My company (a huge publishing conglomerate of which we are one imprint) is in the midst of switching all operations to SAP. While I am one of the few people who are not directly impacted and will not have to use it, I have been watching everyone around me struggling, swearing, and despairing. They say it’s hard to remember, counterintuitive, confusing, and conducive to error, and makes getting the information they need more difficult.
We certainly needed to switch to something, since our old system consisted of a bunch of data bases that couldn’t talk to each other, but I can’t help wondering if this is really the solution. Management assures us that once we get used to it we’ll wish we had switched long ago. My colleagues swear they’ll always hate it.
Has anyone here worked for a company that switched to SAP? I gather it’s fairly common. I’d be particularly interested in hearing about people who had good experiences with it. Although it’s always fun to be able say I was right and management was wrong, I do work here, and I’d like to feel confident that my company will continue to function.
I live in a state whose government is still in the process of switching to SAP. They have had TONS of trouble but from what I know that is due more to politics and project management than to the software itself. I hear/read that SAP should share some of the blame but at least 75% of the problems are not related to SAP but rather management decisions.
SAP R/3 is superb if properly implemented, properly configured and properly used – if you’re only using one or two modules, why bother? It’s also starting to get a little long in the tooth – SAP are pushing some version called “mysap.com” as well.
Mr. S worked for a printing company that implemented SAP. Everyone HATED it. Not having to deal with SAP anymore was one of the reasons he was happy to have been downsized.
I worked on a SAP implementation at a major Govt. agency. It was/is poorly managed and the implementation schedule was so ambitious that was nigh on impossible to do on time and under budget. I told them so (I’m a project scheduler) and they laid me off. I was a subcontractor and the bearer of bad news, so there you go. Anyway, the user community is openly hostile to the implementation, and the myriad contractors working on the implementation are very competitive with each other so that a cohesive effort isn’t happening. This is the second try for that agency to implement a ERP system, with the first being a spectacular and very public failure. Good riddance to them…
We use SAP, but it has been customized for our company (a huge multi-national). I hated it when I started here, but hate it a bit less now. It probably doesn’t help that our division has unique requirements (compared to the rest of our company) and it can be very restrictive and frustrating to use. Our SAP Help Desk people also have a more “Help Yourself Desk” approach, which can drive us to the point of murder.
Still, like anything, it has to be properly installed and maintained to be effective. Garbage in, garbage out and all that…
I’ve worked on various SAP installations, within my big evil corporation, all over the world. It can be good for some things and not so good for others. The main, and pretty much only, advantage is the integration. Very solid there. Plus, if you work for a large company, once you get used to it then everything else is fairly similar. The tricky parts in an SAP installation are recognizing what works well on SAP, what doesn’t, and not doing SAP just because everyone else is. Since I don’t have the slightest idea how a publishing conglomerate works, I couldn’t say whether it would be a good fit. But if it’s a huge company there’s a decent chance it should fit. It will help a ton if you use internal people who know your business to make these decisions instead of leaving it to a high priced consultant to determine.
OK, thanks guys. I have these morbid visions of the entire company grinding to a halt on D-day (we’re on what feels like a very rapid implementation schedule), but from what you’re saying I’m guessing it’s just going to be a Damn Nuisance, with maybe some actual benefits.
Yep. It’s like any complex, relatively inflexible system: if it’s properly put together, and you know what you hope to gain from it, it can be great. Too often it’s used inappropriately and badly implemented, though.
IMH experience, SAP is great if your business fits the SAP model. The converse is not true. Trying to get SAP to fit your business can cost $ millions in modifications and the SAP help desk will be helpless to assist you in these modified areas.
At the company where I work, SAP seems to do well in accounting, finance and order entry. Less well in logistics. Pretty bad in service and parts and warehouse management is a nightmare.
All the users seemed to hate it initially. Now only almost all of the users hate it.
That’s actually one of the things that worries me, Smeghead. The original trainer was apparently all but incoherent. After lots of complaints, she was replaced, but since her classes were supposed to lay the foundation for the rest, you have to wonder how well trained people really are going to end up.
Slightly off topic, I wonder if your IT people really were idiots. I guess some of them are, or at least actively hostile, but in my experience, IT people are often working with both hands tied. They’re stuck having to make people implement systems they know have problems they’re not allowed to fix, on time scales they know are unrealistic. They have lie about what they really think and act like they expect everything to work out. In the meantime, everyone blames them for decisions they didn’t make. And if they point out where they see potential problems, they get laid off like An Arky did.
I’d be happier about this switchover if I were confident management people were really listening to whatever advice the IT people have to give.
The business model almost never fits the SAP model. The trick is to change your business model as much as possible and adapt the software as little as possible. This can be done on a module by module basis. If you have a business process that doesn’t fit the model well at all, and you truly believe that it would adversely affect your business by changing it, then you should not do that module but keep that outside of SAP. This is hugely problematic if it’s an accounting piece, less so for outer layers of the model.
Note: It’s a hell of a lot harder to do the above than say it. It’s almost always easier to program around flawed business processes than correct the processes. It’s also devilishly hard sometimes to find or agree that a business process is flawed, especially from within a company. What’s ridiculous to an outside observer is just the way it’s always been done to the corporate drones on the inside.
Oh, I know. I was working a night job as an IT person at the time. Trust me, they were idiots. Of course, considering how much that company was willing to pay, I wasn’t surprised.