Hey I wondered why squirrels did that too, but you've obviously given it a lot more thought than I. Also, I always try to avoid them, but several times it did not work out for the squirrel, so maybe the secret is not to take any last minute squirrel avoidance measures and my hit rate will drop to zero . . . it's worth a try. I feel terrible whenever I hit one. Also I wondered if it was only Canadian squirrels that had this odd behaviour quirk . . . I guess not.
Where is the article about the iphone 3g and the strained relationship between ATT and steve jobs?
Having lived through several ERP implementations I can tell you that they never come close to the payback they are supposed to give a business. The thing about using standard software is if you start customizing it to fit your business process, it isn't that standard any more and you can't just hire people off the street to come in and work with it. And if you don't customize it, then your business has to change and very few ERP packages are ever sold to business user with the upfront qualification "we can do that out of the box--as long as you do it are way." ERP sales are one of the greatest hoaxes ever pawned off on businesses and if i were a CEO, I would fire anyone proposing one.
What do ERP and SAP stand for?
ERP = Enterprise Resource Planning, often used interchangeably with ERM.
SAP = Shrieking, Angst and Panic, or what happens to management when dealing simultaneously with user revolt due to a poor ERP implementation, and the accompanying vendor invoices. Actually, it's a name derived from the company's original name, "Systems Applications and Products."
ERP = Enterprise Resource Planning
SAP = Solutions and Programs. They *hate* it when you pronounce it "sap" (both as a verb and as a noun there are terrible negative connotations), but the rule in computers has always been, if you can pronounce it, you must do so.
I can verify this squirrel behavior from bike rides. I often do 112+ mile rides along rail trail pathways in Georgia which give me a lot of data points. They have a 10-20 foot grassy border and contain tons of squirrels. Most cyclists know that squirrels will run straight at them.
Rabbits run with you for a while and then go off at a 45 degree angle.
Deer stay still until you're within 50 yards and then they take off.
Dogs actually want to catch you but they haven't mastered targeting yet and end up carving nice hyperbolic curves that always, thankfully, miss your back wheel by about three inches. Silly dogs.
Chipmunks head off at an angle relatively perpendicular to the path of the bike.
Cats crouch and slink. They'll dart off about 50% of the time.
Snakes don't know what's happening and often get run over... at which point they realize something's up.
For reference from other rides:
Vultures will eyeball you while eating dead deer until you're within 25 feet and then they'll take off.
Cows will generally ignore you but on at least one occasion have run at cyclists.
Rednecks honk and throw drinks at you.
They *hate* it when you pronounce it "sap"
Too funny! The SAP project managers, implementers and programmers were considered the 'rain makers' - high billable rates, long-term projects, margins to make any business analyst smile - and could do no wrong. Pre-Y2K projects were jumping, because you knew come heck or high water the show had to go on by 12/31/99.
And of course, you had the client up against the wall, and boy-howdy did they pay.
I'm not sure I buy your line of reasoning about squirrels and cars. Evolution can effect behavioral changes in a species quite quickly when the penalty for not doing so is instant death.
Indeed, the same species can exhibit significantly different behavior in different regions. Case in point: squirrels. I lived in Alaska for a while, and I've noticed that Alaskan squirrels are quite different. They don't move with the same fluid motion as they do elsewhere; rather they'll hold a pose very still, and move as quickly as they can a few feet, then freeze again. If you're not watching them closely, they appear to just teleport from pose to pose. The reason, I assume, is the high numbers of eagles and other large birds of prey just waiting to punish any sign of movement.
In the case of cars, I suppose that the number of squished squirrels must be low enough compared to the overall population just it doesn't make a lot of difference.
I hit a squirrel on the road last week, the first one I've ever hit in my life.
We have been a longtime customer of a company once called PostalSoft, then FirstLogic, then it was acquired by Business Objects. It became difficult to access support and I could never get the Business Objects support portal website to work. But, I still had a phone number and could actually call someone.
