Born in the USA: German-speaking users fail to take up SAP's acquired business apps

Although proximal to the global application giant SAP, German-speaking users have yet to significantly take up its line-of-business applications, which arrived via acquisitions made during the nine-year tenure of former CEO Bill McDermott. Results from a recent survey show that only 17 per cent of the German-speaking user …

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe Germans are just cheap??

Or maybe SAP is like McDonald's, where on a per-capita basis, people in many markets outside the U.S. buy more food from Mickey D's than Americans do.

(Beer, because many McDonalds in Europe sell it, making it the best thing on the menu! )

[iron]

Re: Maybe Germans are just cheap??

If they were cheap they wouldn't be using SAP. More likely the US written software doesn't translate well, assumes periods for decimal points and puts the date in Mickey Mouse order.

[logicalextreme]

Re: Maybe Germans are just cheap??

I realise that you're talking about presentational date formats, but I've seen the databases underlying SAP and can confirm that different dates are stored internally in about as many different forms and datatypes as you could possibly imagine (and I mean imagine — there are homegrown systems of date representation in there that resemble the fever dream of an Obfuscational Sciences PhD).

[logicalextreme]

Re: Maybe Germans are just cheap??

More like it's just the Germans cementing their stereotype of being sensible and quality-conscious (and presumably trying to offset the collective guilt their nation feels for having inflicted SAP upon the world in the first place).

[Pascal Monett]

"convincing businesses currently running rival systems to make the leap to SAP"

What for ? There is no such thing as a cheap transition to another ERP. Once you have chosen a given provider, it quickly becomes so expensive that you are better off staying where you are.

And honestly, given the cost of SAP licensing, I would be of the opinion that I could just as well put the money into building my own ERP solution instead of paying SAP to make all the configuration changes of its base system into something I can use.

[Anonymous Coward]

Concur

We're obliged to use this crap for work expenses. It sort of does the job but has such an abysmal user interface. For example the previous package we used had project codes that were alphanumeric so you had some idea if you were using the wrong one because it was an abbreviation of the project you were working on.

Concur on the other hand, gives me a drop-down listing about a hundred-odd 8-digit project codes and I have to stare intensely for minutes to make sure I've used the right one.

[dakliegg]

Companies develop very unique ways to do their accounting so one barrier is companies have to change their accounting practices to fit into the editorial provided by the software company. Software companies in this space develop elaborate customization features based on what they see in their markets.

Because SAP and the US LOBs developed in differing markets they will have different editorials on accounting baked into their software. The number of customers where the fit is great out of the box will be a subset.

Over the long term SAPs implementations will evolve to be more customizable to reach the same customers. No one in this world is positioned to steal their lunch and this suite with criss LOB integrations will quietly run everywhere, in every major company and every government on the planet. Just give it a couple decades.