12 ms·

Software horror show: SAP Concur

198 points by luu 4y ago

speps 4y ago
2022
tluyben2 4y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33857694 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33857694
- gnabgib 4y ago
  Extensive discussion too.. 356 pts, 190 comments
haunter 4y ago
SAP must be the sacrificial lamb to keep the “legendary german engineering” myth alive
- jimnotgym 4y ago
  To be fair US companies have built some truly awful tools in this field. Can anyone remember the name of that awful booking system Oracle sells?
  - bigDinosaur 4y ago
    Is there any mythos around US engineering in the way there is about German practicality, efficiency, and reliability?
    - jimnotgym 4y ago
      There is about software engineering yes, a myth that only the US can build great products
      - signatoremo 4y ago
        Only in your imagination. Many great products made by none US companies are used in the US and deservedly recognized — Redis, Jetbrains’ ones, Erlang, Lua, Scala, nginx, etc.
- TMWNN 4y ago
  I've heard it said that the truth behind the myth of German engineering and German efficiency[1] is that Germans are, rather, rule followers. [1] Example of both: The new Berlin airport
  - croes 4y ago
    Wasn't the problem with the Berlin airport that they didn't follow the rules, e.g. fire protection?
    - ingomaro 4y ago
      Fire protection mess ... was a symptom. The root cause was that the local governments (city of Berlin and state of Brandenburg) wanted to split the pie for many small to medium businesses in the region. Noble idea but hard to execute as we found out later... So instead of giving it all to a contractor that actually knows how to build (large) airports they tried to managed it themself. Those people were unexperienced in this size of operation and it went all downhill from there. It's a common theme with big projects: Local administration is unexperienced but tries to do it anyway and they fail or get ripped off every time. What we should have is a federal unit that just does large scale construction/engineering projects.
- seabird 4y ago
  The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that German engineering is something they want. In automobiles, industrial equipment, electronics, software, etc. you can sense when Germans were involved. I've accepted that it's something I'll never understand, and that they probably feel the same way about American designs. Same planet, different worlds.
  - zelphirkalt 4y ago
    In terms of software you are probably right, since we are behind in so many areas and education for jobs about creating software is not the best. About cars: Do you mean things like the VW scandal? Or do you mean actually shoddy engineering in cars? I think the reputation for engineering stems from darker times.
    - lstodd 4y ago
      Well, considering best german automotive engineering got left behind in early nineties and that for like 20 years already owning a BMW or Mercedes means constant hassle and tons of cash for trivial repairs - yes. German auto engineering just isn't there. VW scandal is different - it's what you get when you set unreasonable and actually conflicting requirements.
- throwmeaway1112 4y ago
  I recently found out it's not SAP native software - rather it's USA based company/product that was acquired by SAP.
jzwinck 4y ago
Concur is indeed a poor system. I suppose the thinking is that by having each employee of a big organization do a small amount of work, they can avoid hiring a central person who just accepts receipts in envelopes and deals with them. Or maybe that by putting up roadblocks like Concur, some employee expenses will not need to be reimbursed. The problem is that this requires educating every employee on how to use these systems. That's a waste of time and a drag on productivity. Better to hire that central person who will learn all the quirks of whatever system is used and let the other 99% of the organization do their jobs. When companies need photos of their employees they find a photographer who provides that service. They don't ask each employee to learn about lighting technique and do the post processing according to a written set of standards in hopes the photos will look consistent. But with Concur that's what happens.
- notimetorelax 4y ago
  I would argue that giving my receipts to an admin also requires a fair amount of input from me before they can file the expense report. I’d rather much prefer an expense tool that works.
  - xupybd 4y ago
    Xero has a great tool but last I checked it was $5 per employee per month. With many not making claims every month that is too much overhead per claim.
    - a2800276 4y ago
      SAP is notoriously expensive. It's not conceivable that anyone chose SAP to save a dime. Or $5.
- viraptor 4y ago
  > some employee expenses will not need to be reimbursed. I don't think the savings would offset the system cost. But then again, I've definitely got a threshold where just spending my money without claiming is worth it for my mental health...
ramraj07 4y ago
Search is one place where mediocre engineers and even many good ones consistently seem to think they know what they are doing, and they know what is good enough, and worst of all, that all of this is super easy. The solution, universally, is “use elastic search” (though there’s also the puerile cousin where people say “use the like operator”) but elastic search has never solved search if all you did was learn and set it up in a day. The most important factor is to make sure you weight your results by two numbers - one that tries to score the match of the result to the search string and another which is a more absolute weight (which could be population here, simplistically). Without that search will look like this, and these engineers will always say, “this looks good to me? Just finish typing the city and it’ll give you what you want?”
