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).

> has an integration with SAP

There is your problem right there. A family member worked for a large German company which used in-house developed software for exchanging and preparing lab reports for customers. The software worked well since the 90ies, was perfectly tailored to the company, and the people writing it were in the same building and could ship bug fixes within hours. Everyone was happy. Around 2015, someone in management had the idea to move the entire process to a customized off-the-shelf SAP product because of <buzzwords>. The software engineers were in effect degraded to administrators. The new system missed so many edge cases of the lab process that they had to fall back to pen, paper and phone. Customer complaints and employee turnover started to skyrocket immediately afterwards.

I worked with several multinationals, and the Germans always had very complex processes, but cannot at all confirm that they were the least digitised. The Americans were always behind in integrations (lots of file-based stuff), using outdated software, etc. I think the US has this problem that in Germany working for a bigger company is attracting talent, vs. the US where the talent goes to tech, while the rest is really far behind, i.e., Fortune500.

Germany is desperately wishing for a wonder weapon that will help them catch up and overtake other nations technologically. They constantly talk about smart cities and AI pie-in-the-sky projects while their administration is paper-based, risk-averse and parsimonious. They would not recognise not use such a breakthrough solution if it was handed to them.

Berlin's Chief Digitalization Officer's Twitter account was pure black comedy, until he was replaced by someone who - to my knowledge - has been AWOL for years.

This describes large companies everywhere

I encountered oil wells essentially controlled by post-it notes passed around an office.

That reminds me.

I worked for a company where we punched in using an iButton (it's a pretty neat 1-wire thing that fits on a key chain).

The punch clock system was logged and then at the end of the month, they printed out a single A4 sheet for every employee for us to make corrections and sign. Of course, someone had the unenviable job of going over all those and applying the corrections.

We also had to write down hours spent on different projects in a completely different system that wasn't at all integrated with the punch clock system.

At some point in the last couple of years that I worked there, they switched to Workday. That was not an improvement.

In many cases in Germany "digitalization" means there's a PDF which you can download, print, fill out sign and scan and send copy of.

> I get reminded that they still use pen and pencil in production environments to log data,

That's the fundamental reason they're using humanoid robots - industrial robots have a hard time holding pencils.

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.

They make connecting SAP so difficult... this is the only way

> 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 made an app that fixes this part of the problem. The rest is cultural.

That might actually describe a pretty good implementation of an interface to SAP.

I think pencil is more efficient than SAP.

They are improving, though, given the international pressures. I've seen it at least in the organisation I am working (a university hospital).

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

I've only seen pen and paper at work in connection with things where real paper signed with actual pens was required by law in such unambiguous terms that nobody felt like taking the risk of PDFs or a boolean database column. So, less than once per year. I've never printed anything for work and I'm not really sure how I would correctly print something. I think there is one printer in my branch office, somewhere?

I haven't seen any production process in automotive involve hand-written paper and I doubt it exists. Automotive supply chains have always been under massive cost pressure and therefore were always at the forefront of the most deeply digitized and automated supply chains.

> 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.

> someone downloads an xls file and uploads it to Tableau

Sometimes this is because of red tape and not because of software. I’ve run into many situations where you can log into the system and download a spreadsheet from the web interface, but the equivalent API hasn’t been configured (or has been deliberately disabled).

SAP is truly terrible.

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