13 ms·

Software horror show: SAP Concur

356 points by AndrewDucker 4y ago

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ghaff 4y ago
In my experience, the far bigger complaints with corporate expense management software is the audit process which kicks back expenses often for random and trivial reasons rather than the software itself--which may not be magical but generally isn't the main source of pain.
- zachrose 4y ago
  Sometimes they work together! I submitted an email receipt and it kept getting rejected because Concur only shows the first page of a multi-page PDF unless you go through some very non-obvious navigation to see the whole thing.
- emodendroket 4y ago
  I was a bit vexed when my expense report with something I bought at a retail store, with the receipt, was rejected because I did not provide an invoice with my name printed on it. But that wasn't even the software!
imwillofficial 4y ago
I found concur to mostly work for me. It’s kludgy for sure, but I always get paid and expenses handled fast. Sometimes within a day.
- ConradKilroy 4y ago
  I must concur, imperfect Concur is a major improvement from the past systems of doing travel expenses.
- deleted 4y ago
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- blinkingled 4y ago
  This is true for me and I have been recently submitting many expenses each week - it always worked. Hell I even liked the itemized expense entry feature!
- dehrmann 4y ago
  It doesn't not work.
thefourthchime 4y ago
As the author mentions. This was a failure on and down the chain, from QA to PMs. When I see software like this, it reeks to me of contractor work. We hire them to handle something that we don’t have time for our core team, and or something not very important. The result is the devs do a minimal job to get paid. QA doesn’t care and the PMs either didn’t see it, or have bigger fish to fry.
- munchler 4y ago
  That’s funny. I used to work for a high-end consulting company, and we always marveled at the level of dysfunction in our clients’ IT departments. They would call us in when their devs couldn’t/wouldn’t do the work. We were pretty expensive by comparison, but at least we got the job done. I guess it just depends on the kind of contractor you hire.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - emodendroket 4y ago
    I don't think there's a logical inconsistency here. Imagine that the quality of work we can expect from a contractor with no particular investment in your long-term success is a 7. If your internal team can produce a 10 given the time, you'd look at that and think it's not very good. On the other hand, if your internal team can only manage a 4, hey, go with the contractor.
  - wil421 4y ago
    Typical consultant mindset. They cant fathom how big IT got into the situation they are in due to legacy software, mergers, and periods of no investment. They only do greenfield projects and have complete disregard for IT’s processes. What’s funny is the big consultancies are usually to blame for stupid IT or they make bean counter decisions to not invest in IT. Thus the reason we need chop shops to come in and and help. Oh, and god forbid we add an FTE with domain experience who can help us.
    - 4y ago
pflenker 4y ago
This is common for software where the people who take the decision which software to buy are far removed from the people who are going to use it. No product manager cared about this, because this feature needs to work only well enough for a sales pitch, if even that.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  > software where the people who take the decision which software to buy are far removed from the people who are going to use it As far as I'm concerned, that's the definition of enterprise software.
- bri3d 4y ago
  100% agree with the buyer not being the end-user. As long as the product supports the needs of the buyer (administration and reporting, rules engine for product selection, etc.), the needs of the end-user can be neglected. HRIS software (PeopleSoft, SuccessFactors, Workday, etc.) is the same way. The deals keep close and the checks keep coming in. I don't think it's fair to say with a lot of this software that no one cares, though, just that the business as a whole adds up to a poor frontline experience. It would surprise me exactly 0% to learn that there was a whole "improve the Concur UX for frontline users" team who repeatedly get their feature asks deprioritized in favor of something needed to close a deal. And, also consider that when it comes to these sorts of big enterprise products, many are drowning under 20+ years of trying to support every bizarre customized customer corner case, third-party integration, and often with no ability to deprecate an old feature. Perhaps adding sort capability breaks some arcane customer scripting functionality added ten years ago which is poorly understood, but cannot be removed due to a clause in the MSA.
- deleted 4y ago
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- triggercut 4y ago
  Usually I would agree, but SAP and other ERP software are handled differently from most other software procurement. Procurement is one of the core functions of the SAP ecosystem, so those most closely involved in buying it here are usually the ones who will be using it.
Havoc 4y ago
Yep...they're all a pain. At least they mostly work once you jump through the required hoops
_jal 4y ago
The Concur UI is a bucket of ass, classic enterprise software. Barely tolerable when it is working, and it is broken or super slow maybe 1 in 4 times I try to use it. On the trip side, the car rental selector is something special. You can't check multiple vendors at once, so if cars are in demand, expect to spend a while discovering you can't get one.
a_c 4y ago
These kind of bad UX problem can be easier to rationalize once we understand the money flow. Would you stop using it because of such UX? Would your stopping cause the company to stop procuring SAP? Was the search the selling point in the first place when the sales representative pitch the software to finance department? Probably no, no and no. So are all other bad UXes. And we can probably wager that a better UX doesn't yield the developer a better pay cheque.
- Mister_Snuggles 4y ago
  The ironic thing is that if the user stops using this software the company benefits because they don't have to pay out the expense claim that the user didn't enter. This seems like a win for the company and the company would conclude that using SAP has reduced their expenses. The key thing about enterprise software is that it's never sold to end-users, it's sold to senior managers and executives. The contact that this group will have with the software is to approve transactions (e.g., Reqs, POs, Expense Claims, etc) and maybe view some reports. You can bet that these interactions are very streamlined.
- alkonaut 4y ago
  It also probably describes long lead times and lots of overhead (expensive deployments etc). I guess the question that is often missing when these systems are specified and bought is “if we find a trivial but annoying UX papercut issue in the software which is 5 minutes of actual development time, how quickly and how cheaply would we have that fixed once we report the issue?” Having systems people like is important. I think that often seems to get lost.
- emodendroket 4y ago
  I think you could also work from likely evolution of the system. Probably this was just a string and somebody at some point thought, hey, let's add suggestions and did the quickest way they could think of to do that without fundamentally reworking.
- underwater 4y ago
  The is the hallmark of bureaucracy. Seperate the functions, and then let each team externalise the costs without any checks and balances. Finance purchase Concur because it solves their problems and integrates with their existing tools. They don't care that people hate it, or that it wastes the company's resourcing when people are fighting a broken UI instead of doing their day job. Normally engineers are shielded from this pattern in their day jobs. But I have worked at companies that have gone the other direction. In one I met with a risk averse gatekeeping team and told them that for a newly acquired product we were not going to be able to meet the (arbitrary) SLO for the glut of tickets they assigned us, and asked for help. Their suggestion was to pull the app from market.
misthop 4y ago
Link hugged to death. Archive http://web.archive.org/web/20221204204618/https://blog.plover.com/2022/12/04/ http://web.archive.org/web/20221204204618/https://blog.plove...
java-man 4y ago
This is a clear indication that the user is not the customer. The first time someone arrives at the scene catering to the users, the whole industry will be wiped out. This happened to the phone handsets when iphone arrived. So, future investors - look at the startups that address the user problems, not the client problems, even though the latter are paying.
- cxf12 4y ago
  When business pays the ad dollars, the customer is never the user who's policies and features are at center.
- fphhotchips 4y ago
  The two are fundamentally different. Unless you can devise a way to do BYO expense platform, you're comparing B2B to B2C product development, marketing and sales. Do you think the PMs at Concur just woke up one day and decided to be user hostile because they're asshats? Of course not. They did what the Sales team, and Gartner, told them they needed to give to CFOs so that they would buy it. And then CFOs bought it. Until someone can quantify the benefit of "better UX" to CFOs, or provide that and all the CFO facing features they want, crappy expense platforms will continue to be the order of the day.
  - mgkimsal 4y ago
    It will be impossible to do any real comparison because the bad stuff is relatively entrenched at most large places. Small quality issues for users would reduce errors, and get expense data reconciled faster. But… by how much? 10%? 20%? No one will care enough to fund a large system replacement for a 10% reduction in expense report filing.
- emodendroket 4y ago
  > The first time someone arrives at the scene catering to the users, the whole industry will be wiped out. I find it a little hard to see to be honest. Team members might push to use Slack over some other chat solution because they spend all day using that -- I've seen that happen and work. How often do you do expense reports that you're really going to nag the company to buy your favorite solution?
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sokoloff 4y ago
I hate submitting expenses probably as much as the typical engineer, but Concur seems “no better, no worse” than the typical dumpster fire of these systems. I will say that it does have good integration between the company card transactions and the expense reporting feature. I am more mystified than the author at why my 75-mile range electric car offers a default sorted list by full street name, then by state, happily inquiring as to whether I intend to drive 225 miles to my entered street name before a matching entry that’s 4 miles away.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Of course, Google Maps seems to be equally random when it starts guessing your destination. I reluctantly started using a corporate card for most things because I sort of had to. I don't like not getting the personal benefits but it actually does make (most) things easier with Concur. Only real issue is it's harder to split personal and company charges.
  - emodendroket 4y ago
    Don't you still need to make an expense report in that case?
