Live data from Hacker News

Software horror show: SAP Concur

blog.plover.com

11–20 of 204 posts

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#11
The Concur UI is a bucket of ass, classic enterprise software. Barely tolerable when it is working, and it is broken or super slow maybe 1 in 4 times I try to use it.

On the trip side, the car rental selector is something special. You can't check multiple vendors at once, so if cars are in demand, expect to spend a while discovering you can't get one.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#12
These kind of bad UX problem can be easier to rationalize once we understand the money flow. Would you stop using it because of such UX? Would your stopping cause the company to stop procuring SAP? Was the search the selling point in the first place when the sales representative pitch the software to finance department? Probably no, no and no. So are all other bad UXes.

And we can probably wager that a better UX doesn't yield the developer a better pay cheque.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#14
This is a clear indication that the user is not the customer. The first time someone arrives at the scene catering to the users, the whole industry will be wiped out. This happened to the phone handsets when iphone arrived.

So, future investors - look at the startups that address the user problems, not the client problems, even though the latter are paying.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#15

As the author mentions. This was a failure on and down the chain, from QA to PMs. When I see software like this, it reeks to me of contractor work. We hire them to handle something that we don’t have time for our core team, and or something not very important. The result is the devs do a minimal job to get paid. QA doesn’t care and the PMs either didn’t see it, or have bigger fish to fry.

That’s funny. I used to work for a high-end consulting company, and we always marveled at the level of dysfunction in our clients’ IT departments. They would call us in when their devs couldn’t/wouldn’t do the work. We were pretty expensive by comparison, but at least we got the job done. I guess it just depends on the kind of contractor you hire.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#17

As the author mentions. This was a failure on and down the chain, from QA to PMs. When I see software like this, it reeks to me of contractor work. We hire them to handle something that we don’t have time for our core team, and or something not very important. The result is the devs do a minimal job to get paid. QA doesn’t care and the PMs either didn’t see it, or have bigger fish to fry.

That’s funny. I used to work for a high-end consulting company, and we always marveled at the level of dysfunction in our clients’ IT departments. They would call us in when their devs couldn’t/wouldn’t do the work. We were pretty expensive by comparison, but at least we got the job done. I guess it just depends on the kind of contractor you hire.

[deleted]

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#18
I hate submitting expenses probably as much as the typical engineer, but Concur seems “no better, no worse” than the typical dumpster fire of these systems.

I will say that it does have good integration between the company card transactions and the expense reporting feature.

I am more mystified than the author at why my 75-mile range electric car offers a default sorted list by full street name, then by state, happily inquiring as to whether I intend to drive 225 miles to my entered street name before a matching entry that’s 4 miles away.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#19

I found concur to mostly work for me. It’s kludgy for sure, but I always get paid and expenses handled fast. Sometimes within a day.

This is true for me and I have been recently submitting many expenses each week - it always worked. Hell I even liked the itemized expense entry feature!

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#20
post #12

These kind of bad UX problem can be easier to rationalize once we understand the money flow. Would you stop using it because of such UX? Would your stopping cause the company to stop procuring SAP? Was the search the selling point in the first place when the sales representative pitch the software to finance department? Probably no, no and no. So are all other bad UXes. And we can probably wager that a better UX does…

The ironic thing is that if the user stops using this software the company benefits because they don't have to pay out the expense claim that the user didn't enter. This seems like a win for the company and the company would conclude that using SAP has reduced their expenses.

The key thing about enterprise software is that it's never sold to end-users, it's sold to senior managers and executives. The contact that this group will have with the software is to approve transactions (e.g., Reqs, POs, Expense Claims, etc) and maybe view some reports. You can bet that these interactions are very streamlined.

Post reply on HN