| ▲ | Maxion 11 hours ago |
| Whenever I hear german companies mention digitalisation, I get reminded that they still use pen and pencil in production environments to log data, pass those sheets to secreteries who enter the data into legacy systems so data analysts can enter it into another system that then has an integration with SAP. Data from SAP then flows onwards to some buzzword filled Azure product that costs a few million a month from which someone downloads an xls file and uploads it to Tableau where they run some simple calculations. Someone else downloads it as an xls and manually writes (not copy pastes) the numbers into a power point presentation and makes graphs by drawing shapes. This is then presented at some bi-monthly meeting. I wish I was making this stuff up. |
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| ▲ | wenc 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I used to work for the US side of a German multinational (one of the largest in the world) and discovered the same thing when it came to software. The German side always had slick presentations (they always had good visual marketing) and impressive claims, but whenever I tried to work with their products, I always found the claims overstated and that they hadn't really executed deeply. This despite my German counterparts working hard (I visited HQ in Germany and when they work, they really work and clock the hours, no idle chitchat)... yet it doesn't translate to impact. A lot of their products had impressive front-ends but half-baked back-ends (on the American side, it's the reverse -- our interfaces looked like crap, but our stuff actually worked and often delivered in less time). A lot of their designs were also non-human friendly (if you've ever driven a German car, you'll realize that the car was built for engineers and not for end users -- weird little user-hostile features pop up everywhere). I don't understand why this is -- this is a nation that produced Dieter Rams. Tobi Lutke (CEO Shopify) likes to talk about how Germans grew up surrounded by good design, yet that design culture never permeated many German products. I own a Bosch in-unit washer/dryer and it's frustratingly unintuitive and has a "my (the engineer's) way or the highway" philosophy. I went to a BMW talk once about the infotainment system (it was built on the latest Azure tech), but came away feeling that the work was not deep. It was skin deep. I wonder what has happened to the German builder/tinkerer culture that made German manufacturing great. In the 1980s and 1990s, Germany was synonymous with excellence. But in the 2000s-present, not so much (except maybe in very narrow mittelstand verticals, e.g. Zeiss). |
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| ▲ | Geof25 41 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > I wonder what has happened to the German builder/tinkerer culture that made German manufacturing great. Over engineered stuff which hate the user is staple of German manufacturing. Look on tanks during WW2. Impressive on the surface but unreliable crap for everyone who used it. | |
| ▲ | pcurve 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | "if you've ever driven a German car, you'll realize that the car was built for engineers and not for end users " cracks me up. I once leased a BMW for 3 years. By the time I returned the car, I still didn't what all the cryptic buttons for HVAC and other controls. They just refused to follow established automotive ergonomic conventions. Anyway, my father used to do business with Germans for a long time. He had many interesting stories to share, but one that has always stayed with me is, his disdain for how cheap / penny pinching his German companies and their employees were when doing deals. This was in the 90s, so definitely passed the West Germany glory days. My take is, in the era of global competition, Germans didn't know how to strike the right balance and effective allocate resources. Where to compromise, and where not to. I don't know if it's sheer stubbornness or they're just wired differently. | | |
| ▲ | joe_mamba 28 minutes ago | parent [-] | | >how cheap / penny pinching his German companies and their employees were when doing deals I think most people(Americans mostly) don't have the faintest idea how true that is right now. Here's a comment of mine from a few weeks ago giving such a present-day example that will blow your brains of how cheap german companies are. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47018023 I feel like German companies know they lost the innovation race (I mean companies that aren't Zeiss), they lost the cheap manufacturing race "thanks" to Russian gas dependence and ideological denuclearisation before enough renewables were built, so all that's left for them now to stay afloat is reducing labor and operating costs by offshoring and pinching all the pennies they can find, but even that it not enough since from where I stand there's weekly corporate bankruptcies and layoffs. |
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| ▲ | analog31 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I wonder if anybody's manufacturing was great before the Japanese quality revolution. It took Germany longer than the US to adopt modern quality control. Granted, Germany did a lot of it, for instance their chemical industries were staggering. I've formed the impression that every country's engineering and design cultures are essentially aesthetics. | |
| ▲ | vjvjvjvjghv 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think Germany got infected by the shareholder value and privatization virus but doesn't really understand it. | | |
| ▲ | RobRivera 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Whats funny is when its privatized by publicly traded companies it becomes this weird nationalized-kinda but not really thing that turns the economy into a bifercated class of first class citizens and second class citizens. |
