[Closed] SAP claims another victim

When it's in a small organisation <50 employees it's a cool tool, anything other than that and the consultants who convinced the organisation to install it ought to payback all they earned in commission, then fix the gaps.
And be made to walk around said organisation wearing a Ronald McDonald wig.

Nice response from Canyon. They seem to have got on top of it relatively quickly considering how horrible it can be to fix IT that was dysfunctional from the start

You must have a different definition of "quickly". The parts I ordered in September 2015 were despatched yesterday apparently.

What would you recommend instead?

care to explain to the non IT savvy folks ( ie me ) what is SAP

What would you recommend instead?

Slamming your cock in a kitchen drawer. Altogether less painful...

UTAS use SAP slightly more than 50 employees I think

SAP itself is rarely the problem. Usually poor specification of what you want, poor management of the project or trying to do too much too fast. Moving factory at the same time as implementing new systems seemed like a triumph of ambition over experience.

I have now read each post here, as well as the original links, and still have no idea what SAP is.

[i]SAP itself is rarely the problem. Usually poor specification of what you want, poor management of the project or trying to do too much too fast. Moving factory at the same time as implementing new systems seemed like a triumph of ambition over experience. [/i]

This. No different to any other system, IT or otherwise.

There are three key deliverables to any project; quality, time and budget. To mis-quote Keith Bontrager, pick one. 🙂

don't fret saxonrider - i read the top link and i've no idea of what it is either - if it needs explaining then it's fubard

Two types of companies that have implemented sap.
Those that were big enough to take the massive hit to revenue and those that went bust.
We are currently in the process of a global implementation of a new sap system and isn't it fun

sap1
sap/Submit
noun
1.
the fluid which circulates in the vascular system of a plant, consisting chiefly of water with dissolved sugars and mineral salts.
synonyms: plant fluid, vital fluid, life fluid, juice, secretion, liquor, liquid
"these insects suck the sap from the roots of trees"

verb
1.
gradually weaken or destroy (a person's strength or power).
"our energy is being sapped by bureaucrats and politicians"

SAP is the business equivalent of slamming your cock in a kitchen drawer. The one with all the knives in.

(It's a massive stock control/ordering/sales/process management tool. It's also shit. The number of implementation disasters you hear of, I'm surprised anyone still buys it. Even installing box fresh, unmodified SAP is a nightmare.)

Tarmac top floor were using it around 12 years ago when I was running a big industrial job. It was an absolute shambles of incorrect beam deliveries, wrong cut out holes, beams coming for halfway down the shed at the start etc.
I believe they ended up in serious financial trouble due to counter claims by construction contractors.

We had a ordering nightmare last year with our major supplier (multi billion $ US company) after they implemented SAP. That's the fourth company I have had major dealings with who have implemented SAP and all have been ultra painful. Maybe that's just the way it is with this type of software.

Software to 'run' your business. Customer relationships, logistics, accounts, invoicing, all that crap.

I've not dealt with it, but SAP sounds like a bit of a dinosaur. You seem to need to pay people shitloads of money to implement it for you, which means you have to tell them specifically what you want. However chances are you don't know until it's too late and your original mistakes have already buggered everything up.

Modern software should a) allow businesses to see for themselves how it's working internally (e.g. show business processes as diagrams so that anyone can see if they're wrong) and b) allow businesses to be involved in the process of development, suggest changes, and have those changes made as they go along.

In the old days you had to describe the whole system first before anything was written, which meant that if you realised half way through implementation that it was wrong, it was hard to get it changed.

This is why outsourcing is often prone to failure. Businesses will nominate a couple of token business people to be "business analysts" and work with the outsourcers, but they've really no clue about how to specify a new system to do what they need and improve on their existing processes.

SAP is the business equivalent of slamming your cock in a kitchen drawer. The one with all the knives in.

Yep, it's not quick from our timeline but for fixing a big IT cockup it's good

Sap isn't the problem.
It's the numptys that call themselves consultants.
The number of projects I have been on where I have had to step in and re configure fundamental aspects of the design just tires me out.
I was one of the first consultants to join sap UK in the 90's and it is an endless battle with stupid people calling themselves consultants.
And as with MFI, when stupid consultants design the system it does indeed make them go bust.

christ I looked at their website and finding a basic explanation was as productive as searching for a Jesus in a Taliban training camp. Took to wikipedia and I went from being worried that I had no idea what they were talking about to thinking does anyone really know what they are talking about and is it just a load of bollocks invented to make life more complicated and justify pointless existences?