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Yes. But it means that all the expenses are accounted for and added to the expense report even if I need to add receipts for some of them and may have to add some additional information, e.g. category. As I say, not my choice but it probably captures some random fees etc. that I otherwise tend to forget about.
    - jojobas 4y ago
      Depends. Most companies would have you specify the project/cost centre for every purchase, but amounts/locations/etc are automatically provided by the card issuer.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      Of course, you are still spending company money at thosr expenses have to be properly accounted for.
jojobas 4y ago
From memory, it remembered places you've entered and showed them up top when searching. I wouldn't challenge that concur sucks, the fact that you receipts are OCRed from the app but not from the website drove me nuts
emodendroket 4y ago
I have used Concur and don't have any strong feelings about it. It is not wonderful but it does the job. I think it is a little overwrought to call it a "horror show" that the list isn't really sorted. Presumably they see typing in the place name as the primary use case and this was an afterthought. I kind of expected serious bugs from the title.
revskill 4y ago
Is this topological sort ? So, it's a hard solved problem. Because, for example, postgresql order by doesn't allow it by default.
- emodendroket 4y ago
  I guess the author suggests, why not at least do SORT BY country THEN BY city_name or something like that. Which might be nice, I suppose.
  - revskill 4y ago
    It's only possible if the address field is not single Text field :)
    - emodendroket 4y ago
      True, but it's not even sorted naively as a single string.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > Is this topological sort ? No, neither what it is doing or what it ought to be doing is a topological sort. What it is actually doing seems like “return all matching the stem without any sort [or sorted by ID or some other non-relevant value].” The various things the user suggest are all sorts by fairly simple functions, not the kind of dependency ordering at issue with a topological sort. Choosing the best one to use as a default might be hard, but they aren’t the kind of complex things you can’t implement as a simple order-by once you are set up for it.
wardb 4y ago
SAP Concur is a complete nightmare for managing expenses. It's so bad that it will ruin your entire weekend, leaving you feeling frustrated and drained. The interface is a convoluted mess that is practically impossible to navigate, and entering expenses takes forever. The expense categorization system is an abomination that will drive you insane with its constant mistakes and errors. The approval process is a black hole that sucks up your expenses and never spits them back out. I feel SAP Concur is the worst software ever created for expense management, and using it makes me wish I never had to do expenses again. Expensify is so much better. The OCR isn't great though
cxf12 4y ago
its pretty interesting that maps.google.com has an SAP Concur listing with about a 3.3 rating.
lepus 4y ago
Concur's backend is typical of a slow moving industry that works with old awkward systems like airlines. It's a shitshow of business logic and 20 year old legacy code that would be a long expensive nightmare to rewrite for little actual profit so no manager would ever approve of such an endeavor. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a mess of queries involved with this search such that trying to do a real sort of the results would require a significant degree of rewriting and touching scary code with huge amounts of bureaucratic review in order to be DOD compliant, so it gets labeled as "good enough" even if the current state drives some developers crazy.
- josephg 4y ago
  They need to call a sort function. It can happen in the client, because the data set is small. It should have happened when the app was first written, at which time they weren’t maintaining legacy code - they were writing a UI from scratch and could make changes easily. Sort functions are built in to every programming language I’ve ever used. I agree with the author. There’s no reason for it to be like this but incompetence - either at an individual level, system level or both.
  - the_sleaze_ 4y ago
    I used to work in a system where seemingly trivial sort()s would break the entire stack. It is entirely plausible that a sort is nontrivial.
    - josephg 4y ago
      In 30 years of programming I've worked in plenty of systems where this sort of thing is nontrivial too. But its always the result of incompetent abstractions getting in the programmer's way. Downvotes notwithstanding, I stand by my claim that this is always the result of incompetence. Either at the small level (laziness) or at a larger scale (incompetent system design).
      - _s 4y ago
IceDane 4y ago
This is the least of SAP's crimes against software. Pretty much everything SAP builds is janky and awful like this. If you're lucky, "minor" UX problems like these are the only thing you have to deal with, but in the vast majority of cases, that's not going to be the case. Where I work, I also have to use a SAP system for expense reports. I can't even tell you what it's called, but the interface is basically just directly from SAP GUI(except embedded, very poorly, into a website) and every single interaction you perform results in a sync query to the backend, freezing the UI until you get a response. The worst part is that no one really cares. SAP doesn't care. The users/companies that are stuck with SAP don't really care, or at least if they do, well, no one is going to spend valuable dev time on building their own internal expense registration platform(or whatever) just to fix something that sucks to use, but otherwise "works". I also have to register my hours, being a consultant, and this also happens via some SAP system. One thing my current project manager told me recently is that the description field that we have to use to describe what work we did is just invisibly cut to 40 characters on the backend. I can freely type a whole essay describing what I did, but the pm reviewing will just see 40 characters. Assuming that any sort of thought goes into most of SAP's software is like trying to reason about an insane person's behavior. It's completely pointless since there is no reason involved.
- deleted 4y ago
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X-Cubed 4y ago
Even Google Calendar does this. If I'm adding an event an hour from now, why does the Location auto-complete list show locations that are impossible to reach in time at the top of the list? Is it not more likely that I would be booking an event near to my either my current location or my home?
- mjd 4y ago
  My number one complaint about Goofle Calendar is that it'll let me schedule an event in the past, with a reminder and everything, and say nothing.
  - XajniN 4y ago
    Will the reminder work if you time travel to the past?
nikhilgk 4y ago
A few years ago, we were building somethings to integrate with multiple expense and invoice management systems. Concur's odata based APIs were by far one of the worst integration experiences I had. (Even worse than integrating with dot net SOAP APIs from AXIS and Java) You could see that some of the older APIs were well documented and thought out and the new versions were considerably worse. What we realized was that the earlier versions were built prior to SAP acquiring Concur.
fghorow 4y ago
I was forced to use an SAP product at an old job about 15 years ago. Unfortunately, I find it completely unsurprising that any SAP.* product is a dis-organized mess of a kludge, with no rationality evident anywhere. Oh, and the CIO who foisted that pile of cr*p upon my organisation? She moved on shortly after SAP was implemented -- undoubtedly to foist SAP on some other poor unsuspecting org. I sure hope her SAP stock has tanked.
- gabrielsroka 4y ago
  SAP acquired Concur.
Scuds 4y ago
I interviewed with them prior to the SAP acquisition back in 2017. "We're looking for someone with experience with ASP and database performance improvements." "You mean, ASP.net - not old school VB6 derived, interpreted - 'pretty cool for 1997' Active Server Pages - ASP?" "Hey hey! You're the guy we want!" Of course I would have taken the job if I'd known they'd be acquired. edit: Huh, they were acquired in 2014? Ah well - it's like someone's MVP that made it out to production, then they made it big and that MVP kept being glommed onto.
dan-buzzkill 4y ago
TripActions is great, best I’ve used
fetzu 4y ago
Sometimes when I feel like the worse product manager in the world, I just click that Concur link in my work computer browser’s bookmark bar to remind myself that, even if I suck, some bloke at SAP is doing their job even more terribly than me..
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
We used to use Concur, at my old job. I hated it, but didn't use the mobile app. I always did my expenses by hand, on my workstation, after travel, and I took notes by hand. It worked better than the old manual version, we had before it (It can be worse, because it was worse, and I have the scars to prove it).
rdxm 4y ago
cesarb 4y ago
I can see another issue in that list: for half of the entries, it displays the state but not the country, and for the other half, it displays the country but not the state (or its local equivalent). Given that there are things like cities with the same name but within different states in the same country (a quick web search tells me that, in my country, there are many cities like that), and even states named identically to an unrelated country, it's not hard to see how this could get confusing. (Edit: here is a full list of homonym cities in my country: https://www.embrapa.br/manual-de-referenciacao/anexo-cidades-homonimas https://www.embrapa.br/manual-de-referenciacao/anexo-cidades...)
- psidium 4y ago
  aquilo ali varia se o teu usuário é daquele país ou não. é uma cidade do meu país? cidade, estado. É de outro país? cidade, PAÍS.
cookiengineer 4y ago
We actually joke around the area where SAP is located (Walldorf, Germany). In surrounding cities devs joke about the fact that there are literally dozens if not hundreds of web agencies doing nothing more than mobile/tablet ready SAP user interfaces. That's their only business model. I'm not kidding you, there's an entire ecosystem around the fact that SAP UI5 is so crap that people cannot use it on their smartphones. And concept-wise it's built very similar to the early jquery-ui releases (remember the first iPhone's menus? Yeah, THAT old), but only in undocumented and even crappier. I don't even know how to rationalize this anymore. At one point I ditched every company that uses SAP, but it's like the plague. You can't avoid it.
- intelVISA 4y ago
  The people buying the software don't have to use it, would you buy your corporate underlings the comfortable, expensive shoes or just enough rags to painfully remind them who their masters are? SAP produce the lowest cost rags in town, and you will learn to love them.
  - jjeaff 4y ago
    I thought SAP was extremely expensive.
    - eastbound 4y ago
      That’s for the golf course. Same as IBM: The business model is they mostly sell golf courses, and software is a side-effect so they have to save on that.
      - skrebbel 4y ago
        Are you just making stuff up?
        eastbound 4y ago
        I was sysadmin for IBM software in a 50k-people company, there is no way they paid 12m$ for ClearQuest, ClearCase or RequisitePro when Git and Jira were already out. They clearly played golf to win this market.
MikeDelta 4y ago
Sorted lists require an extra license, I am sure sales will be happy to talk to procurement in getting you one.
