“Once again about the naked king” or as I tested SAP B1 (sap business one)

Little preface

Yesterday's post about "how not to let yourself be thrown when choosing ERP" caused some discussion, during which I promised to lay out material on how to practice my instructions can be applied and how it happens in general. He promised - I spread it.

Frankly, this material was intended for my LJ . Anyway.

A year and a half ago, this story began. An acquaintance of mine came as executive director to Paramed (there is such a company). Previously, he worked as a commercial director at my client. Calls to me: “Here, it seems, they are throwing a company with SAP business one, they feed for half a year with breakfasts, there is nothing at all, neither the TK, nor the prototype, nothing at all ... Help me figure out whether it makes sense to invest further in a black hole?” Okay, I think, why not help. Well, I began to understand it, introduced myself from a certain company, and arranged a presentation with these guys who were trying to implement in Paramed. I looked at the product, everything became clear. Divorce tourists. Wrote a post in sql.ru. Here it is www.sql.ru/forum/actualthread.aspx?tid=610610&hl=sap . Read, amusing.
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I'm actually a supporter of honest business. If you can do it. Do not know how - do not lie that you know how. I am most annoyed by those who not only lie, but also make money with it.

I didn’t plan to cause any discussion there (on sql.ru), but I just wanted to tell the community the truth about what I saw with my own eyes. About Habr then did not know, but it would have told here. However, the discussion turned around "Mama Do not Cry." This post on sql for more than a year and a half, and there is still discussion going !!! I myself almost did not participate in the discussion, this was not my goal.


But then, after 1.5 years, my colleague told me that my post is still very much discussed and I decided to look in. Of course, I did not read all the comments, too much, but I noticed a certain user (he has such a strange email, sbo_sap@bk.ru) who accused me of lying. The first thing I thought was that, perhaps, a year and a half later, my post was simply outdated and the guys from the glanders simply solved the problems I wrote about there (and I don’t even doubt that many of the sapovtsy posts read) . I, of course, suggested that this person meet and test SB1 together, with a webcam and put the report somewhere on the rutub. But ... the meeting did not take place, because he lives in another city. And for some reason, there were no other people willing to refute my words ...

But still, the words of this person did not give me peace, and I thought that maybe in 1.5 years something had changed in SB1, and its developers had made a functional breakthrough and now everything really works?

I decided to test it again. It turned out that in 1.5 years little has changed. But what caught my eye was that it seemed that all the SB1 sellers (by the way, for these 1.5 years the product abbreviation has changed for some reason. Maybe they are trying to dissociate themselves from the negative? They used to call SBO, and now SB1) carefully read my post, because that when SB1 was presented to me this time, then in the part related to the presentation in ppt, the emphasis was placed on those things I wrote about 1.5 years ago. Well, the type is here and here it is, too, and we also have it. No, well, maybe so, of course, it happened by chance and my post on sql had nothing to do with, and the guys just decided to slightly change the approach to the presentation ...

How cool is ppt

According to the ppt presentation, there are already 65 happy owners of SB1. I asked to give me the coordinates of the leaders of 2-3 companies from this list. Not so simple. First, you need to organize a survey of my company, then agree on a budget, and only then I, like, will be given the opportunity to talk with customers. I did not refuse the survey, and decided to go all the way. Inspection made and about him, perhaps, it is worth writing a separate post. I did not get the coordinates of at least one client where it is implemented and works. After the examination, they simply stopped communicating with me. Apparently, they understood that I am too complicated a client, who is not enough, that he will simply become the happy owner of SAP SB1 and he will also have to do something.

Everything is clear, SAP, steepness, all that, implementations around the world, huge turnovers, etc. Breathtaking. Only one thing is not clear - and then everyone writes, almost obscenely, according to the results of the implementations (or rather attempts) of this decision. All over the world, everything is wonderful (sort of), but with us, here on you, somehow does not add up. Either we are not, or we are not being introduced, or we don’t want to adopt this “best practice”, damn it.
This time I went to the coolest company, from all those who implement SAP B1. Coffee, however, poured instant, and even without cream. Well at least they gave sugar ...

