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 ?
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.
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.
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
If you didn't have it a lot of money disappears without a trace.
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.
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.
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.