SAP competitor for ERP?

[CITA430]

I'm doing some stuff in class about Enterprise Resource Planning and one thing we've heard of is SAP. Are there any competitors to SAP? Any free, open-source that you know of? Have any of you prepared ERP and if so can you talk about your experience? Thanks!

[mendhak]

You won't get very many serious replies in Chit Chat, so I'll move this to General Developer.

[szlamany]

There is so much reading available on the web when you google

ENTERPRISE RESEARCH PLANNING

I'm assuming you have done that already.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterpr...ource_planning

I've worked with companies that used MRP for there manufacturing plants - very specialized and customized. Of course without that the MRP would not really assist the plant.

One of those larger companies converted to SAP back 10 years ago - SAP wanting to be all things to that company took the MRP past the manufacturing and into the whole realm - thus the ENTERPRISE. Accounting, invoicing, financials...

Before SAP there were dozens of independent applications - on many different hardware platforms - with us programmers doing lots of intergration development to move data around.

Once a company goes SAP you kind of leave the VB world - all programming in SAP is done in a proprietary langauge called ABAP. ABAP is 4GL. I'm not so sure that you are going to find many ERP or SAP experienced people on the VB forums here...

Oracle was probably the big ERP shop before SAP took the world - I'm sure CA (Computer Associates) has offerings.

We are a small software house - but we develop what is now called ERP's mainly for municipalities and school districts. Bringing all aspects of all offices and departments and users into a single database is a decades long development process. We've been doing this for 25+ years - before ERP was a buzzword in the community.

We are big supporters of 4GL's - it's our main way of accomplishing "all aspects of the enterprise". We have 4GL UI's - 4GL report writer engines...

Wiki has a list of open source erp's and a full list of SAP competitors - that compete on the scale of SAP

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...tware_packages

[RhinoBull]

...I'm not so sure that you are going to find many ERP or SAP experienced people on the VB forums here...

I've done my duty with SAP for about 3-4 years but decided to move away from it.
Global company I used to work for back in the 90s was mainly Mainframe shop with relatively small PC dev group.
We did mostly C++, MS SQL and Oracle, some asp. Then came SAP so everybody had to convert or go home.
I can tell you that for all COBOL programmers that was a major move and step up and for us (pc dev group) that was a major step back.
ABAP is a very simple language that had (at the time) very limited capabilities and had one very lousy editor (72 or less char per line, etc, etc... ).
For developers it's not the language that takes time to study - it's the functional modules like Material Master, sales & Distribution, etc.
SAP is a monster and it may take you a lifetime to learn it. Since it's one of the most expensive packages only large coprs could afford it but financial world didn't buy into it and there are not many manufacturing facilities in my town.
All that means that I had to commute pretty far so it annoyed me and I finally quit.

What I waste of time that was but I'm sure many would disagree.

[szlamany]

@rb - I remembered that you did sap/abap - I knew you would be along here soon

I never worked with it - just watched it take over a huge old mainframe/cobol shop like you described...

[RhinoBull]

LOL...

[KTech]

A company I worked at spent a couple million on SAP but ended up scrapping the whole thing after a year of development and the product was still not ready. Two years later they started a SIEBEL implementation. I did not stick around to see if they were just going to waste a few more million on that. It is a catch-22 that you have to develop a system for marketing people to use but marketing people change their mind about every hour on the hour. They always come up with some new initiative that is going to revolutionize the industry even when we haven't finished implementing last weeks great idea.

[RhinoBull]

Scrapping [as you said] couple of millions is "normal" for sap clients but how about 1/4 of a billion (or somewhere along those numbers) about 10 years ago by a major corp in the south-west?
App sap projects go over budget (and some of tem in significant numbers) but even that doesn't ensure that it is (or will be complete).