Preparation for performance

Two weeks before the meeting sent them a list of functional requirements to prepare. This is not even so simple a list as a specific chain of business processes and workflow for the delivery of equipment within the project, from the commercial offer, to the invoice for the shipment of goods to the client, plus a simple production. Everything is there, invoices, contracts, customer orders, orders to a supplier, invoices, invoices. In short, the complete chain of normal business processes of a company supplying equipment, taking into account factory numbers, is all as it should be. Well, in the end, of course, financial statements, both for a separate transaction (project), and for the entire company.
Overall, the presentation was excellent. I mean that part of it that is in Power Point. And when we started looking at the combat product and its capabilities ... everything changed in the opposite direction. By the way, the person who was supposed to demonstrate the product itself was not even invited when ppt was shown. That is, apparently, the option was considered that after ppt I will be in complete ecstasy from the greatness and power of sap, and I don’t even want to watch it, but I will immediately ask to write me a bill.

A curtain

But I plucked up the impudence and began to watch the product. Then a man was invited with a laptop.
The ability to work several "their" companies in the same database, like implemented. But even the list to which they are entered is very suspicious. The name of the director, accountant, bank and its details for some reason are entered manually, and not from the corresponding directories. An interesting nuance: there were two of our companies in this list, but for that reason I don’t remember exactly 5 or seven of the lists from which you already choose a company when entering any document.
Project management in SAP business one is completely absent. Or rather, it is present, but only in the form of a certain label, where there is a project name and ID. And that's all. That's all. Nowhere in the system is there any connection with this table. With the same success, this table can be maintained in Excel.

Of the contract

Contract management is also virtually absent. Yes, there is a list. But it even lacks half of the important parameters of any contract. It is impossible to form contract templates (no fish were shown to convince me that the system knows how to form a contract preamble, requisites, specifications, etc.), nor organize chains of movement and agreement harmonization, nor restrict access depending on the state of the contract. But we have the status of a contract - the presenters proudly told me. But nothing, except as a comment this status can not be named. This status can be changed by anyone, in any sequence and at any time. Primary files with the contract text or its scanned image cannot be stored in the database either. Of course, they tried to “buy” me with a link to a file, where the picture of the contract allegedly could be. But this file is not in the database, but simply on the computer and in SAP only the link to the path to this file. It is clear that in a week this file will not be in that place, and everyone will just shrug their shoulders to the question “where did the file go”.

In general, documents

Suffice it to say that, for example, during the presentation, the invoice template disappeared somewhere, which we could not see from the system. What is being done in industrial operation, even if a company that sells glanders, itself loses these patterns? It turns out that all document templates are in some files "outside" and SAP B1 itself does not generate documents at all. This makes Excel, where, apparently, written some macros. The only document template that I was shown from the sap itself is a simple commercial offer, where there is only a sign with the goods. What to do for those who have Open office is not clear. Although no, of course. I think such people should not even apply to sap, because the wrong one is not.

Stock

Very original built warehouse accounting. It does not matter at all whether you are selling or producing what you are doing, you still have to deal with certain parties, which always and everywhere will have to point and choose with your hands. And it’s okay if you do, say, medicine. There really is no way to go without parties and lots, and they must be indicated everywhere. But even if you sell covers from cans or even banks themselves, you always have to choose lots everywhere and indicate in them the quantity of goods being shipped (received). Otherwise, you will not see the accounting of the CCD. But even in the case of the use of these batches, in the invoice, for example, the goods will be broken not by the CCD, but by these batches. And in our case, it came out quite original. We have a product in the chain counted by factory (serial) numbers. What was my surprise when in the bargaining-12 and in the invoice the goods were divided by serial numbers. That is, you ship 100 pcs. There is no one product that you want to take into account by serial numbers and in the documents you will have a hundred (!!!) lines. Moreover, you will need to specify tsiferku a hundred times in each serial number when it is shipped. This is how miraculously the consultants adapted their lot system for accounting for serial numbers. Take the goods to the warehouse, by the way, can be without serial numbers. The quantity of goods received at the warehouse and the need to indicate (enter) the appropriate number of serial numbers of things that are not related. Yes, another nuance. When you enter a CCD, for some reason a country should not be chosen from the directory, but should indicate its international code. God forbid you make a mistake and indicate the wrong country code (although the system will easily allow you to do this), then in the invoice in the “Country” column you will receive a “donut hole”, i.e. empty, which is what happened in our case. I asked to indicate Bangladesh. Well, do you remember all the codes? The girl pointed out BG, but it was necessary BGD. Bad luck.

