11–20 of 184 posts
It also inverts incentives in other ways. I'm narurally inclined to be frugal, but that would often involve buying 3 or 4 smaller things to eat rather than a large meal. Since I know that would massively increase my own expense filing hassle, I instead tend to make individual purchases which are larger than I otherwise would.
Furthermore, amongst the already-low-priority UX issues, I can imagine UX of the expenses application being rock bottom, because which business ever called up their ERP vendor and said “we need to make it easier for our staff to claim expenses”?
SAP must be the sacrificial lamb to keep the “legendary german engineering” myth alive
Can anyone remember the name of that awful booking system Oracle sells?
Concur is indeed a poor system. I suppose the thinking is that by having each employee of a big organization do a small amount of work, they can avoid hiring a central person who just accepts receipts in envelopes and deals with them. Or maybe that by putting up roadblocks like Concur, some employee expenses will not need to be reimbursed. The problem is that this requires educating every employee on how to use these…
I would argue that giving my receipts to an admin also requires a fair amount of input from me before they can file the expense report. I’d rather much prefer an expense tool that works.
Numerous large American tech companies are using that for supplier, including Intel, Google or ARM. They used to have their own system, and they moved to that abomination.
Everything is counter-productive, the UX is insane, but to give you an idea: you have a list of PO or invoices, but you cannot click on them to see them, you have a three-dot menu that allows you to get an email to "act on the PO"... They broke the simple idea of an hypertext link... I'm not even talking about changing a bank account...
The drop-box looks like it does because it's good enough and there there are no business pressures on the market for SAP to fix it. The manager gets to keep their job by buying SAP and the low level staff needs to deal with such stupidities (and much, much worse ones) ad infinitum.
SAP must be the sacrificial lamb to keep the “legendary german engineering” myth alive
To be fair US companies have built some truly awful tools in this field. Can anyone remember the name of that awful booking system Oracle sells?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair US companies have built some truly awful tools in this field. Can anyone remember the name of that awful booking system Oracle sells?
Is there any mythos around US engineering in the way there is about German practicality, efficiency, and reliability?
Concur is indeed a poor system. I suppose the thinking is that by having each employee of a big organization do a small amount of work, they can avoid hiring a central person who just accepts receipts in envelopes and deals with them. Or maybe that by putting up roadblocks like Concur, some employee expenses will not need to be reimbursed. The problem is that this requires educating every employee on how to use these…
We had this issue with a certain report that was outputting weird values. Company had to pay the partner for support. I’ve skimmed over the code and it was processing hardcoded index positions. I repeat the person who did that had no concept of a loop. Since the query was returning more than 250 results the remaining rows were being ignored.
The solution? They increase it to 500. Certified. SAP. Partner.
Other issues like having to create folders on the shared NFS volume because developer couldn’t arse to create parent folder if it doesn’t exist. New supplier? Need to mkdir otherwise those long running reports would be inconsistent. Ah… let’s not forget CHMOD 777 EVERYWHERE when handling file systems.
Don’t even let me start on the “move to standard” utopia and the horrors that come with it.
I didn’t dare to touch that thing. First it was the company could lose support if the supplied code was modified and second if they knew I could fix stuff they would treat me as some cheap labor alternative.