Software horror show: SAP Concur

https://blog.plover.com/prog/crap-warning-signs-2.html

by luu • 4 years ago

198 181 4 years ago

blog.plover.com

speps• 4 years ago

2022

tluyben2• 4 years ago

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33857694

gnabgib• 4 years ago

Extensive discussion too.. 356 pts, 190 comments

haunter• 4 years ago

SAP must be the sacrificial lamb to keep the “legendary german engineering” myth alive

jimnotgym4• 4 years ago

To be fair US companies have built some truly awful tools in this field.

Can anyone remember the name of that awful booking system Oracle sells?

bigDinosaur• 4 years ago

Is there any mythos around US engineering in the way there is about German practicality, efficiency, and reliability?

TMWNN• 4 years ago

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

croes• 4 years ago

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

seabird• 4 years ago

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.

zelphirkalt2• 4 years ago

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.

throwmeaway1112• 4 years ago

I recently found out it's not SAP native software - rather it's USA based company/product that was acquired by SAP.

jzwinck• 4 years ago

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 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.

notimetorelax• 4 years ago

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.

xupybd• 4 years ago

Xero has a great tool but last I checked it was $5 per employee per month. With many not making claims every month that is too much overhead per claim.

viraptor• 4 years ago

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...

lrem• 4 years ago

I’d rather apply Hanlon's razor here. And for your example: my employer finds it worthwhile to maintain a security person to be equipped and trained to take adequate pictures of employees in each office. It’s a linearly scaling cost that could be optimised away. But, it removes failures modes (contract photographer not delivering, employee missing an appointment, …) with total expected impact exceeding the cost of a camera and explaining to a new guy which corner of the office has the lightning set up for three point portraits.

contrast• 4 years ago

I wouldn’t expect it to make things easier for employees to require them to have printed receipts for everything. That’s a roadblock in its own right.

I’ve not used Concur but I’ve never met anyone who hasn’t preferred moving on from antiquated paper processes for expenses. Faster to scan receipts on the go, easier to track, less risk of a lost receipt, bulk of expenses are incurred via a digital process anyway.

rwmj4• 4 years ago

Concur tip - you can upload a 1x1 png in place of the lost receipt. (For some reason the "I don't have a receipt" option still requires you to upload a receipt.)

Closi• 4 years ago

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.

In a big company that person who 'just accepts receipts and deals with them' will have to enter the receipt into an expenses system like Concur anyway.

Personally I find it much easier and faster to input it myself than to put everything in an envelope with enough information in the envelope to allow an admin to correctly expense/bill it (e.g. cost centers, an explanation for why the hotel was over the policy allowance, a bank transaction for that thing I lost the reciept for...).

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.

IMO the better comparison would be hiring an in-house photo team which has to be used any time anyone in the company wants a photo of something.

It's quicker for me to take a photo of this prototype I made than it is for me to arrange for the in-house photographer to come.

rikroots• 4 years ago

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

PascLeRasc3• 4 years ago

When my company needed photos of everyone they announced a new policy and then 10 minutes later sent aggressive emails to each manager asking why they thought it was professional for their subordinates to be out of compliance. We use Concur too.

bobwernstein12• 4 years ago

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.

tw985213586• 4 years ago

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

TeMPOraL2• 4 years ago

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.

ramraj07• 4 years ago

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?”

themoonisachees2• 4 years ago

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.

beardyw• 4 years ago

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?

ZiiS• 4 years ago

Pleasing 100,000 folks by inconveniencing 10,000,000.

tsujamin• 4 years ago

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

Moissanite2• 4 years ago

Having to use Concur is one of the primary reasons I have avoided ramping up travel again after the COVID lockdown period ended.

It also inverts incentives in other ways. I'm narurally inclined to be frugal, but that would often involve buying 3 or 4 smaller things to eat rather than a large meal. Since I know that would massively increase my own expense filing hassle, I instead tend to make individual purchases which are larger than I otherwise would.

jl6• 4 years ago

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 staff to claim expenses”?

IshKebab• 4 years ago

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.

pavlov• 4 years ago

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.

jimnotgym4• 4 years ago

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 to look up the right one. Then their line manager doesn't get around to signing it off, so employee chases accounts team, and accounts team have to chase approvers. Senior people are usually worst.

The accounts team then hand to justify why they processed a claim despite x,y and z...to external auditors.

