Software horror show: SAP Concur

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 systems. That's a waste of time and a drag on productivity. Better to hire that central person who will learn all the quirks of whatever system is used and let the other 99% of the organization do their jobs.

When companies need photos of their employees they find a photographer who provides that service. They don't ask each employee to learn about lighting technique and do the post processing according to a written set of standards in hopes the photos will look consistent. But with Concur that's what happens.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#6

Post by ramraj07 » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 8:38 AM UTC

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 it up in a day.

The most important factor is to make sure you weight your results by two numbers - one that tries to score the match of the result to the search string and another which is a more absolute weight (which could be population here, simplistically). Without that search will look like this, and these engineers will always say, “this looks good to me? Just finish typing the city and it’ll give you what you want?”

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#7

Post by notimetorelax » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 8:44 AM UTC

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 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.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#8

Post by beardyw » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 8:45 AM UTC

The folks on Los Andes are pleased it doesn't always assume Los Angles. Are we sure there isn't a bit of a sense of entitlement here?

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#9

Post by tsujamin » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 8:46 AM UTC

having an app (even Concur) to do expense acquittals sounds like heaven to me...

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#10

Post by viraptor » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 8:47 AM UTC

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…

> some employee expenses will not need to be reimbursed.

I don't think the savings would offset the system cost. But then again, I've definitely got a threshold where just spending my money without claiming is worth it for my mental health...