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Software horror show: SAP Concur

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Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#161

Post by hef19898 »

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…

Why would I use my ERP system on a phone to begin with? IMHO, this market comes from management, and other people, unwilling to work inside an ERP system. And the clout to get away with it.

Not every piece of software has to be a consumer app.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#162

Post by mry2048 »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #70
mgkimsal wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t sense all of that from the comment, but you’re definitely anti-consultant. Sometimes consultants are brought in specifically to bypass whatever internal processes are in place. Those internal processes are sometimes the very reason not enough is getting done and external resources are brought in.

I would say that GP comment definitely has a “normal teams are useless until consultants come in” view, which the parent comment also seemed to pick up on. Specifically, this part bugged me: > 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. This makes it seem like the developers just didn’t want to do the work or it was har…

No post body was provided.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#163

Post by rocqua »

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?

My company uses a horrible SAP interface. I then had the complexity of making an Excel sheet that actually works, and making it properly interface with SAP so I only have to use the excel sheet.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#164

Post by pjc50 »

mint2 wrote: post #122
acdha wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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”,…

If that’s a public company that sounds like that is malfeasance and grounds for an investor lawsuit

This happens _all the time_. When was the last successful investor lawsuit on grounds of a failed enterprise IT solution?

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#165

Post by pjc50 »

hef19898 wrote: post #161
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…

Why would I use my ERP system on a phone to begin with? IMHO, this market comes from management, and other people, unwilling to work inside an ERP system. And the clout to get away with it. Not every piece of software has to be a consumer app.

Expense reporting while in the field.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#166

Post by dijit »

sokoloff wrote: post #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 , happi…

> Concur seems “no better, no worse” than the typical dumpster fire of these systems.

Circula has been good to me. I've submitted maybe 50 expenses with it, it's very easy to use.

Not associated, other than being a (suprised) happy customer.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#167

Post by Daneel_ »

sokoloff wrote: post #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 , happi…

Sadly it doesn't allow all my receipts to be uploaded as a single pdf, I have to split them all up individually. Most other systems let you do this.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#168

Post by Someone »

> There is no resource constraint that is so stringent that it would prevent the programmers from replacing

> displaySelectionList(matches)

> with

> displaySelectionList(matches.sorted())

> They just didn't.

It’s quite possible that it isn’t that simple. Hypothetically: if the user selects the 13th item in the list, how do you, as a programmer, know that was the 42nd in the original list, so that you can send back “42” as the selected item to the backend?

That sorting logic may have to be more complex, and, under time pressure, beyond the means of your average programmer (did matches.sorted() modify the list in place, making a linear search in it for the text of the item not work?).

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#169

Post by tibbydudeza »

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…

Former ABAP developer here - there are a lot of cruft and technical debt in the core but they can't easily change it because it's behaviour is certified and accountants trust it - so they wrap the old crud into sexy JS and cloud bindings but you can only go so far with that.

So they expand by buying up other companies and slapping their interfaces on it (you shall use HANA and not Oracle or anything else).

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#170

Post by tibbydudeza »

rocqua wrote: post #163
deely3 wrote: post #66

Earlier 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?

My company uses a horrible SAP interface. I then had the complexity of making an Excel sheet that actually works, and making it properly interface with SAP so I only have to use the excel sheet.

As a SAP developer there are so many ways to read Excel sheets but they all suck in one way or another - SAP itself does that but it depends on which SAP module you are programming in (MM/FICO/EWM) so each module has a mediocre implementation to read in XLS.

Somebody got fed up and did a general purpose XLS import library, but some sites forbid you using it.

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