The SAP bought Business Objects. We were informed that all support would need to be routed via SAP Service Marketplace website effective 07-07-2008. Of course, the login and password credentials for this website would shortly follow.
It's 7-11-2008 and we have no login and no password. Calling Sap at 866-890-7686 results in nothing but indefinite background music.
We will seriously be considering other vendors in our next budget year.
I always figured the squirrels doing the dodging were males trying to impress the females with their fearlessness and agility.
But once you've got into customising your system rather than just adding a GUI, you've lost your certainty that it will upgrade to the next version of SAP seamlessly...
The squireel is using the rush the net tactic because it is still sound from an evolutionary perspective.
It does serve to rid the tribe of inefficient and slow squirrels who misjudge the speed of the aproaching SUV mammoth and his likely tactic as distance closes. And that is an evolutioanry good.
What we need are zoologists to measure the changing vector between SUV and squirrel based on speed and siting distance and under what circumstance the squirrel chooses to go in front of the front wheels or behind.
And then, why he stops precisely in the middle and escapes damage from the rear wheels passing across his track.
We do know one thing. Like the Mammoth tiger, the SUV may become extinct before the squirrel does. The latter does, after all, have a more efficient engine. and a greater supply of fuel.
A study at Texas A&M found that the squirrels are overwhelmingly urban and male that are found dead in the road. I remembered hearing about this last year, so I googled it.
SAP used to know what they were about. The entire point of going with SAP was that, as a corporation, you didn't really have to know how to translate your needs into a working bit of software; you just had to be willing to lay your company bare and let SAP customize their systems to fit. The high price of the software was (this is up for debate) justified by the fact of the customization.
Problem is, that's not the case anymore. As you rightly point out, SAP's revenue stream is now primarily back-end support rather than front-end customization and training. In addition to this, custom development has become much less expensive with the advent of mature open-source languages, frameworks, and development environments.
All of which brings into question the value SAP provides. If you're getting hosed on the support, and the front-end integration is both obscenely expensive and laughably difficult to use, what's the point?
A partner and I have formed a small company to handle business under $100m in exactly this way. Using a standard foundation of our own design; extending and modifying it to address specific requirements; and obsessively using established standards, we're able to do it at prices comparable to pre-packaged, unmodifiable software and certainly far less than SAP would ever quote. We're only four months old and people are beating down our door.
Far better interfaces, too, if I may say so.
I say this not for self-promotion, but to point out that SAP has left a bad taste in the mouths of many companies and has, by creating such abysmal software, alienated exactly the type of customer that used to be its bread and butter. And some of us are going to pick up where they're failing.
We run for your car because that's the way we're facing. The reason we run is because we're not able to properly judge a predator of that size and speed, and so we panic.
GuiXT is a bit of a niche player. We are currently using it to implement all the RF (wireless) screens for our client's warehouse and quality management needs. Beyond that it simply falls way short in terms of actual ABAP customization.
The trick with SAP (and I have done many implementations now) is to keep it as standard as possible and only customize the areas where your business has an edge over everybody else. That way you keep the implementation expenses down and the "vanilla implementation" for the remainder of the system often helps businesses streamline rusty old processes that got bogged down over the years.
You focus your energy on the areas that differentiate you from your competitors and away you go. Often it is the action of the actual implementation that helps the good businesses realise what it is that sets them apart and it drives them to greater heights.
This is so timely!
SAP bought out Business Objects last fall. This week, they switched the Business Objects Support site over to the SAP Support Portal. They also replaced the Business Objects Support telephone numbers with a recording directing users to the SAP Support Portal.
Now, did they notify all the users of Business Objects Support in advance of the change? Did they supply users of Business Object Support with the SAP Support Portal access codes needed to enter the site? Did they convert over the existing support incidents from the Business Objects Support site to the new SAP Support Portal?
No, no, and no.
The net result is that all the Business Objects Customers have been effectively cut off of all Support this week.
The correct response to this behavior would be to avoid ever doing business with SAP in the future. Unfortunately, with such huge companies buying out other vendors, this may be exceedingly difficult to do.
