General and Casual Questions about SAP integration

[timns]

Anyone on the forum have any experience with talking to, or being called by, SAP?

I just want to get a feel for what can and cannot be done.

[rjbull]

What do you mean by SAP?  Wikipedia SAP disambiguation page

Do you mean the business software - known at the place I used to work as Stop All Production, because that's what it did for a while?

[timns]

A good example of me having tunnel vision when it comes to over-frequent use of acronyms.

Yes, I do mean SAP as in the SAP ERP / Business Management software thing that costs millions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_AG

[cranioscopical]

Anyone on the forum have any experience with talking to, or being called by, SAP?

Often I've been called a sap when being given a stern talking to. I tend to head away from those asap.

[rjbull]

Are you stuck with SAP ERP, or do you yet have a chance to reach the escape pod?

[timns]

Are you stuck with SAP ERP, or do you yet have a chance to reach the escape pod?

-rjbull (January 28, 2011, 05:46 AM)

Haha! I'm talking to a client who joust bought ECC6 and I'm wondering how easy they are going to find it calling out to a SOAP service that we provide. From the little I know, it always feels like there's quite a bit of development work required to get any sort of integration going with 3rd party utils.

[barney]

Been years since I've dealt with SAP - the commercial entity - but when our part of MCI converted, it was an ongoing disaster.  We had thrice-weekly meetings just to deal with what had gone wrong the previous week/day/report.  It's prolly a good product in its own right, but conversion from [IBM Big Iron]  DB2 was an ongoing disaster.  I think they finally got it working, but they lost a lot of productivity in the conversion, and a lot of procedures/attitudes/reports had to be adjusted along the way.  Luckily, I missed all but the initial onslaught - retirement had more advantages than I knew/appreciated at the time  .

[timns]

Been years since I've dealt with SAP - the commercial entity - but when our part of MCI converted, it was an ongoing disaster.  We had thrice-weekly meetings just to deal with what had gone wrong the previous week/day/report.  It's prolly a good product in its own right, but conversion from [IBM Big Iron]  DB2 was an ongoing disaster.  I think they finally got it working, but they lost a lot of productivity in the conversion, and a lot of procedures/attitudes/reports had to be adjusted along the way.  Luckily, I missed all but the initial onslaught - retirement had more advantages than I knew/appreciated at the time  .

-barney (January 28, 2011, 07:41 PM)

Oh you fill me with confidence  Just glad I'm not paying the bill. Apparently a medium sized company (i.e. around 1000 employees or so) should budget at least $10 million for a complete SAP ERP system.

Holy moly! 

[barney]

Been years since I've dealt with SAP - the commercial entity - but when our part of MCI converted, it was an ongoing disaster.  We had thrice-weekly meetings just to deal with what had gone wrong the previous week/day/report.  It's prolly a good product in its own right, but conversion from [IBM Big Iron]  DB2 was an ongoing disaster.  I think they finally got it working, but they lost a lot of productivity in the conversion, and a lot of procedures/attitudes/reports had to be adjusted along the way.  Luckily, I missed all but the initial onslaught - retirement had more advantages than I knew/appreciated at the time  .

-barney (January 28, 2011, 07:41 PM)

Oh you fill me with confidence  Just glad I'm not paying the bill. Apparently a medium sized company (i.e. around 1000 employees or so) should budget at least $10 million for a complete SAP ERP system.

Holy moly! 

-timns (January 28, 2011, 07:52 PM)

A 1K workforce?  And they'tr trying to use SAP?  Seems to me as though that's trying to kill a fly with a Sherman tank!  As much as I dislike Oracle, 'twould seem a better choice for that size work force.  Hell, even MySQL, or <shudder /> MS SQL would suffice in such an instance.  But, then, SAP has for years had a superlative sales force ... too bad their $upport contingent doesn't equal it  .

[Shades]

Have you seen the prices that Oracle asks nowadays for their licenses? MS-SQL is a lot cheaper. PostgreSQL is open source, is actually quite similar to Oracle and suits 1000-people companies just fine. DBA skills in any of the mentioned databases so far will be the main decision making point.

The Xerces (C++) library is very good (open source) and extensive with XML which will take a lot of programming work out of the equation. XML/SOAP is the combination of choice when letting 3rd party apps communicate with something like SAP. Getting your head around creating proper XML communication will be the next problem.