- themoonisachees 4y ago
  Very true, but also consider: SAP is a billions of dollar corporation. They can afford to throw like 5 engineers who have specific experience in elastic search to fix this in a day. They won't because they have no reason to, but this is software that you sign a contract for, not some random OSS project on github.
beardyw 4y ago
The folks on Los Andes are pleased it doesn't always assume Los Angles. Are we sure there isn't a bit of a sense of entitlement here?
- ZiiS 4y ago
  Pleasing 100,000 folks by inconveniencing 10,000,000.
tsujamin 4y ago
having an app (even Concur) to do expense acquittals sounds like heaven to me...
Moissanite 4y ago
Having to use Concur is one of the primary reasons I have avoided ramping up travel again after the COVID lockdown period ended. It also inverts incentives in other ways. I'm narurally inclined to be frugal, but that would often involve buying 3 or 4 smaller things to eat rather than a large meal. Since I know that would massively increase my own expense filing hassle, I instead tend to make individual purchases which are larger than I otherwise would.
jl6 4y ago
The most fundamental theorem of Enterprise software is that the users aren’t the the customer, and so UX issues fall to the very bottom of the priority list. So the explanation is very plausible. Furthermore, amongst the already-low-priority UX issues, I can imagine UX of the expenses application being rock bottom, because which business ever called up their ERP vendor and said “we need to make it easier for our staff to claim expenses”?
- GuB-42 4y ago
  This is something I never understood about enterprise software. No one should understand better than companies with employees that time is money. If your employees spend an extra hour each month dealing with bad software, that's an hour of unproductive time you are paying for. Even if your employees tend to work unpaid overtime (boooo), that's still an hour of unpaid overtime that could have been used to do actual work. And employees are definitely going to spend the time necessary to claim expenses. They may skimp on other tasks, but expenses are money, so they are definitely not going to miss that one. Big companies love metrics and spying on you, and the time spend on corporate apps is an easy thing to measure. So if you see that your employees spend countless hours on ERP, it should rise tons of red flags.
- IshKebab 4y ago
  > which business ever called up their ERP vendor and said “we need to make it easier for our staff to claim expenses”? Businesses that were fed up with fielding questions from employees about how to claim expenses? In my experience it's reasonably common for companies to switch expense claim systems because their existing one was rubbish. I haven't worked for any SAP-using megacorps though tbf.
  - pavlov 4y ago
    There’s Expensify which is supposed to have a very good UX and does about $200M annual revenue. So at least that much people are willing to pay for a better expense claim tool.
    - 4y ago
jbk 4y ago
Have you ever used SAP Ariba? Numerous large American tech companies are using that for supplier, including Intel, Google or ARM. They used to have their own system, and they moved to that abomination. Everything is counter-productive, the UX is insane, but to give you an idea: you have a list of PO or invoices, but you cannot click on them to see them, you have a three-dot menu that allows you to get an email to "act on the PO"... They broke the simple idea of an hypertext link... I'm not even talking about changing a bank account...
- popotamonga 4y ago
  The nightmares. I was a supplier for cocacola and it was so bad they had to do the invoicing for me because it was magic.
- BenFeldman1930 4y ago
  Maybe "SAP Dirty Sanchez" would be a better name?
- sizzle 4y ago
  Yes good luck trying to order from a vendor catalog using the SAP front end, enter the correct shipping info and get any UI confirmation or cues the order was input correctly and will be sent to you. Maybe our implementation is just broke, but there are so many unintuitive backwards UX patterns I shudder to use it every time.
- BostonEnginerd 4y ago
  I'm currently dealing with multiple customers moving to Ariba. What a pain -- it doesn't work in Safari reliably, finding out where anything is takes several minutes.
manholio 4y ago
What happened here is that a 1000 ton gorilla is entrenched in the business operations market and it's irrational for managers to phase them out since it's very risky for their careers. This poisons the field for startups who can't grow to the critical mass to be viable on this market, which in turn lowers competition, witch leads to monopolistic practices, inefficient bad software and broken drop-boxes. The drop-box looks like it does because it's good enough and there there are no business pressures on the market for SAP to fix it. The manager gets to keep their job by buying SAP and the low level staff needs to deal with such stupidities (and much, much worse ones) ad infinitum.