What ever happened to business who thought "the customer is always right" and treated their customers humanely?
I remember back in the DBase III days, our company sold a computer system to a particular customer who also happened to have a DBase III system. The customer called us because the person who programmed and helped keep that DBase III system intact was on vacation, and the indexes in the application were all messed up.
I didn't know anything about DBase III, but I was a programmer and it was a programming language. I got a reference book and started decoding the program, so I knew how to rebuild the indexes.
I found a couple of places where the database was changed, but the indexes weren't updated. Then, I realized that DBase III had the ability to index its own databases. What was going on here? If I could spot the programming problem with in a couple of hours with no knowledge of DBase III, why didn't this "expert"? And, why was he doing something manually that apparently DBase III could do on its own?
A little further digging, and I discovered that he had hidden in the application a way to automatically rebuild the indexes by pressing "Control-R". I suddenly realized what was going on. This company was his monthly paycheck. The indexes weren't being updated correctly because he wanted the indexes to become corrupted. It is also why he didn't use the built in indexing in DBase III.
Every month, he'd come here, putter around for a few hours, then hits Control-R, fix the index issue, and send the customer another bill.
The amazing thing about SAP is that once you have installed it and changed your business model to match it, trained your employees, there is no way you can ever get rid of it. Short of a merger or acquisition, you will alway be an SAP customer.
Are squirrels going to be the super-secret guest on the first episode of NerdTV season 2? Perhaps the show has already been run-over by an SUV?
I worked at a company who did the whole SAP, modify your processes path.
They had three companies with three custom systems all doing the same thing (three hardware systems, support, etc, etc), so the board decided to merge all the systems in one SAP implementation (on advice from the Boston Consulting/Stranglers)
Worked fine for standard business practices, MM, AR, AP, etc, but sucked in the SD module as that is what these company did, Sales.
So the Sales module was modified to match how the best of the old systems did sales, costing a fortune and taking an age.
By the time the system was complete (24 months later) the business had sold two of the three companies (and their systems) so we ended up with a 35 million dollar replacement for a system that fairly much just worked.
Now I understand the CRINGE in Cringley :O) Really el Cringeo U R the best. Keep up the good work as you are the "Digital Drudge"!
I, we luv ye! You do not shrink from sitting in as God when the cause demands an expose! Who is afraid of playing God cannot lead in the digital cosmos!
Evolution can be really slow.
Decades ago, I worked swing shift waaay out the in the desert on a military base. Every night, on my way to work, I ran over 5-10 jackrabbits. Four other people worked the same shift at the same location driving the same road - so maybe 25-50 jackrabbits per night.
If evolution was working fast, I can't imagine how many jackrabbits were killed each night 30 years earlier when that location opened!
An oldie but goodie - the real reason squirrels behave the way they do can be found here:
I totally agree.
Here in Brazil we can really feel this kind of behavior not only from SAP, but from every single ERP vendor. It´s amazing how EXPANSIVE they are and how, actually, in most case, simply don´t work. There´s a joke around here: some people say SAP means "Sistema Atrasador de Projetos", wich can be translated into english in something like "Projects Delayer System".
"People who claim to know jackrabbits will tell you they are primarily motivated by Fear, Stupidity, and Craziness. But I have spent enough time in jackrabbit country to know that most of them lead pretty dull lives; they are bored with their daily routines: eat, fuck, sleep, hop around a bush now and then... No wonder some of them drift over the line into cheap thrills once in a while; there has to be a powerful adrenalin rush in crouching by the side of a road, waiting for the next set of headlights to come along, then streaking out of the bushes with split-second timing and making it across to the other side just inches in front of the speeding front tires."
-- Hunter S. Thompson
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72
And it works, because I've never hit a squirrel with my car.
I've hit three in the last ten years or so...obviously the NorCal squirrels are more suicidal. Maybe it's something in the water.