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| ▲ | jarek83 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | BMW's most recent infotainment is a big step backwards to me in both areas - aesthetics and UX. Its previous generation was one of the best in the market also in both. I literally don't consider buying the newest 4-series just because of it, especially of the ultrawide driver's "monitor" - it's just so ugly, and I regret it, since on the outside the car appeals me so much more. I'd rather spend the same on previous year model with better specs. | | |
| ▲ | pcurve 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | agreed. IMHO, last good BMWs were E90 and F10s. That's when they still cared about craftsmanship even in areas not visible to customers. |
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| ▲ | Lio 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > if you've ever driven a German car, you'll realize that the car was built for engineers and not for end users -- weird little user-hostile features pop up everywhere I drive a German car, all be it one from 2015, I don’t recognise this statement at all. I find it quite well designed. This sounds more like over generalised FUD to me. | | |
| ▲ | gregorygoc 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I agree. Parent comment is making extremely generalized statements, about German cars with overconfidence. There’s not a single “German” car, it’s a huge ecosystem of brands like VW (Audi, Porsche), BMW, Mercedes. I’m quite sure they don’t have the single “user-hostile” interface. |
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| ▲ | estearum 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This describes large companies everywhere I encountered oil wells essentially controlled by post-it notes passed around an office. |
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| ▲ | jimbokun 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Maybe they found the PostIt notes worked better than whatever software they tried. | | | |
| ▲ | SoftTalker 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I distinctly remember reading that the entire bill of materials for building a Boeing 747 was managed in Excel. I have not been able to find that claim since then but it was so amazing to me that I remember it. It doesn't really make sense as I think about it now, because the 747 design predates Excel by many years so maybe it was BS. | | |
| ▲ | throwaway2037 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Assume that later models of the 747 were managed in Excel. No trolling: What is wrong with that? You can write insanely powerful software using (1) formulas on the sheet (which are essentially functional programming) and (2) imperative logic in VBA (HTTP calls, database calls, file system, etc.). For years, I used this model and wrote pretty powerful software. Sometimes, I miss it for the encapsulated system. These days, in "biz dev" (internal software), it seems like the Excel model was replaced with an Electron front-end (HTML/CSS/JS) with Java back-end. | | |
| ▲ | nradov 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | There's nothing particularly wrong with it, Excel works great. But almost any complex Excel file is riddled with obscure bugs and the nature of the tool makes it impractical to apply some of the most effective quality control techniques. Like you can't easily do code reviews or write an automated test suite. | |
| ▲ | SvenL 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I second this! Excel is a front end everybody knows and everybody can run. I always got laughed at when I say the biggest competitor of small apps (things like gym diary, meal planner etc.) is excel. Now that it even support python… |
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| ▲ | jimnotgym 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Or even more likely gets emailed around daily to a bunch of people, half of which don't work there anymore, most of which don't read it, and one that is looking to haul people over the coals over a KPI that is against the companies best interests, but is powerful enough to command this wasting of time |
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| ▲ | dgxyz 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I've seen worse. For 2 years I received the results weekly, that I didn't ask for, of a $1m a year burn reporting stack. This was launched during a massive back patting ceremony like something out of Severance. So one day I stared at it randomly and noticed that the pie chart percentages on one thing didn't even add up to 100. Looked back at history and it turned out this had been the case since day one. Spent a day taking it to bits and a good 50% of it made no sense at all and people had been making business decisions on it without checking it. And to remediate it? They replaced it with some AI generated slop which is even worse. |
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| ▲ | nradov 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's always funny when HN users comment that there are no more opportunities for startups and it's too hard to compete against large, wealthy corporations. The reality is that most of them are so badly managed that competing against them is easy if you're actually competent. | | |
| ▲ | tristor 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > The reality is that most of them are so badly managed that competing against them is easy if you're actually competent. The world is a graveyard littered with startups that thought this way. One of the consequences of wealth concentration and monopolies is that it is insufficient to be better than your competitors because your customers are also incompetent. To find product-market fit you not only have to be better, you have to be noticed by someone that cares that you're better and upon reflection confirms you solve a valuable problem. By way of analogy, it's not enough to realize that MouseCorp makes shitty mousetraps and the local village spends $1M/yr on them. You can make a better mousetrap thinking its worth $1M/yr, or do the deeper look and realize the local village doesn't have a mouse problem but rather has a problem with too many feral cats, and has no interest in buying better mousetraps and once their attention is gained simply stops buying mousetraps altogether. Both parties lacked competence, but that didn't mean there was a market. | | |
