With 100 mildly competent developers on staff (although not with SAP developers) a company can develop in house everything they need to run a business in a period of time that is shorter than what is needed for a typical "SAP adjustment".
It really boggles the mind. What can be so complex that you can not do it in 300 person years of development time plus the cost of SAP.
Specially with the tools that exist in open source. Amazing databases, data modeling systems, libraries to integrate into literally everything.
It think the bigger problem might actually be to define the process you want to implement. What are the specifications, what of your existing system is actually needed and what isn't. Rather then the actual implementation of those processes in some digital process.
I have a friend who work himself up from worker in a warehouse to team leader and now SAP something something manager. And from the story he tells me I am mostly constantly confused. The whole environment feels incredibly foreign.
> It really boggles the mind. What can be so complex that you can not do it in 300 person years of development time plus the cost of SAP.
Build a inventory planning and tracking system for a company that operates in every country in the world and has to issue and receive invoices, customs documents, waybills etc in hundreds of formats, currencies, languages and accounting standards.
And you are right that the biggest problem is definining processes and data types. Whatever waybill system a 100-head HN Rust and JS crack commando comes up with, you can rest assured that there's some authority somewhere that wants an item displayed differently, so you either patch this and many other edge cases until your codes becomes an unworkable spaghetti, or you go back to the drawing board countless times and ship nothing, or you outsource it to SAP and the likes who have spent decades coming up with a working solution (even if it's not that elegant).
Its a fair point the amount of differences of the external world really does force an absurd amount of configuration complexity on your system however well you do on your internal processes.
You really don't just need 100 programs but you need 30 people defining the processes and 200 configuration experts.
This really seems like something the world would profit from creating a huge amount of open libraries for all this stuff. There are so many old apis in all these old systems. I work in banking and when switching company and then you re-implement the same shitty format again.
You would obviously need some people who have done ERP systems experience, not just 100 random developers.
I think, at least I have heard, that Tesla does its own internal system, would be interesting to see how many people they have working on that if its true.
Yeah because developing business practices from scratch for a giant company is a coding problem so 100 developers should solve it... probably as difficult as making the next Uber for rikshas, right?
Posters in this thread are so clueless it hurts to read.
For one, it's similar to the "nobody ever got fired for picking IBM" saying. Especially in Germany. As far as I remember, one of the managers involved was former SAP too.
But also, SAP has a lot of accounting and legal process knowledge baked in that is reusable even if you customize everything about it. That's what "mildly competent" developers are missing.
> Respectfully, the way you affirm such a thing with such certainty gives me the feeling that you might be pretty far left on the Dunning-Kruger graph on this topic right now.
No, writing "Respectfully" at the beginning of your comment doesn't make you respectful. You are just one of those people who want to show they are smarter than anyone else without adding anything useful to the discussion. Hide your insults better next time. Or better, don't insult at all. Or even better, shut the fuck up.
Please don't respond to such a comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes everything worse, and "shut the fuck up" is the kind of thing we ban accounts for. Please don't post like this again.
Saying that you seem to be a novice in a certain field is not an insult. I myself don't know much about SAP and that's fine. But I don't have the pretention of saying with confidence that all the customers of a $100B+ company are idiots for paying millions when they could hire 100 developers for a year and be done with it.