peterbmarks 4y ago
Of course they are motivated to make it hard to claim expenses. This is genius.
bitwize 4y ago
> Assume that bad technical decisions are made rationally, for reasons that are not apparent. Actually, this example proves the rule. Large enterprise applications like this are used by governments and large businesses that must comply with various accounting, legal, and administrative regulations. So vendors like SAP are incentivized to deliver products that take the least amount of effort and incur the least amount of risk while still meeting the twisty little maze of requirements. If bogo-sort is the least-effort way of organizing the location list, bogo-sort it is. For example it may add the locations to a map or hash table, and then iterate over them in an unspecified order.
asyncscrum 4y ago
My favorite fight search tool was hipmunk. Their 'agony' sort was my favorite feature in any software ever. SAP bought them, and I was so hopeful that Concur would bake this into their god awful app that I had to use for work. No luck. RIP Hipmunk.
- topaz0 4y ago
  What is "agony sort"?
  - vzqx 4y ago
    According to [1], it sorted flights by an "agony" metric which was a combination of price, duration, and number of stops. [1] https://www.afar.com/magazine/hipmunk-is-shutting-down-heres-everything-you-need-to-know https://www.afar.com/magazine/hipmunk-is-shutting-down-heres...
- Xt-6 4y ago
  I used to work at Hipmunk, stayed until it got shot down. SAP Concur approached us to use our auto-completion algorithm/database to power their new UI or whatever. Apparently the 2 or 3 different DB they already had for that exact use case were not good enough. Our result were sorted by population size of the destination, The concur people could not believe it was that only that.
deleted 4y ago
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mabbo 4y ago
Why would they even care? The people who decide that everyone in their company must use SAP Concur are rarely the people who need to file expense reports- they either don't travel much, or they have people under them who take care of it. Instead the decision will be made based on price. Hiring bad devs and rushing poor quality software out will be a net savings for SAP.
skissane 4y ago
At my old job, I was jealous of people at other companies who got to use Concur. Whatever Concur's flaws may be, the system we had was obviously worse. "Wow, you take a photo with your phone and it goes in an app? Wish we had an app. Instead I have to submit it on a website, print the cover page as a PDF, collect all my receipts as further PDFs, merge the PDFs, and then send them via email with a single PDF attachment." It had to be a single PDF, the system would reject the email if it had more than one attachment. Given it was a computer program not a human at the other end, I never worked out why we had to send it via email, as opposed to just uploading it via a web form. At least I knew enough to merge the cover page PDF and receipt PDFs into one using Ghostscript. A lot of less technical people, they'd print them all out then scan them back in.
- jvanderbot 4y ago
  At one of my two career employers, to create an electronic deposit for your paychecks you had to: 1. Email payroll asking for the right form (an excel sheet would arrive via email) 2. fill out that excel sheet that had no validation at all, just formatting. you enter your bank info, amount, etc. If you needed more lines, you had to "attach another sheet". 3. Then you printed that, 4. signed it, 5. scanned it, and 6. emailed it to payroll@the_company, 7. who would call you and tell you what you did wrong, and then 8. they'd just do what you said over the phone anyway. Yes, the excel sheet existed for no reason other than to align your typed text on the resulting printed page properly. It of course had giant "Do not edit any cells" on the top in red.
  - doktorhladnjak 4y ago
    Reminds me of the time I had to fill out an expense report to get reimbursed by a company who had flown me out for an interview. It all had to be done in Excel. Unfortunately my bank account number was very long, which caused Excel to round down the last two digits. My reimbursement went into someone else’s account who then flagged it to the bank before we got it all straightened out.
mjd 4y ago
A reader who is a former employee of SAP has sent me a technical explanation of how this could occur. The explanation makes a lot of sense to me, and I have updated the article to include it.
S_A_P 4y ago
SAP continues because they have a great sales team that makes execs feel like they are making a choice that never gets them fired. SAP doesnt care about UX and in the 10 or so years Ive dealt with it on the periphery, its been a barely serviceable product with a terrible user interface. I especially love how the localization is so sporadic in the application. Sure the front end will be mostly english, but be prepared for a lot of tables/columns/fields to be in German. Granted, its been a few years since Ive done much SAP related work(I build interfaces between trading systems and SAP for accounting and some logistics interfaces.) Anyway, their goal is to move into new business verticals and not really fix the product. They are actually trying to move into the trading and risk management arena in which I work. So far they have one major client that I'm aware of and they are struggling to make it work.
- tibbydudeza 4y ago
  As an SAP dev knowing some German is a big help - not German but my home language has Germanic roots without the gender bits so close enough, so it helps if I need to read their variable names as comments are sparse or simply not there.
quickthrower2 4y ago
I am a bit disappointed, was expecting something way worse for "horror". Maybe the horrors are on the bugs he hasn't mentioned but had to put up with. One possible excuse for SAP Concur here, and I am just guessing, is that the sorting is in some kind of customer-specific config setting that the admin needs to setup. I.e. they made it configurable for each client's needs. If you don't set it up it defaults to this "undefined" behaviour. Good defaults are better than this though, so alphabet sorting would come ahead.
- tjungblut 4y ago
  I don't think so, I vaguely remember Concur was a big monolith with a huge MSSQL server in the back. I highly doubt they can just rip it out and replace it with HANA and "forget" the sorting. There's a good reason Concur is in Bellevue right next to MSFT, it's a really big .NET shop. They wanted to go to micro services eventually, but not sure how that ended up. This sorting by country and city never worked, it didn't work during my time at Microsoft in 2014 (they replaced it with their own mstravel tool thankfully), nor did it work at SAP in 2018. I frequently travelled from Berlin to Walldorf (in Germany obviously) and it always picked Berlin in Arizona (IIRC?) first. Walldorf it eventually got right, but I do strongly believe somebody just hacked this into first place in the frontend.
user3939382 4y ago
So the near universal consensus from the technical community is that SAP makes crap software. Yet here we are obsessing over monads while they laugh all the way to the bank. So what’s the lesson? Maybe good software is a waste of time and smart money just focuses on the marketing. Unfortunately that’s what I’ve seen over many years.
- kjellsbells 4y ago
  Opinion: SAP focused on the buyer, not the user. I see this in technical software sales all the time: vendors have an X, so they target the team that might X or currently use the inferior Y when they could be using X. But in reality, those people are rarely if ever the buyer, as in, the person who has the budget and the authority to actually issue a PO. In the size of company that uses an ERP, that person is not going to be Raj in Accounting who likes your webified TrelloAsana travel and expense dashboard, or Sara in IT who enjoyed your demo of the JSON export to PowerBI. Its going to be a committee of Finance EVPs who give a final thumbs up to the CFO to write the check. The other part to this story is that at this level, SAP (and peers) are using highly skilled partners as force multipliers to sell. I can honestly say after years in technology that I have never actually seen a SAP employee so to me. But I have seen a boatload of folks from Accenture and Deloitte and Tech Mahindra try to sell digital ERP transformation via a $$$$ contract that used SAP in the tech stack. In short, SAP doesnt need to be the best. It just needs to win the CFO and make partners money. This is one reason why SAP wins.
  - stainforth 4y ago
    Why can't leadership in a company just do the right thing in making decisions that make the company better?
    - kjellsbells 4y ago
      What does better really mean, though? For the CFO, a SAP implementation solves multi-million dollar problems in inventory, sales taxation, expense management, compliance, etc. That is "better" for their organization. If it comes with a slighty cruddy travel and expense system, oh well. That piece probably represents like 1% of the deal value. Enterprise sales at this level requires a deep understanding of what the buyer values in your product, not what you think is valuable. I dont claim that SAP delivers on these claims (ie I'm not carrying water for them) but they are good at hitting this button.
quantum_state 4y ago
Concur is really a piece of junk … it’s very shameful any company pushed out such pollution into the IT ecosystem..
nexoft 4y ago
I would say that such relatively mature software companis carry such old products with dependencies to account for that they are overwheght and only address vunl/p0 bugs; no new features or improvement. I do use Concur where I work and it is bad, in this particular case maybe less effort was made from SAP on the front end, or your back-then-company's SAP departement did a poor job implementing it. either way such mess is also the result of poorly managed departement having 15+ years members that lost interest and that are maintainig very old products.
WirelessGigabit 4y ago
Remember. The usability of this tool isn't vetted by the people who sign the contracts. These people all have assistants doing the work for them. So they never see the pain points. This is all based on flashy PowerPoints and expensive dinners.
FrostKiwi 4y ago
What gets me the most is this instance of SAP Concur to have timestamps on files of receipts being uploaded. I don't have access to the Concur app, so must use the web interface. That interface rejects smartphone photos from the company iPhone, because of unrecognized timestamps. Scanner or bust. Furthermore electronic receipts PDFs are also rejected for the same reason. So what I do is scan a blank piece of paper, Photoshop in a screenshot of said receipt and submit the Photoshopped PDF, which is recognized as having a valid time stamp. Also, being at an international company, certain elements are in Japanese, certain elements in English and certain elements in German, no matter what the interface language is set to. Certain fields that do translate have opposite meanings after being translated. It required a company internal instruction to understand. Never ending warnings you can't turn off and many other small things lead me to skipping small expenses and just eating them, because I can't be bothered to fight Concur.
- mustardo 4y ago
  > Never ending warnings you can't turn off and many other small things lead me to skipping small expenses and just eating them, because I can't be bothered to fight Concur. Sometimes I wonder if this is a "feature not a bug" the company wins and saves money (in the short term) It probably costs them via reduced employee happiness turnover etc etc indirectly but there is no KPI for that