irusensei 4y ago
My personal experience so far is that the whole SAP ecosystem is a great way for incompetent people to print money. I’ve worked for companies that ran SAP and paid obscene amounts of money for SAP consultant and developers to write terrible code using their proprietary language. We had this issue with a certain report that was outputting weird values. Company had to pay the partner for support. I’ve skimmed over the code and it was processing hardcoded index positions. I repeat the person who did that had no concept of a loop. Since the query was returning more than 250 results the remaining rows were being ignored. The solution? They increase it to 500. Certified. SAP. Partner. Other issues like having to create folders on the shared NFS volume because developer couldn’t arse to create parent folder if it doesn’t exist. New supplier? Need to mkdir otherwise those long running reports would be inconsistent. Ah… let’s not forget CHMOD 777 EVERYWHERE when handling file systems. Don’t even let me start on the “move to standard” utopia and the horrors that come with it. I didn’t dare to touch that thing. First it was the company could lose support if the supplied code was modified and second if they knew I could fix stuff they would treat me as some cheap labor alternative.
- HyperSane 4y ago
  I worked for a company that uses Syteline ERP and it was a similar horroshow.
  - noAnswer 4y ago
    I worked for a company that uses Microsoft Navision. The consultant/dev wold remote work via Teamviewer directly on the production system. Build in editor had no syntax highlighting. No version control possible, since the code is in the database. (Unless the dev copied the code into Notepad and saved it separately.) Certain reports would block all clients company-wide. To print something one would need to click ~6 buttons with super long mouse movements. I programmed AutoHotkey-Scripts to ease the pain. "Fun" times :-)
    - HyperSane 4y ago
      Syteline would take HOURS to run a report that generated estimates on how much material needed to be ordered for the next month. Year end reconciliation would take over 12 hours. It was just absurdly slow.
pflenker 4y ago
With sap, the end user is not the customer. Hence, the whole thing is designed to pass a sales pitch and nothing else. The people who use this are not the ones who make the buy decision.
- samwillis 4y ago
  That's the same with all enterprise software sales. However the counter argument is that there are multiple layers of "end user" and the executives who purchase it, but don't "use" it, are still recipients of the the output from the system. They will read the reports, and use it for insight. Point is though, you are right, the majority of users of these systems are very removed from the purchasing decisions. And therefor the UX for them is very often subpar.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Everybody but upper management uses ERP systems to literally keep the lights on. And some of those reports are to be published quarterly, you know, balance sheets and such...
- hef19898 4y ago
  The whole system, SAP is way more than expenses (!), is there to keep multi-national manufacturing networks running. And to pass all kinds of quality and financial audits. That people fail to realize that, and still think dumping on legacy UI and ERP systems, is just beyond me...
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    People do realise that. That doesn't mean SAP has a good UI.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      Until we have a discussion about things like inventory valuation and write off rules across coubtries and business units, the use of production orders, demand forecasting, monthly closure across sites, countries and lefal entities, assets and corresponding write offs and how all of that is integrated in one sofware suite, and how those systems do one thing better than others, I highly doubt people do get it. So far, and the last time we discussed Concur here, we stop at comments about lines in reports, how bothersome it is to upload receipts and how all of that is taling away minutes of peoples othereise highly productive time on their job.
a2800276 4y ago
"And then the product manager didn't point at the screen and say “wouldn't it be better to alphabetize these?” And the UX person, if there was one, didn't raise any red flag, or if they did nothing was done." ...and all of the no doubt uncountable complaints by the poor sods being forced to use this pile of crap by senior executives, who have secretaries to fill out their expense reports for them and get invited to luxury junkets by SAP, were utterly ignored
LAC-Tech 4y ago
My supply chain consultant friend can never understand why I recoil whenever he mentions SAP.
- hef19898 4y ago
  Which says a lot about both of you.
  - LAC-Tech 4y ago
    Be constructive with your feedback, please!
thayne 4y ago
I've seen the same thing (dropdown with no discernable order) in other products too. Like the AWS console and atlassian products. Although, in some of those cases it was eventually fixed.
Kiro 4y ago
The list is sorted, just not alphabetically. No idea why the author presumes that lists can only be sorted in one way or not at all.
- Sebb767 4y ago
  The list might be ordered, but it's not sorted, at least not by a criteria that would be obvious to me or the author.
sidcool 4y ago
I think it's a bit fashionable here at HN to lambast enterprise software (and companies). I myself find a guilty pleasure in doing so. We like to call them incompetent. But these companies do something right. If not software then in sales or marketing.
