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Software horror show: SAP Concur

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Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#171

Post by robertlagrant »

hef19898 wrote: post #148
robertlagrant wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other points you mentioned weren't relevant to the UI or the UX. That's why no one's addressing them. I get you have some knowledge here and so want to talk about it, but should do so in the knowledge that you're doing so in spite of its relevance, not because of it. In a similar way if someone criticises the Amazon UI, coming in saying, "But no one's addressed my comments on how hard logistics and warehouse mana…

You have no idea how the UI of Amazon's internal tools, whrn it comes to Retail and Fulfillment, look like, do you?

I'm not even saying their external UI is good. I'm saying no one should be justifying it with an irrelevant experience they happen to have and can't resist sharing.

I haven't convinced you of that though, so I think that's that.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#172

Post by robertlagrant »

hef19898 wrote: post #147
robertlagrant wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sibling comment nailed it. It's just a brief analogous category error. Someone thought SAP was bad and messed up an implementation, therefore people who think SAP is bad mess up implementations. Someone thought snow was white and killed 50m people, therefore people who think snow is white are mass murderers.

Ok, you got me. I am no match to your logic nor your argumentative skills. SAP sucks, because its UI is bad. Doubly so because the UI of an expense solution SAP acquired through a third party is bad. You win. Now someone has to come up with something that solves all the other challenges industrial enterprises have. And tell them whatever alternative was developed is actually so much better that an ERP system change i…

You seem to have needlessly changed the topic. I'm refuting the specific point I was talking about. You seem to be cheering for your team regardless of pros and cons.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#173

Post by donatj »

Another possible explanation is that the app wasn’t built in house. For a time our app was outsourced to a shop in Eastern Europe. They were not particularly pleasant to work with and were generally very bad at following directions.

Getting revisions done, let alone done correctly was a struggle. None of us were mobile developers and thus none of us knew Objective-C nor Java so our ability to properly review or modify the code we received was pretty limited. Our app suffered for it, it became picking our battles and small things like the order of a drop-down fell by the wayside.

In a perfect world we would have stopped working with them but in reality we’d signed some sort of agreement I’m not entirely privy to and we were going to use them for a set amount of work.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#174

Post by BostonEnginerd »

jbk wrote: post #15

Have 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…

I'm currently dealing with multiple customers moving to Ariba. What a pain -- it doesn't work in Safari reliably, finding out where anything is takes several minutes.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#175

Post by tw98521358 »

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…

On a small scale it makes sense, if you don’t have enough work to fill one employee worth of time it makes sense to distribute that work to everyone and loose efficiency. If the company is bigger than a certain size there is enough work and a specialist would do it faster and cheaper but internal accounting loves to appear more productive by cutting headcount and hiding costs through distribution.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#176

Post by tw98521358 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #157
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…

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 righ…

Yep well described

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#177

Post by tw98521358 »

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.

That doesn’t make the nightmare of expense reporting go away. You just do it of the corporate card, it tracks better but is still a total pain.

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#178

Post by tw98521358 »

aikinai wrote: post #99
rhn_mk1 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The blame is now even more clearly on the employees. They get the hassle of expenses because they want the kickbacks.

You still have to file the expenses even if you use the company card, at least everywhere I’ve worked.

And you can still get stiffed if you loose the receipt

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#179

Post by tw98521358 »

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.

That’s got to be like a tiny fraction of SAP

Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur

#180

Post by tw98521358 »

bobwernstein1 wrote: post #153
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…

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.

For 30k not enough. Usually an office admin person can process that kind of stuff as part time responsibility. And you have one for every 50-100 employees. So that would be 300-600 PTE users for 30k
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