I’ve witnessed several SAP implementations, along with the buying process.
In short, it’s seen as a safe option, because it’s what “everyone else” uses, and the decision makers have typically come from businesses where SAP has been used.
Nobody actually likes it - but they don’t see any alternatives as viable.
Similarly, I’ve seen folks migrate to and from the various MS Dynamics platforms, and it’s a universal shitshow, with the exact same reasoning, just a different tribe.
ERP software generally sucks, as it has to be all things to all men, ends up customised to meet needs which are obsolete by the time the customisation is complete, and it usually either gets to the point where nobody understands any of how it got to be the monster that it is, and a long and painful replatforming happens, and the cycle begins again - either with a new supplier or a new version of the same old.
The question isn't whether it "sucks" or not, but rather to whom it "sucks".
It rightly reads as sucking to us as tech-savvy developers, but that's not the reality for the actual consumers of such products who are not programmers. To them, irregardless of our protests of inefficiency or bloat, there are only 2-3 possible platforms and the competitive advantages of each over the others are judged on entirely different criteria than we would use.
Remember the first rule of design (for better or only in this particle case, almost certainly worse): you do not represent your users.
I was one part of the latter group. And am also part of the former, evidently. User from the latter group hate it, rightly so, for bad UI and UX. I do, too. But then I see the intercontected processes you have to run a busniess. And you have to run your business, to a certian degree at least, digital. from that perspective, SAP sucks the less. Which kind of makes it a good software I guess?
> it seems the consensus is that it really does suck
It sucks to the people who has to use it and maintain it. It doesn't suck for the people who sign the checks that pay for the licenses and the hardware to run it.
The cost/implementation of SAP is so big that the decision to use it can only be signed off at C-Level.
Any company who is looking at SAP is likely doing business in the US - Sarbanes-Oxley means CFO and CEO have to personally sign off on the financial accounts and are criminally liable (am sure it's the same in other countries).
SAP at it's core is all about financial control. SAP sell SAP to CEOs and CFOs by telling them it will provide strict financial controls to their company and avoid them personally going to jail / paying huge fines. It's an easy sell
This is probably even worth it. Once your company has anything more than a few hundred employees, financial accountability itself at any level is a serious problem enough to warrant some kind of financial control.
If you didn't have it a lot of money disappears without a trace.
'More modern' these days appears to be the 'thousand papercuts' approach - many SaaS products that collectively provide the same feature set.
It's still hell, just a different kind of hell.
Bespoke is a genuine competitor. In the UK it's not uncommon for SAP implementations to cost several million £s, this could be used to build bespoke software.
There's a massive risk here though - there are thousands of ways bespoke ERP can go wrong. Underfunding the project causes problems, but arguably the worst projects were overfunded. Then there's recruiting the right people and developing the right culture - archaic business hierarchies are almost mutually exclusive with good software teams.
In other words, there isn't really a very good option. You can understand why business leaders, who are often not technology experts, would go with something that has 'worked' for them in the past.
Bespoke is expensive but sometimes the least expensive option. I worked at a company that just hired an auditing consultant firm to certify their existing system. It took a year of locking down existing processes and slapping approvals and change management on everything, but at the end the system stayed more or less the same with minimal changes in business process required. I think they made the right choice, but they had the personnel, time, size, and money to do it. I think it would have been riskier, taken longer, and been more expensive to buy an ERP (NetSuite and SAP were evaluated), and the business came to the same conclusion. However I would not recommend this for for any company with less than half a billion in revenue already!
M&A (mergers and acquisitions) is a big factor - for most large corps it happens all the time, you haven't finished integrating all your acquisitions before you get new aquisitions or get acquired yourself. So if you go the bespoke path, you have to continuously migrate departments and their data off of SAP or something like that. And when you get acquired, you'll likely have to migrate to SAP or something like that - and, more interestingly, you may come to a situation where you need to migrate to SAP or something like that before an acquisition to remove a potential risk factor for the acquirer you're targeting; that's going to cost a lot but it's worthwhile given the expected M&A money.
True! But than, when Amazon started, there was no solution for their problem, e-commerce with an integrated logistics software suite, available. Which gave Amazon a huge advabtage over competitors. That changes since a couple of years if you ask me. Which could be a problem for Amazon in the long run. Very long, so.
Out of the box, probably nothing. Something that supports all features you will actually want to use? That depends on who you are and what you actually need to do but, then, you'll need to figure out what you want, what you need and what is available on the market. This assessment is, in itself, quite costly.
> I've seen at techcrunch Berlin 2019 that there is something called SAP.io, somewhat opening its plateform ?
No.
SAP.io is how SAP thinks it can hit long arc innovations. It runs accelerators for „entrepreneurs within SAP“ who would otherwise have no chance against corporatized SAP.
What else are they gonna choose? Even SAP implementations fail, it's $10-100m project. Execs are not going to go for slightly better software to increase the risk of blowing through millions and wasting 3-4 year to end up with the same system. That's how SAP sells
I've had to use it at EU big corp, and it to this day the worst experience I had.
I've seen at techcrunch Berlin 2019 that there is something called SAP.io, somewhat opening its plateform ?