[Closed] SAP claims another victim

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.

[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.