It is a software that is unique in the world in that it can operate every aspect of a business across the world.
And that is why it is the only software that any major company operates.

[quote=Sancho ]Sap isn't the problem.
It's the numptys that call themselves consultants.
...
I was one of the first consultants to join sap UK in the 90's

Ah...

I mean the endless production line of consultants from the big consulting companies.

Not me obviously.

But seriously.
I have only worked with a handful of people that I could recommend to a client to implement sap.

By operate do you mean completely destroy?

I suspect no other company competes with SAP as they know it's a hiding to nothing.

We've got SAP, £multibn infrastructure co. For management reporting we have to ask our suppliers what we've bought off them.

Yep the implementation was poor but FFS what heap of shite.

Like I said
Don't blame the software
It work how you want it to work.
If you balls up the implementation
Don't blame the software.

Poor workmen always blame their tools.

I suspect no other company competes with SAP as they know it's a hiding to nothing.

Surely the best approach is to make some software they want to buy, sell it to them and then retire to the Bahamas?

Or maybe it should be easy to configure and flexible. Like it isn't.

It's always the user's who end up with a solution that doesn't work for them when the company doesn't assign someone to the project who knows what they are doing.
I see it time and time again.
If some dick doesn't bother to find out how a department works
You can't blame the software.

oldbloke - Member
SAP itself is rarely the problem. Usually poor specification of what you want, poor management of the project or trying to do too much too fast. Moving factory at the same time as implementing new systems seemed like a triumph of ambition over experience.

If you balls up the implementation
Don't blame the software.

That's disingenuous.

If the software is so difficult that you need to hire specialists to make head or tail of it, then the software is not great. If it's so hard to implement that it needs lots of specialists, then they are in so much demand you have to hire anyone you can find, they can be shite, and they can milk you whilst pretending to do what 'you' want, when their job is to help you figure out what you want, then yeah the software isn't that great.

Businesses change though. Quickly. SAP is extremely difficult to change once set up. Ergo it's not very good.

It's easy to configure
It's hard to get a company to understand their own business
And it's hard to get consultants to challenge the business on how they operate.
If I can configure it to run a magnox reactor then it's not that hard.
😉

[quote=Sancho ]Poor workmen always blame their tools.

Is that like software consultants blaming companies for not implementing their software properly?

I'm afraid molgrips has it here - if so many different companies end up making things worse, then you have to start to wonder whether there might be something wrong with the software.

What molgrips said

Lol you guys need to get on with it
See what you can do

I have saved companies millions with their sap.
And improved the work of countless people using it.
It is the best out there
Get over it

It's hard to get a company to understand their own business

I support software that is in a related area to SAP, in some ways.

My software is a piece of piss to use. 90% of my job is getting companies to understand their business and how to go about expressing it in the right terms. I don't want to sit there implementing the stuff for years, I want them to implement it themselves. I suspect SAP's business model is the former, no?

SAP is crap. 12 weeks for the 'expert consultants' to work out how to print an invoice? It's also hideously expensive and you either need an in house team or a money grabbing but useless third party to do anything as simple as adding a name to a database. Shocking.

Also a magnox reactor dies one thing all the time forever. A massive corporate changes every 5 mins and no one person knows every facett of that business, its unknowable. The software should be able to take what all those bits do and produce an overall picture from the numerous constantly changing parts. SAP struggles with this cos it's clunky, rigid, unintuitive and the result itself of iteration that's been done for specifics that create blind alleys.

It's hard to get a company to understand their own business

This time last year I spent three months at a client on a pilot, they are going ahead with their 2 year project on their own, without any consultants....

We use it at work. Its shockingly bad.
The people who use it all the time are fine with it, but people who don't use it for their main job role really struggle with it. Yes, you can get what you want done....but it is not logical or straightforward....

I think you'll find there aren't any Magnox reactors running now. SAP implementation was a disaster and about 3 years ago Magnox moved wholesale to Aggresso, another pile of junk. Off to Wylfa next week, let's see how that pans out.

Hi Sanchos. You sound like someone who knows a piece of software extremely well, but has been working with it far too long.

It was over ten years ago Neila
It was a sideline we did whilst at bnfl.

But yeah I feel for people who hate using it as when it's set up badly it's awful.
Just a shame that happens.
But it can be avoided.