Setting an expectation that if you don't get it right up front, the computer won't let you through is a very powerful selling point to a CFO who has to control this rubbish

rwmj4• 4 years ago

This would be true if they weren't employees of the same company who are wasting time on make-work nonsense when they could be doing something productive.

Moissanite2• 4 years ago

Wouldn't a flat per diem payment make more sense then? That way you don't need the complex (and presumably pricey) expenses software, and you don't torture your employees with it when they could be doing something useful.

robertlagrant8• 4 years ago

I think it's fine to have expenses software, but I'd love to have something modern and usable. I think the problem is that if you try and make that, all your customers secretly want a clunky ERP and need all the non-expenses features built.

rightbyte3• 4 years ago

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

grogenaut• 4 years ago

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)

TeMPOraL2• 4 years ago

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.

josephcsible2• 4 years ago

They claim for things they lost the receipt for and then they try and pressure some accounts clerk into forcing it through.

If you lose a receipt, or aren't given one at all, for a reimbursable expense, should your employer just tell you that you're out the money for it?

tw985213586• 4 years ago

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.

GuB-42• 4 years ago

This is something I never understood about enterprise software. No one should understand better than companies with employees that time is money. If your employees spend an extra hour each month dealing with bad software, that's an hour of unproductive time you are paying for. Even if your employees tend to work unpaid overtime (boooo), that's still an hour of unpaid overtime that could have been used to do actual work.

And employees are definitely going to spend the time necessary to claim expenses. They may skimp on other tasks, but expenses are money, so they are definitely not going to miss that one.

Big companies love metrics and spying on you, and the time spend on corporate apps is an easy thing to measure. So if you see that your employees spend countless hours on ERP, it should rise tons of red flags.

jbk• 4 years ago

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 "act on the PO"... They broke the simple idea of an hypertext link... I'm not even talking about changing a bank account...

popotamonga• 4 years ago

The nightmares. I was a supplier for cocacola and it was so bad they had to do the invoicing for me because it was magic.

BenFeldman1930• 4 years ago

Maybe "SAP Dirty Sanchez" would be a better name?

sizzle• 4 years ago

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.

BostonEnginerd• 4 years ago

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.

manholio• 4 years ago

What happened here is that a 1000 ton gorilla is entrenched in the business operations market and it's irrational for managers to phase them out since it's very risky for their careers. This poisons the field for startups who can't grow to the critical mass to be viable on this market, which in turn lowers competition, witch leads to monopolistic practices, inefficient bad software and broken drop-boxes.

The drop-box looks like it does because it's good enough and there there are no business pressures on the market for SAP to fix it. The manager gets to keep their job by buying SAP and the low level staff needs to deal with such stupidities (and much, much worse ones) ad infinitum.

irusensei• 4 years ago

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 code and it was processing hardcoded index positions. I repeat the person who did that had no concept of a loop. Since the query was returning more than 250 results the remaining rows were being ignored.

The solution? They increase it to 500. Certified. SAP. Partner.

Other issues like having to create folders on the shared NFS volume because developer couldn’t arse to create parent folder if it doesn’t exist. New supplier? Need to mkdir otherwise those long running reports would be inconsistent. Ah… let’s not forget CHMOD 777 EVERYWHERE when handling file systems.

Don’t even let me start on the “move to standard” utopia and the horrors that come with it.

I didn’t dare to touch that thing. First it was the company could lose support if the supplied code was modified and second if they knew I could fix stuff they would treat me as some cheap labor alternative.

HyperSane3• 4 years ago

I worked for a company that uses Syteline ERP and it was a similar horroshow.

noAnswer• 4 years ago

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 buttons with super long mouse movements. I programmed AutoHotkey-Scripts to ease the pain. "Fun" times :-)

masklinn2• 4 years ago

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.

arpinum• 4 years ago

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.

madaxe_again• 4 years ago

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.

ComradeMatis• 4 years ago

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.

vulcanash999• 4 years ago

I’ve skimmed over the code and it was processing hardcoded index positions. I repeat the person who did that had no concept of a loop. Since the query was returning more than 250 results the remaining rows were being ignored.

Unrelated, but this reminds me of a time when I had to write some code in some proprietery programming language in some industrial automation project to program a PLC. The language was similar to Visual Basic but lacked support for basic things such as for loops. I spent some time creating a "meta-language" that would compile code down to this language with added support for loops and some other stuff. Then I would paste the compiled code in the proprietary software each time I had to change anything.

