Why the World Still Runs on SAP (a16z.news)

Speaking from experience, it's because most systems and companies miss a lot of edge cases and standard business processes while they're trying to reinvent the wheel.

A recent example of this is, when a job has multiple shipments, there can be no single due date, e.g. 5 EA due on Tuesday and remaining 7 EA due on Friday. It's a big surprise to new comers and when you add a couple of hundred edge cases like this, SAP becomes the standard way of both obtaining this information and in a way enforcing it.

SAP is like BB Terminal: If someone is pitching you on replacing it, chances are they don't know even 50% of what it can do.

> Consider what it looks like to use SAP!

Never used SAP, but that just looks dense and keyboard navigable. The density makes it look ugly, but accounting people are rather vocal about preferring things that way.

The title is extremely misleading, it should read "Sick of SAP? Let AI help you out!". With "help" in the sense of "the Australian/Welshman/whatever helped the sheep over the fence".

>That is until now. AI unlocks that opportunity to upgrade, customize, replace, and frankly better access and use the data captured in these systems of record.

Thanks for making my day, funnest quite about AI I ever read :)

And now there is HANA, good luck with that.

If you ever upgraded SAP, you would know why. It is the custom code, user exits and mods that causes issues in the upgrade, not vanilla SAP.