The problem squirrels have is that they're not adapted to "predators" that move so darn fast. It's tough to gauge since you're inside the vehicle, but even a slow-moving car is much faster than anything that might try to catch and eat a squirrel.
So, yeah, the squirrels are doing what their instincts tell them will keep them alive, but at the last moment the squirrel is probably scared out of its wits because you're moving way faster than it expected.
fortunately for them, squirrels have a high reproductive rate. other animals, meanwhile, have been driven to the brink of extinction by the automobile. what does this mean for your analogy? you tell me.
other animals, meanwhile, have been driven to the brink of extinction by the automobile
-1 for not backing up your point, but +2 for the pun.
Maybe the squirrel knows a big cats turning circle prevents him from closing in on his straight line.
Re: SAP. Ever coded in any Microsoft API? DirectX, Windows itself: They're a complete abomination. AND THEY'RE GETTING WORSE! Microsoft replaces their AVI Library with this utter piece of crap called DirectShow. What you could do in a day with the AVI library will take you a week in DirectShow. Microsoft are absolute crap designers. The good news is geeks feel like a God for producing something that works, and difficult systems are great for job security.
Re: ERP. Yeah. I was in a medium-size company that was taken over by a big-company. The medium-size company's new CEO had a plan to turn it around by bringing in JDE, which the big company used. Despite the size there was a single JDE programmer there and he was a God. He was a contractor earning $$$ and even *on*a*retainer!!!!* He had job security as good or better than any permanent employee. The large company's comptroller thought he walked on water. We got glossy brochures and told how frigging awesome JDE was, but when we started digging we realized it was a scam. And when we peered at the JDE interfaces we wet ourselves laughing: It was really, really bad. Worse: You had to change your business TO SUIT THE SOFTWARE!!!! Now that might work if you're opening a McDonald's practice, but for any other type of business its suicide. I understood why there are so few JDE programmers: Programming it is like sculpting cowshat. I've never used SAP, but if it's anything like JDE, it's just a different kind of shat. I have to say if anyone suggests installing an ERP in your business, they're either (1) very gullible, (2) a consultant.
The ice age is certainly an appropriate metaphor to use with SAP. Except it hasn't evolved; it has just become more bloated. The basis for most of the gazillions of tables in the SAP database are punch card data structures designed for the unit record devices that predated digital computers. You can still see the card layouts (with German labels) deep inside the system. You can also see tape and disk related optimizations. In fact, you can observe the entire history of computing in the SAP data structures.
As someone who never misses an opportunity to hit a squirrel or pigeon while operating a two-ton vehicle (hey, kill or be killed right?), it's interesting to know why the aggressive stance from such lightweight vermin. My own theory was an amalgamation of the infamous GEICO squirrel commercial and the scene from the Dreamworks animated movie Over The Hedge, where Hammy Squirrel goes into hyperdrive.
On the serious side, now that you "spilled the beans", more or less, considering the viral nature of some of the elements in your column, how long before many current and potential SAP clients abandon the consulting service and dive into GuiXT themselves? A long long time, I suspect. Despite how much money they could save themselves and or their businesses (to squander some place else, no doubt) from spending needlessly on IT consulting, most would rather NOT upset the apple cart, wake the sleeping dogs, etcetera, and find out how idiotically simple GuiXT is to implement. If you are stockholder in any company that employs SAP, it would behoove you to raise a holy stink at the next shareholders meeting, demand how much money is being thrown down the IT consulting toilet, etc.
I have some experience with what GuiXT does and the way SAP ERP works.
Please note that GuiXT is exactly what the name says: a Graphical User Interface eXTension to what the normal SAP GUI does.
Besides being great at what it does, it DOES NOT change the business processes, so in order to have something nice to use with GuiXT, you still must comfigure SAP ERP.
As interface extensions/alternatives, SAP offers several options at this moment, including a new interface called NW Business Client, which looks cool and does some of the stuff GuiXT does.
There is much to say into what a consultant does for a presentation, but "just doing some GuiXT" is not the most important one, if you are interested drop me an email and I'll be happy to answer.
