Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Software horror show: SAP Concur

blog.plover.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 184 posts

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#71

Post by hef19898 »

robertlagrant wrote: post #65
hef19898 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! I once had the pleasure (ahem) to work with a "solution architect" who shared the opinion around enterprise software you mentioned. He was in charge of getting the MRP running, but he had no idea how MRP works, e.g. he set thought having one (!) use case without (!) lead times life represents a successful implementation... Almost a year later, I still try to clean that mess up...

I have a similar thing with people who think snow is white. Joseph Stalin also thought that, and he killed 50 million people!

Come again?

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#72

Post by themoonisachees »

ramraj07 wrote: post #6

Search is one place where mediocre engineers and even many good ones consistently seem to think they know what they are doing, and they know what is good enough, and worst of all, that all of this is super easy. The solution, universally, is “use elastic search” (though there’s also the puerile cousin where people say “use the like operator”) but elastic search has never solved search if all you did was learn and set…

Very true, but also consider: SAP is a billions of dollar corporation. They can afford to throw like 5 engineers who have specific experience in elastic search to fix this in a day. They won't because they have no reason to, but this is software that you sign a contract for, not some random OSS project on github.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#73

Post by rikroots »

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…

Reminds me of my very first posting in the (UK) Civil Service working as an Admin Assistant for the Highways Contracts team. Beyond filing, and delivering post to people's desks, my main work was to check through the expenses claims made by our consultants. Expenses were submitted by letter and - surprisingly - most claims made sense and would add up to the last penny correctly on first check.

Except for one firm of consultants who seemed, to me, to be chaos personified. Their expenses would go on for dozens of pages and never tallied to the amount they were claiming. In the end I resorted to hand-drawing an 'evil eye'[1] and taping it to my in-tray to try and stop the worst of their excesses reaching into my working day. Getting a promotion away from that work also helped.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_eye

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#74

Post by hef19898 »

robertlagrant wrote: post #68
hef19898 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

People do realise that. That doesn't mean SAP has a good UI.

Until we have a discussion about things like inventory valuation and write off rules across coubtries and business units, the use of production orders, demand forecasting, monthly closure across sites, countries and lefal entities, assets and corresponding write offs and how all of that is integrated in one sofware suite, and how those systems do one thing better than others, I highly doubt people do get it.

So far, and the last time we discussed Concur here, we stop at comments about lines in reports, how bothersome it is to upload receipts and how all of that is taling away minutes of peoples othereise highly productive time on their job.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#76

Post by arpinum »

masklinn wrote: post #46
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.

I've gone through 3 certification processes for a company. First was gained via licence sales, second via spend on training by the vendor, third via 3 blog posts about the vendor.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#77

Post by ingomaro »

croes wrote: post #38
TMWNN wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard it said that the truth behind the myth of German engineering and German efficiency[1] is that Germans are, rather, rule followers . [1] Example of both: The new Berlin airport

Wasn't the problem with the Berlin airport that they didn't follow the rules, e.g. fire protection?

Fire protection mess ... was a symptom. The root cause was that the local governments (city of Berlin and state of Brandenburg) wanted to split the pie for many small to medium businesses in the region. Noble idea but hard to execute as we found out later... So instead of giving it all to a contractor that actually knows how to build (large) airports they tried to managed it themself. Those people were unexperienced in this size of operation and it went all downhill from there. It's a common theme with big projects: Local administration is unexperienced but tries to do it anyway and they fail or get ripped off every time. What we should have is a federal unit that just does large scale construction/engineering projects.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#78

Post by johnwalkr »

I don’t mind using concur but there is one thing I hate about it. When you take an picture of a receipt, it used to overlay a polygon with four corners for you to crop it. Now it automatically crops it and half the time it cuts off part of the receipt. One time in 100 it falls back to the overlay so you can fix it, but usually you have to delete the image and try again. It tends to fail on similar images so you have experiment by folding the receipt and using different backgrounds until it works. Oh and each time you take a picture using the app, it requires several taps so you have to constantly switch one hand back and forth between handling receipts and tapping on dialogue boxes.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#79

Post by rightbyte »

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…

Workers need to stop giving corporation access to their credit card. That is an even simpler solution.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#80

Post by billwashere »

hef19898 wrote: post #56
pachico wrote: post #51

No CTO was ever fired for choosing: SAP, JIRA, SalesForce, Oracle, ...

Name one serious alternative for SAP, if you need a real ERP system?

Depends on the industry,Oracle Netsuite is similar to SAP. A lot of construction/professional services use Deltek Vantagepoint. Also Mircosoft Dynamics comes to mind.
Post reply on HN