Software horror show: SAP Concur

Opinion: SAP focused on the buyer, not the user. I see this in technical software sales all the time: vendors have an X, so they target the team that might X or currently use the inferior Y when they could be using X.

But in reality, those people are rarely if ever the buyer, as in, the person who has the budget and the authority to actually issue a PO. In the size of company that uses an ERP, that person is not going to be Raj in Accounting who likes your webified TrelloAsana travel and expense dashboard, or Sara in IT who enjoyed your demo of the JSON export to PowerBI. Its going to be a committee of Finance EVPs who give a final thumbs up to the CFO to write the check.

The other part to this story is that at this level, SAP (and peers) are using highly skilled partners as force multipliers to sell. I can honestly say after years in technology that I have never actually seen a SAP employee so to me. But I have seen a boatload of folks from Accenture and Deloitte and Tech Mahindra try to sell digital ERP transformation via a $$$$ contract that used SAP in the tech stack.

In short, SAP doesnt need to be the best. It just needs to win the CFO and make partners money.

This is one reason why SAP wins.

You have to remember why companies buy from the likes of SAP: compliance.

That’s the one thing that SAP excels in.

Sadly this means that usability falls by the wayside. And while SAP‘s user interfaces are exceptionally bad, their competitors do not exactly prioritise ease of use either.

In this case a subpar user experience is combined with an immature technology stack. SAP infamously stopped supporting 3rd party databases and now require their customers to use the in house HANA database instead. Problem is that HANA is not a great database. Painfully slow and lacks features. In this case, pre-sorted result sets.

In 30 years of programming I've worked in plenty of systems where this sort of thing is nontrivial too. But its always the result of incompetent abstractions getting in the programmer's way.

Downvotes notwithstanding, I stand by my claim that this is always the result of incompetence. Either at the small level (laziness) or at a larger scale (incompetent system design).

That's one facet of such software. But another facet, and by far the largest by ongoing expense (as in amount of people-hours it consumes) is just data input, with little to no decisions to be made. In SAP Concur case, one example I painfully experience is reimbursing business trips. In other cases, this may be timesheets, or inventory, or point-of-sale ordering and invoicing.

The "UI could be improved" is really understating it here - there are low-hanging fruits that could cut down the time spent on data input by factor of 5-10x. This I know for a fact, because I can compare my own experience (e.g. various timesheet & expense forms I used over the years, and the hypothetical case of me preparing the report in Emacs in some structured format, and bulk-importing it to a tool - that's easily a 20x time save), or observation (POS software used in stores today, vs. the DOS-era tools they used just a decade ago - close to 10x the difference).

We're talking extreme waste of money here. Plenty of shops I've seen are bottlenecked on the POS software UI - meaning they either have to let X% of customers go, or support extra registers and personnel. We're talking mental blocks that make people redefine workflows - every place I worked in that required timesheets and expense reports would see people doing them weekly, monthly, or quarterly, instead of daily (as they're supposed to), because the UI is such a time waster that everyone wants to put it off until HR starts complaining, and then back-fill it in bulk. And don't get me started on how shitty UI in healthcare impacts the quality of care...

Concur is a million times better than what I've used at previous jobs. It now takes me mere minutes to file expense reports. Travel booking is a breeze too after you go through it once or twice.