How Elon Musk Approaches IT At Tesla

onehitwonder writes "In short, they build it themselves. When Tesla Motors needed to improve the back-end software that runs its business, CEO Elon Musk decided not to upgrade the company's SAP system. Instead, he told his CIO, Jay Vijayan, to have the IT organization build a new back-end system, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company's team of 25 software engineers developed the new system in about four months, and it provided the company with speed and agility at a time when it was experiencing costly delivery delays on its all-electric Model S."

Comments

Re:SAP

[jellomizer]

The issues that a lot of people really don't get.
Products like SAP are great if you do your business the same way as everyone else.
That said. Businesses all tend to run differently thus SAP becomes more of a problem then it helps.
However Suits like the Term Enterprise software and signing big checks, it makes them feel like they are running a big company, and it feels good to know they are running an Enterprise standard software, they probably have been burned by the single developer tool that becomes unmaintainable after he leaves so they jump to a full commercial system.

However for the most part if you have a good development team on staff, you usually can make something better, faster and cheaper than SAP. Because you can focus on what is important and leave out the extra stuff. But as I stated your company will need a development team, not a single guy who is the lone coder.