategy by Retool team to write about SAP. Retool is for every organisation who do not think of SAP but get the fast internal tools ready to be deployed.

Former SAP ABAP developer here with 11 years of experience in Retail&#x2F;FICO&#x2F;MM&#x2F;HR&#x2F;CRM&#x2F;POSDM.<p>The software is rather shit esp the old HR and MM stuff ported over from R3 but there is a HUGE ecosystem around it of consultants and consulting companies - nobody is going to get fired for choosing SAP.<p>It is a huge money hole - take any proposed budget and multiply it by 3.<p>But heck it transaction flow works and all the modules tie in with each other and the accountants are very happy.

I led the project that replaced SAP at Tesla in 2012 (as an internal IT employee). Explaining that in detail warrants a full article, book, or movie, but in summary the project was successful, took 13 months start to finish, and took a few years off my life.<p>Prior to that I was an ERP technical consultant. I&#x27;ve had the opportunity to work with many ERP systems at a deep technical level, on both sides of an implementation: the old system a company was moving off of, and the new system I was implementing.<p>I&#x27;m neither an advocate for, nor detractor of, any particular ERP system. Each offering has things it does well, and each has pain points. Unfortunately a lot of people cargo-cult their particular system of choice and lose objectivity. Software is simply a tool and is far less important than the implementation and execution.<p><i>A few SAP aspects that stood out to me from a technical perspective:</i><p><pre><code> 1. You are virtually guaranteed to have an existing capability available for any arbitrary business process need 2. The system architecture facilitates efficient data processing. Tables, forms, and reports tend to be narrow slices of an overall business process, and thus can reduce contention and concurrency problems. Batch jobs are utilized for background processing. 3. The user interface is lightweight and very performant over remote connections (e.g. VPN). Similar to older green-screen systems, data entry can be very fast for experienced users and does not rely on the mouse. 4. The API options for enterprise application integration are good </code></pre> <i>A few SAP pain points I observed:</i><p><pre><code> 1. The surface area and complexity to match the capability is crushing. Tesla&#x27;s relatively vanilla SAP environment had 10,000+ reports and T-Codes in it, of which I would guess less than 1% were actively in use. 2. Optimizing the architecture for scalability came at the expense of the user experience. One would often need to perform several tasks in order to answer a single need. For example, I would observe users exporting several reports, each of which provided a narrow slice of the information, and then combine the dumps in Excel to get the answer they sought. </code></pre> * For ERPs and complex systems in general:*<p><pre><code> 1. It is very difficult to find subject matter experts who can deeply understand what a complex system offers out of the box, and successfully select the optimal capabilities and implement them for business processes. Or, in the case of true functional gaps, can modify and extend the system without creating a mess. 2. It is vital that a company retains the people who have the institutional history of a system and its modifications. Many end up with a revolving door of consultants, each of whom may be an expert in the vanilla product but has no company-specific context. 3. Clarity and completeness are at odds with one another. As you attempt to drive a system or specification toward completeness, clarity and understandability will diminish. 4. The longer an ERP system has been around, the more likely it will accumulate legacy and historical impediments. If a product aspect is working and widely deployed it tends not to be changed or updated to modern patterns or technology. An example in SAP is the cluster table concept, which as I recall from the lore some years ago was a workaround because SAP needed more columns per table than Oracle allowed. Cluster tables do not spark joy in data migration and egress when ABAP is not a feasible option. 5. Also for long-lived ERP systems, from the user experience standpoint, as these systems incrementally evolve over time the standardization and consistency of behavior across modules and application areas tends to fade or diverge. AS I recall with SAP for example, some transaction forms and reports can export to Excel, while many others do not: the feature was not or could not be added as part of the architectural core but was instead bolted on later to limited areas. A young ERP typically builds this in as standard core feature which is available on all forms in the product.</code></pre>

Back in school (probably the year 2000), I did an internship at our local (German) utilities company. They used SAP. Everyone told me how bad it is, how much it sucks, etc. I read comments like here, full of stories of how bad it is and how much worse it makes things.<p>And yet. They thrive and grow. I always leave with the impression that it really does do things well after all, just not in obvious ways.

