What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
My mother works for a fairly large textile lab. For decades, they used an internally developed system for lab reports (they had a few programmers and admins they called the &quot;nerds&quot; that did nothing else than extend and maintain the system). The company switched to a SAP solution a few years ago. Chaos ensued. The SAP solution missed so many edge cases that a huge number of lab reports were either inaccurate or completely wrong because information was lost in SAP translation between different labs. Sometimes clients (huge international players) noticed the mistakes, which then led to costly product delays. It became so bad that communication between labs eventually had to be done on two levels - within SAP, and &quot;informally&quot; by mail, telephone, or by simply walking to the other lab, adding a huge time overhead to every report.<p>SAP removed virtually every automation advantage of the old system, and added the additional complexity of navigating the SAP GUI. Because of this additional workload and the reluctance of the company to hire more people to counter it (after all, SAP was implemented to streamline everything!), employee turnover suddenly skyrocketed. Everytime I talk with my mother, she complains about the system and tells me that another colleague has quit. She only stays because she only has 2 years until retirement.