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Software horror show: SAP Concur

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Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#101

Post by rvba »

munchler wrote: post #15
thefourthchime wrote: post #6

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.

If you work in consulting and you think you deliver good stuff, you are either incredibly lucky (lottery winner level), or you are so incompetent that you dont know you deliver utter crap.

What is your definition of getting the job done? 50% of projects run by consultants fail.

Seriously this level of smug shows how clueless you are.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#102

Post by skissane »

At my old job, I was jealous of people at other companies who got to use Concur.

Whatever Concur's flaws may be, the system we had was obviously worse.

"Wow, you take a photo with your phone and it goes in an app? Wish we had an app. Instead I have to submit it on a website, print the cover page as a PDF, collect all my receipts as further PDFs, merge the PDFs, and then send them via email with a single PDF attachment."

It had to be a single PDF, the system would reject the email if it had more than one attachment. Given it was a computer program not a human at the other end, I never worked out why we had to send it via email, as opposed to just uploading it via a web form.

At least I knew enough to merge the cover page PDF and receipt PDFs into one using Ghostscript. A lot of less technical people, they'd print them all out then scan them back in.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#103

Post by mjd »

A reader who is a former employee of SAP has sent me a technical explanation of how this could occur. The explanation makes a lot of sense to me, and I have updated the article to include it.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#104

Post by S_A_P »

SAP continues because they have a great sales team that makes execs feel like they are making a choice that never gets them fired. SAP doesnt care about UX and in the 10 or so years Ive dealt with it on the periphery, its been a barely serviceable product with a terrible user interface. I especially love how the localization is so sporadic in the application. Sure the front end will be mostly english, but be prepared for a lot of tables/columns/fields to be in German. Granted, its been a few years since Ive done much SAP related work(I build interfaces between trading systems and SAP for accounting and some logistics interfaces.)

Anyway, their goal is to move into new business verticals and not really fix the product. They are actually trying to move into the trading and risk management arena in which I work. So far they have one major client that I'm aware of and they are struggling to make it work.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#105

Post by quickthrower2 »

I am a bit disappointed, was expecting something way worse for "horror". Maybe the horrors are on the bugs he hasn't mentioned but had to put up with.

One possible excuse for SAP Concur here, and I am just guessing, is that the sorting is in some kind of customer-specific config setting that the admin needs to setup. I.e. they made it configurable for each client's needs. If you don't set it up it defaults to this "undefined" behaviour. Good defaults are better than this though, so alphabet sorting would come ahead.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#106

Post by Spooky23 »

deely3 wrote: post #66
Aloha wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We used Excel based expense reporting for years, it takes me much less time to assemble my reports on concur, I rather like it, its the least of all evils.

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?

Depends on the company. If they don’t really care it’s more evidence/proof of expense than anything.

My last employer used some stupid Oracle system to audit the hell out of everything. One time I was flagged for taking a suboptimal route that increased toll expense by $3. Hilarious. I spent like 1.5 hours @ $90 on justification of $3.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#107

Post by HyperSane »

acdha wrote: post #94
cookiengineer wrote: post #71

We 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”,…

Name and shame, that is just ridiculous.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#108

Post by [deleted] »

rvba wrote: post #101
munchler wrote: post #15

Earlier 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.

If you work in consulting and you think you deliver good stuff, you are either incredibly lucky (lottery winner level), or you are so incompetent that you dont know you deliver utter crap. What is your definition of getting the job done? 50% of projects run by consultants fail. Seriously this level of smug shows how clueless you are.

[deleted]

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#109

Post by user3939382 »

So the near universal consensus from the technical community is that SAP makes crap software. Yet here we are obsessing over monads while they laugh all the way to the bank. So what’s the lesson? Maybe good software is a waste of time and smart money just focuses on the marketing. Unfortunately that’s what I’ve seen over many years.
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