- deely3 4y ago
  Most people that criticizes SAP and other enterprise software miss the point that SAP and enterprise software is complex. Not because it made complex but because this area/domain is really complex. Finances are complex, role based access control are complex, ORM is complex. Now combine all these things and add different implementation in different countries/regions and you will probably understand why SAP is de-facto standard.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  That's true. But no one is criticising their business abilities.
samwillis 4y ago
See also: "Lidl’s €500 Million SAP Debacle" https://www.henricodolfing.com/2020/05/case-study-lidl-sap-debacle.html?m=1 https://www.henricodolfing.com/2020/05/case-study-lidl-sap-d...
- hef19898 4y ago
  My personal favorite! And if you dig into it, exclusively Lidls fault. Also, Lidl wanted to do more than just expenses...
- dx034 4y ago
  Which shows how complex enterprise use cases can be and how valuable good SAP consultants are. With all its faults, for many large companies it's still much better and cheaper to have all processes on SAP than using dozens or hundreds of specialized (often self developed) applications. At least with SAP you always find someone who will help you, with your 20-year old in-house developed software, no one will want to touch that code again.
sidcool 4y ago
I remember a similar link posted a while back.
iancmceachern 4y ago
And just think with how many companies use it, so many people wasting so much time every day.
rwmj 4y ago
My particular annoyance is Concur "punishes" you for having the temerity to disable tracking cookies (which is a legal requirement to be the default, and they're based in Germany so there's no excuse). Every time you select this option, which is every time I do an expense, it sits there for many minutes pretending to update my preferences.
- namdnay 4y ago
  I don’t think the law on tracking cookies applies to your work tools on your work computer
  - zelphirkalt 4y ago
    Why do you think that? Are working people not human beings covered by the law? Is an employer allowed to void EU citizen rights?
  - raverbashing 4y ago
    Not if the tracking entity would be the company I'm employed to, not some 3rd party tool Anyway, for non-compliant cookie dialogs, I accept and then remove the cookies manually. Track that. They might enjoy a complaint to the relevant privacy authorities as well
  - d1sxeyes 4y ago
    If that is indeed the case, then there would be legal problems associated with that. Either you are accepting cookies as a private individual, or you are representing your company. Very few companies allow (most) employees to enter into agreements on their behalf.
BuckyBeaver 4y ago
Concur = unmitigated trash
pachico 4y ago
No CTO was ever fired for choosing: SAP, JIRA, SalesForce, Oracle, ...
- hef19898 4y ago
  Name one serious alternative for SAP, if you need a real ERP system?
  - billwashere 4y ago
    Depends on the industry,Oracle Netsuite is similar to SAP. A lot of construction/professional services use Deltek Vantagepoint. Also Mircosoft Dynamics comes to mind.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      Yeah, it really depends on the exact use case. And the availability of functional consultants with relevant industry expertise. SAP isn't great t project management, even if make-to-order works just fine, but that is still a manufacturing environment. SAP is also somewhat lacking in terms of logistics and warehousing (at least it was last time I checked / worked with SAP in that field 5 or so years ago). MS Dynamics seems to have some good ideas when it comes to field services (I never worked with that, so). INFOR is rather good when it comes to project management and project driven manufacturing and planning. So, pick your poison, because no system will satisfy all you wishes, but the decent ones will satisfy almost all your needs, one way or another. One of the big benefits of picking SAP is the huge pool of people with relevant experience, from developers over users (from simple employees over key users to super key users) all the way to those "controversial" consultants. And that across almost all industries, countries, regions and functions.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  The Lidl guy might be a counter-example ?? (Partially their fault though.)
hbarka 4y ago
I don’t understand the disdain here in Hacker News for enterprise software. Every now and then this type of post would show up, decrying how terrible the user interface is or how awful looking the fonts are and how they can program the same functions in 1000 lines of code and support thousands of users. These companies have revenue in the billions. They have enabled large companies, since before many of us were born. Your payroll and accrued sick leave and benefits deductions and AP/AR doesn’t miss a beat because of these companies. Apple runs on SAP (and Oracle and Workday), mind you. So does Google. Are they bad or is it the crowd here?
- hef19898 4y ago
  Thank you! I once had the pleasure (ahem) to work with a "solution architect" who shared the opinion around enterprise software you mentioned. He was in charge of getting the MRP running, but he had no idea how MRP works, e.g. he set thought having one (!) use case without (!) lead times life represents a successful implementation... Almost a year later, I still try to clean that mess up...
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    I have a similar thing with people who think snow is white. Joseph Stalin also thought that, and he killed 50 million people!
    - hef19898 4y ago
      Come again?
