Has anyone used either SAP or SuccessFactors and thought "wow, this is really great!"?
I use SAP (in finance) and it's pretty craptacular in terms of user experience. It's generally counterintuitive and obscure. The problem with enterprise software is that the end user doesn't buy it, the buying decision is made by IT departments and executives who generally don't have to interact with the product on a daily basis.
It seems to me that the only hope for enterprise is software companies that are almost more service than software. Unfortunately, most businesses need something other than a cookie cutter solution and let's face it, that's what you get from most of these big companies, even the SaaS.
One solution is for business oriented programmers to come in and create customized solutions. Believe me, there is definitely a business case for paying a a few good hackers to create customized solutions and manage those solutions on an ongoing basis.
> One solution is for business oriented programmers to come
in and create customized solutions. Believe me, there is
definitely a business case for paying a a few good hackers
to create customized solutions and manage those solutions
on an ongoing basis.
You just described the job of an SAP consultant :)
At SuccessFactors, I once spent about a month figuring out how to install PeopleWare. Somehow word of this leaked out, and I started receiving many cold calls from consultants offering "help" doing the install.
[Installing PeopleWare is, by the way, not for the faint of heart. I would start bad-mouthing it here, but then I wouldn't be able to stop. Let's just say that its craptacularness is fractal]
To buy something like PeopleWare, you pay several hundred thousand dollars and you get a disc in the mail. You throw away the disc and hire a roomful of consultants, each of whom arrives with their own discs full of better versions and customizations and so forth. Three years later you have PeopleWare running.
"Has anyone used ... SAP ... and thought "wow, this is really great!"?"
Yes. HANA is an excellent in memory database. Business Objects is really really cool at delivering data views that look great. Netweaver is a good foundation for enterprise business solutions. SAP Portal software is as excellent of a portal as you will find.
I could also list things I don't like, but to act like a huge software company like SAP doesn't have great software is silly.
"I use SAP (in finance) and it's pretty craptacular in terms of user experience. It's generally counterintuitive and obscure."
Yes, that's what I'd argue is the worst. The user experience, and this is improving after the purchase of Business Objects. You can see this changing (finally). The problem you're mentioning isn't one of finance, or SAP, it's of R3 specifically.
R3 is a big part of SAP, so most of the complaints come from the user experience of R3. Totally valid. No doubts there.
There is a huge push for SAP to become more user friendly. What is nice is there are projects like HANA, SAP Gateway and Sybase Unwired Platform, which are all fairly new technologies that can expose existing SAP systems (i.e. R3 FI Module) and bring them into a better user experience. Check out SAP gateway: http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/gateway
Gateway for example allows you to expose traditional SAP core functions to RESTful APIs and supports Ruby, PHP, Java, etc. So you could technically write a Rails app on top of an SAP system. If anyone in the "start-up SV" land wants more info please let me know. There is an interesting time disruptive right now in Enterprise Software and potentially a lot of money to be had. The users are finally fighting back :)
The value proposition for SAP is consistency in business processes and data accuracy. It views the employee using the transaction code as a position in the company (as in just a cog in the data supply chain) and not a person.
This view is helpful when you want to guarantee business processes are followed correctly in a billion dollar plus company, and this is why this software is sold to CFO's and not IT Departments and End users. This view though has drawbacks when it comes to HR and you expect employees and managers to perform "softer" business processes that are not as rigid. I have implemented SAP ESS/MSS and my experience the culture of the HR staff if vastly different than that of finance and that "cog in the system" isn't working well for them and they need more tools that are "usable" for normal people. That is where I see the latest purchases of Sybase, Business Objects and now SuccessFactors coming. SAP now needs to target their software for "normal people" now that they are moving past simply providing line items to be rolled up on the general ledger
Furthermore, As for your "non cookie cutter" example, the business processes of Purchasing, General Ledger Sales are so similar that most companies that cook up custom business processes because they are designing in the dark and don't have access to information that would tell them a better way of doing it. This is where SAP comes in. If your competitive advantage is not how you execute a Purchase Order or how you move t-shirts from the distribution center to the store, why not just do it how everyone else is doing it?
we migrated to SAP Business One from QB since we manufacture and needed more serious inventory management. It's impossible to fully test it prior to purchase.
Let me say, SAP is a pig, the UI is painfully slow and non-intuitive (though consistent) especially with the various additional "usability" addons. Some things that were left out for the giant price tag are mind-boggling. This was not the promise of ERP software.
I'd equate it to buying an expensive house which comes with the foundation in place, half the framework done and a ton of materials to finish the work yourself....with sparse instructions.
I use SAP (in finance) and it's pretty craptacular in terms of user experience. It's generally counterintuitive and obscure. The problem with enterprise software is that the end user doesn't buy it, the buying decision is made by IT departments and executives who generally don't have to interact with the product on a daily basis.
It seems to me that the only hope for enterprise is software companies that are almost more service than software. Unfortunately, most businesses need something other than a cookie cutter solution and let's face it, that's what you get from most of these big companies, even the SaaS.
One solution is for business oriented programmers to come in and create customized solutions. Believe me, there is definitely a business case for paying a a few good hackers to create customized solutions and manage those solutions on an ongoing basis.