How Elon Musk Approaches IT At Tesla 231
onehitwonder writes "In short, they build it themselves. When Tesla Motors needed to improve the back-end software that runs its business, CEO Elon Musk decided not to upgrade the company's SAP system. Instead, he told his CIO, Jay Vijayan, to have the IT organization build a new back-end system, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company's team of 25 software engineers developed the new system in about four months, and it provided the company with speed and agility at a time when it was experiencing costly delivery delays on its all-electric Model S."
SAP (Score:5, Funny)
S - end
A - nother
P - ayment
Re:SAP (Score:5, Funny)
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Sap n.
1. To undermine the foundations of (a fortification).
2. To deplete or weaken gradually.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/sapping [thefreedictionary.com]
Re:SAP (Score:4, Funny)
Re:SAP (Score:5, Insightful)
The issues that a lot of people really don't get.
Products like SAP are great if you do your business the same way as everyone else.
That said. Businesses all tend to run differently thus SAP becomes more of a problem then it helps.
However Suits like the Term Enterprise software and signing big checks, it makes them feel like they are running a big company, and it feels good to know they are running an Enterprise standard software, they probably have been burned by the single developer tool that becomes unmaintainable after he leaves so they jump to a full commercial system.
However for the most part if you have a good development team on staff, you usually can make something better, faster and cheaper than SAP. Because you can focus on what is important and leave out the extra stuff. But as I stated your company will need a development team, not a single guy who is the lone coder.
It's simple: (Score:2)
It's who's selling the solution. The sales people cater to the execs/management and know the buzzwords that make the all tingly.
If the suggested solution comes from IT/Bottom up it's usually a lot of details they can't grasp and don't really care about.
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From what I've experienced the SAP sales teams usually include a hot blonde who the executives won't turn down for a business dinner.
Keep In Mind... (Score:2)
...that if you do something like this, numerous ISO standards and other auditing bodies follow a formal ERP methodology. There are also issues of compliance with GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principals) and most assuredly, the IRS.
People "run there business like everyone else" for a reason.
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That makes sense for areas like human resources and accouting, but not for areas that are highly specialized for an industry of company.
Re: Keep In Mind... (Score:4, Funny)
That's the point. There is software that can be used to run any company in any field. It's called a compiler, although it does require a good deal of customization.
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The issues that a lot of people really don't get.
Products like SAP are great if you do your business the same way as everyone else.
Exactly. That's why SAP's modules for areas like Human Resources and Accounting work decently well, but other areas that are industry or company specific cause more problems than they solve.
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Products like SAP are great if you do your business the same way as everyone else.
No. No they aren't. At least, not if they are SAP. SAP is a motherbitch. It crops up in industries where it has no business at all, like in casino gaming management. And it needs to be set afire.
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[sap] noun, verb, sapped, sapping.
noun
1. the juice or vital circulating fluid of a plant, especially of a woody plant.
2. any vital body fluid.
3. energy; vitality.
4. sapwood.
5. Slang. a fool; dupe.
As in the person who buys this software product
No article (Score:5, Informative)
Don't bother clicking through - nothing but the same summary.
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Yeah, at first I thought it was adblock/noscript. There is nothing here to view even after I disabled those extensions.
A risky gamble (Score:2, Informative)
Many, if not most, IT initiatives with homebrew tech fails. It's nice when it pays off, but almost always it is over budget and under spec. If the CEO got lucky, good for him, but his CIO shouldn't be sitting in the big chair if he didn't at least warn him it could all go horribly wrong.
Re:A risky gamble (Score:5, Insightful)
How many SAP installs come in at or below budget? How many are actually completed at all, let alone on-time?
Re:A risky gamble (Score:4, Funny)
*Crickets*
Re:A risky gamble (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree.
Some of the most successful IT shops I've ever worked in have been 'build' vs. 'buy' shops. They get tremendous cost advantage from having internally-developed tools that exactly meet the needs of their business.
Done right, it works very, very well.
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I disagree. [...] Done right, it works very, very well.
Yes, the same can be said for any risk-taking behavior. "I haven't worn my seat belt for years and nothing bad has ever happened to me."
Re: A risky gamble (Score:4, Insightful)
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"What have you gained from not wearing seatbelts other than perhaps a few less wrinkles on your clothes?"
