Google will stop using Oracle’s finance software and adopt SAP instead

When they didn't get the decision they wanted, they quickly escalated to exec and director level, and the exec of a major shareholder to try and get the decision overturned.

It wasn't an especially pleasant experience personally, because obviously it involved a lot of very personal attacks by a vendor, but at the same time it was fascinating to watch how they networked from the top down to try to get the decision that they wanted, and run roughshod over the SMEs and process.

Some years later one of the sales team sent me a "Virtualisation for Dummies" book and told me I could learn something from it.

Maybe they have some nicer ones somewhere else but the ones I have used have been buggy, slow, painful messes- I get the strong feeling that SAP is a sales first organisation and engineering is a necessary byproduct.

First, the width of the app window is fixed and cannot be resized. And some wide columns are fixed in place too, meaning that I can only see three columns at the time (out of 30) and therefore I am constantly scrolling left and right. On top of that, every time the window loses focus it does a weird 2-3 seconds refresh when you come back. As a result, we all write everything in Notepad first and only open SAP when we know we won't need to click away anymore.

Every single cell in that "spreadsheet" can do at least 50 things, but I have never managed to get them to do what I need. If I need the specific code of my position I copy-paste it from last month because that cell's search function has never returned anything useful. But if I check last month's data I lose the data of this month that I didn't save (plus the weird refresh thing happens here too). And if I save something it's there forever and cannot be edited. As a result, if I don't have my employee and workplace codes at hand at the beginning it's faster to throw the partial data away and start all over.

Some fields auto-complete, but I'm not sure under which circumstances. A colleague found that double clicking in a specific cell triggers this, but none of us knows why this specific cell.

This is a single app I use exactly once a month. Imagine having to use something like this every day. Even worse, imagine testing this app and saying "yes, this expensive, slow, uncomfortable app is exactly what my company needs, and I'm glad to know that you expect me to adapt to it instead of the other way around".

Note that after that training, the employee will need his notes to complete the task every single time, and will only complete the task rapidly after several years of experience with the software (and undocumented tips from older coworkers).

It's the same with SAP.

Yeah that's the point, its meant to somehow magically work for everyone. And thanks to that, it doesn't really work for anyone and feels awful for everyone.

> So auditors belief that an Oracle ERP system gives them confidence in a company audit is misguided.

I'm no expert, but I don't think typical auditors are there to find things like that.

Oracle/SAP is NOT about whether the system is actually correct.

Oracle/SAP IS about whether the system not being correct is the legal liability of someone else.

We're required to obtain an understanding of the control environment (so the ERP system in this case), and if we want to rely on its outputs we have to do dedicated testing over it. You're right though that if you do alter one transaction it's probably not going to come up in the audit samples. There's a bit of a gradient though between how much you alter and how much the auditors care, because auditors deal with things on a materiality basis. The more you manipulate the finances, the more material it becomes and the more we care, but also the more likely it will be uncovered. If you're changing a few trivial transactions we more certainly will never uncover it unless you're really unlucky, but then the effects of those trivial transactions is trivial anyways so it's not really a problem.

Personally I think this was fascinating. We got a glimpse at how Google decides to create products and later kill them. In this case - executive pet project that died with the executives departure.