@Paul White
If SAP is the 'best' ERP system, how come the user interface looks like it was designed by an idiot?
I know four-year-olds who could design a better UI.
I remember when these systems were DOS-based, and while you often wanted a crib sheet, ONE crib sheet was enough.
I now need around 30 pages of cribs sheets to do simple actions, as you need to click here, click there, type an apparently random code in that box and then choose a menu item. And we're not doing clever stuff - this is just a warranty repair of something!
There's no keyboard shortcut for most of the internal actions - fail.
Where there are shortcuts, the same button does completely different things depending on where you are - Enter executes, except when it doesn't - abject fail.
It's incredibly reliant on a fast network connection - fail.
It's really hard to charge people for stuff - I can send out a freebie really easily, but charging them for it is quite difficult. I can't even determine a price for something without jumping through hoops and using a calculator.
I don't know how they managed it, but sometimes the close and minimize buttons don't work.
If you accidentally try to log in twice because the login script died, it pops up a massive "We'll sue your *** off" dialog box, instead of a more sane "You're already logged in elsewhere - log in here instead/cancel" option.
My biggest bugbear is this one:
If you accidentally hit 'Enter' too early, SAP moans that you didn't type all the necessary data. Ok - that makes sense.
Except that it refuses to let you enter that data, and insists that you have to do it one field at a time and *try to re-run the transaction in between*. And if part-way through entering the data it gets *just* enough to do the transaction, it'll run it.
Even if it's not enough to do the whole procedure - just that step. And then you're stuck, and have to go to someone with high enough privileges to edit what you just entered and type the rest of the data you'll need later on.
Which of course means that plebs like me tend to get assigned much higher privileges than they actually need - opening up the chance to do even more accidental damage.
I've also found that I need a big paper pad next to my computer to write down all the various random transaction numbers it assigns to things, because it refuses to put them where I can actually re-use them.
I'm not alone in this - even our logistics manager thinks SAP has huge issues.
All this means that we tend to avoid SAP if we can.