They gain the smug ability to say: "Fuck-the-gubberment I ain't wearing no seat belt. dis heres a free country and I can make my own dumb decisions"
Re: A risky gamble (Score:4, Insightful)
Risk vs. reward. What have you gained from not wearing seatbelts other than perhaps a few less wrinkles on your clothes
I have learned that most people are utter shit at estimating risk. Especially people who think they're smart and are good at it, but don't actually do the math. We spend trillions to prevent terrorism, but next to nothing to prevent drunk driving. It's because people think that risks they have control over are far less than those they don't, so drunk driving is "Well, I'll be driving, and I'm a good driver, so the risk must be low", and terrorism is "I'll be strapped into the plane and not in control... so it must be much, much worse."
The same kind of thinking applies to rolling your own software, instead of buying it. People are not objective about risk. They flat out suck at it. As for me... what I've learned is to wear my goddamned seat belt, because I read the statistics and know that there's about a 1 in 5 risk of getting into a car accident every year, and the seat belt means a 90% reduction in probable injury -- Without it, I'm just hamburger through the window.
Which is like most companies when they decide to cook their own complex software... they usually wind up paying more, but because they never analyze their own decisions, they, like you, think it's actually less.
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On the other hand, the statistics about SAP rollouts would tend to indicate a very high degree of risk inherent in attempting to use that system.
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On the other hand, the statistics about SAP rollouts would tend to indicate a very high degree of risk inherent in attempting to use that system.
The "other" hand? You're going to take something that's inherently complex and risky even when done professionally by a company with hundreds of developers... and then roll your own? And that's less of a risk in your world?
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I have learned that most people are utter shit at estimating risk
I will see and raise you. I would go as far as to say that everyone sucks at risk management. The fact is that even the most rational of us are driven by base instincts and our habits more than rational thought. And when you get a group of us humans together, the risk management gets even worse. Decisions get made out of fear more than rational thought.
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Custom for core, not custom trashcan, word procssr (Score:3)
"exactly meets the needs of the business" is important for some things, a huge waste of time and money for others. Those "some things" where it matters are generally the core competency of the business - what sets them apart from competitors. Google search needs a database that exactly meets their needs for searching a huge database. MySQL won't meet their need. For 99% of businesses, building a custom database engine would be stupid - MySQL, MS SQL, or Oracle would meet not only their current needs, but
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The trick is to tell the CIO of the company that is your customer that the price and deadline time doubles every single time they make changes. The trick is to get an accurate scope and then a project manager that will tell the customer NO! in a way that they understand, I.E. excessively high prices and they sign a paper that the deadline is ok to ignore. Suddenly that feature that they dreamed up in a meeting is not so important anymore. If it's really important then they will be OK with letting the
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I disagree.
Some of the most successful IT shops I've ever worked in have been 'build' vs. 'buy' shops. They get tremendous cost advantage from having internally-developed tools that exactly meet the needs of their business.
Done right, it works very, very well.
The done right is the tricky part. And that requires actually knowing the needs of the business.
Most execs 'need' SAP because they want an enterprise system. They don't talk about buying it to fix a particular problem, then spend more exec time analyzing the problem to decide what a profitable fix would look like. Businesses that actually do that don't have too much of a problem implementing SAP (because they do it bit by bit) nor do they have much problem writing a solution in-house.
But most folks don't
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There's usually very good reasons it goes wrong. If they tried re-writing SAP, tehy would have as well. I would guess they had very clear specifications for what they needed, and implemented only that, ideally in a concise maintainable well. Bad specs and scope creep kill most projects like this, yet people rarely seem to learn from past mistakes. They're far more likely skilled than lucky.
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.. also, you're completely correct that he should have been warned, although more about the common mistakes rather than the rarity of success, in my opinion.
Mod parent up. (Score:3)
In my experience, the biggest problem is when the CIO is not allowed to refuse requests. Once that is cleared (and the CIO is competent) then projects get finished on time and on budget.
In this case, it sounds like Elon had a lot of confidence in Jay's ability as CIO.
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The problem is, with solutions like SAP, it's also over budget and under spec.
Atleast with homebrew you have a change to ever reach spec and you don't have to spend the same budget again every next year.
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Atleast with homebrew you have a change to ever reach spec and you don't have to spend the same budget again every next year.
In other news, some people believe patching and bug hunting is free and that software never needs modification once installed. There will never be a support cost of any kind.
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So you're implying that if you buy it, the support will be free? I thought the support was the most expensive thing. An in-house tool with only the features your company uses might have much lower support cost. You can also respond to support requests by modifying the feature to make it more clear; and you can do that quickly.
