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.
Software horror show: SAP Concur
51–60 of 204 posts
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#52I was forced to use an SAP product at an old job about 15 years ago. Unfortunately, I find it completely unsurprising that any SAP.* product is a dis-organized mess of a kludge, with no rationality evident anywhere. Oh, and the CIO who foisted that pile of cr*p upon my organisation? She moved on shortly after SAP was implemented -- undoubtedly to foist SAP on some other poor unsuspecting org. I sure hope her SAP stoc…
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#53"We're looking for someone with experience with ASP and database performance improvements."
"You mean, ASP.net - not old school VB6 derived, interpreted - 'pretty cool for 1997' Active Server Pages - ASP?"
"Hey hey! You're the guy we want!"
Of course I would have taken the job if I'd known they'd be acquired.
edit: Huh, they were acquired in 2014? Ah well - it's like someone's MVP that made it out to production, then they made it big and that MVP kept being glommed onto.
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#54I 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 , happi…
Used to use concur in a past life, now expensify. There's not even words for how much better expensify is. It wasn't _that_ bad for a lot of entry types, but for me what made it a constant problem were hotels. It wanted a daily rate and number of days. Yet our rates were different day by day, and it made you do a separate tax entry. So you're having to BS a close enough "daily rate" and adjust the tax field of a spec…
I use Concur and just enter the total and enter X nights in $CITY for a justification. I don't need to enter nightly total much less any sort of breakdowns. As I said in another comment, a LOT of Concur (and expense software generally) pain relates to the hoops a company makes you go through as opposed to the software itself.
When we first implemented Concur, there was a lot of kvetching. A bunch of requirements got dialed down and while there are still a few silly things here and there, they're easy to work around once you know about them and it's mostly just the very random audit thing at this point.
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#55I 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 , happi…
>I will say that it does have good integration between the company card transactions and the expense reporting feature. This surprised me too. Every expense system is ass but at least that saves a lot of data entry.
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#56Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#57This 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.
The two are fundamentally different. Unless you can devise a way to do BYO expense platform, you're comparing B2B to B2C product development, marketing and sales. Do you think the PMs at Concur just woke up one day and decided to be user hostile because they're asshats? Of course not. They did what the Sales team, and Gartner, told them they needed to give to CFOs so that they would buy it. And then CFOs bought it. U…
Small quality issues for users would reduce errors, and get expense data reconciled faster. But… by how much? 10%? 20%? No one will care enough to fund a large system replacement for a 10% reduction in expense report filing.
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#58I 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 , happi…
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#59Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#60Concur's backend is typical of a slow moving industry that works with old awkward systems like airlines. It's a shitshow of business logic and 20 year old legacy code that would be a long expensive nightmare to rewrite for little actual profit so no manager would ever approve of such an endeavor. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a mess of queries involved with this search such that trying to do a real sort of the…
I agree with the author. There’s no reason for it to be like this but incompetence - either at an individual level, system level or both.