SAP R/3 was the first well designed fat client/server application that met the tough requirements of the secondary sector (ex. chemical industry). Since then, R/3 was sold to the tertiary sector mostly because of its reputation, the promises of cost control with a solid finance package, but it was more sheep effect than sheer advantages that drove service-oriented customers to it (it also expanded the market for expensive SAP consultants).
On the GUI front, despite the relooking of R/3 by some well-known californian design agency in the late 90s, it looks like the fat cat has become a dinosaur and the little GUIXT is not quite the missing link with the web technologies.
In production, SAP R/3 requires Citrix Metaframe to be deployed worldwide, GUIXT would make the experience nicer with HTML graphics, it's still a lipstick on a dinosaur.
The adoption of ERP systems in general is just another example of the herd mentality that we humans exhibit every now and then. SAP is just the business version of a mood ring or a pet rock. I think that sooner or later all these suckers will wake up and realize what a load of crap they've bought into.
SAP is professional malpractice
To my knowledge GuiXT only provides an additional layer to customize an existing UI. So its function is limited, and it certainly cannot replace most of the things that consultants are doing.
Let me out myself as an SAP employee who worked as a developer for 16 years now. We have never received an order to keep the applications difficult. On the contrary, there have been many initiatives to improve and simplify. I think the major reasons why SAP software is often difficult to use are:
- It is very very hard, expensive, and time consuming to make good and really usable software. But time to market is essential, and it doesn't help to ship a nice product, but too late.
- Most people who complain about SAP have no idea how complex the functional requirements are. They think it should be easy to code all the requirements from scratch and do a better job. But this is simply not true. But it is much easier to complain, and follow the herd of complainers...
- Developers are not users of the software they are creating. Developers are mostly academics who master the technical and functional aspects. But translating the requirements into really well usable UIs is, as I said above, really difficult and an art in itself.
PS: The company that created GuiXT was actually founded in Germany by the original creator of SAP's ABAP language.
I have the impression that SAP receives more negative press than even Microsoft.
I remember about a decade ago, I sat across the table from a SAP representative who admitted that for every $1 of software sales they generated $9 in consulting revenue. So that $100k you spent on the R3 license will actually cost you $1M to implement. Yikes!! Where are the GOOD open-source alternatives?
The best-run companies run SAP... because attempting to implement SAP drives the weak out of business. It's survival of the fittest, really.
Seems to me that the day is coming when their will be some kind of open sourced for ERP. Maybe there already is. I've been out of the business for quite a few years now.
For most companies, especially medium and small size, the data and the functions have a generic quality to it. Once you design a normalized relational data base, it's nothing more than applying functions and screens against that data. Again the functions are largely the same.
The biggest hitch is the migration from the existing to the 'to be' environment. But even that is a process that has a lot of commonality.
So just like we have open source languages and applications, we'll probably see this go the same direction.
I don't see ERP going open source. Would you trust open source to run mission critical processes? Who do you make responsible if you cannot produce because a software failure? Who provides timely updates due to legal changes?
An open source ERP might save you license cost, but you would still need to pay someone for support. There is a good reason why support doesn't come cheap.
I was hoping for another iPhone / iTunes App Store / Apple Mobile World Domination column, maybe next week :)
Bob, none of this is earth-shattering. If you think like a business owner, your primary objective when implenting ERP is to **increase productivity**.
The highest productivity gains will come from automation that eliminates end users altogether. The real value of an ERP is in the API's (that have no screens at all) that facilitate this automation.
My wife came from Russia with lots of brains, some business experience, and a law degree that is of little use here.
I got her a three-day data entry temp job with the power company. On her last day, her manager said with faint hope, "D'ya think she could learn SAP? The accounting temp firm keeps sending me idiots!"
I knew she was smart enough to figure it out, and that its interface would present little obstacle to a person brave enough to live in a place with a different ALPHABET, so I said "Of course she can!"
Five years later: great salary, full benefits, and a month's vacation per year... all because SAP is confusing!
