taway19920706's comments

This. SAP has no restrictions on how much you customise it - you can customise and extend to your heart's content. The problems come during upgrade - SAP has very mature tooling to manage upgrades but a customer who has veered too far from standard will need to rework their customisations to fit the new version.

Many many customers have been burned by this over the years - being too trigger happy and customising/building their own extensions rather than using the out-the-box functionality. Packaged software exists for a reason, don't use it like a PaaS to built your own solutions.

SAP is now pushing customers to "keep the core clean" and stick to standard as much as possible, which is definitely a move in the right direction.

You would think so, but all of the large consulting firms (Accenture, Deloitte, etc) are driven by billing and people wanting to climb the corporate ladder. What the customer needs comes a distant second. Many projects are staffed with 90-95% juniors or people who have no industry knowledge.

I've worked alongside consultants from Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, etc over the years and, while many of them are very competent, I would /never/ engage one of those large system integrators (SIs) on any project I was involved in. There are many excellent individuals working for those companies, but the companies themselves are terrible and you will struggle to get any of the excellent people involved during your implementation. The experts will appear during the early stages of the consulting sales cycle but will be nowhere to be seen during the implementation.

Unfortunately this is the dirty little secret of SAP implementations. Many SAP customers think "I'll pay top dollar and get a good SI" but they end up getting the latest round of juniors doing the implementation. Seen it many a time.

> But it looks like sub-ERP functions (payroll, HR, etc) have been tackled by many companies and they are wildly successful.

That's true but TBH, even those that are wildly successful aren't actually that great. I've implemented Workday as a replacement for the user-facing portions of SAP's HR and while it looks good, it's nowhere near as flexible. There's a lot of stuff I would expect to be available in Workday and just isn't. That surprised me as Workday is pretty much the HR market leader.

TLDR; Opportunities are there for new companies to do ERP better. It's not easy though...

SAP is successful because they've spent over 50 years learning how businesses work and somewhat successfully implemented reasonably configurable processes within their software. You need to handle MRP? Check. Multi-country payroll with complete integration to finance? Check. Even things as esoteric as downstream oil production (think ARAMCO). Check.

I'm not sure why in the early days they were more succesful than the competitors (JD Edwards, BAAN, etc) - all of the others were doing something similar but SAP overtook them all. Perhaps it was because the system was very flexible - if you needed to enhance the SAP-delivered functionality or build your own to integrated with SAP, they delivered tooling to do so (very crude in the early days, a lot better now).

Related to this is that almost all application souce is available to customers (not open source, but available to view and modify if required). For those who've never worked with SAP, the majority of the application code in their on-premise systems is written in a proprietary COBOL-like 4GL called ABAP. One of SAP's key differentiators in the early years was that customers had access to all of this code and, with the required access, could extend/modify as needed. A masterstroke IMHO.

Source: I've worked as an SAP consultant for 20+ years (including a fair number of those working for SAP) and I'm no fan of any of their products. For the number of extremely intelligent people who work there (and I mean that sincerely - a lot of their employees are /extremely/ smart and forward thinking), the code quality and quality control of their products is abysmal. It's like the majority of the code is written by people who did a training course last week and they /love/ overengineering things, reinventing the wheel or backing the wrong horse. SAP went all in on Silverlight at one point and these days they love OData, which NO-ONE really uses. It also took them years and years to officially support a browser other than IE.

At times they have done some pretty forward-thinking things though. In the late 80s they adopted three-tier before most (R/3, the first three-tier release came out in 1992) and they cleverly have a very portable application. Back in the days of the Unix wars SAP ran on pretty much every OS and all the major databases (heck, Microsoft had to convince them to port to NT and SQL Server, primarily so that Microsoft could run SAP on NT in their own back office).

Rambling a bit here but SAP still pays my bills (and fairly well at that), but I'm no fan and I'm always looking for a way out. Unfortunately, for me the situation is like many SAP customers - once you've checked in, it's hard to leave (apologies to The Eagles).

"but why wouldn't you consider that a core part of your business worth investing into"

Yes, that's true, and every organization of any size (one sufficiently large enough to implement SAP) will have experts in those domains. The problem is that implementing them in software is a large task - definitely not impossible, or even extremely difficult (it's just CRUD on a grand scale), but you need software that can change quickly when new legislation is implemented, etc. Painful, and the reason why so many do implement a COTS ERP. Hell, even Google run SAP S/4HANA these days (they migrated off Oracle ERP AFAIK).

Indeed, to SAP the "partner ecosystem" is a big thing. I think they realised early on that if they were to succeed, their success would be driven by consultants with "business expertise" who were recommending SAP as "best of breed".

Of course, the reality is that many of those consultants who are being charged to customers at eyewatering rates just finished the training course last week and are now "senior".