greatgib 4y ago
To give my software dev guess of the reason of the issue, I would suggest this: Concur being based on SAP, forms are built in a kind of "no code" way. There is a generic component "list picker from data table". Usually, for that kind of components, the order is user defined based of the row position in the data table or an index column value. Like first "N/A" then "yes" the "no". As it is obviously too complicated to manually fill all the cities by hand, this data table was probably setup by a script that didn't mind the order. In addition, the cities data was probably not filled all in one go but incrementally, even with probable late additions when there are report of missing cities.
- bullman 4y ago
  Concur is not "based" on SAP. Concur was acquired by SAP in 2014. The majority of it's existing codebase remains in place to this day. Even the newer more modern code base bits are reactJS based, not SAP based.
ashgoyal 4y ago
No software is perfect. Not even the one which flew Boeing 747, thats why they had 3 services coded by 3 different teams running on 3 different brand processors and the system takes the 2 matching entries as the truth. Even micro processors are not immune to long running bugs. Picking one small thing and demonising a whole team is unfair for them and the company. Sounds like much ado about nothing.
- POPOSYS 4y ago
  Can you post some reference to the Boeing software system that you are mentioning - thanks! Is there some open source software system that does similar things?
- tibbydudeza 4y ago
  That would be Airbus flight controller - concern was over their new by then fly by wire control system so this was used. The US Space Shuttle had the same concept with 4 computers that ran on the same codebase and hardware from IBM that would check each other on critical components (engine burn/flight control) and if one differed it was voted out. There the issue was radiation induced memory corruption as the software was top tier tested and verified to be bug free as possible (they used ADA)
chopete3 4y ago
People who understand and complain about these issues usually don't work for these products as these are not critical systems for a company to function. They serve 2 main purposes. - Have some process in place to get things done. Speed is not important. - Provide livelihood for hundreds and thousands of average developer ecosystems/SIs. They work hard to keep them alive.
hankman86 4y ago
You have to remember why companies buy from the likes of SAP: compliance. That’s the one thing that SAP excels in. Sadly this means that usability falls by the wayside. And while SAP‘s user interfaces are exceptionally bad, their competitors do not exactly prioritise ease of use either. In this case a subpar user experience is combined with an immature technology stack. SAP infamously stopped supporting 3rd party databases and now require their customers to use the in house HANA database instead. Problem is that HANA is not a great database. Painfully slow and lacks features. In this case, pre-sorted result sets.
- tibbydudeza 4y ago
  Our audits were all done by interns from the big accounting firm and they just dumped some of SAP tables and ran it via some internal tool and based on that they signed off our results. HANA - remember the first time we installed that in POSDM - it performed worse than the DB2 install we had before - we upped some settings/buffers/memorty and then they told us to turn on row indexing for one of the core tables (TLOG). I thought columnar was the magic here - why did we upgrade to this again ???.
throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
Concur is a million times better than what I've used at previous jobs. It now takes me mere minutes to file expense reports. Travel booking is a breeze too after you go through it once or twice.
Camillo 4y ago
I use the Concur app to scan receipts for travel expenses. It has a useful feature called "ExpenseIt" (maybe a company they acquired?) that parses the receipt photo, finds the expense amount, and automatically files it in the current expense report. The UI is a bit jarring: you select your receipt, press the button, and after a few seconds it disappears. It doesn't take you to the expense it has created for it in the expense report, or offer such a link. But there is a fixed message saying "can't find your expenses? they were placed in the report". ...except that, every once in a while, the receipt just disappears. The receipt picture is gone, but there is no corresponding expense created in any report. As far as I could figure out, it was simply deleted. So, whenever you scan a receipt, you have to manually track it down to the report where it placed it, to make sure it actually went somewhere and did not get deleted. Or you keep all your paper receipts and spend two hours going through them after the trip. I tried filing a bug report but quickly realized it was impossible.
forgingahead 4y ago
I unfortunately still end up working with contractors who produce code with similar thoughtlessness. Yes, a company like SAP should have caught it via the myriad of reviews and approvals, but ultimately if even in my small universe, this kind of issue can occur because some people just don't care to do a proper job, then it can certainly occur at a larger scale company despite many more layers or "process" to prevent this.
pwh 4y ago
Enterprise app is designed typically for CFO's who approve the purchase but never use them. I used to be enterprise app PM. Not the most pleasant experience. They didn't care about UI/UX. We created vanilla version of the app and the team ended up working mostly with consultant (professional services) who interacted directly with end users and they were paid a lot for customizing the app.
Xt-6 4y ago
I used to work for SAP Concur, not by choice but after Hipmunk got acquired by them. Concur talked to us to use our autocomplete DB in their "new" UI because we had better results. We were using the population size of the location to sort bigger place first. In the end it never went beyond that one call. I think they already had multiple team working on this, not necessary together (there was a big rewrite going full force with micro-service going on).
diceduckmonk 4y ago
What is the developer sentiment between SAP vs Oracle ?
ArjenM 4y ago
We can't have nice things if it requires a little extra, compared to absolute horror all the way down, that's free somehow. I'm the one who raises flags that are neatly placed in the furthest down regions of backlogs nice to have sections.
Someone 4y ago
> There is no resource constraint that is so stringent that it would prevent the programmers from replacing > displaySelectionList(matches) > with > displaySelectionList(matches.sorted()) > They just didn't. It’s quite possible that it isn’t that simple. Hypothetically: if the user selects the 13th item in the list, how do you, as a programmer, know that was the 42nd in the original list, so that you can send back “42” as the selected item to the backend? That sorting logic may have to be more complex, and, under time pressure, beyond the means of your average programmer (did matches.sorted() modify the list in place, making a linear search in it for the text of the item not work?).
cromulent 4y ago
The assumption seems to be that the list is not sorted. A quick search for "Concur locations" finds a config guide [1] which says that there is a location code, which should be based on the UN location codes (or at least not conflict with them). The screenshots in the guide suggest that this code is one of the primary sorting elements (which might make a lot of sense). If the company loads locations without considering this code as a primary sort element and simply abbreviates the location name in English, then you would get the reported effect, I think. I'm not saying this is a good choice for sorting, nor that there are not better ones, nor that Concur is good software. However, this may be incompetence from the administrator / data loading, rather than from the software developers. [1] https://www.concurtraining.com/customers/tech_pubs/Docs/_Current/SG_Shr/Shr_SG_Locations.pdf https://www.concurtraining.com/customers/tech_pubs/Docs/_Cur...
amai 4y ago
No surprise! In Germany the „quality“ of SAP Software is known to have bankrupted several companies: https://amp2.wiwo.de/unternehmen/it/haribo-lidl-deutsche-post-und-co-die-lange-liste-schwieriger-und-gefloppter-sap-projekte/23771296.html https://amp2.wiwo.de/unternehmen/it/haribo-lidl-deutsche-pos... https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/bankrotter-us-pharmakonzern-reicht-klage-gegen-sap-ein-100.html https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/bankrotter-us-pharmakonzern-r... https://www.crm-tech.world/weekly-news/sap-kommt-wegen-produktprobleme-nicht-zur-ruhe-es-rumort-gewaltig/ https://www.crm-tech.world/weekly-news/sap-kommt-wegen-produ... https://www.computerworld.ch/business/business-it/bankrott-sap-projekt-1299551.html https://www.computerworld.ch/business/business-it/bankrott-s... https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/sap-deutsche-software-soll-15-000-arbeitsplaetze-vernichtet-haben-a-81985abe-0002-0001-0000-000177330671 https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/sap-deutsche-s... https://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/wirtschaft/Weltbild-Sorgte-neue-Computer-Software-fuer-Insolvenz-id28711852-amp.html https://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/wirtschaft/Weltbild-Sor...
Phelinofist 4y ago
My previous job was to develop POS software that was marketed by SAP (we were a SAP gold or platinum partner - can't remember which). The POS software did not include the part that actually runs on the POS but also all the backend stuff like order management, inventory management, etc. So we were forced to use the crude SAP XML interfaces for data exchange (IDOCS) and it was really disgusting. We were also forced to use SAP NetWeaver which is a PITA to manage. Also, the customer decided to use POWER9 so we were also forced to use the SAP-maintained port of the JDK for POWER9 and we have found like 4 or 5 bugs in this port. Also, being a SAP partner, we were forced to use UI5 which is such a horrible framework. But the thing is, SAP is a freakin' huge company and the software is quite old. They are on the right track to make things better (XSA, other data exchange format). Another funny story is that some customers decided to host their system at SAP. The SAP department (SAP HEC iirc) that took care of updates of the systems planned with 14h per system per update - complete downtime. One customer had 3 systems at SAP, which meant that it took three Sundays until all systems were updated. Since then, most moved to OEDIV for hosting which does a slightly better job. SAP HANA (the DB) is quite cool though. We had one with 4TB RAM and it was super fast.
qubex 4y ago
I administer a SAP installation. I have such sights to show you.
AtNightWeCode 4y ago
Always sort data server-side if you don't have a good reason not to. I know nothing about this product but I have seen a lot of bugs caused by the assumption that there is an assumed default sort-order.
dakial1 4y ago
Like the author say in the update at the end of the text, my bet is that they used an already sorted database (to save processing power) and when SAP acquired Concur they changed the backend and never corrected the issue. Showing a total disregard for CX, they probably don't have anyone doing any meaningful UX work on that software. My company uses Rydoo and man is that thing easy to use. Could be smarter with chargecodes, but still is lightyears away from Concur....

