a) Engineering: Nobody will rewrite 20 year old views just to improve the UX. In many cases, nobody even dares to touch the 20 years old spaghetti code.
b) Sales: The buyer is not the user. The buyer (playing golf with a sales rep) doesn't give a damn about the actual productivity of what he is buying.
c) Management: There is a solid economical rationale in not giving a fcuk about UX. Over the years, SAP outcompeted and absorbed many competitors that were more interested in UX than golf. Golf won every single time. Nobody at the top understands or cares about UX because it does not bring more revenue, it is a cost.
Source: I am an ex SAP.
I see this trotted out a lot but are all large companies really that oblivious? Do none of the decision makers talk with the people that work for them? Surely those executives aren't so divorced from reality and common sense that they don't see a problem when people complain that things don't work or if they do, it takes an order of magnitude more time and effort?
Surely there must be some other explanation for the proliferation of these systems other than "execs dumb and bad"?
Executives at a large company are divorced from your reality at your level of the job.
Incidentally, that’s part of the fun of working at smaller companies, though the variance is higher there’s also the potential to work more closely with good earnest executives who also want the company to succeed.
>people complain that things don't work
that's a problem and we're going to have to fix it
>it takes an order of magnitude more time and effort
that's not a problem
the fact that Jane the accounting drone has to do twice the amount of work, or has to hire an intern to help her out, or even wants to quit because the job is so awful now is not a problem
it's a rounding error in the overall cost of implementing an ERP system
a new screen with some new data to show for the exec is worth 20 Jane's and her opinions on the new system
you can't even call the new system unethical or fraudulent because 10 people other then Jane can now stop using broken excel sheets to organize their work
basically Jane is collateral damage
Executives want to have successful projects to show to their value to an organization. But usually the board members are unable to comprehend the details of a project. So the herd mentality kicks in. The CTO will seek approval for SAP and provide Gartner magic quadrant BS to give the board a level of comfort.
Now whether SAP is the right tool, or if it inconveniences users doesn't matter a whit to the CTO. All that matters is budget and timeline. The CTO wants to be able to speak to the board and say that the project timeline was met and under budget. All else is a complete non-factor.
In many cases, no. In part because the people that do the operational work aren't the same people who work for the decision maker.
This is the crux of why enterprise software sucks: the user is not the buyer.
Two main reasons:
- It's actually terminal software, that's translated into a GUI from a text interface on the fly.
- The people that buy SAP never have to use SAP. Its interface is not a selling point.
I am intrigued - you mean terminal output is actually parsed, and a GUI view is then generated from it?
E: this would certainly explain the issue of listboxes only having the currently shown items loaded (described by another commenter) - everytime you scroll, the terminal output has to be produced + parsed again
I challenged this design decision when Fiori was introduced and the thing is that statistically the lists are either small or huge. When they're huge, they got touched in less than 10% cases, so by not loading the whole content you save a lot.
It's absolutely not something you just randomly explore. I think that's a more interesting question: what sort of empowerment of employees could you create if the UI wasn't so terrible?
But SAP's moat is elsewhere. You put up with its terribleness because nothing else can do what it does. Beating SAP would require you to reach that, and do something else, part of which could be a nicer UI.
Every detail of the business process is now explicit. Employees have to be forced to work according to actual process. You need quite a bunch training for that. Then employees will find shortcuts to make their own job a bit faster/easier, which will fuck up some cases. You need even more training for that and possibly some redesigns. And all you get from that is depression
I jest. But that's kind of the point. SAP is terrible by the nature of the beast. It's a closed off system with specialised developers who require all sorts of expensive certifications. That doesn't make for good developers, that makes for pigeon-holed developers who don't have a lot of competition.
A terrible SAP developer with all the certifications to their name would probably still find plenty of work, because the expectations are low to begin with, as proven by SAP being held in low regard across the industry.
To me, needing expensive certifications to prove your worth (as if...) is a big red flag. I'm a developer who has 20+ years of experience, I recently worked for Apple and other Fortune top 50 companies, I went from startups to enormous companies.
Nowhere did I need certifications. And my past experience was never enough to land a job. I'd have to prove myself in every job application. That's tiresome and feels extremely unnecessary, but it requires me (and my peers) to stay sharp.
Of course, none of the above is very black and white. There are certified developers who are amazing, and there are open-source developers who keep themselves relevant who actually suck at what they do.
But I'd argue that the SAP group of developers have far more developers who aren't very good and grow complacent, oftentimes because of their certifications. That, combined with a closed-off system, bad documentation, a lack of online support, and a much smaller community, will MORE often lead to software that is of lower quality.
