Why the World Still Runs on SAP | Hacker News Reader

Why the World Still Runs on SAP

a16z.news

15 points7777777phil9 comments

SAP is like BB Terminal: If someone is pitching you on replacing it, chances are they don't know even 50% of what it can do.

> Consider what it looks like to use SAP!

Never used SAP, but that just looks dense and keyboard navigable. The density makes it look ugly, but accounting people are rather vocal about preferring things that way.

Speaking from experience, it's because most systems and companies miss a lot of edge cases and standard business processes while they're trying to reinvent the wheel.

A recent example of this is, when a job has multiple shipments, there can be no single due date, e.g. 5 EA due on Tuesday and remaining 7 EA due on Friday. It's a big surprise to new comers and when you add a couple of hundred edge cases like this, SAP becomes the standard way of both obtaining this information and in a way enforcing it.

I think its because sales, I think all u said is the only reason to not use sap but going bespoke

Bespoke works to a certain extend, just like having various spreadsheets with macros in them, but after a while having a standard business process becomes quite vital. Especially when other people already made the same mistakes and came up with good solutions, but also you will need talent that is already trained for these procedure. Otherwise, you may need to take the burden of training folks all the time for something that they will not be able to transfer anywhere.

yeah my pov and mean with bespoke is

where the company that needs the app, call smaller company to bespoke their requirements instead of big names like sap

You're absolutely right on that one. It usually starts with querying data from complex systems, and slowly morphs into a dedicated solution of itself. I started seeing a lot of OEMs integrating projects like Grafana and Metabase into their product, and LLMs is making things a lot easier for everyone to start other bespoke apps as well.

The title is extremely misleading, it should read "Sick of SAP? Let AI help you out!". With "help" in the sense of "the Australian/Welshman/whatever helped the sheep over the fence".

>That is until now. AI unlocks that opportunity to upgrade, customize, replace, and frankly better access and use the data captured in these systems of record.

Thanks for making my day, funnest quite about AI I ever read :)

And now there is HANA, good luck with that.

If you ever upgraded SAP, you would know why. It is the custom code, user exits and mods that causes issues in the upgrade, not vanilla SAP.

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