Reserve still reserve

Reservation of goods, respectively, also built on this system of lots. You can write out the order and click "reserve". And the product, it seems, is even reserved. But it only seems that way, because if after that you look at the remnants of the warehouse, then nothing will change in the “Reserve” column, and accordingly in the “Free quantity” column. Therefore, in order to reserve, as they say, for sure, it is also necessary to reserve parties. But even after that, it will be difficult to understand how much goods in a warehouse it is free. To do this, you will need to run a list of these batches, and it says in each batch how many free goods are in it. How to use this thing, let's say months, six months after the start of the system, I can not even imagine. The number of parties will already be measured in thousands ... Although, no, I know. Need to do so. Pay the guys for uploading this list to excel and there in the old-fashioned way to write a macro that will summarize this column each time. Oh how!

Where does the cost price come from

The reference book of goods, like 1.5 years ago, is linear. The sliding cost price on the product card is reflected, but it is impossible to understand how it was formed. So we sat with a consultant and, one might say, stared at the monitor stupidly and simply could not understand how the current cost was formed, what it was before and why it changed. Additional delivery costs are considered very original. First, they need to be put in a kind of nameplate, and then again, in a completely different place, they should bring documents from the providers of these additional services, where they also need to indicate the numbers. One thing with the other, of course, is completely unrelated.

We carry "under the order", but we do not deliver ...

Consultants made a very serious emphasis in the presentation (ppt, of course) that the system supports the possibility of reserving goods on the way. A very useful thing, I must say, I almost never really met this functionality anywhere in order for it to work normally. And it is necessary, this asshole (I, I mean), as luck would have it, decided to check how exactly this thing works. Complete fiction and deception of workers, this is no function in SB1. Yes, you can reserve something there in the delivery, but when this item arrives at the warehouse, you can forget about the fact that you have reserved something there, since you will not have a reserve in the warehouse. But on the order card to the supplier in the comments it says “To order such and such.” Apparently, the developers of gangs under the “supplies for the order” just mean automatic formation of a comment, and not the functionality itself. It is impossible to make a single order to a supplier “for several client orders” even in this commenting system, not to mention the real scheme. Apparently it is assumed that after each arrival of the goods, you need to make an announcement on the speakerphone of the company, so that sales managers rush to reserve the goods that have just arrived, manually, using the reservation system in batches, which I wrote about above.

But the storekeepers don't know ...

The workplace of the storekeeper is completely absent in the system. He simply does not. There are no orders for arrival (shipment) in the system. Goods are shipped, just being in the order by pressing a certain button. How the storekeeper learns that it is he who must let go or credit and when , it remains unclear.

Production

Suffice it to say that the cost of the finished product is absolutely not related to the cost of components. Not at all. Further to tell?

Finance sing romances

The income statement seems to be there. He shows some numbers, but it’s impossible to understand what those numbers are, where they came from, how they were formed. Report data is not detailed. In order to understand something, you need to do some other reports. How to compare some reports with others is not clear. In other words, to explain to me what kind of numbers I see in the report on the screen, the consultants could not explain.
The cash flow statement, as understood by glanders, looks very strange. They just showed me a table with amounts and dates. Apparently this is a list of some payments. They probably didn’t hear or didn’t want to hear how such reports are actually built. That there is a company's operating activities, financial, investment and flows on them, that there are cost items and the separation of flows on them. That the indicators of this report go vertically, and horizontally months, also apparently not yet comprehended.

Again the curtain. Applause ... or whistling?

In general, the picture is as depressing as 1.5 years ago. The only difference is that now in the presentation of ppt consultants lie even more.

What is it?

I do not understand what is going on? What is it, a global divorce, or only All-Russian, or general clouding of the brain? Do they also just ask money for their product? And because someone buys ...
The impression was that much more money was invested in the marketing part of the product than in its functionality. Developing "killer" presentations in ppt, which should not be followed by the client's study of the product itself, because "everything is so cool, what is there to watch?"
Such a sad story.