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So SAP support is cheap or free?
To make these claims you must be an SAP integrator/sales person.
I keep warning you and you keep laughing... (Score:2)
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What? ERP systems have been around since the 70s... SAP released R/2 in '79. If you're talking about R/3 (when they introduced server-client architecture), it was released in 1992.
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Many, if not most, IT initiatives with homebrew tech fails.
s/with homebrew tech//
Failure is the default for IT projects - last I heard it was 80% failure rate - most of this is due to unrealistic expectations, newbies billed as "senior" devs, and a project management methodology steeped in anti-patterns [1]. None of this is more prevalent in home-brew over vendor-supplied projects, in fact I'd say it's more likely the other way around.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern#Project_management [wikipedia.org]
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Where would you find an SAP system that cheap?
There is no way one could be rolled out in 4 months.
I have never seen one that did not go over budget and past schedule, nor did what they wanted on launch day. I have not seen that many, but enough to guess that is the common outcome.
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We just went through this exact same exercise at the company I work for. When our antiquated, poorly-designed MRP system started causing too many headaches, we carefully counted the cost of moving to something like Salesforce.com or SAP, but ultimately ended up writing out own system from scratch. After running the two systems in parallel for 6 months to ensure the new system had data integrity we were comfortable with, we cut it off. Having just closed our first month "live" on the new system, I must sa
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I can play the same game...
Many, if not most, IT initiatives with homebrew tech succeed. It's hurts when it doesn't pays off, but almost always it is under budget and satisfies the unique requirements of the business. If the CEO got unlucky, too bad for him, but his CIO shouldn't be sitting in the big chair if he didn't at least recommend doing it in house.
Unfortunately statements like these are easy to reword the exact opposite and not sound crazy. If you look at Gartner's statistics, they have a pretty ev
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Many, if not most, IT initiatives with homebrew tech fails.
I've seen $15k home-brewed storage solutions outpace $50k vended ones as well as $2500 servers outperform $20k ones. Those home-brews rely on talented in-house labor however, so if you can't keep the good employees around, you had better go the $50k route. Oh, don't forget the $4500/year maintenance contract and 3-5 day tier 1 support callbacks from people with such thick accents the interpreter needs an interpreter. That's not fail though because it's a purchased product amiright?
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I don't think you're counting the $1-200k salary of that in-house labor.
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You know there are bright people out there who are willing to work for less money with the understanding that the job itself is more enjoyable and there are rewards down the road.
Not saying any company can just find these people, but they do exist.
In my case, I work for the family business, otherwise it would be nigh impossible for them to hire a developer of my skill level while still paying them the same *relative* peanuts I get. The reward is in knowing I am improving the business in a very cost-effect
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talented in-house labor is expensive. Otherwise, it doesn't stay in-house. Those ARE the rewards down the road.
Re:A risky gamble (Score:4, Interesting)
Yep a guy who built his first tech company at 24 got lucky
what does a founder of paypal know about large scale software projects compared to arm chair CIO on slashdot
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Considering the high cost, higher failure rate, and even higher odds of going overbudget on trying to get SAP to do what you want, I'm not even remotely convinced it was a gamble. If you already have a team in place, this is the less risky way to go because you're only going to build what you need and you're not dependent on a third party to maybe one day make it work if you throw enough consultant money at them.
I always LOVE to hear "DIY" stories (Score:2)
They're always good for a laugh.
We've had a client who, for years, has been threatening to move off to his own little CRM system that one of his in-house techs cooked up. He does this, mostly, because he thinks he's going to frighten us into giving him a free upgrade of his current software.
We always make sure to mute the phone when he does this, so he doesn't hear us laughing at him.
His tech's solution is basically a Fox Pro front end on an excel spreadsheet.
And it doesn't even do a tenth of what the clie
Less risky for Tesla specifically? (Score:2)
I can see the risk aspect to this at a 'normal' company with the typical suit and tie CEO who rose up from sales or marketing. Somehow, though, Tesla probably has some things going for it it that other businesses don't.
For one, a CEO who has built an Internet software based business in an era where you built it yourself because there was nothing else to base it on. The entire company and product they are producing is unlike anything else out there and a lot of what they produce they have to produce themse
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Many, if not most, IT initiatives with homebrew tech fails. It's nice when it pays off...
Most SAP initiatives also fail. Most small businesses fail at business within two years.
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Only a consultant would think that it's better to outsource than to hire competent talent and treat them well.
