[Minn]

Although the stories of SAP sucking companies dry while imposing crap on them are legion, my only direct experience with it was for time reporting at my last contract. With the possible exception of Microsoft Zune software, I've never seen such a digital abomination. You literally needed a charge number to account for all the time it took to navigate all the pointless and horrible interfaces SAP would present you with to simply enter 40 hour under various charge accounts. I can say without the slightest exaggeration that the people that designed that interface were off the charts incompetent as designers, architects, developers and QAs.

How any executive could look at that outrageously defective and hideous interface, that plainly showed the incompetence of all involved with it, and say "sure let's pay a few million up front and a few million a year more a year for that" is way beyond me.

[jurroppi1]

I don’t know how it has changed over the last ten years, but when I used it, there did seem to be an inordinate amount of drilling up and down, navigating away from what seemed to be intuitively the correct place to head to in order to get information.

Apparently it wasn’t as bad then as it is now - of course I have no idea since I’ve been able to avoid using it for a long time. I remember that we needed to switch from MRP because our system had become so customized that we just couldn’t get any support for it anymore. Supposedly SAP fixed all that, but now I hear whole hosts of people telling me that our SAP system is pretty heavily customized.

I don’t know, because I don’t program business systems. I just program ATE and the like, some databases, some HTML, some scripting, VB and dabble in other things like C++. I’m an Expert electronics tech, so I don’t have a lot of call for most of the so called IT skills - other than knowing how to fix PCs and having more knowledge that most of the up line tech support personnel do also.