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Comment by cookiengineer | Hacker News Reader

We actually joke around the area where SAP is located (Walldorf, Germany). In surrounding cities devs joke about the fact that there are literally dozens if not hundreds of web agencies doing nothing more than mobile/tablet ready SAP user interfaces. That's their only business model.

I'm not kidding you, there's an entire ecosystem around the fact that SAP UI5 is so crap that people cannot use it on their smartphones. And concept-wise it's built very similar to the early jquery-ui releases (remember the first iPhone's menus? Yeah, THAT old), but only in undocumented and even crappier.

I don't even know how to rationalize this anymore. At one point I ditched every company that uses SAP, but it's like the plague. You can't avoid it.

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> I don't even know how to rationalize this anymore.

Enterprise IT is like that because the buyer never uses it and often assumes anyone complaining is just whiny/lazy.

A previous employer had a massive outage with an expensive ’Orrible reporting application: down for weeks, developers expecting them to repair corrupted data, etc. They paid many millions of dollars to license that app and millions more for “support”, so you might naively think that someone would demand better results. What actually happened was that the regional sales VP got our VP the corporate box for an NFL game, and Monday morning the edict went out that the problem was resolved and should not be mentioned again. Dozens of people spent the next few weeks continuing to fix things up but understood the message and didn’t include it in their updates to the senior level.

Name and shame, that is just ridiculous.

I'd guess it's something truly 'Orrible.

Maybe helmed by a vicious lawnmower?

Oracle, because I hate this childishness.

The impulse was more to avoid showing up in simple searches.

If that’s a public company that sounds like that is malfeasance and grounds for an investor lawsuit

It wasn’t but also I’d expect something like that to be very hard to make a case about: courts tend to be very deferential to business judgement and I’m sure they’d have very good lawyers arguing that the original problem was unforeseeable and this was maintaining an important business relationship (“the cost of switching would be astronomical!”). This kind of stuff tends not to have consequences unless it’s unbelievably blatant in writing or the higher ups are looking for a justification to terminate someone.

This happens _all the time_. When was the last successful investor lawsuit on grounds of a failed enterprise IT solution?

The goal of whoever chooses the ERP software is to have people make fewer decisions. Whether it takes you 5 or 15 seconds to figure out what to do next/record what you've done is of much lesser importance than what to do next/how what you've done is processed.

Sure the UI could be improved, but https://xkcd.com/937/ rule still applies.

That's one facet of such software. But another facet, and by far the largest by ongoing expense (as in amount of people-hours it consumes) is just data input, with little to no decisions to be made. In SAP Concur case, one example I painfully experience is reimbursing business trips. In other cases, this may be timesheets, or inventory, or point-of-sale ordering and invoicing.

The "UI could be improved" is really understating it here - there are low-hanging fruits that could cut down the time spent on data input by factor of 5-10x. This I know for a fact, because I can compare my own experience (e.g. various timesheet & expense forms I used over the years, and the hypothetical case of me preparing the report in Emacs in some structured format, and bulk-importing it to a tool - that's easily a 20x time save), or observation (POS software used in stores today, vs. the DOS-era tools they used just a decade ago - close to 10x the difference).

We're talking extreme waste of money here. Plenty of shops I've seen are bottlenecked on the POS software UI - meaning they either have to let X% of customers go, or support extra registers and personnel. We're talking mental blocks that make people redefine workflows - every place I worked in that required timesheets and expense reports would see people doing them weekly, monthly, or quarterly, instead of daily (as they're supposed to), because the UI is such a time waster that everyone wants to put it off until HR starts complaining, and then back-fill it in bulk. And don't get me started on how shitty UI in healthcare impacts the quality of care...

Google uses it. My fiction is someone got a kickback and/or owns stock

Google uses Oracle??? Please, do tell more.

Edit: indeed it does: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/05/google-will-stop-using-oracl...

> I don't even know how to rationalize this anymore.

Bad UI doesn't matter, while the company's exec is golfing with the sales rep from SAP. And after the deal is done the exec has an assistant responsible for filing expenses etc.

What then counts for the exec are the reporting features, where somebody can send them a nice report on all the expense bookings, accounted for tax and all those complicated things, and agreggated per depertment etc. and knowing that expenses which can be passed down to customers are put in the invoicing systems ... that's the area where the value of such systems lies. Not in usability.