Bouncingsoul1• 4 years ago

That's odd most of these PLC are programmable with IEC 61131-3 languages,e.g. Structured Text which has For-loops. That said i did my fair share of metaprogramming as these usually lack dynamic allocation.

jmclnx• 4 years ago

I see this all the time, and on our UN*X servers, everything remotely related to SAP is 777, even text files. Not matter how many times I tell them not to do that, it happens anyway.

Good help the company if someone every gets access to the SAP servers.

racked• 4 years ago

Company had to pay the partner for support. I’ve skimmed over the code and it was processing hardcoded index positions. I repeat the person who did that had no concept of a loop.

This is not a SAP-specific problem. I've seen highly paid programmers with veteran-like CVs deliver absolute crap in the PHP world. If there's a shortage of good programmers, you'll get this kind of thing. Moreso if it's in a un-sexy field of work like SAP.

a28002762• 4 years ago

"And then the product manager didn't point at the screen and say “wouldn't it be better to alphabetize these?”

And the UX person, if there was one, didn't raise any red flag, or if they did nothing was done."

...and all of the no doubt uncountable complaints by the poor sods being forced to use this pile of crap by senior executives, who have secretaries to fill out their expense reports for them and get invited to luxury junkets by SAP, were utterly ignored

pflenker• 4 years ago

With sap, the end user is not the customer. Hence, the whole thing is designed to pass a sales pitch and nothing else. The people who use this are not the ones who make the buy decision.

samwillis2• 4 years ago

That's the same with all enterprise software sales. However the counter argument is that there are multiple layers of "end user" and the executives who purchase it, but don't "use" it, are still recipients of the the output from the system. They will read the reports, and use it for insight.

Point is though, you are right, the majority of users of these systems are very removed from the purchasing decisions. And therefor the UX for them is very often subpar.

hef1989819• 4 years ago

Everybody but upper management uses ERP systems to literally keep the lights on. And some of those reports are to be published quarterly, you know, balance sheets and such...

hef1989819• 4 years ago

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...

robertlagrant8• 4 years ago

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

LAC-Tech2• 4 years ago

My supply chain consultant friend can never understand why I recoil whenever he mentions SAP.

hef1989819• 4 years ago

Which says a lot about both of you.

LAC-Tech2• 4 years ago

Be constructive with your feedback, please!

thayne• 4 years ago

I've seen the same thing (dropdown with no discernable order) in other products too. Like the AWS console and atlassian products. Although, in some of those cases it was eventually fixed.

Kiro• 4 years ago

The list is sorted, just not alphabetically. No idea why the author presumes that lists can only be sorted in one way or not at all.

Sebb767• 4 years ago

The list might be ordered, but it's not sorted, at least not by a criteria that would be obvious to me or the author.

sidcool2• 4 years ago

I think it's a bit fashionable here at HN to lambast enterprise software (and companies). I myself find a guilty pleasure in doing so. We like to call them incompetent.

But these companies do something right. If not software then in sales or marketing.

deely3• 4 years ago

Most people that criticizes SAP and other enterprise software miss the point that SAP and enterprise software is complex. Not because it made complex but because this area/domain is really complex. Finances are complex, role based access control are complex, ORM is complex. Now combine all these things and add different implementation in different countries/regions and you will probably understand why SAP is de-facto standard.

robertlagrant8• 4 years ago

That's true. But no one is criticising their business abilities.

samwillis2• 4 years ago

See also:

"Lidl’s €500 Million SAP Debacle"

https://www.henricodolfing.com/2020/05/case-study-lidl-sap-d...

hef1989819• 4 years ago

My personal favorite! And if you dig into it, exclusively Lidls fault. Also, Lidl wanted to do more than just expenses...

dx034• 4 years ago

Which shows how complex enterprise use cases can be and how valuable good SAP consultants are. With all its faults, for many large companies it's still much better and cheaper to have all processes on SAP than using dozens or hundreds of specialized (often self developed) applications. At least with SAP you always find someone who will help you, with your 20-year old in-house developed software, no one will want to touch that code again.

sidcool2• 4 years ago

I remember a similar link posted a while back.

iancmceachern• 4 years ago

And just think with how many companies use it, so many people wasting so much time every day.

rwmj4• 4 years ago

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.

namdnay• 4 years ago

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

zelphirkalt2• 4 years ago

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

raverbashing2• 4 years ago

Not if the tracking entity would be the company I'm employed to, not some 3rd party tool

Anyway, for non-compliant cookie dialogs, I accept and then remove the cookies manually. Track that.

