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Software horror show: SAP Concur

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Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#171

Post by tibbydudeza »

S_A_P wrote: post #104

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…

As an SAP dev knowing some German is a big help - not German but my home language has Germanic roots without the gender bits so close enough, so it helps if I need to read their variable names as comments are sparse or simply not there.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#172

Post by tibbydudeza »

hankman86 wrote: post #133

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 dat…

Our audits were all done by interns from the big accounting firm and they just dumped some of SAP tables and ran it via some internal tool and based on that they signed off our results.

HANA - remember the first time we installed that in POSDM - it performed worse than the DB2 install we had before - we upped some settings/buffers/memorty and then they told us to turn on row indexing for one of the core tables (TLOG).

I thought columnar was the magic here - why did we upgrade to this again ???.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#173

Post by tibbydudeza »

ashgoyal wrote: post #125

No software is perfect. Not even the one which flew Boeing 747, thats why they had 3 services coded by 3 different teams running on 3 different brand processors and the system takes the 2 matching entries as the truth. Even micro processors are not immune to long running bugs. Picking one small thing and demonising a whole team is unfair for them and the company. Sounds like much ado about nothing.

That would be Airbus flight controller - concern was over their new by then fly by wire control system so this was used.

The US Space Shuttle had the same concept with 4 computers that ran on the same codebase and hardware from IBM that would check each other on critical components (engine burn/flight control) and if one differed it was voted out.

There the issue was radiation induced memory corruption as the software was top tier tested and verified to be bug free as possible (they used ADA)

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#174

Post by [deleted] »

eastbound wrote: post #157
skrebbel wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you just making stuff up?

I was sysadmin for IBM software in a 50k-people company, there is no way they paid 12m$ for ClearQuest, ClearCase or RequisitePro when Git and Jira were already out. They clearly played golf to win this market.

[deleted]

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#175

Post by cromulent »

The assumption seems to be that the list is not sorted.

A quick search for "Concur locations" finds a config guide [1] which says that there is a location code, which should be based on the UN location codes (or at least not conflict with them). The screenshots in the guide suggest that this code is one of the primary sorting elements (which might make a lot of sense).

If the company loads locations without considering this code as a primary sort element and simply abbreviates the location name in English, then you would get the reported effect, I think.

I'm not saying this is a good choice for sorting, nor that there are not better ones, nor that Concur is good software. However, this may be incompetence from the administrator / data loading, rather than from the software developers.

[1] https://www.concurtraining.com/customers/tech_pubs/Docs/_Cur...

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#176

Post by mrweasel »

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.

It's not that you'd necessarily want to use the ERP system as such. It just that many companies have base pretty much everything on SAP.

Perhaps you're a fields technician. Your assignments are managed by SAP, inventory is managed by SAP, the customer is managed by SAP, you, yourself is a resource managed by SAP. You venture out to fix a wind turbine, now you either need a laptop and remote in to enter things into a convoluted SAP setup and navigate the myriad of screen in that thing, or someone, perhaps SAP (the company) or some smaller company they bought attempted to bolt on a web GUI or a mobile app, as to simplify the work for the technicians.

There is an entire industry designed around building application to abstract away the SAP client and provide simpler interfaces.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#177

Post by Stranger43 »

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…

The entire sales pitch for SAP is that Oracle and Microsoft based solutions tend to fail even worse then SAP based ones, and that there is no real success stories where a smaller vendor/startup have manged to deliver anything that comes near handling the complexity the old mainframe/minicomputer systems people are trying to replace can.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#178

Post by amai »

No surprise! In Germany the „quality“ of SAP Software is known to have bankrupted several companies:

https://amp2.wiwo.de/unternehmen/it/haribo-lidl-deutsche-pos...

https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/bankrotter-us-pharmakonzern-r...

https://www.crm-tech.world/weekly-news/sap-kommt-wegen-produ...

https://www.computerworld.ch/business/business-it/bankrott-s...

https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/sap-deutsche-s...

https://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/wirtschaft/Weltbild-Sor...

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#179

Post by Macha »

Spooky23 wrote: post #106
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?

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.

Yeah, our automated system (Concur) does end up insisting on justifications for why you picked the 12 hour direct flight which is $100 more expensive than the three options with 2 stopovers and a total travel time in the 18-20 hour range (or sometimes even overnight stays in airports).

Feels like a lot of the goal in these systems is to try enforce rules that no person expense manager could try insist on with a straight face. If even 10% of the company gets scared off by the justification demand and books the inconvenient option, that's $20k/yr saved.

Which is still probably peanuts compared to what Concur costs, but that cost is somebody else's problem to the finance person who gets to claim savings on annual flight costs.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#180

Post by _s »

josephg wrote: post #135
the_sleaze_ wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work in a system where seemingly trivial sort()s would break the entire stack. It is entirely plausible that a sort is nontrivial.

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).

I would even go as far as saying the opposite - engineers too "competent" for their own good.

I've walked in to so many code based where very talented individuals have made incredibly complex systems, using all their technical know how of best practices & patterns, abstraction layers and facades ... and ignored the fact that all they needed was a three field form with a submit button.

It's not just worth knowing if you can, it's if you should.

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