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Software horror show: SAP Concur

blog.plover.com

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Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#41

Post by rwmj »

My particular annoyance is Concur "punishes" you for having the temerity to disable tracking cookies (which is a legal requirement to be the default, and they're based in Germany so there's no excuse). Every time you select this option, which is every time I do an expense, it sits there for many minutes pretending to update my preferences.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#43

Post by Sebb767 »

Kiro wrote: post #30

The list is sorted, just not alphabetically. No idea why the author presumes that lists can only be sorted in one way or not at all.

The list might be ordered, but it's not sorted, at least not by a criteria that would be obvious to me or the author.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#44

Post by rwmj »

jimnotgym wrote: post #25
jl6 wrote: post #12

The most fundamental theorem of Enterprise software is that the users aren’t the the customer, and so UX issues fall to the very bottom of the priority list. So the explanation is very plausible. 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 staf…

That is the crux of it. I have a background in finance, and I think everyone is missing the problem that this is trying to solve. People are careless when they claim expenses. They claim for things they lost the receipt for and then they try and pressure some accounts clerk into forcing it through. They make careless mistakes like multiplying their milage by the wrong rate, because they don't see why they should have…

This would be true if they weren't employees of the same company who are wasting time on make-work nonsense when they could be doing something productive.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#45

Post by rwmj »

contrast wrote: post #39
jzwinck wrote: post #5

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 wouldn’t expect it to make things easier for employees to require them to have printed receipts for everything. That’s a roadblock in its own right. I’ve not used Concur but I’ve never met anyone who hasn’t preferred moving on from antiquated paper processes for expenses. Faster to scan receipts on the go, easier to track, less risk of a lost receipt, bulk of expenses are incurred via a digital process anyway.

Concur tip - you can upload a 1x1 png in place of the lost receipt. (For some reason the "I don't have a receipt" option still requires you to upload a receipt.)

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#46

Post by masklinn »

irusensei wrote: post #20

My personal experience so far is that the whole SAP ecosystem is a great way for incompetent people to print money. I’ve worked for companies that ran SAP and paid obscene amounts of money for SAP consultant and developers to write terrible code using their proprietary language. 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…

> Certified. SAP. Partner.

IME (not sap but adjacent) partners cert and “levels” only has to do with how much you earn for the company.

Competence only comes into play if you’re so egregiously incompetent you start sinking projects and costing product rep’, and neither is really a concern for SAP.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#47

Post by seabird »

haunter wrote: post #4

SAP must be the sacrificial lamb to keep the “legendary german engineering” myth alive

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that German engineering is something they want.

In automobiles, industrial equipment, electronics, software, etc. you can sense when Germans were involved. I've accepted that it's something I'll never understand, and that they probably feel the same way about American designs. Same planet, different worlds.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#48

Post by hef19898 »

pflenker wrote: post #23

With sap, the end user is not the customer. Hence, the whole thing is designed to pass a sales pitch and nothing else. The people who use this are not the ones who make the buy decision.

The whole system, SAP is way more than expenses (!), is there to keep multi-national manufacturing networks running. And to pass all kinds of quality and financial audits. That people fail to realize that, and still think dumping on legacy UI and ERP systems, is just beyond me...
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