356 points by AndrewDucker 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

In my experience, the far bigger complaints with corporate expense management software is the audit process which kicks back expenses often for random and trivial reasons rather than the software itself--which may not be magical but generally isn't the main source of pain.

zachrose 4y ago
Sometimes they work together! I submitted an email receipt and it kept getting rejected because Concur only shows the first page of a multi-page PDF unless you go through some very non-obvious navigation to see the whole thing.
emodendroket 4y ago
I was a bit vexed when my expense report with something I bought at a retail store, with the receipt, was rejected because I did not provide an invoice with my name printed on it. But that wasn't even the software!

imwillofficial 4y ago

I found concur to mostly work for me. It’s kludgy for sure, but I always get paid and expenses handled fast. Sometimes within a day.

ConradKilroy 4y ago
I must concur, imperfect Concur is a major improvement from the past systems of doing travel expenses.
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blinkingled 4y ago
This is true for me and I have been recently submitting many expenses each week - it always worked. Hell I even liked the itemized expense entry feature!
dehrmann 4y ago
It doesn't not work.

thefourthchime 4y ago

As the author mentions. This was a failure on and down the chain, from QA to PMs. When I see software like this, it reeks to me of contractor work. We hire them to handle something that we don’t have time for our core team, and or something not very important. The result is the devs do a minimal job to get paid. QA doesn’t care and the PMs either didn’t see it, or have bigger fish to fry.

munchler 4y ago
That’s funny. I used to work for a high-end consulting company, and we always marveled at the level of dysfunction in our clients’ IT departments. They would call us in when their devs couldn’t/wouldn’t do the work. We were pretty expensive by comparison, but at least we got the job done. I guess it just depends on the kind of contractor you hire.
- deleted 4y ago
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- emodendroket 4y ago
  I don't think there's a logical inconsistency here. Imagine that the quality of work we can expect from a contractor with no particular investment in your long-term success is a 7. If your internal team can produce a 10 given the time, you'd look at that and think it's not very good. On the other hand, if your internal team can only manage a 4, hey, go with the contractor.
- wil421 4y ago
  Typical consultant mindset. They cant fathom how big IT got into the situation they are in due to legacy software, mergers, and periods of no investment. They only do greenfield projects and have complete disregard for IT’s processes. What’s funny is the big consultancies are usually to blame for stupid IT or they make bean counter decisions to not invest in IT. Thus the reason we need chop shops to come in and and help. Oh, and god forbid we add an FTE with domain experience who can help us.
  - 4y ago

pflenker 4y ago

This is common for software where the people who take the decision which software to buy are far removed from the people who are going to use it. No product manager cared about this, because this feature needs to work only well enough for a sales pitch, if even that.

josephcsible 4y ago
> software where the people who take the decision which software to buy are far removed from the people who are going to use it As far as I'm concerned, that's the definition of enterprise software.
bri3d 4y ago
100% agree with the buyer not being the end-user. As long as the product supports the needs of the buyer (administration and reporting, rules engine for product selection, etc.), the needs of the end-user can be neglected. HRIS software (PeopleSoft, SuccessFactors, Workday, etc.) is the same way. The deals keep close and the checks keep coming in. I don't think it's fair to say with a lot of this software that no one cares, though, just that the business as a whole adds up to a poor frontline experience. It would surprise me exactly 0% to learn that there was a whole "improve the Concur UX for frontline users" team who repeatedly get their feature asks deprioritized in favor of something needed to close a deal. And, also consider that when it comes to these sorts of big enterprise products, many are drowning under 20+ years of trying to support every bizarre customized customer corner case, third-party integration, and often with no ability to deprecate an old feature. Perhaps adding sort capability breaks some arcane customer scripting functionality added ten years ago which is poorly understood, but cannot be removed due to a clause in the MSA.
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triggercut 4y ago
Usually I would agree, but SAP and other ERP software are handled differently from most other software procurement. Procurement is one of the core functions of the SAP ecosystem, so those most closely involved in buying it here are usually the ones who will be using it.

Havoc 4y ago

Yep...they're all a pain. At least they mostly work once you jump through the required hoops

_jal 4y ago

The Concur UI is a bucket of ass, classic enterprise software. Barely tolerable when it is working, and it is broken or super slow maybe 1 in 4 times I try to use it. On the trip side, the car rental selector is something special. You can't check multiple vendors at once, so if cars are in demand, expect to spend a while discovering you can't get one.

a_c 4y ago

These kind of bad UX problem can be easier to rationalize once we understand the money flow. Would you stop using it because of such UX? Would your stopping cause the company to stop procuring SAP? Was the search the selling point in the first place when the sales representative pitch the software to finance department? Probably no, no and no. So are all other bad UXes. And we can probably wager that a better UX doesn't yield the developer a better pay cheque.

Mister_Snuggles 4y ago
The ironic thing is that if the user stops using this software the company benefits because they don't have to pay out the expense claim that the user didn't enter. This seems like a win for the company and the company would conclude that using SAP has reduced their expenses. The key thing about enterprise software is that it's never sold to end-users, it's sold to senior managers and executives. The contact that this group will have with the software is to approve transactions (e.g., Reqs, POs, Expense Claims, etc) and maybe view some reports. You can bet that these interactions are very streamlined.
alkonaut 4y ago
It also probably describes long lead times and lots of overhead (expensive deployments etc). I guess the question that is often missing when these systems are specified and bought is “if we find a trivial but annoying UX papercut issue in the software which is 5 minutes of actual development time, how quickly and how cheaply would we have that fixed once we report the issue?” Having systems people like is important. I think that often seems to get lost.
emodendroket 4y ago
I think you could also work from likely evolution of the system. Probably this was just a string and somebody at some point thought, hey, let's add suggestions and did the quickest way they could think of to do that without fundamentally reworking.
underwater 4y ago
The is the hallmark of bureaucracy. Seperate the functions, and then let each team externalise the costs without any checks and balances. Finance purchase Concur because it solves their problems and integrates with their existing tools. They don't care that people hate it, or that it wastes the company's resourcing when people are fighting a broken UI instead of doing their day job. Normally engineers are shielded from this pattern in their day jobs. But I have worked at companies that have gone the other direction. In one I met with a risk averse gatekeeping team and told them that for a newly acquired product we were not going to be able to meet the (arbitrary) SLO for the glut of tickets they assigned us, and asked for help. Their suggestion was to pull the app from market.

misthop 4y ago

Link hugged to death. Archive http://web.archive.org/web/20221204204618/https://blog.plover.com/2022/12/04/ http://web.archive.org/web/20221204204618/https://blog.plove...

java-man 4y ago

This is a clear indication that the user is not the customer. The first time someone arrives at the scene catering to the users, the whole industry will be wiped out. This happened to the phone handsets when iphone arrived. So, future investors - look at the startups that address the user problems, not the client problems, even though the latter are paying.

cxf12 4y ago
When business pays the ad dollars, the customer is never the user who's policies and features are at center.
fphhotchips 4y ago
The two are fundamentally different. Unless you can devise a way to do BYO expense platform, you're comparing B2B to B2C product development, marketing and sales. Do you think the PMs at Concur just woke up one day and decided to be user hostile because they're asshats? Of course not. They did what the Sales team, and Gartner, told them they needed to give to CFOs so that they would buy it. And then CFOs bought it. Until someone can quantify the benefit of "better UX" to CFOs, or provide that and all the CFO facing features they want, crappy expense platforms will continue to be the order of the day.
- mgkimsal 4y ago
  It will be impossible to do any real comparison because the bad stuff is relatively entrenched at most large places. Small quality issues for users would reduce errors, and get expense data reconciled faster. But… by how much? 10%? 20%? No one will care enough to fund a large system replacement for a 10% reduction in expense report filing.
emodendroket 4y ago
> The first time someone arrives at the scene catering to the users, the whole industry will be wiped out. I find it a little hard to see to be honest. Team members might push to use Slack over some other chat solution because they spend all day using that -- I've seen that happen and work. How often do you do expense reports that you're really going to nag the company to buy your favorite solution?

deleted 4y ago

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sokoloff 4y ago

I hate submitting expenses probably as much as the typical engineer, but Concur seems “no better, no worse” than the typical dumpster fire of these systems. I will say that it does have good integration between the company card transactions and the expense reporting feature. I am more mystified than the author at why my 75-mile range electric car offers a default sorted list by full street name, then by state, happily inquiring as to whether I intend to drive 225 miles to my entered street name before a matching entry that’s 4 miles away.

ghaff 4y ago
Of course, Google Maps seems to be equally random when it starts guessing your destination. I reluctantly started using a corporate card for most things because I sort of had to. I don't like not getting the personal benefits but it actually does make (most) things easier with Concur. Only real issue is it's harder to split personal and company charges.
- emodendroket 4y ago
  Don't you still need to make an expense report in that case?
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Yes. But it means that all the expenses are accounted for and added to the expense report even if I need to add receipts for some of them and may have to add some additional information, e.g. category. As I say, not my choice but it probably captures some random fees etc. that I otherwise tend to forget about.
  - jojobas 4y ago
    Depends. Most companies would have you specify the project/cost centre for every purchase, but amounts/locations/etc are automatically provided by the card issuer.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Of course, you are still spending company money at thosr expenses have to be properly accounted for.