| ▲ | nradov 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Right, so don't waste time trying to sell low-margin products to local governments. As the saying goes: it's like trying to shear a pig, too much squealing and not enough wool. | |
| ▲ | stinkbeetle 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > The world is a graveyard littered with startups that thought this way. One of the consequences of wealth concentration and monopolies is that it is insufficient to be better than your competitors because your customers are also incompetent. It's less that and more that governments and bureaucrats are corrupted to create barriers tot the market and to turn a blind eye to anti competitive behavior and outright illegal practices. For example huge banking corporations have been caught laundering money for drug cartels and got away with fines -- if your fintech startup tried that on, you would never see the outside of a prison cell. |
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| ▲ | fires10 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I have seen this way to often in other areas. That is the push here as well AI can sort through it. Too many people are held to account for not meeting what amounts to made up numbers. | |
| ▲ | functionmouse 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Someone intentionally doesn't want those numbers seen or applied. |
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| ▲ | kensai 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| They are improving, though, given the international pressures. I've seen it at least in the organisation I am working (a university hospital). |
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| ▲ | kingjimmy 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| They make connecting SAP so difficult... this is the only way |
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| ▲ | paffdragon 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's not how it works. You suppose to contract a consulting company that contracts some offshore company to connect you to SAP. | | |
| ▲ | isbvhodnvemrwvn 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | But you can't just hire one, you have to hire functional consultants (who tell you your flow is wrong and you have to adjust that to how SAP does things) and then implementation consultants who don't know how the process works, but can actually implement that integration. And then again after the next release because the integration broke. | |
| ▲ | GuestFAUniverse 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | And the customer being cheap doesn't pay for the proper modules and thus everything gets mapped to PSP elements -- to keep the same old garbage piles that get pushed around. | |
| ▲ | jimbokun 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I wonder if it’s cheaper to just have an AI write the parts of SAP you actually need. | | |
| ▲ | xarope 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | if the AI is a certified SAP consultant, sure. But then it would probably cost you $20K/month in subscription. |
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| ▲ | FrustratedMonky 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That might actually describe a pretty good implementation of an interface to SAP. I think pencil is more efficient than SAP. |
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| ▲ | hypeatei 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I agree and it's quite resilient to digital outages/downtime (at least in terms of hours, probably not more than a few days) so your manufacturing productivity won't drop to zero when the ERP system goes down. The paper logs can also be entered later when the system comes back up. As we've seen in the Iran conflict, datacenters are a target and result in extended outages. | | |
| ▲ | jimnotgym 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I remember a few years ago hearing that SAP stood for Stop All Production |
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| ▲ | fHr 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | true absolute dogshit software | | |
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| ▲ | drnick1 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > I wish I was making this stuff up. Lmao. Yes it's a pretty good summary of what happens in the corporate world, and not only in Germany. |
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| ▲ | KnuthIsGod 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| SAP is truly terrible. |
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| ▲ | jimnotgym 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Well.... Before you say SAP is terrible, have you tried the competition? It has some data entry screens that are super efficient, cursor always goes to the right place, tab moves you to the right place etc. 15 years and lots of ERPs later I have never seen better When you are viewing a purchase invoice on the ledger you can see the PO it is matched to, click on it and it goes to the PO. Click a line on the PO you can see the GRNs related. Click on them you go to the actual GRNs Oracle ERP can't do any of that. |
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| ▲ | monero-xmr 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
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