Hacker News Reader

Comment by sdan | Hacker News Reader

Nicely written article, but I don’t see what the use of an ERP is? Can’t it just be replicated with some excel spreadsheets?

View on HN

If you're a big enough organisation to need an ERP like SAP, it would cost more to manage your data with spreadsheets than it would cost to just license SAP.

I mean, that's literally how you price enterprise software.

Interesting. Was thinking that some startup could exactly do this, but realized that given how deeply integrated SAP/Oracle is (as mentioned in the article) it's very hard to do.

Basically: Make a really bad product + make it mission critical = a product that people are literally glued to using

Salesforce is probably the closest that happened to "some startup that could do this", and it's almost as big and complex as SAP.

Peak HN right here.

in what way?

Ridiculous to even suggest that the stock management, ordering, billing and delivery tracking for companies like Adidas and their partners worldwide could run on some Excel spreadsheets. Shows stunning disconnect from how much heavy lifting enterprise software like SAP does.

I think you'd be surprised how much is still done in Excel at even really big international companies

In the the same way the Mona Lisa can just be replicated with some canvas and paint, sure.

ERP is basically a centralized hosted version of a lot of spreadsheets. So no, because Excel doesn’t facilitate cooperation very well.

So Google Sheets would work?

If you have 400-1000 hours to reinvent the wheel, sure!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com