Don't change a thing!
OK. Now explain why the California quail (yes, it is the state bird) in my driveway will FLY IN from yards away, just to land and run in front of a car.
When I ride my bike around my squirrel-infested neighborhood, I usually aim for the squirrels, because I can't predict which they'll run if I try to miss them. This way I usually miss them, and I don't endanger myself by trying to take evasive action. However, one small one recently froze in place, and I ran straight over it, twice (front and back). Even so, the odds are with the squirrels. Isn't evolution weird?
There's an old story in marketing circles (maybe even true) that at one point in time, Bactine developed a formula that was entirely sting free. Sales went down. They put back that bit of sting, sales went back up. Perception: It hurts, it must be strong stuff. Sounds like SAP may be the Bactine of Enterprise Resource Management.
This is a very simplistic account of customizing an ERP package. The ERP package touches a large part of a company's operation, and the complexity is in integration with other systems and customizing it to their (often modified) business processes. I wish it were as easy as customizing a bunch of screens.
Besides, the whole premise of ERP packages is that they come with the knowledge of best business process practices, and persuade a company to change its business.
While usability of ERP and a lot of business aplication software leaves a lot to be desired, the high cost of implementaiton is data management, integration and change of busienss processes - none of which can be solved by a screen customizing app
I can't predict which way they'll run either, but I can tell you why they're running in the direction they run. 1) They're scared, so they run for a tree. 2) Squirrels are territorial about their trees, so they can't run up their neighbor's tree, they have to run up their own personal tree. Which may be on the other side of the street. What we need is to equip each squirrel with a set of ruby slippers, so all they have to do is click their heels and say "There's no place like home..."
Hi -
While the take outlined on GuiXT is a little simplistic, it does hold more than a little water when it comes to user interface customisation.
As for the rest - A large part of the consulting SAP does is based on trying to change the mindset of the the client to run their business in the "SAP" way (yes - it does sound like the borg), and reduce as much as possible the customisation to rule-table changes.
The way in which you characterise SAPs approach reminds me a lot of my own experiences. I have developed connectors for Perl, Ruby, and Python which can be used in frameworks such as Rails, Pylons etc. Why does corporate SAP not embrace these community contributions - because it has potential (real or imagined) to undermine their own software customisation offerings. The squirrel inside takes over.
(caveat: the SDN community, and certain other internal factions have been quite receptive to the connectors, but they lack the clout of the corporate side).
Cheers,
Piers Harding.
Chelsius once worked for a company that sold Unix-based medical systems to doctor's offices and hospitals in the New Orleans area. The owner had written a small billing system in BASIC and sold the system at an unbelievable markup with time bombs all over the place. When one would go off, he would hold them hostage until he would log in through his mandatory modem connection with his undocumented password, "tgo" for "The Great One" and randomize the date of the next time bomb.
My listed name this week is the reCaptcha text I see!
I wish you'd mentioned the other reason many corporations choose to implement ERP systems: Their IT departments want to avoid the responsibility of actually knowing how the company runs, and their business folks think IT can't change the systems fast enough to keep up with the business. It's a total scam, and keeps consultants like me employed.
My listed name this week is the reCaptcha text I see!
This hits quite close to home with regard to the IT dept for a manufacturing plant I worked for around 18yrs ago. They switched to SAP a while after I left. I didn't know much about SAP except that some competitors were using it, and that it was more universally loathed by programmers than Microsoft products.
I still regard all except 1 executive as clueless cowboys, prety much hotheads. And I think most people would consider them mad if they ever met them. They had very little idea of what was happening on the shop floor - same as me or the IT dept but at least I was aware of it.
The IT dept was large at the time and they were trying to implent some sort of in house executive information system (EIS, MIS and proably 3 or 4 other names around that period). But the executives could not agree an anything, one was in charge of invoicing and wanted the month to run a few days early so that he could see what he could invoice for that month, several wanted it to run for the true month and 2 or 3 in charge of various types of production wanted the month to run late so they knew what supplies to order in advance. They all wanted completely different options in the main menu - it seemed they couldn't cope if all their main options weren't in front of them all the time.