jojobas 4y ago

From memory, it remembered places you've entered and showed them up top when searching. I wouldn't challenge that concur sucks, the fact that you receipts are OCRed from the app but not from the website drove me nuts

emodendroket 4y ago

I have used Concur and don't have any strong feelings about it. It is not wonderful but it does the job. I think it is a little overwrought to call it a "horror show" that the list isn't really sorted. Presumably they see typing in the place name as the primary use case and this was an afterthought. I kind of expected serious bugs from the title.

revskill 4y ago

Is this topological sort ? So, it's a hard solved problem. Because, for example, postgresql order by doesn't allow it by default.

emodendroket 4y ago
I guess the author suggests, why not at least do SORT BY country THEN BY city_name or something like that. Which might be nice, I suppose.
- revskill 4y ago
  It's only possible if the address field is not single Text field :)
  - emodendroket 4y ago
    True, but it's not even sorted naively as a single string.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> Is this topological sort ? No, neither what it is doing or what it ought to be doing is a topological sort. What it is actually doing seems like “return all matching the stem without any sort [or sorted by ID or some other non-relevant value].” The various things the user suggest are all sorts by fairly simple functions, not the kind of dependency ordering at issue with a topological sort. Choosing the best one to use as a default might be hard, but they aren’t the kind of complex things you can’t implement as a simple order-by once you are set up for it.

wardb 4y ago

SAP Concur is a complete nightmare for managing expenses. It's so bad that it will ruin your entire weekend, leaving you feeling frustrated and drained. The interface is a convoluted mess that is practically impossible to navigate, and entering expenses takes forever. The expense categorization system is an abomination that will drive you insane with its constant mistakes and errors. The approval process is a black hole that sucks up your expenses and never spits them back out. I feel SAP Concur is the worst software ever created for expense management, and using it makes me wish I never had to do expenses again. Expensify is so much better. The OCR isn't great though

cxf12 4y ago

its pretty interesting that maps.google.com has an SAP Concur listing with about a 3.3 rating.

lepus 4y ago

Concur's backend is typical of a slow moving industry that works with old awkward systems like airlines. It's a shitshow of business logic and 20 year old legacy code that would be a long expensive nightmare to rewrite for little actual profit so no manager would ever approve of such an endeavor. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a mess of queries involved with this search such that trying to do a real sort of the results would require a significant degree of rewriting and touching scary code with huge amounts of bureaucratic review in order to be DOD compliant, so it gets labeled as "good enough" even if the current state drives some developers crazy.

josephg 4y ago
They need to call a sort function. It can happen in the client, because the data set is small. It should have happened when the app was first written, at which time they weren’t maintaining legacy code - they were writing a UI from scratch and could make changes easily. Sort functions are built in to every programming language I’ve ever used. I agree with the author. There’s no reason for it to be like this but incompetence - either at an individual level, system level or both.
- the_sleaze_ 4y ago
  I used to work in a system where seemingly trivial sort()s would break the entire stack. It is entirely plausible that a sort is nontrivial.
  - josephg 4y ago
    In 30 years of programming I've worked in plenty of systems where this sort of thing is nontrivial too. But its always the result of incompetent abstractions getting in the programmer's way. Downvotes notwithstanding, I stand by my claim that this is always the result of incompetence. Either at the small level (laziness) or at a larger scale (incompetent system design).
    - _s 4y ago

IceDane 4y ago

This is the least of SAP's crimes against software. Pretty much everything SAP builds is janky and awful like this. If you're lucky, "minor" UX problems like these are the only thing you have to deal with, but in the vast majority of cases, that's not going to be the case. Where I work, I also have to use a SAP system for expense reports. I can't even tell you what it's called, but the interface is basically just directly from SAP GUI(except embedded, very poorly, into a website) and every single interaction you perform results in a sync query to the backend, freezing the UI until you get a response. The worst part is that no one really cares. SAP doesn't care. The users/companies that are stuck with SAP don't really care, or at least if they do, well, no one is going to spend valuable dev time on building their own internal expense registration platform(or whatever) just to fix something that sucks to use, but otherwise "works". I also have to register my hours, being a consultant, and this also happens via some SAP system. One thing my current project manager told me recently is that the description field that we have to use to describe what work we did is just invisibly cut to 40 characters on the backend. I can freely type a whole essay describing what I did, but the pm reviewing will just see 40 characters. Assuming that any sort of thought goes into most of SAP's software is like trying to reason about an insane person's behavior. It's completely pointless since there is no reason involved.

deleted 4y ago
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X-Cubed 4y ago

Even Google Calendar does this. If I'm adding an event an hour from now, why does the Location auto-complete list show locations that are impossible to reach in time at the top of the list? Is it not more likely that I would be booking an event near to my either my current location or my home?

mjd 4y ago
My number one complaint about Goofle Calendar is that it'll let me schedule an event in the past, with a reminder and everything, and say nothing.
- XajniN 4y ago
  Will the reminder work if you time travel to the past?

nikhilgk 4y ago

A few years ago, we were building somethings to integrate with multiple expense and invoice management systems. Concur's odata based APIs were by far one of the worst integration experiences I had. (Even worse than integrating with dot net SOAP APIs from AXIS and Java) You could see that some of the older APIs were well documented and thought out and the new versions were considerably worse. What we realized was that the earlier versions were built prior to SAP acquiring Concur.

fghorow 4y ago

I was forced to use an SAP product at an old job about 15 years ago. Unfortunately, I find it completely unsurprising that any SAP.* product is a dis-organized mess of a kludge, with no rationality evident anywhere. Oh, and the CIO who foisted that pile of cr*p upon my organisation? She moved on shortly after SAP was implemented -- undoubtedly to foist SAP on some other poor unsuspecting org. I sure hope her SAP stock has tanked.

gabrielsroka 4y ago
SAP acquired Concur.

Scuds 4y ago

I interviewed with them prior to the SAP acquisition back in 2017. "We're looking for someone with experience with ASP and database performance improvements." "You mean, ASP.net - not old school VB6 derived, interpreted - 'pretty cool for 1997' Active Server Pages - ASP?" "Hey hey! You're the guy we want!" Of course I would have taken the job if I'd known they'd be acquired. edit: Huh, they were acquired in 2014? Ah well - it's like someone's MVP that made it out to production, then they made it big and that MVP kept being glommed onto.

dan-buzzkill 4y ago

TripActions is great, best I’ve used

fetzu 4y ago

Sometimes when I feel like the worse product manager in the world, I just click that Concur link in my work computer browser’s bookmark bar to remind myself that, even if I suck, some bloke at SAP is doing their job even more terribly than me..

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

We used to use Concur, at my old job. I hated it, but didn't use the mobile app. I always did my expenses by hand, on my workstation, after travel, and I took notes by hand. It worked better than the old manual version, we had before it (It can be worse, because it was worse, and I have the scars to prove it).

rdxm 4y ago

cesarb 4y ago

I can see another issue in that list: for half of the entries, it displays the state but not the country, and for the other half, it displays the country but not the state (or its local equivalent). Given that there are things like cities with the same name but within different states in the same country (a quick web search tells me that, in my country, there are many cities like that), and even states named identically to an unrelated country, it's not hard to see how this could get confusing. (Edit: here is a full list of homonym cities in my country: https://www.embrapa.br/manual-de-referenciacao/anexo-cidades-homonimas https://www.embrapa.br/manual-de-referenciacao/anexo-cidades...)

psidium 4y ago
aquilo ali varia se o teu usuário é daquele país ou não. é uma cidade do meu país? cidade, estado. É de outro país? cidade, PAÍS.

cookiengineer 4y ago

We actually joke around the area where SAP is located (Walldorf, Germany). In surrounding cities devs joke about the fact that there are literally dozens if not hundreds of web agencies doing nothing more than mobile/tablet ready SAP user interfaces. That's their only business model. I'm not kidding you, there's an entire ecosystem around the fact that SAP UI5 is so crap that people cannot use it on their smartphones. And concept-wise it's built very similar to the early jquery-ui releases (remember the first iPhone's menus? Yeah, THAT old), but only in undocumented and even crappier. I don't even know how to rationalize this anymore. At one point I ditched every company that uses SAP, but it's like the plague. You can't avoid it.

intelVISA 4y ago
The people buying the software don't have to use it, would you buy your corporate underlings the comfortable, expensive shoes or just enough rags to painfully remind them who their masters are? SAP produce the lowest cost rags in town, and you will learn to love them.
- jjeaff 4y ago
  I thought SAP was extremely expensive.
  - eastbound 4y ago
    That’s for the golf course. Same as IBM: The business model is they mostly sell golf courses, and software is a side-effect so they have to save on that.
    - skrebbel 4y ago
      Are you just making stuff up?
      - eastbound 4y ago
        I was sysadmin for IBM software in a 50k-people company, there is no way they paid 12m$ for ClearQuest, ClearCase or RequisitePro when Git and Jira were already out. They clearly played golf to win this market.

