alt Hacker NewsWhenever I hear german companies mention digitalisation, I get reminded that they still use pen and pencil in production environments to log data, pass those sheets to secreteries who enter the data into legacy systems so data analysts can enter it into another system that then has an integration with SAP. Data from SAP then flows onwards to some buzzword filled Azure product that costs a few million a month from which someone downloads an xls file and uploads it to Tableau where they run some simple calculations. Someone else downloads it as an xls and manually writes (not copy pastes) the numbers into a power point presentation and makes graphs by drawing shapes. This is then presented at some bi-monthly meeting.
I wish I was making this stuff up.
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This describes large companies everywhere
I encountered oil wells essentially controlled by post-it notes passed around an office.
They make connecting SAP so difficult... this is the only way
I've seen worse. For 2 years I received the results weekly, that I didn't ask for, of a $1m a year burn reporting stack. This was launched during a massive back patting ceremony like something out of Severance.
So one day I stared at it randomly and noticed that the pie chart percentages on one thing didn't even add up to 100. Looked back at history and it turned out this had been the case since day one. Spent a day taking it to bits and a good 50% of it made no sense at all and people had been making business decisions on it without checking it.
And to remediate it? They replaced it with some AI generated slop which is even worse.
That might actually describe a pretty good implementation of an interface to SAP.
I think pencil is more efficient than SAP.
> I wish I was making this stuff up.
Lmao. Yes it's a pretty good summary of what happens in the corporate world, and not only in Germany.
SAP is truly terrible.
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I used to work for the US side of a German multinational (one of the largest in the world) and discovered the same thing when it came to software.
The German side always had slick presentations (they always had good visual marketing) and impressive claims, but whenever I tried to work with their products, I always found the claims overstated and that they hadn't really executed deeply. This despite my German counterparts working hard (I visited HQ in Germany and when they work, they really work and clock the hours, no idle chitchat)... yet it doesn't translate to impact.
A lot of their products had impressive front-ends but half-baked back-ends (on the American side, it's the reverse -- our interfaces looked like crap, but our stuff actually worked and often delivered in less time).
A lot of their designs were also non-human friendly (if you've ever driven a German car, you'll realize that the car was built for engineers and not for end users -- weird little user-hostile features pop up everywhere). I don't understand why this is -- this is a nation that produced Dieter Rams. Tobi Lutke (CEO Shopify) likes to talk about how Germans grew up surrounded by good design, yet that design culture never permeated many German products. I own a Bosch in-unit washer/dryer and it's frustratingly unintuitive and has a "my (the engineer's) way or the highway" philosophy.
I went to a BMW talk once about the infotainment system (it was built on the latest Azure tech), but came away feeling that the work was not deep. It was skin deep.
I wonder what has happened to the German builder/tinkerer culture that made German manufacturing great. In the 1980s and 1990s, Germany was synonymous with excellence. But in the 2000s-present, not so much (except maybe in very narrow mittelstand verticals, e.g. Zeiss).