Some 3000 magic is beyond SAP's powers
August 24, 2016
SAP has taken the place of HP 3000 apps in the last 15 years. Not easily and not completely, in some cases. SAP is known for its switches—choices in configurations that sometimes shape the way a company does business. Some enterprises have to bend their practices to fit SAP, instead of the other way around.
At General Mills, SAP replaced just about everything. As it did, the IT manager there thought "If everyone buys and runs the same generic SAP software, how do you get a competitive advantage over your customers? We had spent years creating custom solutions and with SAP, we transformed the business to be... just like everyone else's."
Success stories are out there, too. Alan Yeo of ScreenJet said the SAP migration that he's helped with "went brilliantly."
"It's because the implementation was driven by the user departments who knew exactly what they wanted," he said. "They were given responsibility for doing it, so they used about zero external consultancy. All we had to do was extract the data from the HP 3000. Shame that we lost a good customer."
In another instance that Yeo is aware of, the company began replacing their financials and purchasing systems, went on to billing, inventory and sales. "Then they got to the clever stuff that the HP 3000 was doing and failed. 16 years later they are still running an HP 3000 doing the clever stuff."
"Places like that will go off MPE at some point," Yeo said. But it won't be because they make SAP do what the HP 3000 does.
SAP has been called imanagement by golf course or management by magazine, at some 3000 shops. At one building component manufacturer, "senior executives wanted to play with the big boys, and since the big boys were all running SAP, we also had to run SAP. The implementation budget exploded. The initial promoters of the move to SAP—the ones who gloated when HP pulled the plug on the HP 3000—ultimately lost their jobs because of the huge cost and time overruns."