ERP industry is so hard(painful) that I wouldnt want to work in it unless they paid top of the top
Good luck competing in that industry
> basic installation of SAP has 20,000 database tables, 3,000 of which are configuration tables. In those tables, there are ~8,000 configuration decisions you need before even getting started.
My little pet theory is that the old "Do as you told" buisness-culture is to blame for germanys inability to produce great software. Software needs developers with agency, who refuse "idiotic" tasks and fight back to improve the product.
Know an israeli who complained about "endless arguing" in israeli software projects, while not recognicing the strength of that.
If its not fought over, all things are developed, all things become meh, teams exaust themselves doing all the things and the product fails, internally unoppossed, but externally years to late, bloated and mediocre to the core.
> My little pet theory is that the old "Do as you told" buisness-culture is to blame for germanys inability to produce great software. Software needs developers with agency, who refuse "idiotic" tasks and fight back to improve the product.
This I have experienced first hand where this junior product manager who wrote some ticket whose requirements when got challenged says "it's mentioned here so you have to do it and you don't have to challenge it". I lost it and I said, "everything needs to be challenged, we are not just going to follow it like a machine". I did apologize to him for my tone. But it bothered me so much.
Its really tough to change that mindset though, once it takes hold, its so deeply ingrained. ("Ober sticht unter").
Basically the whole education system needs to push discussions more, were you have to argue a point, proof you are right and stick to your guns. Something regarding this is going right in some education systems and cultures, and fails utterly in others. Its a education to lead, instead of education to be led.
On the other hand you could argue too many people that stick to their guns are wrong and this too would be a failure of the education system. The scientific method is what we all need to learn and appreciate: form theories, find evidence for but also against that theory to test your thesis. Improve and refine on this basis or drop a disproved thesis.
Complacency, top heavy companies with aged decision makers and the immense difficulties and bureaucracy and risk to personal assets that come with founding a company in Germany are largely to blame.
Software is seen as a necessary evil in Germany, not as the main focus for profit. You can directly see this in most medium to large companies which sell ERP or management software (like Scheer) pay their sales reps a lot more than their developers, even though the latter produce their value.
it's a pretty good field to compete in when the rest of your economy is large or middle scale industry. There's no point for Germany to built "great consumer software tm" in an economy that isn't consumer centric (or so small to largely compete in foreign markets from the beginning).
I worked for a software company in Aachen for a while that supplied software for local manufacturing and this is necessarily "meh" and largely consists of doing as your told and building to specification because that's what industry-adjacent work is like. Doesn't mean it's not good software.
But thats the point. Doing as you are told, often includes reimplementation after remimplementation in germany, not improving upon pre existing software. Not resisting useless usecases, you already know are doomed by experience, but are specified anyway. 5 versions of the same object, collected on a usb and even copied back down (remote) from customer machines.
Exampletime:
A thousand versions of a cylinder valve controller software for a plc floating around a machine builder.
Instead of writting one for each version of statefullness and interfaces to encapsulate the different usecases. (Can be done with TC3) shared by all collagues via Git.
IOpenCloseable {} and that then can be used for example for a drive home routine
DrivePointHome()
{
foreach (IOpenCloseable cylinder in allElementsInHomestateInOpeningOrder)
{
cylinder.open()
wait(cylinder.isOpen())
}
}
And there you have it. Configuration instead of programming. Reusability instead of Recreating. Testability (https://tcunit.org/).
It could all be done. It is done, good, elsewhere on the planet, daily.
In my last career we fought this mentality, to exaustion.
Now im out of it, im just waiting for someone with the mindset to swoop in, disrupt and clean that space out with the effectiveness of good software. There really is no reason to employ half a million electricians to program subpar software when you can have it better for cheap.
We need to look at ERP software in positive light. Fab guy here, there is another beast like this that runs the whole fab. It's made by Applied Materials, called FAB300. It connects to inventory systems, SAP & finance, all the fab tools and process data, automation control through interfaces like SECS/GEM, monitors fab output and wafer starts, material systems and movement of wafers, recipe management, copy exact audits, etc.
ERP/MRP systems are complicated because businesses and factory management is complicated. The fact that we have such pieces of software is a testament that however shitty you think they are, at least we have them. They run real businesses and fabs in prod. They bring revenue and are responsible for running multi-billion dollars of turnover. Whole nation states depend on them. That's kind of amazing.
Idk, I have much respect for SAP and such as I grow older. I feel like if I were to design such a thing with 10k engineers at my disposal, it'd be much worse. It can certainly improve, of course.
Microsoft at one point wanted to become a full featured IT department for companies. From managing their infrastructures, active directory, issuing laptops, but also providing basic erp, kind of salesforce like. I am not sure where they went with that but it certainly an idea that has merit. A small or medium size company should probably outsource its IT department except for the parts that are specific to their business.
ERP are the mother of all vendor lockin for large companies. Not only you need to configure it, but you need to integrate it with the thousands of internal systems.
> but also providing basic erp, kind of salesforce like. I am not sure where they went with that but it certainly an idea that has merit
Microsoft has a suite of ERP software – Microsoft Dynamics. They got it by acquiring a bunch of companies – Great Plains, Navision, Solomon, Axapta. Originally on-premise, now they encourage SaaS but some of it is still available on-premise for those who prefer that. Generally focuses on the small-to-medium enterprise sector, although they've been trying to make inroads on larger enterprises; but large enterprises are still dominated by SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, etc.
I always wondered, why wouldn't an in-house developed lean, ERP system would not trump a behemoth like SAP. A few reasons seem plausible.
- No one gets fired for hiring SAP
- Getting an in-house software developer team that can develop an easily extensible / modifiable ERP system is neigh impossible
It is one of my dream to build an alternative ERP system. But it looks like sub-ERP functions (payroll, HR, etc) have been tackled by many companies and they are wildly successful.
Not just developers, but lawyers, accountants, analysts... I think you grossly underestimate complexity of this thing.
We implemented relatively simple income tax reform a few decade ago in small EU jurisdiction. But law makers were very vague in some important details, and there were about 8 different interpretations. We had to implement, run and support all 8 versions for couple of years, until they decided on final interpretation. Non compliance would be fine of couple of million euro.
And that was tiny country of 5 million people with clean newly written laws. Not babylon with 300 years of baggage like US.
> 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...
The main reason is a third one: You need to have smart and capable business process owners to work with you the right things to build and what to ignore. Most software projects fail because you're giving inadequate or the wrong scope.
I saw a lot of SF projects budgeted and staffed in roughly the same way as you would SAP.
SF started with CRM and has been expanding to ERP, SAP is the other way around. Both are mainly Cloud/Platform-based offerings today, both feature multi-month certifications, high rates for contractors and lots of effort administering/configuring/customizing.
I expect in a couple of years they either turn out exactly the same or swallow each other.
> I wouldnt want to work in it unless they paid top of the top
Anecdotally I knew a few people in the mid nineties that did SAP work and they were paid multiples of everyone else, literally hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Since then lots has been outsourced and offshored so its the opposite, but for a few glory years before dotcom boom it was definitely the place to be.
Good luck competing in that industry
> basic installation of SAP has 20,000 database tables, 3,000 of which are configuration tables. In those tables, there are ~8,000 configuration decisions you need before even getting started.
Gotta be fun :)