[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.