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Software horror show: SAP Concur

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Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#81

Post by madaxe_again »

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…

I’ve spent too long over the years working with businesses who use SAP to not get a clear picture of how it works there.

They are an extremely formulaic organisation. Progression paths are clearly defined, and practically everything is run by a management system. This sounds good, in principal, and does result in a general baseline of reliability.

The flip side of this is that everyone is promoted to the limit of their competence, product development and implementation are rapidly spinning revolving doors, from top to bottom, and roles, not people, own products and decisions.

The result is a sort of methodical malcoordination, and seemingly insane decisions being taken at every juncture - unless you view them all through the lens of an emergent process driven by a simple set of rules and constraints: cover your ass, don’t do it if it isn’t explicitly ordered, always follow the management system.

It’s terrible. It’s just that it’s very reliably terrible, and that has its own appeal to other reliably terrible corporations. It’s all minmax, least worst, etc. - quality does not matter in the corporate world - consistency does.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#82

Post by aikinai »

rightbyte wrote: post #79
jimnotgym wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you have the incentives backwards here. When you use your own credit card for company expenses, you can rack up tons of personal benefits. The company would prefer you to use their card so they get those instead.

A few years ago Google, for example, cracked down and started requiring company cards for expensive purchases like flights.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#83

Post by raverbashing »

pavlov wrote: post #61
IshKebab wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which business ever called up their ERP vendor and said “we need to make it easier for our staff to claim expenses”? Businesses that were fed up with fielding questions from employees about how to claim expenses? In my experience it's reasonably common for companies to switch expense claim systems because their existing one was rubbish. I haven't worked for any SAP-using megacorps though tbf.

There’s Expensify which is supposed to have a very good UX and does about $200M annual revenue. So at least that much people are willing to pay for a better expense claim tool.

Expensify is much easier to use than Concur

But their sales team probably plays less golf, let's put it this way

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#84

Post by zelphirkalt »

namdnay wrote: post #57
rwmj wrote: post #41

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.

I don’t think the law on tracking cookies applies to your work tools on your work computer

Why do you think that? Are working people not human beings covered by the law? Is an employer allowed to void EU citizen rights?

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#85

Post by fetzu »

Fun fact: last year I had to re-input a whole expense report because of a greyed out mandatory field (I wish I was kidding). So I naturally made screenshots of every position to re-enter them. The amount of the second expense report was not the same as the first (it was less in my local currency): apparently the conversion rate is not fixed (for a given day) but can vary on the whims of the system (RNG?).

I emailed our “concur people” about it, and they did not even understand what the issue was. I have since forwarded the case to our finance and IT, but am not holding my breath on getting some kind of answer.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#86

Post by zelphirkalt »

seabird wrote: post #47
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.

In terms of software you are probably right, since we are behind in so many areas and education for jobs about creating software is not the best.

About cars: Do you mean things like the VW scandal? Or do you mean actually shoddy engineering in cars?

I think the reputation for engineering stems from darker times.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#87

Post by ComradeMatis »

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…

It is amazing that some how SAP has made Oracle software half decent in comparison - and that isn't saying much for either of them.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#88

Post by fshbbdssbbgdd »

aikinai wrote: post #82
rightbyte wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think you have the incentives backwards here. When you use your own credit card for company expenses, you can rack up tons of personal benefits. The company would prefer you to use their card so they get those instead. A few years ago Google, for example, cracked down and started requiring company cards for expensive purchases like flights.

This particular form of embezzlement is legal so everybody can get it out of their system.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#89

Post by bonzini »

aikinai wrote: post #82
rightbyte wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think you have the incentives backwards here. When you use your own credit card for company expenses, you can rack up tons of personal benefits. The company would prefer you to use their card so they get those instead. A few years ago Google, for example, cracked down and started requiring company cards for expensive purchases like flights.

And then you have silly rules like "company credit card expires after 9 months of no use" coupled which basically prevents people who travel rarely from following the rules.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#90

Post by iconcur »

My employer recently switched to Concur, and it's the first time I've thought that we're now large enough that teams that are making software decisions for the rest of the company are either insulated from or don't care about the feedback of the people who actually have to use it.

The UX is completely atrocious and the help is even worse. It took far too long to figure out how to make an expense request and they wouldn't accept my valid bank details. Our accounting team even had to send out a company wide message telling everyone to change their password, because apparently you can have both SSO and password logins with the default password set to something like expenses1234.

There are no easily accessible documents. Instead you have to watch videos or wait hours! on hold to speak to someone. We came from Spendesk which was completely intuitive.

On top of all of that, many people had to wait weeks for a reimbursement. I can't garantie that it was because of Concur but I wouldn't be surprised.

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