They might enjoy a complaint to the relevant privacy authorities as well

d1sxeyes• 4 years ago

If that is indeed the case, then there would be legal problems associated with that. Either you are accepting cookies as a private individual, or you are representing your company. Very few companies allow (most) employees to enter into agreements on their behalf.

BuckyBeaver• 4 years ago

Concur = unmitigated trash

pachico• 4 years ago

No CTO was ever fired for choosing:

SAP, JIRA, SalesForce, Oracle, ...

hef1989819• 4 years ago

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

billwashere• 4 years ago

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.

BlueTemplar• 4 years ago

The Lidl guy might be a counter-example ?? (Partially their fault though.)

hbarka2• 4 years ago

I 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. Your payroll and accrued sick leave and benefits deductions and AP/AR doesn’t miss a beat because of these companies. Apple runs on SAP (and Oracle and Workday), mind you. So does Google.

Are they bad or is it the crowd here?

hef1989819• 4 years ago

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...

robertlagrant8• 4 years ago

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

dig12• 4 years ago

I think it is a superiority complex. SAP, IBM, Oracle (and many small companies running for ages) are all making "shitty" products, yet, every year, their revenue is in billions.

On the other hand, we have "beautifully hand-crafted products with love" made in the best languages human can invent (your favorite language only HN crowd dicking around), and those companies are barely paying their developers and bills. But hey, their products are auto-scalable, kubernetes managed, disrupting the industry, powered with green, recycled energy, and vegan food with hand-picked ingredients...

I'll leave it to the astute reader to concur with the pattern here.

neuronic2• 4 years ago

Did you really have to add a jab at vegan food and renewable energy in there and somehow make this about politics?

Where is this weird (and frankly suspicious) hostility against either of those even rationally coming from?

No need to act as if "crazy HN hipster developers" (apparently your perspective) are the only ones who don't understand that there is a very good reason why SAP is still used at Apple and Google.

themoonisachees2• 4 years ago

As a sysadmin i often get dealt the worst part of programs. I get thrown for the update stuff but never actually use the programs so i never get to say "well it's a pain tp update but a joy to use". When i was sysadmin in a small firm, updating SAP components was always the single most furstrating experience, and we ran Matlab.

As someone who has a degree in CS who had to go through "enterprise programming" courses, it's honestly appalling how SAP and Sage are. They're like the Teslas of programming, people who don't know better swear they're great but you can _see_ them coming apart at the seams, and you know that you could do better because you have, back in university.

add to that a healthy dose of anti-establisment and you get the hatred at SAP and Sage, bad products that are viable because they were first to market 30 years ago and now have the necessary connections to appear legit to unknowing decision makers. They have revenues in the billions because the sell the same software as 20 years ago at a premium but switching would be too expensive, so the clients stay.

brianwawok2• 4 years ago

I greatly enjoy my Tesla every time I drive it.

I have never enjoyed using SAP or Oracle products.

deadpannini2• 4 years ago

What you say is true, but these companies aren't successful because their products are usable. They succeeded because of their first-mover advantage, lack of alternatives, and compliance requirements that raise the cost of competition. We don't owe them any respect when it comes to UX.

I can see how it gets tiresome reading repetitive arguments, but a solid theory undergirds all the criticism: that one way to beat SAP, oracle, Microsoft, etc. Is to provide a better user experience.

hef1989819• 4 years ago

Nefore better UI and UX help you beat SAP and co, you need compliant, and industry specific ERP functions on par with them. And then you need to sway all those existing customers away from them. In market that doesn't value UI half as much as you seem to think.

hbarka2• 4 years ago

User experience is fleeting. I like the user experience of manual transmission cars but >80% of new drivers today would scream user experience if you gave them one. Perhaps the complaint here comes from these types of users who expect novelty to their liking.

There was a comical reference to Tesla. If you’ve only experienced the user experience headache that Tesla forces on you every time they have a major software update (at least 2x a year). The muscle memory has to adapt.

IceDane• 4 years ago

They are bad, and the crowd is dismissive.

I work in this industry, though I work almost exclusively with non SAP related stuff.

