Germany, US staffers to be hit hardest as SAP starts shedding 4,400 bodies German ERP biz SAP’s €950m restructuring, which will see 4,400 staffers given the boot, will hit Germany and the US hardest – but those in areas like machine learning reportedly won’t be in the firing line. staff in business suits thrash each other with ring binders SAP to spend €950m on restructure: The thing is, 'loyal …
Upskilling would be easy if they were my team, as exsiting staff have data experience and domain knowledge.
But ATM they are a big corp and need heads rolling so won't happen.
Lol SAP used to very hot and could ask for good $$$ as a contractor, now it's all about AWS, ML, IoT, Crypto times change!
SAP chart going down:
https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/london/sap.do
ML going up:
https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/london/machine%20learning.do
experienced employees can't really be forced to get a pay cut "just to stay", yet inexperienced 'fresh meat' can be exploited more easily than those who are experienced. Or at least, I hope that's NOT what's really happening...
[it wouldn't be the first time if a large company lays off its experienced staff, then hires all new people with less experience at significantly lower wages]
But yeah, if this is the case of "they have the WRONG experience for the new position" then I'd also question why they don't just do internal training and retain existing employees for "the new thing"...
I suppose up-skilling those about to be made redundant would be out of the question?
Real ML would be manipulating large data sets and coding the maths to do advanced prediction, self-coding, and re-testing the resultant algo. SAP's core business is run of the mill big database transaction processing. I've programmed TPS a long while ago, I work for companies that run large SAP data systems, and I can assure you that for decent ML you need very different, far more mathematical and logic skills. For the everyday core business (and most "cloud" shit) you only need good logical problem solving.
I might add that SAP are getting left behind. Few people want HANA and S4. The core utility sector is realising that the SAP is the problem, not the solution, and customers want SaaS, low cost to change, and fully cloudy hosting, which SAP want to do, but don't have a name for, nor a business model that creates the right costs for customers. Put simply, SAP are like the big banks, big utilities - too big to fail, but essentially an incumbent business with the incumbent's sense of entitlement and aversion to change.
For SAP management, far better to throw a few thousand employees on the bonfire and claim they need new skills, than to admit that their business is past its "best before" date.
"...watch this knowledge drain" all too often, and that the firm should ensure there was a plan in place for it to be passed on to the remaining staff."
Yes, and the right way to do this is to hand out redundancy notices, or whatever, and expect the victims to cooperate.
It happened to me. My colleague and I were laid off as that the company we were working at was bringing in some people from Bangalore to do our jobs for half the price. When we were asked by the company to show the new people the ropes on checking with our bosses in the UK we were told "Just show 'em were the loos are, and leave it at that." So we did. I heard later that the place descended into chaos after we left and the company had to bring the work in-house.
Unfortunately, it seems like companies have figured out that all they need to do is fire experienced people as soon as they ask for more money, then replace them with college grads who haven't been through an exploitation cycle yet. New grads don't find out until the first job or two that giving your entire life over to the company isn't going to get you anywhere unless you're climbing the management ladder.
The problem I see is that this firing cycle keeps getting shorter and shorter. People aren't allowed to be good at their jobs and have a career progression that includes salary growth. I'm also kind of skeptical that SAP is actually doing anything serious with AIMLBlockchain...I think they just need to appear to be doing so. SAP is boring backoffice financial and CRM software at its heart. Other than bolt-on machine learning stuff, what is actually being done in these fields?
I'm also kind of skeptical that SAP is actually doing anything serious with AIMLBlockchain...
Me too, although I'm also in the school that says ML, blockchain are merely expensive solutions searching for a problem.
My own business uses SAP, and we have a VAST cost problem, and management hope for an IT solution. But I know enough to say that the problem is a combination of SAP itself, our utterly incompetent management, denial of the problems, simply too many people doing anything, and a lack of innovation and commercial enterprise. No amount of AI, ML, or blockchainery will solve those. If it could, Watson would have told IBM's board how to run their business properly.
From my long career, I reckon that in a random sample, one in three colleagues will be a waste of space. Unfortunately two in three senior managers will also be a waste of space (well done to HR "professionals" everywhere!). And because of this surplus of Gumpishness in senior management, they're always looking for an easy fix, like technology.
Good news. SAP's 'Inscrutable Icons' creation department is to be disbanded and shut down.
The next release will just use ever-changing randomly-selected highly-obscure Unicode characters as icons, instead of those customised inscrutable icons traditionally used by SAP. This change is expected to be completely unnoticeable to most users. They'll continue to flail away until something happens.
The little-known Business Workplace feature that disables the Internet in Albania for 3 hours will continue to be assigned to random icons, exactly as before. Apologies to the people of Albania; I was merely trying to approve an ECO.
This is a byproduct of many different management decisions over the past 5-years. Now the folks who make accounting software need to do some creative accounting and adjustments to the balance sheet to ensure that senior management get paid out on assorted different goals and targets. Fairly easy math; shed the expensive long term staff and replace them with more junior people who cost less money. There are also movements and changes at the top, see today's announcement about Mr Leukert leaving the company. He probably gets much better terms and conditions than the standard early retirement offered to others in Germany.
Many of the activities are sustained by the long term "support/maintenance" revenue stream. IF you are already a wall-2-wall SAP shop, then there is little choice other than to buy into the next big thing with artificially intelligent chains of blocks the learn from the machines. (because all the humans who understood those things have now left the building)
It is quite likely that under the covers and behind the scenes a vast amount of effort will be focussed towards integration of SAP with SAP to allow SAP apps to communicate with other SAP apps. This is after all what all the simplification was supposed to do.........
this will affect their Ariba subsidiary. I'm hoping "significantly." Before SAP bought them, Ariba was a nimble organization with fantastic support and customer service. Since SAP gobbled them up "support" is total shit*, "customer service" is delivered with sneers of indifference, and they are now about as "nimble" as an arthritic octogenarian...
* MANY of the Ariba personnel I've talked to in recent months freely admit this - almost as if they're PROUD of it.
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