They argued and changed speca over 18 months and then canned it for a serious reavaluation and brought in several consultants. And it seems they solved it in the end by bringing in SAP which probably gave none of them what they were pushing for in the first place.
My feeling is that they brought in SAP because it was unlikely to be a career limiting decision and because they couldn't work out what they needed. I also think that in general many IT projects that fail do so because executives or managers can't clearly and accurately specify what they need. For a large organization this is a moddelling issue and is worth doing regardless of IT issues. Which I guess that's pretty close to what Robert said.
The biggest thing about SAP is that it takes so much disk space. It eats space like you wouldn't believe. If SAP went away, storage facilities would see demand for their services drop.
It is interesting to me that this article follows the Independence Day one. Interesting because this article seems to miss the point you made in that one. Yes, I believe that SAP and it's integrators are taking advantange of their customers in many cases, though probably not all. I know that consulting componies often charge way too much for some of their services to support other services that the customer will not pay for, but desperately needs.
I suspect SAP customization has a great deal more to do with gaining an understanding of ones business, and properly identifying the metrics to pay attention to then it has to do with changing field names or screen order. My experience with integration work teaches me that the problem is not how one encodes the invoice total. Nor is the issue transporting the invoice total over the wire. The real issue is deciding what invoice total means (pre-tax, post-discout, estimate/actual, etc). Obviously invoice total is just one example. Understanding your data is critical to any business. As the business grows it becomes more difficult to do. The result is companies like SAP who come in and ask people, what do you mean by this number here? That's the real scam.
Pat O
Powerful software that's deliberately difficult to use? Sounds like Oracle to me!
Both of these companies will eventually get wiped out by more user-friendly competitors.
I thought your most telling comment was the one about managers not taking the time to walk around and talk to people.
My company got a new CEO from "outside." He addressed us all and seemed a personable guy. But he never took the time to walk the halls and stop at someone's desk and ask "What do you do for this organization?" "What do you do?" "Why is it done?" "What doesn't work?" You know the rest. Instead he started a path to ERP, MIS, and Six Sigma.
But without a "bottom up" understanding of the business, these applications all were found to exist in their own "boats," floating on top of the business, adding cost and work, but not really adding value.
Sad.
There is an unspoken assumption in this column that that SAP has monopoly power. Oracle for one, competes with SAP. There is a long list of ERP software on the Wikipedia page. I noticed the claim in a comment that you can’t get rid if SAP by switching. That must be false if it is possible to produce an SAP system with GuiXT as easily as is claimed and the competition had something like it. Can someone (another column?) explain the barrier to entry in ERP?
I heard a relevant story about how biologists looked for the cause of red squirrels being replaced by grey squirrels in London during the 20th century. Red squirrels with radio collars were reintroduced into London. They were all run over by cars.
This reminds me of an EMC product called AutoRun. Essentially, it's an application-aware framework for disaster recovery. Normal DR software concentrates on the hardware and the OS, but doesn't do anything to verify that the apps are running properly. AutoRun has the capability to ensure that the apps are running properly.
So what's the problem? AutoRun has an interface that only a Linux kernel programmer could love. And keep in mind that the base product is just a framework for scripting the instrumentation and intervention a complex app server farm will need to start up in the correct order. You want that module they've written for Oracle? That costs extra. The module they've written for MS SQL? Yup, extra. Exchange? You got it: extra.
So with (A) no apps actually supported out of the box by the base product, and (B) only a few really widely-supported app modules pre-built and available for purchase, you'd think this app was ripe for a user-contribution community, wouldn't you? If so, then you clearly don't work for EMC. When I asked them about that, they replied that their consultants *do* share customizations internally, but they don't have anything for customers to use.
IOW, no user contribution community because this app is pretty much a vehicle for selling consulting services. That's why its interface is hideous.