But yeah I feel for people who hate using it as when it's set up badly it's awful.
Just a shame that happens.
But it can be avoided.

So why does it happen so often? Not a coincidence surely. Something about the software must be encouraging the situation.

Does it stop double posts?

So what software that does what SAP tries to do is better? Or are they all bad?

Very few companies set out on a major software implementation unless they want to revolutionise their business processes, and they hope to use the software to enable that business change.

So they're trying to do two massively difficult things at once.

Without sufficient budget.

Without telling most of the people responsible for speccing, testing and using it.

Just did a quick read, one comment on SAP said that it is easy to customise, which means that people end up customising it a lot. This means that you are then dependent on expensive consultants (who may be crap) to change those customisations, and if you need to upgrade you have to pay someone to change them or rip them out, as the commenter had to do.

You can customise the crap out of our product. We used to spent much of our time doing it, but now we expressly recommend against it - for exactly those reasons. We used to think it was a selling point and would jump all over it, because we understood it.

Sounds like SAP consultants love to customise, because they can. After all, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Is SAP going to be the new STW forum software? 😛

The problem with SAP is its too good.

It gets sold as a super customisable solution that can do anything you want, and it can, however as there is no standard solution and companies are made of different departments with different needs it ends up a twisted broken.

The only way to implement software like this is to design it (as Sancho says with a management design team), them implement it, then make management process changes so everyone changes how they work to suit. It sounds drastic but its the way it should be done.

I work for a company that does similar, and also connects with SAP. Its horrible to see people trying to implement stuff when new parameter are found but data has already been added.

care to explain to the non IT savvy folks ( ie me ) what is SAP

In my world, it's a method for calculating the energy efficiency of a dwelling, used to demonstrate compliance with Building Regulations.

You don't fit SAP around your company. You fit your company around SAP. It is a dinosaur and I await the minnows of the free software stack to start nibbling it, or I guess more likely, everything move cloud-wards with different products talking to each other over common data formats and protocols.

I've used SAP and helped the SAP consultants set up systems for it. A mahoosive cost, just for the software licenses. It's a license to print money and some businesses are so scared that when they've got it they'll pay anything to make sure it keeps running. Until you get idiots who start playing with the data dictionaries and hence cause upgrade issues. 🙂

I had to use it for time booking. What a heap of utter poo!

people end up customising it a lot.

But that's not unique to business solution type software. I've a bit more experience with CAD PDM systems, and you hear that all the time. If your process doesn't match the out of the box solution, it's just a bit of customisation. What you're not told is that every time any of the software changes (like an update) the customisation fails, so you need to get the 'expert' back in at £1000 a day to fix it.

Like I said
Don't blame the software
It work how you want it to work.
If you balls up the implementation
Don't blame the software.

The company I used to work for (a few thousand employees globally, consumer goods that suck, based in a small town in Wiltshire) implemented SAP when I was there. They had 30 odd consultants to implement it for a year and it was still shit. Most of them flew in from Barcelona every week.

Microsoft AX, anyone ? :/ It's like SAP, but with additional Microsoft.

See also

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/13/npower_sap_customer_system_failure/

Molgrips talking shite as per normal.

SAP works well if your company is willing to change the way it works to suit SAP. contrary to what's written above, it doesn't like customisation and thus will be a pain in the arse to change stuff, and then maintain the stuff you've changed. Accept how it works and change your business model/processes to work with it, rather than change it to suit your processes. I worked for a large company that replaced their ERP with it and once people accepted that they'd be doing ledger/balance sheet/management accounts how SAP wanted them to do it, it worked for them. And that's with accenture doing the install so there must be some merit in it.

That all said I think it's a shit piece of software and would actively avoid working somewhere that had it or was intending to implement it. its also stupidly expensive, but as the CFO at my last place told me, it's like having the Range Rover on the drive....yep, he was a dick.

Don't get me started on Business Objects...

For those that do not know what SAP is, SAP is:

Click

Wait

Click

Wait

Click

Wait

SAP have the best sales team on the planet.

Had the pleasure of managing a companies Sap team for a couple of years. Works very well with other sap stuff. Very expensive for what it does. People who work in it think somehow it is special and does magic stuff other vendors cant do. Bit like cancer, once you have it, it is quite hard to get rid.

cheers_drive -> Dyson should have been told his SAP was crap, he could have gone into a shed for a year and fixed it. That's what he does isn't it?