MikeDelta 4y ago

Sorted lists require an extra license, I am sure sales will be happy to talk to procurement in getting you one.

peterbmarks 4y ago

Of course they are motivated to make it hard to claim expenses. This is genius.

bitwize 4y ago

> Assume that bad technical decisions are made rationally, for reasons that are not apparent. Actually, this example proves the rule. Large enterprise applications like this are used by governments and large businesses that must comply with various accounting, legal, and administrative regulations. So vendors like SAP are incentivized to deliver products that take the least amount of effort and incur the least amount of risk while still meeting the twisty little maze of requirements. If bogo-sort is the least-effort way of organizing the location list, bogo-sort it is. For example it may add the locations to a map or hash table, and then iterate over them in an unspecified order.

asyncscrum 4y ago

My favorite fight search tool was hipmunk. Their 'agony' sort was my favorite feature in any software ever. SAP bought them, and I was so hopeful that Concur would bake this into their god awful app that I had to use for work. No luck. RIP Hipmunk.

topaz0 4y ago
What is "agony sort"?
- vzqx 4y ago
  According to [1], it sorted flights by an "agony" metric which was a combination of price, duration, and number of stops. [1] https://www.afar.com/magazine/hipmunk-is-shutting-down-heres-everything-you-need-to-know https://www.afar.com/magazine/hipmunk-is-shutting-down-heres...
Xt-6 4y ago
I used to work at Hipmunk, stayed until it got shot down. SAP Concur approached us to use our auto-completion algorithm/database to power their new UI or whatever. Apparently the 2 or 3 different DB they already had for that exact use case were not good enough. Our result were sorted by population size of the destination, The concur people could not believe it was that only that.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mabbo 4y ago

Why would they even care? The people who decide that everyone in their company must use SAP Concur are rarely the people who need to file expense reports- they either don't travel much, or they have people under them who take care of it. Instead the decision will be made based on price. Hiring bad devs and rushing poor quality software out will be a net savings for SAP.

skissane 4y ago

At my old job, I was jealous of people at other companies who got to use Concur. Whatever Concur's flaws may be, the system we had was obviously worse. "Wow, you take a photo with your phone and it goes in an app? Wish we had an app. Instead I have to submit it on a website, print the cover page as a PDF, collect all my receipts as further PDFs, merge the PDFs, and then send them via email with a single PDF attachment." It had to be a single PDF, the system would reject the email if it had more than one attachment. Given it was a computer program not a human at the other end, I never worked out why we had to send it via email, as opposed to just uploading it via a web form. At least I knew enough to merge the cover page PDF and receipt PDFs into one using Ghostscript. A lot of less technical people, they'd print them all out then scan them back in.

jvanderbot 4y ago
At one of my two career employers, to create an electronic deposit for your paychecks you had to: 1. Email payroll asking for the right form (an excel sheet would arrive via email) 2. fill out that excel sheet that had no validation at all, just formatting. you enter your bank info, amount, etc. If you needed more lines, you had to "attach another sheet". 3. Then you printed that, 4. signed it, 5. scanned it, and 6. emailed it to payroll@the_company, 7. who would call you and tell you what you did wrong, and then 8. they'd just do what you said over the phone anyway. Yes, the excel sheet existed for no reason other than to align your typed text on the resulting printed page properly. It of course had giant "Do not edit any cells" on the top in red.
- doktorhladnjak 4y ago
  Reminds me of the time I had to fill out an expense report to get reimbursed by a company who had flown me out for an interview. It all had to be done in Excel. Unfortunately my bank account number was very long, which caused Excel to round down the last two digits. My reimbursement went into someone else’s account who then flagged it to the bank before we got it all straightened out.

mjd 4y ago

A reader who is a former employee of SAP has sent me a technical explanation of how this could occur. The explanation makes a lot of sense to me, and I have updated the article to include it.

S_A_P 4y ago

SAP continues because they have a great sales team that makes execs feel like they are making a choice that never gets them fired. SAP doesnt care about UX and in the 10 or so years Ive dealt with it on the periphery, its been a barely serviceable product with a terrible user interface. I especially love how the localization is so sporadic in the application. Sure the front end will be mostly english, but be prepared for a lot of tables/columns/fields to be in German. Granted, its been a few years since Ive done much SAP related work(I build interfaces between trading systems and SAP for accounting and some logistics interfaces.) Anyway, their goal is to move into new business verticals and not really fix the product. They are actually trying to move into the trading and risk management arena in which I work. So far they have one major client that I'm aware of and they are struggling to make it work.

tibbydudeza 4y ago
As an SAP dev knowing some German is a big help - not German but my home language has Germanic roots without the gender bits so close enough, so it helps if I need to read their variable names as comments are sparse or simply not there.

quickthrower2 4y ago

I am a bit disappointed, was expecting something way worse for "horror". Maybe the horrors are on the bugs he hasn't mentioned but had to put up with. One possible excuse for SAP Concur here, and I am just guessing, is that the sorting is in some kind of customer-specific config setting that the admin needs to setup. I.e. they made it configurable for each client's needs. If you don't set it up it defaults to this "undefined" behaviour. Good defaults are better than this though, so alphabet sorting would come ahead.

tjungblut 4y ago
I don't think so, I vaguely remember Concur was a big monolith with a huge MSSQL server in the back. I highly doubt they can just rip it out and replace it with HANA and "forget" the sorting. There's a good reason Concur is in Bellevue right next to MSFT, it's a really big .NET shop. They wanted to go to micro services eventually, but not sure how that ended up. This sorting by country and city never worked, it didn't work during my time at Microsoft in 2014 (they replaced it with their own mstravel tool thankfully), nor did it work at SAP in 2018. I frequently travelled from Berlin to Walldorf (in Germany obviously) and it always picked Berlin in Arizona (IIRC?) first. Walldorf it eventually got right, but I do strongly believe somebody just hacked this into first place in the frontend.

user3939382 4y ago

So the near universal consensus from the technical community is that SAP makes crap software. Yet here we are obsessing over monads while they laugh all the way to the bank. So what’s the lesson? Maybe good software is a waste of time and smart money just focuses on the marketing. Unfortunately that’s what I’ve seen over many years.

kjellsbells 4y ago
Opinion: SAP focused on the buyer, not the user. I see this in technical software sales all the time: vendors have an X, so they target the team that might X or currently use the inferior Y when they could be using X. But in reality, those people are rarely if ever the buyer, as in, the person who has the budget and the authority to actually issue a PO. In the size of company that uses an ERP, that person is not going to be Raj in Accounting who likes your webified TrelloAsana travel and expense dashboard, or Sara in IT who enjoyed your demo of the JSON export to PowerBI. Its going to be a committee of Finance EVPs who give a final thumbs up to the CFO to write the check. The other part to this story is that at this level, SAP (and peers) are using highly skilled partners as force multipliers to sell. I can honestly say after years in technology that I have never actually seen a SAP employee so to me. But I have seen a boatload of folks from Accenture and Deloitte and Tech Mahindra try to sell digital ERP transformation via a $$$$ contract that used SAP in the tech stack. In short, SAP doesnt need to be the best. It just needs to win the CFO and make partners money. This is one reason why SAP wins.
- stainforth 4y ago
  Why can't leadership in a company just do the right thing in making decisions that make the company better?
  - kjellsbells 4y ago
    What does better really mean, though? For the CFO, a SAP implementation solves multi-million dollar problems in inventory, sales taxation, expense management, compliance, etc. That is "better" for their organization. If it comes with a slighty cruddy travel and expense system, oh well. That piece probably represents like 1% of the deal value. Enterprise sales at this level requires a deep understanding of what the buyer values in your product, not what you think is valuable. I dont claim that SAP delivers on these claims (ie I'm not carrying water for them) but they are good at hitting this button.

quantum_state 4y ago

Concur is really a piece of junk … it’s very shameful any company pushed out such pollution into the IT ecosystem..

nexoft 4y ago

I would say that such relatively mature software companis carry such old products with dependencies to account for that they are overwheght and only address vunl/p0 bugs; no new features or improvement. I do use Concur where I work and it is bad, in this particular case maybe less effort was made from SAP on the front end, or your back-then-company's SAP departement did a poor job implementing it. either way such mess is also the result of poorly managed departement having 15+ years members that lost interest and that are maintainig very old products.

WirelessGigabit 4y ago

Remember. The usability of this tool isn't vetted by the people who sign the contracts. These people all have assistants doing the work for them. So they never see the pain points. This is all based on flashy PowerPoints and expensive dinners.

FrostKiwi 4y ago

What gets me the most is this instance of SAP Concur to have timestamps on files of receipts being uploaded. I don't have access to the Concur app, so must use the web interface. That interface rejects smartphone photos from the company iPhone, because of unrecognized timestamps. Scanner or bust. Furthermore electronic receipts PDFs are also rejected for the same reason. So what I do is scan a blank piece of paper, Photoshop in a screenshot of said receipt and submit the Photoshopped PDF, which is recognized as having a valid time stamp. Also, being at an international company, certain elements are in Japanese, certain elements in English and certain elements in German, no matter what the interface language is set to. Certain fields that do translate have opposite meanings after being translated. It required a company internal instruction to understand. Never ending warnings you can't turn off and many other small things lead me to skipping small expenses and just eating them, because I can't be bothered to fight Concur.

mustardo 4y ago
> Never ending warnings you can't turn off and many other small things lead me to skipping small expenses and just eating them, because I can't be bothered to fight Concur. Sometimes I wonder if this is a "feature not a bug" the company wins and saves money (in the short term) It probably costs them via reduced employee happiness turnover etc etc indirectly but there is no KPI for that

greatgib 4y ago

To give my software dev guess of the reason of the issue, I would suggest this: Concur being based on SAP, forms are built in a kind of "no code" way. There is a generic component "list picker from data table". Usually, for that kind of components, the order is user defined based of the row position in the data table or an index column value. Like first "N/A" then "yes" the "no". As it is obviously too complicated to manually fill all the cities by hand, this data table was probably setup by a script that didn't mind the order. In addition, the cities data was probably not filled all in one go but incrementally, even with probable late additions when there are report of missing cities.

bullman 4y ago
Concur is not "based" on SAP. Concur was acquired by SAP in 2014. The majority of it's existing codebase remains in place to this day. Even the newer more modern code base bits are reactJS based, not SAP based.

ashgoyal 4y ago

No software is perfect. Not even the one which flew Boeing 747, thats why they had 3 services coded by 3 different teams running on 3 different brand processors and the system takes the 2 matching entries as the truth. Even micro processors are not immune to long running bugs. Picking one small thing and demonising a whole team is unfair for them and the company. Sounds like much ado about nothing.

