How many are using SAP , and if so , do you like it ?

[Baker in Virginia]

Good Afternoon,

Just wondering , are many of you using SAP in your plants ? If so , is it difficult to learn ? Are there many training videos available to learn ? What version of SAP are most factory maintenance programs using ?

Thanks so much .

 

[ojz0r]

TLDR; Run.


My experience is mostly as a bystander. The company i worked for was implementing SAP for god knows what and to me it looked like a fantastic vendor lock in and never ending developement($^2) platform.
Although, we had the "pleasure" of doing our time reporting into it. I say pleasure like in the sense you could technically use sandpaper to wipe, but if choice is given that is not high on the list.
I heard that there was a guy/girl in economics whos whole job was to copy and past from SAP into excel sheets.



The possibilities of SAP are endless, therefore also the developement.

 

[dwoodlock]

Have worked at 2 companies who used it. One was a smaller company where i worked during and after implementation; one was a massive global company which had been using for years.

In both cases there usually isn't enough of a support structure to make it suit the people who use it on a daily basis's needs. It ends up being something that is operated using a lot of tribal or informal knowledge and most people try and avoid it if they can.

Those that see benefit from its implementation don't really have to use it, so no pain for them.

Maybe when it has a strong development team it can be fantastic, but I have never seen that.

 

[joseph_e2]

TLDR; Run.

SAP tries to be everything to everyone, which means that it does no single thing well. Everything is a pain and overly complex. To just enter an order for parts requires at least 5 or 6 screens and prompts, most of which are repeated for each individual part (no auto fill). Many of the screens have a page full of fields, only 2 of which are required. And required fields aren't identified clearly. You just get an error message popup when you miss one. Basic keyboard shortcuts that most people who've used Office are used to do different (and irreversible) things.


Yeah, just run.

 

[Robobob]

sap tries to be everything to everyone, which means that it does no single thing well. Everything is a pain and overly complex. To just enter an order for parts requires at least 5 or 6 screens and prompts, most of which are repeated for each individual part (no auto fill). Many of the screens have a page full of fields, only 2 of which are required. And required fields aren't identified clearly. You just get an error message popup when you miss one. Basic keyboard shortcuts that most people who've used office are used to do different (and irreversible) things.


Yeah, just run.

+1000

 

[drforsythe]

You can substitute Oracle for SAP in the above comments and all points are equally valid. Bean counters love the information available, but the everyday users pay for it.

 

[dummy_bit]

Our maintenance is SAP based. There's a lot of functions that don't apply to our use of it and it is a rather tedious GUI. We just learn the parts we need to interact with it and ignore the rest. We'd setup our own variant so the information is displayed to our liking only to have someone decide its not needed and erase it making it difficult for maintenance techs to figure out if the time was added to someone else on a call or not.

I'd say bluntly it is NOT user friendly when there's so many people trying to change things they shouldn't and no overall oversight.

 

[OkiePC]

I worked for a large corporation while it was being implemented. Toward the end of that process we were still using the old system for much of our normal work.

It was like they bought a new Cadillac so they could show it off to the corporate suits and then make us swing the doors open to push it down the road.

 

[harryting]

User interface is like from 2 decades ago. However, there is a reason that even Microsoft uses it. For big corporation it supposedly make accounting a lot easier.

I think I can say safely that no one use SAP willingly, they use it because they have to.

 

[cardosocea]

Better than nothing... but that's about it.

 

[Puddle]

I've used it before. It's a huge piece of software that sells itself as a complete business solution. It's a great tool for accounting use and the idea is that by getting purchasing, sales, production and maintenance to input data for downtime and parts used, it can track products through from raw materials ordered right through to finished products as well as maintaining costs for engineering stores.
This is great in theory, but given that each step is performed by different people and that the whole thing is so difficult to navigate, the data doesn't end up being worth anything.