[Closed] SAP claims another victim

[i]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. [/i]

🙂

I've been in IT over 30 years and first was involved in SAP with an R/2 project in a German subsidiary, and since then have worked on many implementations of SAP, its competitors and other software.

I'm now General Manager at a software house.

Bottom line, the majority of companies are unable to tell you how their processes actually work, and even less have them documented.

So how they expect to be able to automate/change them is beyond me, and I see the impact of this every single day.

Also no one ever does a zero-based budget, and they usually expect staff to work on the project alongside their 'day job'.

I can't help thinking that a company of the scale of Canyon would have been better with salesforce? I am not an end user or developer though!

In custom software development, people used to say 'the requirements are the problem', and then they spent a lot of time and energy writing down the requirements in more and more detail, and then threatened to do terrible things to their customer's firstborn if they dared change anything. It didn't work. Then they realised that the problem was that, in any complex company, it was simply not possible to specify business processes and requirements in advance. This is what really drove the adoption of [url=www.agilemanifesto.org]agile [/url]development. So those above who blame the customer for not specifiying what they need in advance are asking for the impossible. All that leaves you with is the option of bending your business to fit SAP - assuming you can figure out how it works, which given a UI that is as about as user hostile as a cornered rat, is a challenge in itself. Luckily for SAP, and unluckily for the rest of us, the alternatives are no better.
This is actually quite an interesting situation. Given that SAP and its competitors are almost unversally hated, and have demonstrably damaged so many firms, why has the market not generated a better answer?

a UI that is as about as user hostile as a cornered rat,

I'm stealing that description.

As an occasional SAP user I have to say its the most unintuitive and obtuse piece of cr*p its been my misfortune to have to use. And that's experience of two separate implementation at two difference companies.

What If you are a multibillion dollar global organization with tens of thousands of employees and manufacturing and distribution subsidiaries scattered across the world. And you have terabytes of business critical data that has to be accessible to everyone 24/7 whether they are working in a manufacturing plant in Poland or a planning department in New York, what else would you use?

Only thing comparable I can think of is Oracle and that's equally as "shit" or "good" depending on your point of view.

Having used (rather than implemented) both Agresso and SAP in different businesses, I have to say that SAP feels like the better system.

Though I use SAP for asset management (fundamentally a database of characteristics and defects of structures) and Agresso for small scale financial management of projects.

[quote=somewhatslightlydazed ]What If you are a multibillion dollar global organization with tens of thousands of employees and manufacturing and distribution subsidiaries scattered across the world. And you have terabytes of business critical data that has to be accessible to everyone 24/7 whether they are working in a manufacturing plant in Poland or a planning department in New York, what else would you use?

Whatever they were using before some [s]highly[/s] over paid consultants sold them SAP. Because the chances are they had something which worked - just something custom built over time, customised to fit the business model, which was a bit of a mess, but worked. Not as shiny as SAP though.

^^^^ Thats what we had before SAP.

And we left it switched on and running in parallel to SAP until SAP was stable and "working".

Then SAP fell over, again.

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.

This

Every IT implementation I've been through as an end user and once as a project manager has been delayed and/or cocked up because of this.

[I] Because the chances are they had something which worked - just something custom built over time, customised to fit the business model, which was a bit of a mess, but worked[/I]

Possibly. Or equally likely they were trying to get by with a cobbled together set of systems that they had inherited. Systems that didn't talk to each other run by scattered IT departments that also didn't talk to each other and kept doing thing "their" way because that's the way it has always been done.

Which was still likely better than SAP, and even if not, could be made better than SAP by spending a lot less money and just getting the intelligent people they already have in their organisation talking to each other.

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...

Sales pitch? I wouldn't go near it, let alone sell it. My point was that if a company is willing to change how it works to fall in line with SAP, then they'll have more success than those (Canyon) who don't.

As for ORacle - one word, Exadata. So good, the FCA are talking about binning off the entire multi-million pound estate because of it.

The Oracle project I know about that struggled used too many offshore resources, seems to be the way now as reduces costs so much. Most regret the pain in the end!

Never used SAP, but I know know firms who have and not liked it. One multibillion $ MNC we deal with has been struggling with a new implementation for about two years and still can;t print out the data they need anywhere near as easily than the system that preceded it.

