Comment by IceDane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IceDane | Hacker News Reader

I recently got a job in the ERP industry(SAP), though my purpose is essentially to do stuff that is not SAP related.

I don't think it should surprise anyone that SAP makes mistakes and/or that ERP systems are hard to implement. SAP in particular is an absolute monstrosity. I don't just mean in terms of size either. I can't help but think about that Nietzsche quote about the abyss.

SAPs systems should become textbook examples of tech debt left to accumulate, of what happens when systems are allowed to grow in whatever direction is useful at the time without any thought for the future or proper design. This isn't very surprising either since I can't imagine that there is any group of human beings on Earth that is capable of understanding SAPs systems to the point where they could extend it safely.

SAP also takes the NIH syndrome and makes it a core value. Everything they make is worse than that other technology that accomplishes the same. See UI5 - it's like they traveled back in time and hired a CS freshman in the late 90s to develop it.

When they don't have the expertise to create a copy from scratch, they just use the competitors' solutions and wrap that in their own marketing. They want you to only use SAP stuff.

The figures mentioned in the article about how important SAP is to the world's economy and logistics should scare the living shit out of anyone.

You are conflating SAP the company with SAP the ERP with SAP the NetWeaver/ABAP platform.

From my experience the actual platform, while certainly showing its age, is surprisingly well designed and still very much relevant, despite SAP the company doing its best to replace it with something “modern”/“nosql”/“bigdata”/buzzword-of-the-day. I think that it would do good to many web-oriented developers to study how SAP/ABAP works, because it follows the web-style request/response + background tasks architecture since it’s inception. One interesting thing is that the low-level network protocol used by NetWeaver is ugly undocumented binary thing that you are supposed to use through binary blob, but API of said binary blob has very much the “POST random JSON somewhere and get JSON back” feeling.

For the ERP itself there are many people downthread saying exactly same thing: the ERP works and is well thought-out. And almost always breaks horribly when you start to customize it to match your random ad-hoc business processes.

Companies adopting ERP (almost) invariably overestimate the costs of bringing their business processes in line with the software and underestimate the costs of bringing the software in line with their business processes.

On the other hand SAP is still by far my favourite ERP as a finance user. Interfaces that look like the green-screen dumb-terminals of the past are fantastically productive for data entry. Tab tab F9

I loved the rigour of the thing, I trusted it.

Further than that, SAP Business One is pretty good to use too

Haha - so true. The first versions of some of the financial packages built on salesforce and elsewhere - so SLOW. Click, wait, dropdown -> wait for it to populate with the 1,500 items when devs probably only tested with 5 etc etc, then click, wait, click, wait. All much better now of course, but the early years were terrible.

I find Netsuite is still combersome for fast data entry. But it is also very flexible and extensible...

PC based POS systems in India are apparently DOS or Foxpro apps on modern Windows. Tally, ERP giant, has an interface from 1995. That's how they remained productive while the world regressed to the mouse.

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