Comment by philipodonnell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by philipodonnell | Hacker News Reader

> Software from the Walldorf-based software company SAP was to be adapted to the needs of Lidl. So far, however, the new system has only been introduced in the small agencies in Austria, Northern Ireland and the USA. It has been shown that the SAP version developed by over one hundred IT specialists is not suitable for high-turnover countries.

I realize these words are not directly from the company and I am reading them through Google translate, but I do think they accurately reflect what makes these implementations work or not. If you are getting into SAP and "adapting it to your needs" then you will almost certainly fail.

Scenario: I am implementing SAP's invoice approval workflow in a company that already has an invoice approval workflow that a former CFO designed quickly after a problem a few years earlier. Its worked fine.

Companies who are successful implementing SAP: "I mean SAP's workflow makes sense, is already implemented, works for much larger companies, and has no bearing on our core business, so lets just switch to that.

Companies who fail at implementing SAP: "Lets hire some consultants to adapt SAP to our needs"

Source: I did process flows in preparation for SAP implementations in the late 2000s.

This is what I always said; you change your company to adapt to SAP, not the other way around. Then you chose the wrong product. SAP has everything and then a billion configuration switches which should match what you want; they say they would want you to adapt it to your needs by programming, but really it's not very good for that.

On the other hand I know some consultants making millions by creating customizations to SAP specific in their vertical and then sell that as a packaged product to all competitors. Usually these products are incredibly niche (like a specific workflow for Scandinavian utility companies that implements some stuff all Scandinavian utility companies require by law but SAP does not provide. Picking between then implementing it by hiring Accenture or buying off the shelve from someone who did this before is easy.

This is exactly what happened at WM: https://www.zdnet.com/article/promises-promises-a-look-at-wa...

> If you are getting into SAP and "adapting it to your needs" then you will almost certainly fail.

This is a tricky topic. If you're getting into SAP and you're not adapting it to your needs, you're almost certainly doing something wrong.

The trick is that it _has_ to be a "meet in the middle" kind of situation, where SAP wants to be used in a certain fashion, but also allows a certain amount of leeway — any non-trivial implementation project will involve both tweaking the knobs SAP provides to fit the customer, and developing bespoke components for those scenarios that SAP either doesn't cover at all, or doesn't handle the way you'd like.

I think it depends what adapting means. People often (and I guess LIDL fell for that too) just think they can adapt everything to their needs and that really is not possible. A lot of processes benefit more from changing the processes than the SAP implementation of those processes. IMHO.

Absolutely. The bar we always tried to hit was whether the process we were being asked to change was represented a fundamental way in which this company was intentionally different from other large companies, or whether it was just the way it was before they saw what the SAP version looked like.

90% of back-office stuff is exactly the same between very large companies no matter the industry or history, but that is very hard to get across to the career accounting manager who designed those processes and now is having SAP shoved down their throats.

Secretly, I always suspected that one reason for bringing in SAP was that the senior executives recognized how inefficient their backoffice was but weren't willing to force huge process changes and create ill-will for barely marginal benefits, so they hired SAP to come in and be the bad guy to argue about it for them. Then they can say "Yeah man, SAP sucks, soooo inflexible, I argued against it but what are you gonna do, changing it is really expensive, I guess we'll just have to do it their way" and message boards fill up with complaints about how inflexible and expensive SAP is. Funny how that works!

> Then they can say "Yeah man, SAP sucks, soooo inflexible, I argued against it but what are you gonna do, changing it is really expensive, I guess we'll just have to do it their way" and message boards fill up with complaints about how inflexible and expensive SAP is. Funny how that works!

Scapegoat as a Service. I wonder just how common this is in practice.

it's called strategy consulting

As in: It's everywhere.

> Scapegoat as a Service. I wonder just how common this is in practice.

Common enough that they made a book and show (kinda) about it: House of Lies :)

If you don't, basically, change your organization to the way SAP (or any such "product") already is set up to run, you are essentially buying a programming language (or perhaps framework) that is poorly documented, with a much smaller online community (for examples, tutorials, Stack Overflow questions, etc.). So it is the same problem you already don't like your solution to, except with a lot of things stacked against you now.

But, they won't make the sale if they honestly say "use it the way it is or else don't buy it", so they say something more along the lines of "you can customize it".

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