And a lengthy preamble puff piece to hype Tesla software engineering for some reason? Would be interesting to see a real breakdown of those engineering decisions.
Agreed. Tesla's decision to create an internal applications team and make their own enterprise software is one thing. This may be interesting at many levels, but it does not provide convincing support that open source versions are needed, much less viable.
I think it was a decent decision to go home rolled ERP - by the time you get where you're going with off the shelf it's often so customised you may as well have started from scratch anyway, at least then you aren't held to ransom over version upgrades which break your customisations and unsupported-nes. Not sure what the connection to open source is as Warp seems to be closed source? It's kind of an obtuse segway.
At a time your are bleeding money is it smart to have a 250 person team creating an ERP from the ground up? If I was a big investor I’d want to know if it saved them money and why didn’t they focus more on their manufacturing problems. Elon said they backtracked on the amount of automation he thought they could build in the assembly line. It could’ve easily been a mistake creating your own ERP, glad it worked out.
I wonder how the vendors feel about bespoke erp integrations. I’m sure Tesla wielded its might to force them to copy or find a new customer. When I did ticketing system’s integrations, bespoke systems were sometimes a massive pain to deal with and ancient.
AFAIK, yes, it is. ERP consultants are super expensive and the licenses for traditional ERP software aren't cheap. If you can build your own bespoke ERP that covers just everything you need for your company to run AND it's cheaper to maintain even considering labor costs, then why not do it?
That's true a 250 person team isn't cheap. That sounds like a lot of people to me but I assume that's not just coders but all kinds of analysts, trainers, managers, implementation etc and 4 months is a commendable timeframe.
I bet the quote from SAP wasn't cheap either though!
>So, Tesla hired a new CIO Jay Vijayan who, along with a technical team of more than 250 people, in 4 months built the ERP system, called Warp, which currently is an essential part of Tesla’s operations and online sales platform.
That's an impressive achievement if true. Coordinating 250 people working on new software is a nightmare and 4 months is a short timeframe to even build a strong foundation.