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My former CEO crowed it was "The Cadilac System" and spent millions on it. What a friken waste..
My former employer spent $10 million and counting on an SAP upgrade. I wondered if we went back to using index cards if we could ever be $10 million less efficient.
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The same as any other equipment, if you aren't maintaining it consistently, in a few years when a part breaks and a mechanic finally opens it up, it is a rusted mess and you have to replace the whole thingamajig.
article (Score:5, Informative)
By Rachael King
Reporter
Half Moon Bay, Calif. — Leave it to Elon Musk to buck conventional wisdom. When Tesla Motors Inc.TSLA +7.29%, the Silicon Valley-based automaker he founded, needed to improve the backend software that runs its business, he decided not to upgrade the company’s software from SAP AGSAP.XE 0.00%. Instead, he told CIO Jay Vijayan to build it himself.
“Initially, I was very skeptical,” said Mr. Vijayan, Thursday, at Constellation Research Inc.’s Connected Enterprise Conference in Half Moon Bay, Calif. But, in the end, “Elon was right,” he said, adding that the new system gives his company the speed and agility it needs. His team built it in just four months.
Guus Schoonewille/AFP/Getty Images
A view of a Tesla car on an assembly line
Last year, Tesla was facing delivery delays of the all-electric Model S which it introduced on June 22, 2012. At the same time, Mr. Vijayan’s team of about 25 software engineers was working hard to build a system that could support ramped up production. The improved information technology systems are important for managing high volume production of the Model S, according to company filings. The system went live in July 2012.
Backend software, known as enterprise resource planning software, can make or break a company. SAP has become the world’s largest business software company by building incredibly complex software that can manage customers, suppliers, and the entire lifecycle of a product. SAP says that it is a leading provider of technology for the automobile industry, with nine out of the top 10 companies running SAP applications.
The software is widely used by other large companies as well. Hewlett-Packard Co., for example, uses SAP software to manage the operations needed to sell its printers, servers and PCs. H-P CIO Ramon Baez, also attending the conference, told CIO Journal that it operates at too large a scale to build its own custom enterprise resource planning software.
“You can shoot yourself in the foot if you don’t know what you’re doing,” said Mr. Vijayan. “You need the right team,” he said.
Yet, Mr. Vijayan was in a tough spot. It can take more than a year and millions of dollars to roll out SAP software because of all the integration required. For example, NTT Data is currently undergoing a two-year, $20 million enterprise resource planning consolidation. Tesla didn’t have the time needed to undertake such a project. By creating a custom software project, he was able to get it up and running quickly, partially because it didn’t need integration of disparate applications. Because Mr. Musk made a clear decision, it also helped Mr. Vijayan get immediate cooperation from business leaders.
Yet, there will likely be challenges ahead as Tesla grows. Building and running a lightweight enterprise resource planning system can be done when a company is relatively small but the problem is making it scale, Ben Haines, CIO at Box Inc. told CIO Journal.
“I’m super confident that it’s going to be able to scale very well,” said Mr. Vijayan. “It’s now one of the best systems we have.”
Re:article (Score:5, Interesting)
I like how they describe SAPs customers as an industry (automobiles) which struggles, and a specifc company (HP) which outright sucks. If correlation was causation I'd say buying SAP is how you destroy a company.
Building it is one thing (Score:5, Insightful)
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We have come to the painful realization that project and financial accounting cannot effectively be done with the same software. It actually has better value for us to hire anothe bookkeeper and run our tax books in QuickBooks and project accounting in a fairly simple database. All the downsides of rolling your own still exist in a packaged solution; the real costs are in the customization.
In retrospect, rolling our own (even at contract rates of $135/hour) would have had a 3-year payback compared to the
Does I run Linux? (Score:2, Funny)
I bet it uses a beowulf cluster architecture. Just make sure some idiot from accounting doesn't spill a bowl of hot grits on the server. Even with a journaling filesystem like ext4, or the superior ReFS, hot grits can petrify most sys admin types.
I wish these Tesla folks the best of luck on this homebrew. In the end though the ROI and TCO will surely be much worse than a suitable off the shelf package from an established vendor like Microsoft or IBM. It may not matter, though, because Tesla will likely flam
In House Manufactering (Score:3)
Tesla does a tremendous amount of the work in-house. This includes things like the class A metal stamping, battery packs and a slew of custom parts and electronics. Most auto makers warehouse pre-stamped body panels and parts. Tesla warehouses raw rolled steel and aluminum. They make the parts as needed. They have one of the most automated factories in the world so it's unlikely that an outside supplier would be able to do it cheaper.
