My supply chain consultant friend can never understand why I recoil whenever he mentions SAP.
Which says a lot about both of you.
Be constructive with your feedback, please!
Software horror show: SAP Concur
151–160 of 184 posts
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#152The 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…
But it turns out you can actually have good UI on the systems with good controls. At work we used to use concur and then move to expensify which is naturally easier to use even though I have had some issues with it. Before concur we were using some ridiculously terrible Oracle solution which made the concur solution look decent by comparison. Honestly it really felt like Oracle was forcing their developers to use Oracle forms the develop the application.
(edit: terrible stt)
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#153Concur 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 have a whole Concur team of like 5 people at least. All fte's. Employees still have to declare their own expenses. Almost 30k employees. So your suggestion of having just 1 person handling all declarations won't work unless you are suggesting 5 fte's for just Concur isn't enough.
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#154I don’t understand the disdain here in Hacker News for enterprise software. Every now and then this type of post would show up, decrying how terrible the user interface is or how awful looking the fonts are and how they can program the same functions in 1000 lines of code and support thousands of users. These companies have revenue in the billions. They have enabled large companies, since before many of us were born.…
I don't understand the disdain here in Woodworking News for Ikea furniture.
(Business success and the craft of software development, or of user interface design, and so forth, are related, but not the same thing.)
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked for a company that uses Syteline ERP and it was a similar horroshow.
I worked for a company that uses Microsoft Navision. The consultant/dev wold remote work via Teamviewer directly on the production system. Build in editor had no syntax highlighting. No version control possible, since the code is in the database. (Unless the dev copied the code into Notepad and saved it separately.) Certain reports would block all clients company-wide. To print something one would need to click ~6 bu…
Syteline would take HOURS to run a report that generated estimates on how much material needed to be ordered for the next month. Year end reconciliation would take over 12 hours. It was just absurdly slow.
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#156Have you ever used SAP Ariba? 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 "ac…
Yes good luck trying to order from a vendor catalog using the SAP front end, enter the correct shipping info and get any UI confirmation or cues the order was input correctly and will be sent to you. Maybe our implementation is just broke, but there are so many unintuitive backwards UX patterns I shudder to use it every time.
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#157The 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…
I think it's still not the problem being solved here.
To my understanding, from conversations with people on the finance side of things, the point of this game is that:
1. If you get everyone to do their own expensing; and
2. If you set up a system that's robust against mistakes made by people with no understanding of corporate finance, which is almost everyone in a given company (that's the "if you don't get it right up front, the computer won't let you through" principle you mention); and
3. If you tell everyone to use it and that it's their responsibility to be good stewards of corporate money they have the privilege of using, etc.; then...
4. ...you get to hire less people on the finance side of things.
I think it's another case of large organizations chasing legibility[0], to the detriment of everyone within. It's similar to what a lot of other office/business software does: it lets the company get rid of a class of specialist, whose salaries are clearly visible on the company books, by distributing their work more-less evenly across everyone else in the company. This, obviously, causes everyone to lose productivity, as they're being distracted with work that's outside their specialization/expertise, but that only adds up to an "unexplained" overall small productivity drop of the organization (and the frustration of most employees) and is not clearly visible in the company financials.
--
[0] - To borrow the term from Seeing Like a State.
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#158This is what you get with "corporate" software, when people making the decision are never actually use it, and people using it are never have a vote on buying decision.
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#159Concur 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 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.
I think that's precisely it; see my other comment about legibility here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34294834. That's the conclusion I reached from listening to overworked finance people complaining about their understaffed departments handling the "audit seasons" around expenses.
And I think there's a lot more of it happening, mostly thanks to software - starting with the ubiquitous office suite, that made everyone their own secretary, manager and graphics department.
> When companies need photos of their employees they find a photographer who provides that service.
Do they still? My last experience with this is the company asking every employee to please kindly submit a current photo by themselves.
Obviously, the error in this kind of thinking is assuming that "having each employee of a big organization do a small amount of work" is free, because "it's just a small amount of work". It is, but a) the more iterations of this happen, the more of it adds up, and b) it's disruptive to every employee, as it competes for time and focus with the specific jobs people were actually hired for, slashing productivity across the board.
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#160I don’t understand the disdain here in Hacker News for enterprise software. Every now and then this type of post would show up, decrying how terrible the user interface is or how awful looking the fonts are and how they can program the same functions in 1000 lines of code and support thousands of users. These companies have revenue in the billions. They have enabled large companies, since before many of us were born.…
As an ERP consultant, I love when these discussions come up. It spreads more hatred for Oracle and SAP among the developer community and keeps my jobs safe.