There are of course the certified consultants that work for clients of SAP. I can however understand why they need certifications. It's probably impossible to configure these systems without some kind of special education in them.
And as for the quality of SAP devs.. I work for SAP and I have met many very qualified developers at the company. Far more than I anticipated before joining the company. Quite a few have been poached by Google et al but that is another topic.
Anyway SAP/ERPs aren't code for running your business. They're code for running code to run your business. Now you have all the shortcuts SAP made to get stuff out the door, and on top of that you've got all the layers of shortcuts your business has made to get things out the door too. Therefore lots of nasty difficult complexity.
And finally I've seen evidence that in SAP people treat it like the fundamental abstraction layer is the spreadsheet[1]. So like in unix everything is a file, in SAP everything is a spreadsheet. This is a nasty complicated fundamental abstraction without the natural elegance of Unix's one.
[1] Maybe it really is, maybe it isn't but that's how a large chunk of the ABAP code I've seen treats it.
I remember SAP circa 2003. The only think that used XMLHttpRequest (AJAX aka dynamic html) was Outlook web frontend, and SAP web UI. GMail that widely popularized dynamic html did not even existed yet.
It definitively is neither pretty, discoverable nor intuitive, but in the hands of experienced power users (who have spent a lot of time learning the UI), it works really well. I have seen people (who have used the system probably for > 10 years) dig the most arcane information out in seconds, navigating through about ten different views without ever touching a mouse.
It's a UI from another era, but if you take the time to learn it properly, it can be very efficient.
SAP is very inconsistent across different views. It's not about learning a different concept, but memorizing each little detail.
On some forms you need to press <enter> to get to the next one. Sometimes it's clicking a button. Another time it's <F3>.
You can become a pro in SAP UIs, of course. But it's tedious and your knowledge applies nowhere else.
I’m fairly certain most of them are bad. You don’t make an everything monster and have things be good. They’re likely at best adequate.
With a lot of the nice looking web based apps we're used to looking at, the UX and the target domain evolve together and if there isn't an elegant way of doing a particular operation then there's going to be pressure to drop that operation entirely. SAP deployments always have to do everything in the organisation so complicated corner cases either get dropped (bad) or end up with suboptimal interfaces (also not great!).
Why did AWS, a group probably fairly technical savy and a direct competitor to its vendor, take so long [1] to migrate from Oracle?
Why does Google, as of today, have job openings for SAP in its Rev Rec division [2], and more widely in areas touching [3] “ SAP ERP domains (e.g. Finance, Revenue/Cost Management, Billing, Materials Management, Sourcing, Procurement and/or Inventory Management)”?
Granted you could say, and I believe in one of the many google “corporate biography” books Eric Schmidt allegedly worked through this same problem: hey is an ERP a product for us? A core competency? Should we build it? [Seems HN discussed this in 2021 already, 4]
Conversely, given the wide ranging scope of random things Google has built and how naively simple accounting and something like a fixed asset ledger looks at first glance…why did they never do it? Surely not because building 7 conflicting chat tools was a priority.
My guess (as a non developer) would be it’s crazy hard to build SAP. From personal experience even QB Online has a daunting level of “backwards compatible” complexity [5] in its data scheme even coming from an accounting background. The API keeps versioning up incrementally and you’ll find gems like “XYZ local French Tax” and other accumulated baggage. As an anecdote, using arguably a knowledgeable vendor, as of a year ago it wasn’t possible to populate a full simple profit and loss statement via Fivetrans ETL tool [6], even though they did a phenomenal job in mapping out the ERD compared to anything else that existed imho [7]. CDATA let you run SQL queries, but the complexity of scripting some of the reports was much more fragile. The community even built a DBT layer [8] and given how cumbersome it was to generate even just the “Revenue” line on the P&L out of a simple non-enterprise tool like QBO, SAP seems 1000x harder.
That’s probably why everything in-market, post-sales cycle is garbage. But hey, someone in a dorm room might be working on replacing SAP right now :)
Note: this excludes versioning, which I believe Workday does every six months, which is also a bunch of work twice a year.
1. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/migration-complete-amazons-...
2. https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/142858723165905606-r...
3. https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/118792275728704198-s...
4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26706991
5.(imprecise but good starting point) https://developer.intuit.com/app/developer/qbo/docs/api/acco...
6. https://fivetran.com/docs/applications/quickbooks
7. https://docs.google.com/presentation/u/0/d/1u0dnyq5L_rcEgR2_...
8. https://fivetran.com/docs/transformations/dbt/data-models/qu...