While they do have a lot of things they get from other vendors, it's a fairly small list in comparison to most transportation manufacturers. In addition they have a relatively small number of products they make (including parts for other auto makers). Because of this they simply don't need SAP. It's a size and scope that you could do in-house. GM or Ford could never scrap their logistics suite and have a replacement in 4 months.
Oversell? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure they built it in 4 months...
But likely spent the last 9 years figuring out why SAP was bad. Hence they knew what they wanted (by now)... Hire some good s/w developers and voila... you'll have a better system from the get-go. That's business systems 101: it's all about domain knowledge. Sure they built it in 4 months, but I see it took them 8.6 years to create it... by understanding why the SAP solution sucked and the experience on what worked and what didn't.
If they started from scratch with no SAP experience.... well I'm sure we'd see a different story. The same story as Oracle, MS, HP, IBM, and SAP (i.e. their in-house systems suck big time).
Now some new MBA graduate will disagree: now new systems can be built in 4 months, muck did it... then again...
Brilliant (Score:3)
This sentence from the summary is just great:
“When Tesla Motors needed to improve the back-end software that runs its business, CEO Elon Musk decided not to upgrade the company's SAP system.”
Someone should make a poster from it.
Social ROI (Score:3, Informative)
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Did you see where it only took 4 months? I haven't seen an SAP **upgrade** that went that fast, much less a deployment.
Re:Now Open It (Score:5, Interesting)
Did you see where it only took 4 months? I haven't seen an SAP **upgrade** that went that fast, much less a deployment.
Of course, the reason for that isn't the (complete) ineptitude of people at SAP, or the superstar statusing of the engineers at Tesla.
Its easy to build a one-off solution that works for what a company needs on day one, do it quickly and be successful. Its vastly harder to build a one-off solution that still works for what the company needs done ten years down the line. And damn near impossible to build a one-off solution that just magically has equivalent success and value to other companies just by open sourcing it.
SAP upgrades can easily take that long, but SAP can easily run organizations an order of magnitude bigger, and two orders of magnitude more complicated than Tesla.
IMO, the key thing people should get from this is the importance of making sure you buy what you actually need. If Tesla could replace their SAP system in four months with 25 engineers, odds are pretty high they had overpurchased when they went with SAP to begin with.
Re:Now Open It (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe they exist, but have you ever seen a company that actually could deploy or upgrade SAP faster than building something in house?
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Maybe they exist, but have you ever seen a company that actually could deploy or upgrade SAP faster than building something in house?
Depends how complete their understanding of their immediate, short term and mid-term requirements are.
I'd say yes, for companies that actually had a good handle on their requirements. I also think most companies are bad about calculating the real costs of doing a complex system like that DIY. Its easy to enumerate the up front costs, but much harder to enumerate the costs over time of support, enhancements, and hardest of all, operational inefficiencies because the system couldn't do "X" and there wasn't ti
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I think all that stuff is just as much a problem with SAP. Lots of costs because it did not do X on launch day.
Not saying you're wrong, just saying it is not unique to building in house.
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Maybe they exist, but have you ever seen a company that actually could deploy or upgrade SAP faster than building something in house?
Depends how complete their understanding of their immediate, short term and mid-term requirements are.
My take away from all the articles I read about SAP implementations (most of which have failed just like most large IT projects):
The successful implementations actually revised or at least analyzed their business processes.
In my own experience, I see people complaining all the time about how bad the inventory system.
But whenever I've been tasked to fix it, I can't find any computer problems. It's not like someone entered 5 widgets and the computer changes the number to 6 or 65 or changes the item to penc
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Not saying that rolling your own is necessarily a good idea, not all corporations (even large ones) are set up for that. But I think the market is ready for more nimble products that do
Re:Now Open It (Score:5, Informative)
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Probably not, though in Tesla's case if they keep having their cars burst into flames when they get into an accident, they may not be around in 10 years (that's not a slap, just a comment).
Does SAP make it any easier to change as you company evolves over the next 10 years?
Hell no! SAP doesn't make it easy to change, PERIOD.
SAP isn't something you can just install and forget about it.
Don't worry. Once you
Re:Now Open It (Score:4, Funny)
SAP can easily run organizations an order of magnitude bigger
I lost it at easily.