POPOSYS 4y ago
Can you post some reference to the Boeing software system that you are mentioning - thanks! Is there some open source software system that does similar things?
tibbydudeza 4y ago
That would be Airbus flight controller - concern was over their new by then fly by wire control system so this was used. The US Space Shuttle had the same concept with 4 computers that ran on the same codebase and hardware from IBM that would check each other on critical components (engine burn/flight control) and if one differed it was voted out. There the issue was radiation induced memory corruption as the software was top tier tested and verified to be bug free as possible (they used ADA)

chopete3 4y ago

People who understand and complain about these issues usually don't work for these products as these are not critical systems for a company to function. They serve 2 main purposes. - Have some process in place to get things done. Speed is not important. - Provide livelihood for hundreds and thousands of average developer ecosystems/SIs. They work hard to keep them alive.

hankman86 4y ago

You have to remember why companies buy from the likes of SAP: compliance. That’s the one thing that SAP excels in. Sadly this means that usability falls by the wayside. And while SAP‘s user interfaces are exceptionally bad, their competitors do not exactly prioritise ease of use either. In this case a subpar user experience is combined with an immature technology stack. SAP infamously stopped supporting 3rd party databases and now require their customers to use the in house HANA database instead. Problem is that HANA is not a great database. Painfully slow and lacks features. In this case, pre-sorted result sets.

tibbydudeza 4y ago
Our audits were all done by interns from the big accounting firm and they just dumped some of SAP tables and ran it via some internal tool and based on that they signed off our results. HANA - remember the first time we installed that in POSDM - it performed worse than the DB2 install we had before - we upped some settings/buffers/memorty and then they told us to turn on row indexing for one of the core tables (TLOG). I thought columnar was the magic here - why did we upgrade to this again ???.

throwawaaarrgh 4y ago

Concur is a million times better than what I've used at previous jobs. It now takes me mere minutes to file expense reports. Travel booking is a breeze too after you go through it once or twice.

Camillo 4y ago

I use the Concur app to scan receipts for travel expenses. It has a useful feature called "ExpenseIt" (maybe a company they acquired?) that parses the receipt photo, finds the expense amount, and automatically files it in the current expense report. The UI is a bit jarring: you select your receipt, press the button, and after a few seconds it disappears. It doesn't take you to the expense it has created for it in the expense report, or offer such a link. But there is a fixed message saying "can't find your expenses? they were placed in the report". ...except that, every once in a while, the receipt just disappears. The receipt picture is gone, but there is no corresponding expense created in any report. As far as I could figure out, it was simply deleted. So, whenever you scan a receipt, you have to manually track it down to the report where it placed it, to make sure it actually went somewhere and did not get deleted. Or you keep all your paper receipts and spend two hours going through them after the trip. I tried filing a bug report but quickly realized it was impossible.

forgingahead 4y ago

I unfortunately still end up working with contractors who produce code with similar thoughtlessness. Yes, a company like SAP should have caught it via the myriad of reviews and approvals, but ultimately if even in my small universe, this kind of issue can occur because some people just don't care to do a proper job, then it can certainly occur at a larger scale company despite many more layers or "process" to prevent this.

pwh 4y ago

Enterprise app is designed typically for CFO's who approve the purchase but never use them. I used to be enterprise app PM. Not the most pleasant experience. They didn't care about UI/UX. We created vanilla version of the app and the team ended up working mostly with consultant (professional services) who interacted directly with end users and they were paid a lot for customizing the app.

Xt-6 4y ago

I used to work for SAP Concur, not by choice but after Hipmunk got acquired by them. Concur talked to us to use our autocomplete DB in their "new" UI because we had better results. We were using the population size of the location to sort bigger place first. In the end it never went beyond that one call. I think they already had multiple team working on this, not necessary together (there was a big rewrite going full force with micro-service going on).

diceduckmonk 4y ago

What is the developer sentiment between SAP vs Oracle ?

ArjenM 4y ago

We can't have nice things if it requires a little extra, compared to absolute horror all the way down, that's free somehow. I'm the one who raises flags that are neatly placed in the furthest down regions of backlogs nice to have sections.

Someone 4y ago

> There is no resource constraint that is so stringent that it would prevent the programmers from replacing > displaySelectionList(matches) > with > displaySelectionList(matches.sorted()) > They just didn't. It’s quite possible that it isn’t that simple. Hypothetically: if the user selects the 13th item in the list, how do you, as a programmer, know that was the 42nd in the original list, so that you can send back “42” as the selected item to the backend? That sorting logic may have to be more complex, and, under time pressure, beyond the means of your average programmer (did matches.sorted() modify the list in place, making a linear search in it for the text of the item not work?).

cromulent 4y ago

The assumption seems to be that the list is not sorted. A quick search for "Concur locations" finds a config guide [1] which says that there is a location code, which should be based on the UN location codes (or at least not conflict with them). The screenshots in the guide suggest that this code is one of the primary sorting elements (which might make a lot of sense). If the company loads locations without considering this code as a primary sort element and simply abbreviates the location name in English, then you would get the reported effect, I think. I'm not saying this is a good choice for sorting, nor that there are not better ones, nor that Concur is good software. However, this may be incompetence from the administrator / data loading, rather than from the software developers. [1] https://www.concurtraining.com/customers/tech_pubs/Docs/_Current/SG_Shr/Shr_SG_Locations.pdf https://www.concurtraining.com/customers/tech_pubs/Docs/_Cur...

amai 4y ago

No surprise! In Germany the „quality“ of SAP Software is known to have bankrupted several companies: https://amp2.wiwo.de/unternehmen/it/haribo-lidl-deutsche-post-und-co-die-lange-liste-schwieriger-und-gefloppter-sap-projekte/23771296.html https://amp2.wiwo.de/unternehmen/it/haribo-lidl-deutsche-pos... https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/bankrotter-us-pharmakonzern-reicht-klage-gegen-sap-ein-100.html https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/bankrotter-us-pharmakonzern-r... https://www.crm-tech.world/weekly-news/sap-kommt-wegen-produktprobleme-nicht-zur-ruhe-es-rumort-gewaltig/ https://www.crm-tech.world/weekly-news/sap-kommt-wegen-produ... https://www.computerworld.ch/business/business-it/bankrott-sap-projekt-1299551.html https://www.computerworld.ch/business/business-it/bankrott-s... https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/sap-deutsche-software-soll-15-000-arbeitsplaetze-vernichtet-haben-a-81985abe-0002-0001-0000-000177330671 https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/sap-deutsche-s... https://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/wirtschaft/Weltbild-Sorgte-neue-Computer-Software-fuer-Insolvenz-id28711852-amp.html https://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/wirtschaft/Weltbild-Sor...

Phelinofist 4y ago

My previous job was to develop POS software that was marketed by SAP (we were a SAP gold or platinum partner - can't remember which). The POS software did not include the part that actually runs on the POS but also all the backend stuff like order management, inventory management, etc. So we were forced to use the crude SAP XML interfaces for data exchange (IDOCS) and it was really disgusting. We were also forced to use SAP NetWeaver which is a PITA to manage. Also, the customer decided to use POWER9 so we were also forced to use the SAP-maintained port of the JDK for POWER9 and we have found like 4 or 5 bugs in this port. Also, being a SAP partner, we were forced to use UI5 which is such a horrible framework. But the thing is, SAP is a freakin' huge company and the software is quite old. They are on the right track to make things better (XSA, other data exchange format). Another funny story is that some customers decided to host their system at SAP. The SAP department (SAP HEC iirc) that took care of updates of the systems planned with 14h per system per update - complete downtime. One customer had 3 systems at SAP, which meant that it took three Sundays until all systems were updated. Since then, most moved to OEDIV for hosting which does a slightly better job. SAP HANA (the DB) is quite cool though. We had one with 4TB RAM and it was super fast.

qubex 4y ago

I administer a SAP installation. I have such sights to show you.

AtNightWeCode 4y ago

Always sort data server-side if you don't have a good reason not to. I know nothing about this product but I have seen a lot of bugs caused by the assumption that there is an assumed default sort-order.

dakial1 4y ago

Like the author say in the update at the end of the text, my bet is that they used an already sorted database (to save processing power) and when SAP acquired Concur they changed the backend and never corrected the issue. Showing a total disregard for CX, they probably don't have anyone doing any meaningful UX work on that software. My company uses Rydoo and man is that thing easy to use. Could be smarter with chargecodes, but still is lightyears away from Concur....