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by rbanffy 2902 days ago
One of the reasons companies adopt software like SAP is to replace process expertise with software. If a highly paid process expert accomplishes a task in half the time a poorly paid person accomplishes the same task with SAP, SAP wins if the poorly paid person makes half as much as the well paid one.

Also there is a question of scalability - the supply of smart people is limited and depending on smarts is risky. Hiring people that may even be smart when that's not required and that can't do any damage because the software prevents them from doing it will scale better than having to hire only smart people to operate more flexible software.

1 comments

> One of the reasons companies adopt software like SAP is to replace process expertise with software. If a highly paid process expert accomplishes a task in half the time a poorly paid person accomplishes the same task with SAP, SAP wins if the poorly paid person makes half as much as the well paid one.

Assuming SAP is free both to license and implement. From what I've heard of SAP installations, that's rather far from the normal case.

It really depends on your scale. If you replace a thousand people who earn a thousand more than their replacements, you made a million right there.
> If you replace a thousand people who earn a thousand more than their replacements, you made a million right there.

Well, no, doing some quick research, because SAP annual license costs are substantially > $1000 per user, you've lost something like at least half a million and potentially several million in that case. Just considering license fees, and not other SAP-related costs.