Re:Now Open It (Score:5, Funny)
It is easy! The users and their business models are simply all wrong LOL
Re:Now Open It (Score:5, Funny)
> I lost it at easily.
I misread it as "SAP can easily ruin
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"or the superstar statusing of the engineers at Tesla."
I heard that they look for people that demonstrate they are good and ignore fake things like degrees that do not show aptitude or drive.
Granted this was from a friend of a friend that worked there as a drive systems engineer, he claimed that he was recruited by Tesla from his work on electric cars he was publishing online.
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"...I heard that they look for people that demonstrate they are good and ignore fake things like degrees that do not show aptitude or drive.
hhhmmmm, this explains those random electrical fires and that tablet monstrosity near the driver... [j/k - I like their cars, just not gonna spend 80k on one.]
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From the comments I'm readin in this story, my take home messege here is that SAP probably shouldn't run organizations at all. What the hell does their software do for all this expense and hassle anyway?
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It's one of those great mysteries.
I've yet to meet anyone that didn't despise SAP. It's a terrible user experience, it's a terrible admin experience, and it costs a metric-fucktonne.
Trying to implement SAP has literally bankrupted companies!
And yet, it persists. It must provide some value to someone, somewhere..
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Re:Now Open It (Score:4, Insightful)
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Their system is probably custom-tailored to their business processes. Not only would it not be appropriate for many other businesses and thus have a very small market, but it could also expose some of Tesla's secrets on how they operate, which would then give their competitors (enemies really, because they have no actual competition at the moment) an advantage over them.
They could theoretically invest more money into its development to make it appropriate for mass market consumption. But entering the busine
Nor for Tesla next year. Build, Buy, FOSS (Score:3)
Given that they only spent a few months on it and don't have experience building broadly applicable SAP systems, we can be pretty certain you are correct in this statement:
> Their system is probably custom-tailored to their business processes. Not only would it not be appropriate for many other businesses ...
It's probably still true if we change a few words:
> Their system is probably custom-tailored to their current business processes. Not only would it not be appropriate for many other businesses, in
Re:Nor for Tesla next year. Build, Buy, FOSS (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't matter. Become enterprise SW company? (Score:2)
I don't think it matters that their leadership _can_ do it. Do they _want_ to become an enterprise software company?
If not, it's a distraction from the goal. If they want to be an electric car company, they should focus their energy on electric cars, not email, SAP, staplers sandwiches or anything else they _could_ build.
Disclaimer - Some have posted that SAP is CRAP and there is no reasonable alternative. I find it hard to believe that there is no off-the-shelf software to fit the need, but if so, that
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Generally, you should build within your core competency, and buy generic systems for generic tasks.
A sensible suggestion, unless you find that the generic systems suck or don't even exist. In my line of work that happens more often than I expected. If that is the case, then you could consider rolling your own solution if you are set up to develop and support software outside your core competency. You'll probably want to hire some people who are competent in the area you're building software for. (Payroll seems easy at first glance but it really isn't)
A nice example from the past: the Lyons company
Re:Nor for Tesla next year. Build, Buy, FOSS (Score:5, Funny)
"Tesla should design their own cars, especially electrical subsystems of the cars, but buy trashcans, spreadsheets, and SAP."
Correct.
MBA-grade correct.
And that pesky Bezos should focus on his company's core competencies, selling books, and let the generic part, like IT, to the good known providers on the field, as all other e-companies in these dot-com boom days are doing.
After all, even if he ends up with a excellent IT group, what would he do with the spare capacity? Losing tons of money, I say.
Probably true, I don't know SAP. No good alternati (Score:2)
That's probably true, from the very little I know about SAP. Is there not a good off-the-shelf or customizable alternative?
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SAP can handle payroll, and some organizations actually use that functionality. Let me know who you've found that kept their job after messing up payroll (who isn't also sleeping with the boss).
Enterprise or not... you're toast.
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Oracle seems to be able to. They blew up payroll for a large company, Comcast. Completely pooched payroll right after the AT&T merger and pissed off a ton of people.
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When every organization did the same thing, had in-house staff to support it, and didn't have to bother with consultants. It can be a problem to keep track of all the different legal changes in the various locations though.
And hope, in 24 years, they've still got some geezers on the payroll who remember that old "Java" language from the early 21st century running on a crufty emulator no one can remember how to reinstall and can figure out all the places the engineers had said 4 bytes were plenty to hold a timestamp.
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To be fair, Java will generally yell at you if you try to assign a timestamp to an int.
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