"Implementing ERP isn’t just a purchasing decision: it’s committing to redoing how you handle operations. Installing the software is the easy part; adjusting the whole company’s workflow is the most of the work."
Don't think of erp and implementing it as a software development challenge. Sure, Developers can fscrew up*, an erp implementation but they cannot make it succeed - it is fundamentally a business transformation endeavour and must be undertaken as such to have a chance.
Well, management did. Every other phrase they uttered was "The old system did it this way" or "I used to just press F2". The pushback to learning something new was unreal.
Nevermind the fact that multi-step processes were reduced to a simple button click. Or that inventory and customer management were orders of magnitude better. The old system!! The old system did it another way!
The same with the parent commenter's thoughts, "Sure, developers can screw up [business transformation projects], but they cannot make them succeed."
More generally, a good way to botch a business transformation project is to select technical solutions without a keen grasp of how they fit your business need, and to bullheadedly stick with those solutions as friction is revealed with the business needs.
Both distorting the business around vendor software and ending up continuously fighting with the vendor software throughout th effort (both of which are commonly cited “how to fail” routes) are clear (though superficially opposite) symptoms of that same failure occurring upstream in the process.
- From the ERP end: you want it to be as flexible as possible so that it can reflect how the business actually operates and should operate in the future
- From the organization's end: you want to identify not only how the business currently operates, but how you would want it to operate in an ideal world
Part of me wonders if these things are more of a "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" thing than anything else. Are people buying the workflow because it's what they really need, or are they buying it because everyone else uses it?
2. HR, Finance, all the backoffice stuff - that's not your competitive advantage. It's not your core business. You just want to do it as efficiently and quietly as possible.
3. Therefore, in ideal case, a company realizes it is not a special snowflake, buys an ERP, implements it as vanilla as possible, and quietly goes on focusing on what IS their competitive advantage / core business... rather than spending years, millions of dollars, and tremendous risk, by trying to customize ERP to some obscure different process they just "must" have :-/
however, not once have I ever heard of an SAP implementation going well. It's a massive undertaking and takes total commitment from so many different people and roles in an enterprise. You need genius PMs and BAs along with a genius client team before you even talk about the actual technical people.
Sometimes it depends who you ask; I found that hands-on people on the ground and SMEs tend to be very negative about it, for personally valid reasons - it's a lot of work, it doesn't go smoothly, and it disrupts and changes what and how they do it.
However, there are quite a few ERP implementations where the top-level stakeholders feel the results are worthwhile the disruption and pain, and from that perspective it "went well" - the business objectives were overall met, whether it be capabilities or speed or reporting or integration/centralization or headcount or complexity reduction, all of it ultimately boiling to money at some level...
Only the top-level stakeholders felt the results were worthwhile the disruption and pain -- that they did not suffer.
But have you ever heard of one going well ?
As in, not just worthwhile to a tiny minority of the people on the top?
Yeah I bet it makes stuff more efficient, but clearly there's a disparity between the people suffering "disruptions and pain" and the ones who ultimately feel it has been worthwhile.
And maybe, just maybe, what is right for the business is bad for the majority of the staff. At least in the short term. I know that is a bitter pill to swallow, but it is reality.
Perhaps an example more palatable on HN would be Uber replacing all its drivers with software. Clearly better for the business.
If you're selling widgets, and selling 100 units a month, there are growing pains on the path to 100 units a day and 100 units a minute that you can't anticipate, and that billion-dollar retailers have already figured out. So I think to the extent that physical B2C sales is pretty constant across industries, you know that if you're big enough to justify the investment in SAP or a similar ERP platform, there exists a process that you'll need 0.5, 1, or 5 years from now that they have and you can't really articulate today.
Software for software developers can be a huge focus here, but it's just scratching the surface of software for the rest of the world. I was startled when I applied for a job at a company in my city, and they told me their product was entirely API connectors for the local banks. In fact all of the companies I've worked for here have been making software for local industries! From solar installers, energy efficient lighting manufacturers, local commerce and POS systems, mechanics software, creative market places, local lead generation.
I think if you want to start a business from scratch and you're not in SV, it's worth targeting those problems instead of problems that SV/startups have. You might not get sexy VC capital, but you might be able to jumpstart with some clients up front.
At Accenture, for example, there were projects where 30-40 full time consultants were flown in from all over the country to do big SAP implementations.
...so you could see how Systems Integration partners heavily sold SAP products.
Open source tries to make great software. Does the best job.
The one unicorn I worked for had so much cash to spend, there were at least 3 teams of 8-10 engineers on the same floor trying to solve similar business and infrastructure problems with different combinations of open source software.
Is SAP something that can be somehow scaled down? if this is used for a beer store, it has to be really large store, if that's what is written in the cited article is true:
"A basic installation of SAP has 20,000 database tables, 3,000 of which are configuration tables. In those tables, there are ~8,000 configuration decisions you need before even getting started. And that’s why SAP Configuration Specialist is an actual job title!"
You are absolutely right, a single retail store would not use such an ERP :)
Let me guess, you live in Toronto?
good thing we have SAP to facilitate the development of large scale business, such as monopolies and cartels.
https://www.acclimation.com/au/solutions/sap-bydesign-vs-bus...