On one hand, the problems being solved are complicated and for some products, there are decades of embedded domain knowledge, and they have a lot of products, and can basically do anything any kind of business needs to be able to do, and integrate it somehow with other parts of the system.

On the other hand... large parts of it are absolutely horribly engineered. ABAP is a programming language that makes me recoil in disgust. What it is is the result of polishing the same turd for several decades, seemingly without one person or group ever trying to think about the direction or bigger picture for the whole stack(which is just impossibly large at this point, and like a tentacle monster from another dimension).

It does work, but mostly because people have been hammering out the kinks for thousands of person-years. As for the things said about the consulting industry.. they are definitely true.

wlonkly• 4 years ago

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.)

downvoteme1• 4 years ago

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.

mrjin• 4 years ago

Try their timesheet function in any browser, much more amazing. Every time you save something, it opens a new tab!!

PascLeRasc3• 4 years ago

That's a nice feature considering how much they go out of their way to override the native context menu and disable middle mouse button click so you can't open two expense reports in two tabs.

quickthrower2• 4 years ago

Recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33857694

devniel• 4 years ago

SAP invested a bit on improving UX, e.g. things like SAP Fiori and SAPUI5, I was even able to create hybrids apps using its SAP Kapsel.

johnwalkr• 4 years ago

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.

fetzu2• 4 years ago

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.

masklinn2• 4 years ago

apparently the conversion rate is not fixed (for a given day) but can vary on the whims of the system (RNG?).

Assuming all the dates were set up the same, it could be that the exchange rate are "latest at creation of expense" (or just "latest") and the rates had been updated in the meantime.

I'd usually expect the exchange rate to be the rate at the date the expense was incurred but...

fetzu2• 4 years ago

You might be right!

This would be hilarious but totally in line with the rest of the tool. Takeaway would be to do the expense reporting when the conversion rates are advantageous!

iconcur• 4 years ago

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.

LightG• 4 years ago

OMG sorry this is so relevant ... we've just been dealing with a client with SAP software that is supposed to automate on-boarding suppliers/customers.

It takes 2 people client side to hand hold third-parties through the labyrynth, and 1 person at the third party to desperately go back and forth to those 2 people to check if everything is ok and to answer questions about why things aren't progressing.

Literal facepalm.

Have had the same experience with two other clients recently. What is going on with SAP?

99failures• 4 years ago

SAP Concur is weird. Supposedly the best solution in the marketplace (got any alternatives?) and 50% of the functionality is pretty good, the remainder 50% is questionable.

And the complexity reminds me of mainframes' UX.

PaulAJ• 4 years ago

SAP has a very clear idea of how it makes money. It makes money by selling to senior managers who don't have to use it, and have very little idea of the realities for people on the front line. So SAP have no incentive to produce a system that is useable, because that won't increase their sales. Their sales are increased by clever salespeople, so that is where the money goes.

voidee• 4 years ago

I’ve no doubt that you have many anti-Concur club members here! Whenever they make “improvements” it breaks something. Monthly Concur expense reports are torture, possibly being the only part of my job I consistently dislike. Can anyone recommend better alternatives to lobby my company to try?

rightbyte3• 4 years ago

Can anyone recommend better alternatives to lobby my company to try?

A stapler, a letter, a pen, an envelope and a secretary.

That is how I always done it were I worked and it worked flawlessly each time.

During Covid WFH I had to send email and take photos of the recipes so it was abit more cumbersome but I managed to cope.

higeorge13• 4 years ago

Spendesk?

PascLeRasc3• 4 years ago

SAP Concur somehow permanently kills the KeyPassXC extension for me on every browser, every computer. I think that's pretty impressive.

prepend• 4 years ago

The real reason is because the stackoverflow copypaste that worked didn’t sort the results.

This stuff drives me crazy as there are people who just don’t care. I can’t imagine ever looking at those results and not doing something simple to make it better.

najdan33• 4 years ago

This thought deserves some admiration:

Assume that bad technical decisions are made rationally, for reasons that are not apparent.

It could be generalized:

Assume that acts or behavior you don't understand are made rationally, for reasons that are not apparent.

SergeAx• 4 years ago

This 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.

newbieuser• 4 years ago

Enterprise software is the software that mostly lies and bullshit today. Companies spend a lot of money because at the end of the day, it's working. Who cares how it works.

donatj• 4 years ago

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.

Software horror show: SAP Concur

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