SAP, and many competing products from companies such as Oracle, are frameworks and programming languages, although not very good ones, sold to customers as if they were applications. You need just as many people to &quot;customize&quot; (actually &#x27;program&#x27;) after you convert to SAP, as they needed before, but now they have the illusion of using a standard application.

my tidbit of the SAP world (I now work for a company building connectors to these ERP).<p>I had a upgrade process meeting for SAP and I invited my usual SAP engineers.<p>I had a polite decline from one of my favorites so I dropped by her desk to ask her why she wouldn&#x27;t come.<p>&quot;I work on SAP 7, not SAP 8. I&#x27;m going to be retired in 2 years by the time this project kicks off and dead by the time it&#x27;s implemented&quot;

Anekdote:<p>My last name is Sap ( translated to Juice from Dutch).<p>Recruiters don&#x27;t get it. So my linkedin profile says: i wish my last name was DotNet instead of Sap :p

Oh yeah I remember when they brought SAP in at my old work and no-one knew how to search for parts anymore. They distributed an Excel spreadsheet exported from the old system along with the SAP part number so we could find things.<p>Absolute joke of a UX&#x2F;UI. And don&#x27;t tell me it can&#x27;t be done better. The dated, out of support one we had prior had a better UI.

There’s a really great novel called Red Plenty by Francis Spufford which is set in the USSR of the 1960s. The protagonists are mathematicians and economists who build a computerized planning system, not so different from SAP, to support of Kruschev’s goal of fully automating planning and manufacturing by 1980. Beautiful prose, too.

All this negativity about SAP, but why do companies invest in it then? A quick search on google shows no happy users.

Interestingly, SAP is used by the metal health services&#x2F;psychology of my local District Health Board. It gets a hilariously bad rap for its usability, but I presume it gets the job done well because they&#x27;re still using it!<p>It does, notably, have an integration problem because the rest of the DHB services don&#x27;t use it.

As an outside company without a relationship with SAP, what&#x27;s the best way to build integrations with it? What&#x27;s the path? How do we get access to sandbox environments, and will it cost money? I figured I&#x27;d selfishly ask while this is number one on HN and all the SAP gurus are here!

&gt; What&#x27;s SAP<p>Nothin&#x27; much, how bout you?

&quot;Business went well: SAP ended their first year with DM620,000 in revenue, a little over $1M in today’s dollars.&quot;<p>This doesn&#x27;t seem realistic if they mean inflation adjusted; do they mean using today&#x27;s exchange rate? Or are both numbers inflation adjusted?

They also own Sybase.<p>(For those who don’t know Sybase supports an SQL implementation which is seemingly used nowhere except sales and trading for Wall Street banks, who largely adopted it in the 90’s and have been slow to move off. MS SQL Server was originally a port of Sybase.)

If you&#x27;re not a billion-dollar, multi-national corporation, you&#x27;re better off using an ERP system targeted to your specific industry.<p>You&#x27;ll save tens of million on implementation, you&#x27;ll get better support, your users won&#x27;t want to kill themselves...

The problem I have with SAP, as someone who works in a service desk environment, is that it seems universally slow to migrate&#x2F;replicate to user’s devices once they’ve had it allocated. I don’t know why this is, but it’s a pattern I’ve noticed.

SAP is bizarre. It&#x27;s like the Objects Anywhere obsession in the late-80s carried on, and here you go.<p>The rest of the world went one way, and SAP another, and believers are obsessed with it. Despite every other thing they do going an entirely different direction.

SAP is like nicotine. It doesn&#x27;t give you anything back, you start it because it looks like all of your friends are doing it. It stinks like hell, but you get used to it. And once you become a user, it is fucking hard to leave it.

Now do &quot;robotic automation&quot; which unfortunately has nothing to do with robots

Concur is definitely the most obnoxious thing I&#x27;ve had the misfortune to have to fuck with.<p>At least my company auto books the flights out of their slush funds as opposed to me needing to buy it and get reimbursed :puking_emoji:

I reviewed the article, people pay for SAP? And ... &quot;Developers can create their own database tables using the SAP interface.&quot; - everything is fine though because users can create their own forms!

Hmmm, worst thing ever used. Glad it&#x27;s getting retired in our organization.

Earlier discussion (2020, 600 comments): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22244750" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22244750</a>

Django started as a quasi-ERP for simple document publishing business (created by WaPo).<p>I think there is great potential for modern ERP frameworks.

My opinion is that SAP is worth so much because of lock-in...that&#x27;s billions of dollars of prisoners...

Back office is sticky and expensive to replace. Keep your customers happy and you basically have an annuity.

SAP is not a good alternative to Odoo.

Why did the author’s name disappeared from the article and instead now it just says “Retool Team”?

Bookmarked the article for later but isn&#x27;t SAP like just a more powerful version of Workday?

This thread is a real horror story.

One of my many mistakes: SAP wanted to buy our startup and we didn&#x27;t sell.

