I work in the SAP industry (it is almost an industry in its own right), and I think tomndebb’s summary is pretty good.
I think the reason that SAP is so successful is that they’ve made the best pitch, to date, at a true all-in-one business software solution. Integrated products from diverse vendors is an attractive idea, and probably some day it will actually work. But until that day, it’s just simpler to buy your core MRP/ERP/whatever software from one vendor. This is the software that makes sure you have everything you need at the right time, that everybody’s paying you, that you’re paying them, that you’re paying your employees and the taxman the correct amount, and so on and so on. It’s a horrible interconnected mess, and nobody has ever come up with a workable all-encompassing solution for it.
SAP supposedly comes closest to achieving it. OK, it forces you to buy every component from SAP, even if most of them are shitty compared to the individual competition. But put it all together, and the idea is that you have an integrated (big SAP word, that, “integrated”) solution better than the sum of the parts you could get elsewhere.
I’m not really convinced by all this, and think that a big part of SAP’s success is clueless CIOs swallowing SAP’s marketing bullshit and convincing each other that SAP is necessary. I think at some point an actually competent company, maybe somebody like Salesforce.com, will turn the ERP world upside down and SAP will be exposed as the barely competent dinosaur that it is.
I think we have a winner:
from two posts upthread:
I find it interesting that I have never spoken to anyone involved with an SAP project that felt it went well or that it was worth while, and yet they still are successful. I know one guy whose company have tried to implement it three different times.
I wish I had that kind of marketing force for my product.
The executives were thrilled with all the reports that showed how much money and time was going where, but we on the front end couldn’t even pull up a meaningful list of prior issues on a specific piece of equipment. The whole system seemed to be designed for executive presentations and not to actually make it easier to service the customers.
Like so many things (my pet peeve is corporate web sites-I have never seen one that was worth the electrons), making it look good to the senior execs that make the decision to buy is quite different from making a useful product.
As a user, I hate it. It’s totally counter intuitive. One false move in a busy screen full of buttons, tabs and links and you are shit out of luck. There’s no way to search, no drop down menus with options, just a bunch of weird symbols.
Want to look at a document, enter CC04. Want to sign off on a document, enter IQS2 or maybe IQS1 depending on what kind of document. Start a purchase request, ZMM1 or something. Fuck. How does anyone make sense of that?
If you are creating a change order and you hit the button with the little green flag instead of the button with box and a pencil you have fucked yourself and probably lost all of your work which can’t be saved part way though.
I don’t know anyone who likes SAP with the exception of those fucking freeloading consultants who set up shop at your company for eighteen months and can’t teach for shit when it comes time to do the training.
Full disclosure #1: My employer competes with a very, very small subset of SAP’s Logistics stack.
Full disclosure #2: I’m an infrastructure guy, so I cringe a little at the number of buzzwords I’m about to use.
Full disclosure #3: I’m on my second double deuce of Ruination IPA.
SAP will be toast within a decade. SOA and cloud computing sound like a whole load of flimflammery and bullshit right now, but when the Fortune 500 folks finally get their Service Oriented Asses in gear, a whole load of itty-bitty SaaS shops are going to spring up to eat SAP’s lunch - in very small bites.
My company is doing quite well doing it now, with nothing more than a couple of EDI programmers and a few brilliant networking and systems folks (my team), a handful of web developers, and an ace DBA. We’ve sustained pretty impressive growth going on ten years now, and a significant number of our customers are also SAP shops. We do a very small bit of what SAP does, only much, much better, at a fraction of the cost.
And this is mostly via EDI and VANs or AS2, which is pretty one-off when compared to a mature, standardized SOA implementation. We just had our first current customer ask about switching from EDI to XML over secured FTP. They’re chomping at the bit, and they’re a Fortune 100. Make of that what you will.
That actually sounds worse than IFS. I can search (oops, I mean “query”) for things if I happen to know which category to query under (and have rights to do so, which has been a constant problem). Our company managed to save a few bucks by having our managers who were on the IFS committee train us. :rolleyes:
This perfectly describes the consultants I dealt with in both of the SAP-related projects I mentioned upthread. On the plus side, they were very nice people to deal with. But one should not have to explain to a logistics “expert” that an order may be for more than one item, so there may be more than one shipment involved in the order, and therefore two or perhaps a dozen shipping records. If it needs explanation, one should only have to explain this concept once. :rolleyes:
At least the consultants weren’t arrogant jerks as well as being, um, uninformed. I’ve dealt with those kind of folks on other projects.
It’s true, and I really think it is one of the main reasons that implementations can go so wrong. A good implementation should be one that provides the business with the tools that it needs to do the work it needs to do - so surely the starting point should be understanding the work that the business does. If you spend any time on any of the support boards (particularly those that are not run by SAP themselves) it’ll curl your hair. I just keep thinking “someone, somewhere is paying you very handsomely and THIS is the sort of thing you don’t know?”
The SAP industry (and I agree that it is an industry) has unfortunately developed a name as a bit of a gravy train, and it’s attracted far too many people with far too little business experience. The technical side of implementation isn’t hugely difficult, although it’s time consuming and it can be fiddly: what you pay external ‘experts’ for is the experience to know what the effects of your choices will be.
I cringe when I hear the horror stories, of which I have plenty too, and the real loathing, but it’s common to hear. It starts to sound like an excuse, even to me, but I really do believe that it’s a great system, considering what it has to do. However it is easily, and often, implemented very badly and that makes all the difference. For every person saying they can’t find anyone who’s had a successful implementation, I could find you one who has, and I could get you ROI numbers to measure the success. ::shrug::
(I’m trying to balance the need for full disclosure of my interest here with my desire to preserve some level of anonymity by the way, but I am very closely involved).
My company recently converted from AMAPS to SAP. For a long time, I was able to joke about the consultants, “the third floor is full of sap”. Thankfully, I don’t have direct contact with it, but I’ve heard it called a “write-only” system.
Your anecdote reminds me more of the consultants the company hired to build its e-commerce site. After the contracts were signed and work was in progress, they asked if it was *really *important that an order could have more than one recipient.
