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by simias 2902 days ago
Well that's an other thing, when you look at these solutions from afar you often see the core functionality and think it's not a big deal but the devil is always in the details, the millions of small functionalities hidden everywhere for specific tasks is what makes it very hard to compete. Every company has specificities, they want to interface with $external_software, they want to import $arcane_data_format etc... You start by writing a slim and tidy database engine and the next thing you know you have to implement an MS Excel to protobuf converter.

It's easy to underestimate the complexity of an ERP for even a moderately sized company, let alone one the size of LIDL.
2 comments
arethuza 2902 days ago
ERP systems are basically accounts packages with aspirations for world domination.

From a long way, and I mean a really long way, they seem straightforward - but get close and they are Lovecraftian horrors.

Remember, SAP is how Lucifer interacts with our world.

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craigsmansion 2902 days ago
Whereas Oracle is how Larry Ellison interacts with our world.

A reasonable business case for SAP, I suppose.

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rbanffy 2902 days ago
I'd take my chances with Lucifer.
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sseveran 2902 days ago
Its actually much worse than that. I have considerable experience in a similar class of system, electronic medial records. A common thread I saw in both our PeopleSoft implementation and our EMR implementation was that both are not really packaged products, but platforms to implement our organizations workflows. We were not about to adapt our workflow to some software package so really we buy the product and then spend hundreds of millions using it to encode how we want to operate. By the time you are actually inside the database you typically find a data model that is optimized for flexibility over anything else. So its not really that we need weird connectors, its that we say oh no, we actually have this functionality in this weird department that no one else has with data that is subtlety different from other organizations and a workflow that no one else has. Then repeat that thousands of times.
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