Just saw this story on Levi Strauss submitting an SEC filing because their rollout of SAP ERB is having a negative impact on their earnings. Ooch!
I was always told that skwerls ran under cars because it was dark under there and looked like a good place to hide, actually running towards the tires because it looked like a hidey-hole.
ot$.02
I, on the other hand, have run over an idiot squirrel who was playing just such a game. Thump.... And last week I progressively slowed down as another idiot squirrel kept changing its mind which direction it wanted to run, right in front of my car. I think they're just stupid little animals. Whereas SAP is just a stupid big program that can't even erase a digit without dropping the decimal point.
Is it true it is known as "SAP" because they thought "Sucker" was too obvious?
Nobody mentioned the Companies that sued or are suing the ERP software and consulting vendors. I found these links but don't know if there was an outcome or not?
http://news.cnet.com/Waste-Management-sues-SAP-over-complete-failure/2100-1014_3-6235776.html
http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878-1040637.html
I say bring it on as all of the ERP implementations I have been associated with have failed or cost at least 10 time more ... Could it be me ;-)
HAHA! You think this behavior is bad in the software industry, you should look at health care!
I won't add to the flurry of comments about SAP, but will add to the more interesting part of the story - squirrel stategies.
I think the one thing squirrels haven't considered is that cars are not just four tires busting a relatively predictable path that they need to dodge - all the squirrels I have killed by car seemed to have cleared the wheels, only to look back to see the little rodent flying ass-over-tea kettle in the rear-view. Seems they get clobbered by low-hanging undercarriage components, or some such thing.
Its those low-flying chunks that will get you every time!
SAP is about the worst thing that can happen to a company.
It does make sure that everyone in the company with out exception will be very upset. Usually this is hard to do. SAP can do it for you. They get everyone.
Bob
Squirrels, SAP and ESRI are all similar. Lets lay odds on who disappears first. There is no reason GIS interfaces have to be so hard to use, but don't worry there are lots of support options available, for a price. I hope all of these fuzzy tailed rats get what they deserve.
Having implemented SAP a few times, in different countries for a Fortune 50 company (but no experience of GuiXT) - my take is that if you want to run Vanilla SAP you need to match their concept of "best practice" - if that means hiring a score more people, then your company has obviously been working the wrong way (for years as the SAP business model is ALWAYS right). However, the model that SAP has - at least in our case, could not handles 1000s of individual transactions per day - we were told (by Plattner himself, the head honcho) that we should reduce the number of transactions - and then compared us to their typical clients (appliance & car manfacturers who operate distributor networks with fewer transactions) to support his claim. We did indeed have to change our business model because of SAP and we implemented some very strange things to handle things like deposits (money became a product that we sold!) - just to use SAP as is (or "out of the box" as our VP of IT wanted). I found the combination of arrogance, price and army of ill-informed business consultants leaves a very bad taste - and though I now know many SAP modules now intimitely - and can design around SAP - I won't go near it.
Heh, I worked for a major Telco when they made the switch to SAP. Everyone got a mouse wrist-wrest emblazoned with the incredible slogan:
"One , One SAP."
Couldn't have been more true.
I always assumed we were the first customer to implement SAP (a year ago). Everyone else must be faking to protect their jobs. "Really, nobody's had to import customers with email addresses before?", etc.
What's more incredible is the longer people work with SAP, the more they accept bad interface design. "That's the way ABAP/SAP works" is my least favorite answer.
GuiXT has gone a long way to addressing this stuff (though it's not without it's quirks either).
Wow.
I could care less about SAP, but all my life I have wondered why squirrels do that (even though growing up in Michigan and now living in Calfornia I rarely ever even see a squirrel anymore).
Now I know.
Thanks.
What was all that SAP stuff, anyway?
Here I always thought that the squirrel's hiding spot was on the side of the road they were running to.
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Would that all the worlds data have such a gui interface. I've got years of Excel spreadsheets and Access .mdb's that could use a module that could make sense of them in an hour. Still I suffer from "Data Data everywhere but not a thought to think."