_jholland 3 days ago

I have made it my mission to conquer SAP and gain control of our own critical financial data.

As a business, they uniquely leverage inefficient and clunky design to drive profit. Simply because they haven’t documented their systems sufficiently, it is “industry standard practice” to go straight to a £100/hr+ consultant to build what should be straightforward integrations and perform basic IT Admin procedures.

Through many painful late nights I have waded through their meticulously constructed labyrinth of undocumented parameters and gotchas built on foot-guns to eventually get to both build and configure an SAP instance from scratch and expose a complete API in Python.

It is for me a David and Goliath moment, carrying more value than the consultancy fees and software licences I've spared my company.

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  • piva00 3 days ago

    It's unfortunate it is your employer's IP, this shim on top of SAP would be extremely valuable if you sold as another product to enable internal teams in SAP-world corporations to develop without the knowledge of SAP arcana.

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    • robertlagrant 3 days ago

      Yes I would strongly recommend monetising this, even though you'd have to rebuild it from scratch. Worth filling in a Y Combinator application?

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      • dbreunig 3 days ago

        Yes, look up Winshuttle.

        A very successful company with some of the happiest customers I’ve ever seen, whose entire product was a SAP hack that allowed people to enter their data using Excel. As someone unfamiliar with SAP, absolutely blew my mind.

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  • jgraettinger1 3 days ago

    Hi, I’m a cofounder / CTO of estuary.dev. Our whole mission is democratizing and enabling use of data within orgs.

    Open to a conversation about your work here? Reach me at johnny at estuary dot dev.

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