[bliss]

HR data is necessarily controlled though, there are pretty stingent controls in law around that. I understand the pain of not being able to report on stuff, but there is probably a sound reason. However, the delivery you describe sounds like a broken organisation tbh

[_4msi]

No, this is the SAP business model. If people think that Apple, Sony, or Microsoft try to lock you in to their 'walled garden' then these people have never seen an SAP installation/integration.

It's almost its own industry. There are fleets of consultants charging ~$1000 a day just to install the system. Then, as the OP said, they charge by the hour for customised reports which means that businesses have to choose their report very carefully, and will probably need several more hours consulting when one aspect didn't work quite how they thought.

I would be surprised if the commenter here was someone who didn't already have access to the data. They are being frustrated by consultants who want to keep their billable hours up, and extraneously restricting access under guises such as "this person doesn't have enough training to touch the system," because it keeps them in paid work.

Source: Friend of mine. Man on the inside.

[tastroder]

I'm not sure comparing walled gardens is that benefitial here. Most larger firms will either have consultancies on retainer or in-house personnel that can generate these reports anyway.

> They are being frustrated by consultants who want to keep their billable hours up, and extraneously restricting access under guises such as "this person doesn't have enough training to touch the system," because it keeps them in paid work.

I'm not sure why there's quite a few people pointing these aspects out in here. As opposed to the person using that data to keep their own billables up? "this person doesn't have enough training to touch the system," seems like a perfectly valid thing to say given what these systems do and is certainly not unique to SAP. The learning curve might be steep, the documentation looks ancient, the ecosystem might seem unapproachable, but at the end of the day this isn't that different to similarly scaled products from players like AWS or MS for example. They might have more approachable lower tiers and are nicer in quite a few technical aspects but other than that? It's often consultants and "certification or gtfo" as well. It's not like the consultant costs come as a surprise to anybody in these industries. Sure, it's their own little sub industry but you could say the same about these other ecosystems as well, that's not special - it is just how a few of these sub sectors are structured.

[hef19898]

Reminds me. I once wanted / needed a KPI to monitor consignment stocks. So I needed agregated inventroy numbers fo the past. Quite a simple calculation, SAP has stock movements and the current stock. So just plus / minus, right? The external devs wanted 70k € back in 2011/12 to put that into SAPs Business Warehouse. Not being able to programm ABAP myself, I went to my manager. He came up with a report, in the prodcution system, after 2 hours, half of it during his lunch brake.