I had actually heard the name SAP come up in passing at my last company, who had lots of ginormous clients. But all I'd really gathered before reading the article was "it's some kind of database, or something".
When was this? Leo Apotheker became CEO of HP in 2010, after 22 years at SAP (two as CEO). He then presided over a sequence of colossal fuck-ups, lost 40% market cap, and was fired less than a year later.
HP definitely knows about SAP, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're not big fans.
Correction: 22 years at SAP, not as CEO.
I'm not sure about his SAP earnings, but he sold HP an 11 month CEO for upwards of 27.5M[0]. That sounds like the perfect way to end your sales career ;-)
[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/01/business/lets-stop-reward...
Not to say he wasn't bad at it (I honestly don't know) but it's a hard job to get right.
SAP is/was virulent in nature. If you used it for one thing it damn near forced you to use it for everything. A significant chunk of the work EDS were undertaking (as IT outsource) was migrating to SAP.
Our timesheets, project plans, data, hell even a huge chunk of our app development was done in SAP. We were paying through the nose for SAP contractors too.
That’s pretty dismissive. I work at a company with ~80B in revenue, I never interacted or heard of SAP in work context. In fact it is only incidentally that I’ve heard of them previously. There are hundred of thousands of engineers working in companies with 10-11 digit capitalizations that will never interact or hear about SAP.
Edit: to clarify because I am getting a bunch of downvotes. My point is not about SAP’s penetration, it is that lots of engineers (even in companies that use SAP) might not encounter SAP products. The perspective “of you haven’t worked with SAP you are in a small org” is wrong.
I would fully agree with that, my generalization was kind of the opposite - if you work at a small company you are unlikely to use or work with SAP.
My other generalization was that HN was focused on startups, their technical culture, the cool and interesting, and almost by the definition not on boring bread and butter aspects. Does not mean that people/users themselves do not work there - I have spent twenty years on PeopleSoft/Oracle myself, but that is not why i come here and yes, the overall zeitgeist on HN toward e.g. Oracle is pretty consistent :->
FWIW, comment was not meant to be dismissive. I was genuinely fascinated, late at the night, at the notion that IT industry professionals might not be exposed to a behemoth such as SAP or even ERPs at large, and was pondering as to how that might come to be; there's absolutely personal bias & hubris in it, which is why I tried to understand where it came from and what's the diff between background of my friends and colleagues, vs perhaps some other IT professionals :)
The fact that you are arguing against this might be why you are getting downvoted. The original comment was saying “if you are in a small org you probably haven’t worked with SAP”, which is not the same thing.
Edit for further clarification: I can see how it might look like they were arguing what you stated, but it was more of a Bayesian inference. Many HN readers are at a small company, therefore a plausible reason that an arbitrary HN reader might not have heard of SAP would be that they are in the large pool of HN readers that are {in small companies and, therefore, do not work with SAP}
Since you are in the machine learning silo, your perspective may be a little skewed.
It would not surprise me if KP were using ECC for their finances or some other area the parent comment is not familiar with.
https://www.erpsoftwareblog.com/2012/11/why-does-microsoft-h...
What would be the point of Google writing their own financial consolidation software?
I.e. HR & Payroll legislative rules and best practices, business & organizational process transformation etc, are not what Google Engineers and IT necessarily have experience in, and if they allow hubris to override that fact, it might not go great.
Internets indicate that Google uses Oracle, Apple uses SAP.
This info may be outdated - for example, Facebook claims they built their own ERP just recently; I do wonder what that "backend database" part is though, or how much HR/Pay/Finance, as opposed to inventory/datacentre management, is custom: https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/15/how-facebook-does-it/
You're either using SAP and you don't know it or you're using Oracle.
EDIT: just looked at your linkedin profile. I can see that your company literally has SAP consultants working for them full time. I don't know which SAP products you are using but you definitely are an SAP customer.
Or you're using NetSuite (which nowadays is Oracle, granted, but a rather different product from what most people think of when they talk about Oracle or SAP in an ERP context), or you're using Microsoft's ERP (Dynamics something or other? Never used it), or you're using something developed in-house (very likely running on an AS/400). Or hell, you might be running multiple ERPs in a weird limbo state mid-transition (e.g. Thermo Fisher, which was using AS/400 and SAP (or maybe it was Manhattan? Or both? My memory's fuzzy...) - the latter of which might very well have been partially implemented on AS/400 in order to integrate with the existing ERP - as of a couple years ago when I was working for them).
It's worth noting, too, that there are plenty of large and arguably-dysfunctional companies not using an ERP at all, or (like with my current employer) it's relegated to very specific uses because other functionality got offloaded to other systems (for example, it's relatively common to run a WMS separate from the ERP and integrate between the two, as it is with an eCommerce system; in my employer's case, all three are separate).
At the same time, I guess you have to be at a company of a certain size for it to be relevant to your life... But that perhaps proves the point - HN is very starup focused, and occasionally in a bit of a bubble (which is fine - I come here to get away from my daily mainstream IT grind and see excited people talk about cool things:), yet a hundred reasonably successful startups won't employ or touch near as many people as a single "quietly" successful traditional behemoth.