For weeks, there have been speculations about what may have caused delayed payments from Booking.com towards accommodation hosts after the travel marketplace performed so-called system maintenance. Allegedly, it was an SAP system migration that may have caused troubles and serious delays in payments. – writes PCWorld.
Gergely Orosz, an IT blogger posted on X, fka Twitter, what he learned from his own sources about the outage in Booking.com’s IT systems. Gergely Orosz referred to an SAP go-live. Moreover, he suggested that it was not Booking.com’s IT staff that made an error, but experts – consultants – from a service provider who deliver complex IT solutions to numerous big companies. If this holds, then Booking.com’s IT staff couldn’t do much to repair and recover the systems; they were dependent on the vendor of the ERP system.
Orosz implied that Booking.com had quite a good IT staff, but an outage in an SAP migration is not in their area of responsibility. He tweeted:
Heard about a major tech company which has pretty good software engineers… having a massive outage that none of these engineers can help resolve.
Because that outage is an SAP migration outage. Done by not these engineers (who know nothing about SAP) but consultants who do.
Spabook thinks that Booking.com must have implemented the Finance features SAP S/4HANA. Such an implementation project is a huge change in a company’s ERP system. If you want to learn more about this topic, and what this system is capable of, check out Controllingportal’s excellent article (in Hungarian).
Why is an optimal implementation of SAP S/4HANA such a rare case?
An optimal implementation of SAP S/4HANA is as rare as a four-leaf clover. The marketing communication of the software manufacturer and its partner ecosystem highlights the technical specifications, speed, and ease of migration and not the integration and governance concepts of the company or the group.
Company executives who decide to implement or upgrade to SAP S/4HANA either delay the transition or provide an overly short project time frame and insufficient budget for the implementation partners, because they think ‘it’s only a migration project”. Understandably, consultant companies take the job even with an underplanned budget and impossible deadlines – and end up with an implementation of the same functional scope.
It’s a paradoxical situation. On one hand, replacing the old R/3 system with a new technology is indeed a migration. On the other hand, the goal and meaning, which are the essence of an implementation project, are lost in such a sketchy implementation.
By a twist of fate, there’s a lot more at stake now than it was in the 90s. 25 years ago, having a rudimentary concept resulted in the lack of process integration between logistics, accounting, and controlling after the go-live of the first implementation project. No one cared if a few dozen more employees were needed in the warehouse and in the finance and controlling departments.
But today there’s a lot more at stake. SAP S/4HANA is the DNA of the company and its complete supply chain, the digital twin of the business-critical strategic processes. The rat race of today’s volatile economy allows only few a second or third implementations. – writes Controllingportal.
What Is SAP?
SAP delivers a variety of ERP systems, SAP R/3, SAP ERP, SAP S/4HANA, and SAP Business One, making SAP SE – and not SAP AG – the world’s leading vendor of ERP software.
An ERP system is a software covering all business processes of a company. SAP’s industry-specific solutions are used by more than 32000 companies in more than 120 countries, small and medium enterprises and large companies alike.
SAP SE is the world’s largest provider of enterprise application software.
Source for the What Is SAP? Section: https://www.sap.com/about/company.html?pdf-asset=4666ecdd-b67c-0010-82c7-eda71af511fa&page=1
