What about SAP is bad? Genuinely curious

I use exactly one SAP application once a month to enter how many hours I worked every day of that month. Let me tell you about it.

First, the width of the app window is fixed and cannot be resized. And some wide columns are fixed in place too, meaning that I can only see three columns at the time (out of 30) and therefore I am constantly scrolling left and right. On top of that, every time the window loses focus it does a weird 2-3 seconds refresh when you come back. As a result, we all write everything in Notepad first and only open SAP when we know we won't need to click away anymore.

Every single cell in that "spreadsheet" can do at least 50 things, but I have never managed to get them to do what I need. If I need the specific code of my position I copy-paste it from last month because that cell's search function has never returned anything useful. But if I check last month's data I lose the data of this month that I didn't save (plus the weird refresh thing happens here too). And if I save something it's there forever and cannot be edited. As a result, if I don't have my employee and workplace codes at hand at the beginning it's faster to throw the partial data away and start all over.

Some fields auto-complete, but I'm not sure under which circumstances. A colleague found that double clicking in a specific cell triggers this, but none of us knows why this specific cell.

This is a single app I use exactly once a month. Imagine having to use something like this every day. Even worse, imagine testing this app and saying "yes, this expensive, slow, uncomfortable app is exactly what my company needs, and I'm glad to know that you expect me to adapt to it instead of the other way around".

This app you use is using 20 years old UI concept that has been replaced by SAP a few times. But thanks to the almost eternal compatibility it still works. SAP products have many weaknesses and they are always late and not the best adopting the new trends. But a lot of blame they get is caused by poor implementations in one side and the customers not adopting the newer options for another.

SAP apps are internal and very sensitive to changes, so usually they don’t get priority, but at least you can thank that using such an old app designed for old windows terminal still works. It should just be replaced, but SAP usually leaves that decision to customers and this delays the change a lot

Having an application that keeps working for decades isn't particularly rare in large companies. And yet the SAP applications are systematically among the worst ones to use, worse than the IBM terminal apps or a command line utility.

It's like a framework that allows companies to build apps. The kind of apps for which every employee needs a 4-hour training (for each app) just to be able to fill some data in a form regularly, or to be able to view a list of assigned tasks and close them.

Note that after that training, the employee will need his notes to complete the task every single time, and will only complete the task rapidly after several years of experience with the software (and undocumented tips from older coworkers).

Without being curt; their products.

Maybe they have some nicer ones somewhere else but the ones I have used have been buggy, slow, painful messes- I get the strong feeling that SAP is a sales first organisation and engineering is a necessary byproduct.

That's one way of viewing them and I think quite valid. Another lens is that they have a product that can be customized to meet almost any need, but as a result what you get out of the box, or with a poor implementation, is severely lacking. This also drives what you observe - Having an extremely flexible framework rather than a finished product in your sales offering means your salespeople get to run amok promising the absolute earth. Of course SAP can do what you need... it can do anything*

So therein lies the issue - Evaluating a fully customizable software product that will be critical to your business is very difficult to do before it is actually crafted into what you have in mind. So the procurement and implementation processes are often an uphill battle against magical thinking where people are imagining a certain wonderful outcome but without careful, critical attention what you'll end up with is a heap of shit.

I have a policy of not working for organizations that have either oracle or SAP in the core of their environment, unless my purpose in coming onboard is to move them off it. This limits me in many ways, but I know from experience I'm avoiding a significant amount of pure bullshit, enough to make it worth the rule.

*if you're willing to fund an as-yet-unknowable level of customization effort to reach your organization's particular nirvana.

tl;dr the future SAP has sold to Google may indeed look better than the Oracle reality they're currently living, but it doesn't necessarily follow that their SAP reality will be any good. Such are the perils of procurement.

Is there an alternative for companies of that scale?

Possibly not, but the hazards of software procurement bite bigger at that kind of scale, and it's an under-studied science with not enough assurance of quality outcomes. I'm sure that 'x percent of IT projects fail' metric has improved at least somewhat in the last couple of decades but it's still fraught with pitfalls. Not uncommon to end up with an end result only as good as, or even potentially worse, than the one you were rushing away from. Better the devil you know, and all that.

Regarding altenatives at that scale, I've not been involved in a project at that kind of scale, biggest SAP implementation I was involved in was ~10k employees and Alphabet is sitting at ~130k right now. I don't want to dive too much into speculation, perhaps Google will get a good outcome with this approach and since they're coming from a bad place with Oracle the future might still be crap but perhaps just a bit less so.

The biggest issue with procurement of SAP and it's ilk is it shifts a fundamental burden from procurement to implementation. With a defined software/SaaS solution that's ready to go out of the box, you get to answer a lot of the yes/no functional questions at procurement stage. It can do it or it can't do it and you get to decide how important that is to you. With SAP, every requirement is answered with 'it can do that' with the massive asterix that to make it do what you need it's all going to need to be customized to do so. That opens you up to a lot of risk IMO.

Thanks for the detailed answer. I hadn't thought about the shift from procurement to later in the life of the product.

Sure. Make it yourself. Very easy. In several of my companies we would create our own business layer, without the SAP bullshit.

It's cheaper, it's faster, it doesn't need training and cheat cards, it's self explanatory, and you can maintain it by yourself. Plus you know it inside out. Plus you can add much better features, like graphical reports on top of it easier.

I've had some working experience with SAP. If you use their latest and greatest, it's not as painfully bad as people think it is. Large part of SAP will be in-house customization (or you pay SAP to do that), so that is a very mixed bag.

The other part is; SAP supports things forever. You can run their old buggy DB from 2003 in 2021 with paid support. Bug-for-bug compatible on Windows Server 2019 probably too. That has a lot of value for a lot of SAP customers.

I would also remind that SAP (and DTAG) built the german corona tracing app, which was delivery in about 2 months, open source under Apache2.0 and very privacy aware. And well within budget no less.

Agree. It’s like they have a two-man team for every product, and any bug fixes are going to take years.

It's the classic-PHP of business systems. You could build great systems in (old-school) PHP, which dramatically improved users' lives; but more often than not, you'd end up with an unmaintainable bowl of spaghetti instead, that only the original cook could understand - and very rarely users' lives would actually improve in any meaningful way.

It's the same with SAP.

Not comparable. PHP has at least fantastic performance. SAP is not only as ugly and illdesigned as PHP, it is mostly slow as hell. Besides expensive. PHP is free.

To run a simple non-official query, you would need to aquire a timeslot on Friday evening running over all 100.000 records, because the thing will run for half an hour. Not kidding.

I talked to the sales agent why they don't add indices to their database, and he answered "we don't need explicit indices. Our system is so advanced, it does auto-indexing". Lol. They really believe their own bullshit. Looks like their idea of a JOIN are 3 nested for loops.

Not as litigious, and doesn't own Java, (whose std library APIs google copied).