>nice reporting and usability both are within reach and we should not give up the fight

I can't use SAP on my phone because it's rooted and they block that. I have literally no idea why. I'm not going to commit fraud, and if I was going to, having a phone I control would not help matters in the slightest compared to receipts or (more likely) a partner who gives me a kickback under the radar -- like booking.com does for people who say they travel for business, for example.

It's a cat-and-mouse game. Once you actually are root, there's always ways to force apps to behave as you want.

It's worth noting that SAP Concur wasn't designed by SAP. They acquired it. It's had some minor UI tweaks since, but for the most part is unchanged from the pre-acquisition product.

If by "minor UI tweaks" you mean "destroyed the platform" then, yes, it has had some work done.

Their most recent announcement is the reintroduction of the ability to drag-and-drop receipts onto expenses. Not in the list view where everyone used to do it, mind you, but maybe someday they will bring that feature back as well. Maybe they will eventually bring back their outlook program that lets you upload an email as a receipt too!

Former ABAP developer here - there are a lot of cruft and technical debt in the core but they can't easily change it because it's behaviour is certified and accountants trust it - so they wrap the old crud into sexy JS and cloud bindings but you can only go so far with that.

So they expand by buying up other companies and slapping their interfaces on it (you shall use HANA and not Oracle or anything else).

The entire sales pitch for SAP is that Oracle and Microsoft based solutions tend to fail even worse then SAP based ones, and that there is no real success stories where a smaller vendor/startup have manged to deliver anything that comes near handling the complexity the old mainframe/minicomputer systems people are trying to replace can.

> doing nothing more than mobile/tablet ready SAP user interfaces

As a user, a user interface is literally all I care about, so this seems great to me.

Why would I use my ERP system on a phone to begin with? IMHO, this market comes from management, and other people, unwilling to work inside an ERP system. And the clout to get away with it.

Not every piece of software has to be a consumer app.

Expense reporting while in the field.

It's not that you'd necessarily want to use the ERP system as such. It just that many companies have base pretty much everything on SAP.

Perhaps you're a fields technician. Your assignments are managed by SAP, inventory is managed by SAP, the customer is managed by SAP, you, yourself is a resource managed by SAP. You venture out to fix a wind turbine, now you either need a laptop and remote in to enter things into a convoluted SAP setup and navigate the myriad of screen in that thing, or someone, perhaps SAP (the company) or some smaller company they bought attempted to bolt on a web GUI or a mobile app, as to simplify the work for the technicians.

There is an entire industry designed around building application to abstract away the SAP client and provide simpler interfaces.

The people buying the software don't have to use it, would you buy your corporate underlings the comfortable, expensive shoes or just enough rags to painfully remind them who their masters are?

SAP produce the lowest cost rags in town, and you will learn to love them.

I thought SAP was extremely expensive.

That’s for the golf course. Same as IBM: The business model is they mostly sell golf courses, and software is a side-effect so they have to save on that.

Are you just making stuff up?

I was sysadmin for IBM software in a 50k-people company, there is no way they paid 12m$ for ClearQuest, ClearCase or RequisitePro when Git and Jira were already out. They clearly played golf to win this market.

There's nothing cheap about SAP. It is just the opposite. They sell the most expensive software ever for any given need. But they make sure to promise their victims that the software covers any possible business "need" under the sun, so the CTOs feel coerced to pay the hefty price.

Damn I can't imagine that given the software, I've never had to buy any SAP stuff so I figured it was only surviving by being the inexpensive option!

SAP = sucks all profit.

Satan’s Accounting Package

SAP, at its core, is an ERP system. Those, in turn, run around MRP (Material Requirements Planning), all in xompliant and auditable manner (if used properly, that is). There is a reason why ERP systems rule the manufacturing world, and SAP rules ERP systems. All the chatter about CTOs going golfing with some SAP sales rep not withstanding, SAP is a very solid system and used by very sophisticated folks (ideally, if not, well, you cannot blame Red Bulls latest Formula 1 car if I crash it in turn one).

So, if you are a manufacturing business, MRP is a must and SAP an expensive but solid choice. If you are not, and thus don't need MRP and ERP, well, you wouldn't use a semi truck for your weekly groccery shopping neither.

People who only look at the UI, and then not even the UI of the core funtionality of an ERP system, and then dump on, e.g. SAP (all ERPs are the dame but different in that regard), just show that they have zero clue what those ERPs are supposed to do and how they are supposed to be used.

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