A gf’s company is converting to SAP, from Germany AFAIK and has heard different opinions about it.
Any experience, opinions?
I have two friends who have worked with it at two separate companies. Both say the same thing: It is fine, if your business does business the was SAP is designed, but if it does not, you are in deep doo-doo. Both have said that it does not customize easily and that once it is customized, the next upgrade will force you to start again. Both say that it is costly to maintain, once you customize and both say that they were better off with “home-grown” applications.
From a developer’s standpoint, that last point may be valid, but may also be a natural tendancy that many developers have towards thinking that they can do it better.
All depends on the size of your business.
Over 1billion, multiple countries, manufacturing facilities, multiple currencies, multiple brands/product lines, etc., probably no better option.
But smaller or less complex companies may find other packages that are easier to implement and maintain.
As for “home grown” software, coming from a long time enterprise system and “home grown” software designer/developer, you simply can’t keep up with the pace of change in business and technology that the software companies can. You can create something that hits a sweet spot for a short while, but the packages keep up to date with changes/trends in business and technology that you simply can’t match economically.
It depends on how she’ll be affected by it. If she is going to be a SAP support person, she can plan on a lot of sleepless nights. An end-user? Probably not a big deal.
One is Tyco international. They are huge. This is their second attempt to implement, the first being an overwhelming failure.
And the developer says that since they now have to work harder to keep up with the business changes, because they have to shoe-horn their business style into SAP’s.
<SHRUG> I dunno, I have not worked with it and likely never will. I only report what my friends have told me.
Amen. Mr. S used it at his last “real job,” for which SAP was most definitely NOT designed, and he thought it sucked giant hairy donkey balls.* It gave him horrible headaches every damn day. Not having to deal with SAP anymore was one of the reasons he was GLAD to be downsized.
*I asked him to approve this characterization, and he said it was actually too kind. He says the hideousness of SAP cannot be explained; it must, sadly, be experienced.
An absolute catastrophe at my company, and resulted in many people losing their jobs and the company taking a gigantic loss.
Whether that’s because of SAP or our IT people, I don’t know for sure.
We have used it at my company for the past year. It is not very intuitive, the reporting is a bit of a nightmare, and it is very rigid / inflexible in many ways. In other ways it is almost TOO flexible - there can be a lot of different ways to search for example, but none of them are efficient.
Blah.
SAP SD support, trainer and key user here.
In short: It sucks.
Tremendusly expensive, not designed for small firms, but we were forced to use it anyway. I got 20+ users under me and customizing is outsourced by firm who seriusly lacks resources. Almost every user hates it, but I kind of getting to like it.
SAP workflow admin and 2nd/3rd level supporter of the HR and financial areas.
It’s very expensive and hard to train your people up on. The training I went on (mostly workflow) was very generic and not very helpful to me. If you don’t have helpful consultants who will generously share their experience it can all go very wrong once they leave.
It’s not intuitive at all. Users find it confusing to use. I spent a lot of time remoted into peoples machines walking them through very confusing processes.
From an IT perspective it’s radically changed the Dept. Initially it was thought that some people could just add SAP into their daily tasks. Wrong. We now have a team of 6 people basically working full time on SAP support and maintenance.
Keeping your staff is harder as well as SAP knowledge and experience is a valuable skill so when someone gets to a certain level they generally find a better paying job. We’ve had terrible trouble keeping a BASIS person on staff. In fact I may be helping out with that in the future.
SAP developer here,
it’s the software of choice for large firms. It works great at the company I work for, but we have several hundred users.
I’m an erstwhile SAP project guy. What kind of development do you do?
FWIW, it’s been fairly successful in places where I had put it in. I like to think we did a decent mix of using SAP’s strengths and adding customizations that our businesses needed. And core SAP can often do a lot more than what a lot of people think or know. The trick is often just finding how to do that thing and accepting that it will be 80-90% of what the users want but that the benefits of a standard systerm where, overall, worth the heartache (not sure that’s true for every organization, depends on where they are to start).
Also, we had an extremely rigorous process for training, standardizing data, etc. And all of our “consulting” was done inhouse, eg, we didn’t hire consultants but built them up from the inside with existing business knowledge.
Mainly ABAP Shibboleth, but they like us to brnch out here, so that includes
reports, user exits, scripts, batch entry jobs, dialogue programming, (small)project management, and a bit of config here and there. whatever needs doing really. latest thing has been an upgrade to version 4.7. Went live yesterday
I currently work for a big company whose name is most commonly associated with high-quality plumbing, but which makes a LOT of other stuff. We use SAP, and my current job is actually to help a company we bought switch over to SAP. IMO, if you’re a corporate behemoth that needs to keep track of the information on tens of thousands of parts in multiple plants, it’s indispensable. If you’re not a corporate behemoth, stay away!