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Comment by cambalache | Hacker News Reader

Want your mind to be blown even more? I worked for a multinational company, I would not be surpised that this company is among the top 10 SAP customers worldwide. Well, everybody hated hated hated SAP, it was a huge hindrance instead of any help.Any use beyond of a "dumb" database was a huge PITA, and I am not fully convinced that all in all it helped more than damaged the business. It was clunky, unintutive, slow, ugly, archaic and a long etc. There were these guys, that were trained as "experts" but they frankly behave more like witch doctors. SAP is coasting just by its name and legacy but from my POV is ripe for the taking. It is not easy though, ERP systems are hard, and changing them ever harder, but in my fantasy world I would like to develop some program and would be very happy to skim 0.00001% of their income.

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SAP's ugly green, old style-UI screens are wonderfully optimised for data-entry. You can be ultra-fast. It's like VIM. It's like driving at 300 mph.

Its all the new fangled dumbed-down, web-ui's that is sheer crap and leaves your head scratching.

Well..the old UI's were coded by old-school, C programmers who started their career in the 70s and 80s. They even wrote a multi-process Erlang style kernel to back the application programming. Performance came naturally from their gut.

Nowadays, we get Electron and congratulate ourselves.

Saw a big write-up somewhere about this. It's easy to learn the muscle memories for various patterns on a text only UI, and you can become extremely fast.

But almost no one is fast with a mouse based GUI

Excel.

Indeed.

I did once get an explanation of how SAP screens work when a former employer was considering buying SAP ERP - it reminded me at the time of how IBM mainframe terminals work.

I worked at an $8bn multinational and we ran the whole operation through SAP from quote to cash... and we really liked it. It was consistent, and the 'ugly' green-screen style data entry is wonderfully efficient. I hear this all the time though, about all ERPs. It is all about how you use them.

Same experience here I work as a SAP Developer at a €14bn multinational.

I had to work in the store for a month and got good feed back from the workers there.

We try the smooth the user experience with web apps for tasks that are done often so it's not to confusing.

But the impotent data entry task like order entry and so on are done the old interface because it's more efficient.

Same with accounts generation.

Almost certainly most operations accounts and tax filings could be fully auto generated from their bookkeeping - if the bookkeeping was good enough.

You could do that by constraining the bookkeeping and adding some intelligence to the reporting.

So why do bookkeeping firms like Xero stop at basic bookkeeping? Because they sell via accountants - who make a lot of money piping data from one computer system into another to change the format a bit.

Enabling certain people to maintain their mystique is lower hanging fruit than pushing for full automation.

Plus who wants to program accounts systems...

'Almost certainly most operations accounts and tax filings could be fully auto generated from their bookkeeping - if the bookkeeping was good enough.'

I firmly disagree. I am supposed to be reviewing accounts right now....accruals, prepayments, deferred income, the difference between capital and expense, capital allowances, R&D allowances, dividends vs salaries, consolidation of groups. The average bookkeeper is not expected to work at this level. That all requires judgement and experience and expertise. That is why Xero stop at the easy bit

That sounds all pretty trivial.

I wonder if you have worked as an accountant? Or at least took some intro courses in the area? Or at a bare minimum took a look at common corporate financial statements?

This is such a typical dismissive reaction by a person who has ZERO insights into the domain.

If it is so trivial, why don't you do it and disrupt the market? Some very trivial millions are waiting for you to just come and get them, what's holding you back?

I don't do it because I care more about my time these days than about making millions :-) And why would I want to do something that is so obviously boring?

Trivial stuff takes what, an hour, a week, a month at maximum to do? So you are trading the opportunity to be financially independent for the rest of your life for what, your free time on a span of one month? Yeah, that does sound reasonable.

Good, then we agree :-)

Ostensibly you’d rather spend your time on HN than making millions.

Definitely! There is no doubt about that :-)

Trivial in the sense of integer multiplication being easy; non-trivial in that it's full of weird & wonderful business rules, many of which are barely written, and strange interactions between different markets and contracts etc.

Half of it is just the business & people skills to extract the necessary information. Harder than you'd think, and that's just asking people for stuff!

For basic bookkeeping, yes, you can generate all the needed reports and tax filings from the books. I'm in Europe and I've had a couple of companies where I had no accountant - I just entered all the transactions in the software and it generated all the necessary filings for me. Payroll is also auto-generated, taxes handled etc.

For complex accounting and analysis you still need accountants and business analysts. It's a different type of job in that case though: instead of handling the common cases, you handle the edge cases that the software is unable to deal with.

Harder than it sounds. A complete drop-in replacement requires an almost unbelievable amount of internationalisation and research. And even if you can get all of that lined up, B2B sales and marketing - and inertia - are a huge challenge.

It's not that it couldn't be done, but it's very much a moon shot and it's not going to happen without someone charismatic and experienced driving it and selling it.

Specific niche feature SAP-a-likes are more plausible on a smaller scale, but sales and marketing will always be the real challenge.

Good luck! You're time to market and the sunk cost fallacy are overwhelmingly against you.

There are smaller ERPs too, but I think often the real alternative is building something in-house tailored to your specific business.

That's basically what Salesforce did, but they ended up skimming a lot higher % than that

I've never seen an et cetera qualified :D

> but in my fantasy world I would like to develop some program and would be very happy to skim 0.00001% of their income.

Which is exactly what SFDC, NetSuite, etc have done. There's definitely room here.

Workday is in the process of doing this. I wish them all the best, but I can't help thinking that we're just replacing the old goat with a new goat.

I did that and was successful to some degree, but it's not easy. I would've done something else if I knew that back then.

You skimmed a small part of SAP’s market? Like, a specific niche that you built a better tool for?

I can only imagine that if you create any tool worth competing with SAP, your customers also have to be huge companies.

Yes, we competed with SAP in a specific industry and honestly our tools were better and more user friendly, and no, they were not all huge companies, which is one of the reasons we were able to eat SAP's cake because we were much cheaper. I believe we got the job 90% of the time when we were shortlisted with SAP.

We lost some customers to SAP later on because they become bigger and "consultants" told them that they should switch to SAP because, you know, all big companies use SAP. I haven't heard of any success stories from those customers yet (this is not entirely SAP's fault though).

Which SAP product did you compete with?

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