My favorite fight search tool was hipmunk. Their 'agony' sort was my favorite feature in any software ever. SAP bought them, and I was so hopeful that Concur would bake this into their god awful app that I had to use for work. No luck. RIP Hipmunk.
Software horror show: SAP Concur
91–100 of 204 posts
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#92We actually joke around the area where SAP is located (Walldorf, Germany). In surrounding cities devs joke about the fact that there are literally dozens if not hundreds of web agencies doing nothing more than mobile/tablet ready SAP user interfaces. That's their only business model. I'm not kidding you, there's an entire ecosystem around the fact that SAP UI5 is so crap that people cannot use it on their smartphones…
The people buying the software don't have to use it, would you buy your corporate underlings the comfortable, expensive shoes or just enough rags to painfully remind them who their masters are? SAP produce the lowest cost rags in town, and you will learn to love them.
There's nothing cheap about SAP. It is just the opposite. They sell the most expensive software ever for any given need. But they make sure to promise their victims that the software covers any possible business "need" under the sun, so the CTOs feel coerced to pay the hefty price.
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could it be that by using Excel you just move complexity of reporting to someone who have to extract these data from Excel and import it into some system or analyze it?
Curious, what is the complexity of extracting data from excel or of loading a csv file into an external reporting system?
It's not so much complexity as it is removing manual process steps and reducing all the risks and overhead associated with taking data on one format and loading it in to another - at scale
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#94We actually joke around the area where SAP is located (Walldorf, Germany). In surrounding cities devs joke about the fact that there are literally dozens if not hundreds of web agencies doing nothing more than mobile/tablet ready SAP user interfaces. That's their only business model. I'm not kidding you, there's an entire ecosystem around the fact that SAP UI5 is so crap that people cannot use it on their smartphones…
> I don't even know how to rationalize this anymore.
Enterprise IT is like that because the buyer never uses it and often assumes anyone complaining is just whiny/lazy.
A previous employer had a massive outage with an expensive ’Orrible reporting application: down for weeks, developers expecting them to repair corrupted data, etc. They paid many millions of dollars to license that app and millions more for “support”, so you might naively think that someone would demand better results. What actually happened was that the regional sales VP got our VP the corporate box for an NFL game, and Monday morning the edict went out that the problem was resolved and should not be mentioned again. Dozens of people spent the next few weeks continuing to fix things up but understood the message and didn’t include it in their updates to the senior level.
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#95This is common for software where the people who take the decision which software to buy are far removed from the people who are going to use it. No product manager cared about this, because this feature needs to work only well enough for a sales pitch, if even that.
Usually I would agree, but SAP and other ERP software are handled differently from most other software procurement.
Procurement is one of the core functions of the SAP ecosystem, so those most closely involved in buying it here are usually the ones who will be using it.
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#96[deleted]
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#97Why would they even care?
The people who decide that everyone in their company must use SAP Concur are rarely the people who need to file expense reports- they either don't travel much, or they have people under them who take care of it.
Instead the decision will be made based on price. Hiring bad devs and rushing poor quality software out will be a net savings for SAP.
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could it be that by using Excel you just move complexity of reporting to someone who have to extract these data from Excel and import it into some system or analyze it?
Curious, what is the complexity of extracting data from excel or of loading a csv file into an external reporting system?
Without good validation (possibly including locked sheets), people will make all fashions of inconsistent entries that “look right enough” but will stymie automated ingestion.
We had some hellish “use Excel as an interface to ‘real SAP’ process” for budgeting/headcount planning and it was almost utility-free for us as users. Even doing copy/paste would break parts of it, but invisibly to the user in real-time but would fail on import days/weeks later.
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could it be that by using Excel you just move complexity of reporting to someone who have to extract these data from Excel and import it into some system or analyze it?
Curious, what is the complexity of extracting data from excel or of loading a csv file into an external reporting system?
You never did this, so you dont know that even the "simplest" thing like writing an address can be done in 50 differenr ways, and then someone has to clean up the data before importing.
Of course you can partially prepare for it by making a file where users have to pick things like town name from a scroll down list (hope your list has every town), but they still can get "creative" and mess it up.
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Typical consultant mindset. They cant fathom how big IT got into the situation they are in due to legacy software, mergers, and periods of no investment. They only do greenfield projects and have complete disregard for IT’s processes. What’s funny is the big consultancies are usually to blame for stupid IT or they make bean counter decisions to not invest in IT. Thus the reason we need chop shops to come in and and h…
As someone who works in big consulting I understand the frustration but have to disagree. A lot of the time we have great people doing great work but we can only take it so far. Clients have to both be willing (want to) and able (have people with the appropriate skills required) to change. If we aren't guiding implementation and leave it to the client often times it will just fall in a heap, out be forgotten about