So, & I speak as an end user here, apart from those who are involved with SAP because they are IT bods running or setting up the system: does anyone who actually use the software think it is anything but a hugely complicated piece of crap?

I agree with Sancho.

Companies that need to implement SAP (or any other ERP) are usually big complex organisations. Its not that easy.

An analogy would be like government. The western world has had government for 2000+ You think we would have got it right by now.

missed this one but
Sancho

If I can configure it to run a magnox reactor then it's not that hard.

flange - Member
Molgrips talking shite as per normal.

SAP works well if your company is willing to change the way it works to suit SAP. contrary to what's written above, it doesn't like customisation and thus will be a pain in the arse to change stuff, and then maintain the stuff you've changed. Accept how it works and change your business model/processes to work with it, rather than change it to suit your processes.

Now thats the sales pitch of the century right there...

as the CFO at my last place told me, it's like having the Range Rover on the drive....yep, he was a dick.

The initials stand for

Select another package

I've witnessed two large scale implementations which have been unmitigated disasters on the performance of the organisations.

B&Q use Sap.

I'm now facing the second redundancy in my career due to a f*d-up SAP implementation - I'm now collateral damage because the new software hasn't delivered the level of improvements / cost savings expected so they've chopped some heads to make themselves look good...

as an end user been through SAP, been through AX, and a few other ERP systems along the way, the primary problem IMO is that customers think they are special, that they need to customise the software to fit their methods.

Reality is customers rarely do anything special, but piss money up the wall on expensive consultants who never really understand how the customer works, who then try and bodge the ERP to fit what they think the customer wants and half way through the process someone at the customer will have a bright idea and change their working practices anyway.

Should have gone for Oracle E-business Suite.

Well I've worked on implementation projects for 20 years and all gone well. Seems European companies often prefer to go for SAP and US ones Oracle.

Should have gone for Oracle E-business Suite.

Well I've worked on implementation projects for 20 years and all gone well. Seems European companies often prefer to go for SAP and US ones Oracle.

Was about to say, you think SAP is bad, try Oracle products.

Just spent a year learning Oracle Identity Management, now writing the year off and thinking of counselling for depression and suicidal thoughts after dealing with Oracle Tech Support.

We also do Dell IDM and that manages to be worse than Oracle 🙁

Its horrible to see people trying to implement stuff when new parameter are found but data has already been added.

That doesn't sound good.

There is clearly *something* wrong with SAP for it to generate so much hate, and be involved in so many cock ups. So what is it - the organisation, the software, the people, what?

Apparently it's the consultants, molly - if only they could get good ones it would be wonderful.

I used to think that SAP was the worst piece of [s]software[/s] tool I've ever had the misfortune to use (The new document control software is running it close) and I used to use simulation software that was based on FORTRAN!

As a limited end user I don't have any experience of SAP but have used JDE Edwards (Oracle) which was so badly implemented that it nearly resulted in a company of over 200 years going under. I've also Maximo (IBM) which seems a little better but is still painful to use.

So my general experience is that they can all be pretty awful, SAP just takes the flak 'cos everyone has heard of it.

Apparently it's the consultants, molly - if only they could get good ones it would be wonderful.

You may be getting close to the truth in this; a better way of expressing it would be "if only they didn't need these hordes of overpaid "experts" and "consultants" it would be wonderful", which I think speaks volumes about the deficiencies of the product and the way it's sold and implemented. And don't get me started on SAP security - that's a whole other world of pain.

Who do you work for Molgrips?

I agree with what Mrmo said - having been involved (on the customer side) of a big implementation, everyone wants to customise the hell out of the software because it makes them feel special, when in reality its vanilla build is the most stable, easy to upgrade and easiest to use. It's not ideal to "change to fit the software" but as others have said an implementation is usually combined with some form of "business improvement" initiative anyway where process and ways of working are being changed.

I'd also agree with the view of consultants. Many do not have a vested interest in getting the thing implemented successfully the first time round because they know (possibly from experience) that the client will throw money at them to get it working once it's in, usually because there are many millions of £ invested in the project already.

My current employer (soon to not be...) has no ERP or MRP software whatsoever and the ability to schedule, see cost and do umpteen other things across multiple sites is, IMO severely lacking. I'm not suggesting SAP per se, but some sort of planner would be useful. Having said that, we do have Agresso (only for HR though...) and we had decided on implementing Syteline until the project was canned. Now, that was a shocking bit of software.

Also, what Dragon just said in his second paragraph.