As I've had it described, it works well for delivering financial data to the top of organisations. That is all.

Also, Mrs Digga is a senior systems analyst for 'a big IT firm' and was once in a meeting which included their (mad German) SAP expert who dropped the phrase "donkey punch" into one of her explanations. I think that sums it all up.

(Google phrase if not familiar but WARNING!: NSFW)

Should have gone for Oracle E-business Suite.

Dear god no - that is the biggest pile of mess I have ever seen! Working on Oracle Process Manufacturing was truly one of the most awful development environments I’ve ever seen. Must actually be a step backwards from working on Colossus…

Rachel

So just how satisfied are the respective customers of these ERP giants? Oracle enjoyed the highest satisfaction rate by far—at 80 percent!—followed by SAP (39 percent) and Microsoft Dynamics (33 percent), according to the report.

from http://www.asugnews.com/article/who-wins-sap-oracle-and-microsoft-erp-software-comparison

I very much doubt they survey the users then.
Most likely senior management who will not admit it even if it has fubared their organisation for 6 months

18 months after implementation and we still have SAP consultants onsite.

And in the company carpark its very easy to spot the SAP consultants car's.

Surely its sort of software pyramid scheme?

why has the market not generated a better answer?

Well the alternative is to implement something yourself, with or without help. That could be even more diffi ult, but fortunately there are tools out there that really really make it quicker to come out with a bespoke solution that you can actually own.

My employer (part of GE) went over to SAP last year.

Our in house SAP team had practiced on several sites before us and it seems to have gone as well as could be expected.

There were initial teething troubles and no shipments for a couple of weeks but now that everyone has been trained and adjusted it seems to be OK.

The UI however, as others have said is bloody terrible. Nested scrolling panes, tiny obtuse buttons.

What's that, click the orange brick thingy with the wiggly thing to see a drawing? AWESOME!!!

Shhhhhhhhh. It's systems like this that mean I have a place in the world. My job description is accountancy, but what I really do most of the time is use spreadsheets and a bit of brainpower to solve 'problems' that crap systems create.

Wherever I have worked I have become a 'go to' person for inexpensive Excel (and at a push Access) workarounds for stuff that would require expenditure to do 'properly'. Basically by being willing to have a go and not dissolving into tears at the site of a lot of data.

About 5% of people in business actually know what they want a system to do. About 5% of these are able to explain it to someone who can actually configure the system. And in most cases the business needs have changed by the time they get it 'right' for the situation as it existed six months ago.

The really scary thing is how much 'castle' gets built on these heaps of poorly defined 'sand'..........

And in the company carpark its very easy to spot the SAP consultants car's.

[img] [/img]

It's highly customisable and if it doesn't immediately suit your transport needs you could always consider changing your needs to suit the vehicle.

Interesting thread.

I've seen many SAP implementations. Some hugely successful with clear benefits to the business and users who (once familiar with it - I agree that it's not always obvious) love it as it makes their lives easier.

On the other hand... I've seen more implementations that match some of the bad stories on here...

For me ,the software isn't what differentiates the implementations.

It's down to doing it right and that means investing (proper hardware, allowing people from the business to be involved full time without being dragged back into their normal roles, testing real life scenarios properly and then highly important, having a good team to support it once live) and not insisting that unqualified people know better than those who know SAP implementation.

Similarly, companies that are badly run tend to have a nightmare with SAP - it does tend to be unforgiving of poor process management - a good example is that it won't let goods out of the door if the goods aren't in stock. Some other ERPs do so changing from one to the other is a bit of a shock...

And of course, not getting crap consultants of which there are many.

I have worked in 2 companies that have implemented SAP (as an IT engineer), and they both ****ed up because it was treated as a pure IT project.

IMO it should be led as a business procedure project with IT systems facilitation. The modern office is the old fashioned factory floor, When you introduce new technology the process also has to adapt. Someone above mentioned nuclear power stations, well blaming SAP for failure in an office would be like blaming nuclear power for not dealing with the 10,000 tonnes of coal being delivered every day like we did with the old power station.

I went through five pages over three different websites run by SAP before then just googling "SAP business" and finding out what it was from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_Business_One

All the actual SAP sites left me clueless and thinking it's probably a business cult built around a sales pitch.