Just looking through the comments made me almost avoid adding to the hatred of SAP but I don&#x27;t know ... SAP is special to those of us who have had to deal with it.<p>I worked at a global multi-national telecom that used an ancient version of the software. You <i>suffered</i> with it. I&#x27;m convinced -- because we were always cash strapped (having been through bankruptcy and back) that part of the motivation for keeping it was that it made doing expense reports <i>so difficult</i> that many abandoned them.<p>SAP <i>looked</i> cool at the time[0]. The web UI had an appearance of a web app and attempted to behave like one. It had many flaws, but they all went unnoticed because of one <i>massive</i> flaw -- it failed to handle the Back button in the browser ... and the UI often put you in a state that &quot;instinct&quot; made you want to click it. When you <i>did</i> click the back button, the web app would see <i>two</i> of you. As this was not an allowed state for a user, the new &quot;you&quot; couldn&#x27;t access the system until the old &quot;you&quot; timed out ... an hour later. This meant a sufficiently complex expense report could take two days to complete since, on average, hitting the back button (by accident) twice per line wasn&#x27;t unusual. So if it resulted in less than $40 coming back, it often wasn&#x27;t worth the effort to do the expense report.<p>My entire experience with SAP was limited to integration with downstream (simple) internal applications and expense reports. Others <i>spent all day</i> within it. It was bad enough to warrant a special launch page that popped the thing up in a window that lacked the back button[1] but that was a pretty inadequate solution.<p>The <i>worst</i> part was hiring SAP developers. Having not looked at the product since the mid-00s (and being far from huge-company-land), I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s still the case, but I suspect so -- SAP was basically a custom setup everywhere it existed. It had the same graphics, similar UI, but requires substantial development to tie everything into it and tie it into everything else. I ended up participating in the interview when the company &quot;got serious&quot; and decided to put some money toward hiring a solid SAP developer&#x2F;lead to get everything upgraded and solve some of the worst problems we had. We brought on a guy and paid him 25K more than the highest paid developer on staff[2]. He, like the previous four (under-paid) employees, lasted about three months before he left for substantially <i>more</i> money. We tried &quot;paying some third party&quot;, too. The problem there was similar -- whomever was contracted to us was either incapable of doing the work or didn&#x27;t last long enough to get past initial planning.<p>The end result was SAP existed in our organization at the same version it was when it was setup, initially, until we got rid of it ten years later when we merged with a competitor. The competitor ran Oracle for ERP and had a team of people to manage&#x2F;develop&#x2F;maintain it. Personally, I&#x27;m not an Oracle fan, but I wanted to buy Larry Ellison a beer.<p>[0] This was the mid 00s.<p>[1] This idea, I think, was tried -- IIRC, the more frequent case was accidentally running into the Backspace key on a non-text field and having the browser hot-key back which isn&#x27;t solved by taking the buttons away.<p>[2] This was saying a lot considering we had software actively developed in C++ that managed a pretty massive audio-conferencing service (and set of related bridges&#x2F;hardware). I met with several on that team -- they were geniuses. The &quot;SAP Guy&quot; had to know Java and SAP. I interviewed him. I wasn&#x27;t impressed.

SAP is a peddler of trash software and obscene contracts to support it. It has been around for decades, making routine business tasks nearly (or sometimes literally) impossible to execute.<p>Even better is that it&#x27;s written in some bullshit language that nobody else uses.

SAP is a mystery to me. Customers hate it with the passion of a burning sun. Yet they don&#x27;t switch. Why? Is what they are doing so hard no competitor has managed to dethrone them? It&#x27;s the only company I know that is universally hated by their customers.

Anyone remember the SAP &#x2F; Intel joint venture called Pandesic?

SAP is a piece of shit that nobody should implement.

nitpick: $100B (now 2022), not $163B<p>Though the drop is not SAP specific, but broad based (tech stocks carnage, ukraine war effects).

Interesting! But too many !!!

Check out www.recurrency.com

we need open book peer-to-peer accounting of resources: mikorizal.org

[2020]

I have worked in places where they didn&#x27;t have a real ERP, and things were a mess. Hard to get anything done, hard to understand, a decent amount of time wasted.<p>Then I worked places with SAP. And if they were lucky and just &quot;did things the SAP way&quot;, the result was easy to understand, actually worked, and saved time.<p>Can you do that without SAP? Of course. Can a SAP system also suck? Of course. I have no argument to make here, other than it&#x27;s sometimes good and sometimes not. If I had to compare it to anything it&#x27;d be IBM.

I came across SAP in my finals at the University, it&#x27;s such a huge company with great use cases.