      - douglee650 4y ago
        It's an allegory OP is making to express their disdain for anecdotal correlation, illustrated here by the absurdity in which the story of a solution architect making a mistake based on a single case, is itself an anecdotal correlation …the purpose of which is perceived to paint an entire class of people (solution architects) as reactively decisive with incomplete information.
quickthrower2 4y ago
Recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33857694 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33857694
mrjin 4y ago
Try their timesheet function in any browser, much more amazing. Every time you save something, it opens a new tab!!
- PascLeRasc 4y ago
  That's a nice feature considering how much they go out of their way to override the native context menu and disable middle mouse button click so you can't open two expense reports in two tabs.
devniel 4y ago
SAP invested a bit on improving UX, e.g. things like SAP Fiori and SAPUI5, I was even able to create hybrids apps using its SAP Kapsel.
johnwalkr 4y ago
I don’t mind using concur but there is one thing I hate about it. When you take an picture of a receipt, it used to overlay a polygon with four corners for you to crop it. Now it automatically crops it and half the time it cuts off part of the receipt. One time in 100 it falls back to the overlay so you can fix it, but usually you have to delete the image and try again. It tends to fail on similar images so you have experiment by folding the receipt and using different backgrounds until it works. Oh and each time you take a picture using the app, it requires several taps so you have to constantly switch one hand back and forth between handling receipts and tapping on dialogue boxes.
fetzu 4y ago
Fun fact: last year I had to re-input a whole expense report because of a greyed out mandatory field (I wish I was kidding). So I naturally made screenshots of every position to re-enter them. The amount of the second expense report was not the same as the first (it was less in my local currency): apparently the conversion rate is not fixed (for a given day) but can vary on the whims of the system (RNG?). I emailed our “concur people” about it, and they did not even understand what the issue was. I have since forwarded the case to our finance and IT, but am not holding my breath on getting some kind of answer.
- masklinn 4y ago
  > apparently the conversion rate is not fixed (for a given day) but can vary on the whims of the system (RNG?). Assuming all the dates were set up the same, it could be that the exchange rate are "latest at creation of expense" (or just "latest") and the rates had been updated in the meantime. I'd usually expect the exchange rate to be the rate at the date the expense was incurred but...
  - fetzu 4y ago
    You might be right! This would be hilarious but totally in line with the rest of the tool. Takeaway would be to do the expense reporting when the conversion rates are advantageous!
iconcur 4y ago
My employer recently switched to Concur, and it's the first time I've thought that we're now large enough that teams that are making software decisions for the rest of the company are either insulated from or don't care about the feedback of the people who actually have to use it. The UX is completely atrocious and the help is even worse. It took far too long to figure out how to make an expense request and they wouldn't accept my valid bank details. Our accounting team even had to send out a company wide message telling everyone to change their password, because apparently you can have both SSO and password logins with the default password set to something like expenses1234. There are no easily accessible documents. Instead you have to watch videos or wait hours! on hold to speak to someone. We came from Spendesk which was completely intuitive. On top of all of that, many people had to wait weeks for a reimbursement. I can't garantie that it was because of Concur but I wouldn't be surprised.
LightG 4y ago
OMG sorry this is so relevant ... we've just been dealing with a client with SAP software that is supposed to automate on-boarding suppliers/customers. It takes 2 people client side to hand hold third-parties through the labyrynth, and 1 person at the third party to desperately go back and forth to those 2 people to check if everything is ok and to answer questions about why things aren't progressing. Literal facepalm. Have had the same experience with two other clients recently. What is going on with SAP?
99failures 4y ago
SAP Concur is weird. Supposedly the best solution in the marketplace (got any alternatives?) and 50% of the functionality is pretty good, the remainder 50% is questionable. And the complexity reminds me of mainframes' UX.
PaulAJ 4y ago
SAP has a very clear idea of how it makes money. It makes money by selling to senior managers who don't have to use it, and have very little idea of the realities for people on the front line. So SAP have no incentive to produce a system that is useable, because that won't increase their sales. Their sales are increased by clever salespeople, so that is where the money goes.
voidee 4y ago
I’ve no doubt that you have many anti-Concur club members here! Whenever they make “improvements” it breaks something. Monthly Concur expense reports are torture, possibly being the only part of my job I consistently dislike. Can anyone recommend better alternatives to lobby my company to try?
- rightbyte 4y ago
  > Can anyone recommend better alternatives to lobby my company to try? A stapler, a letter, a pen, an envelope and a secretary. That is how I always done it were I worked and it worked flawlessly each time. During Covid WFH I had to send email and take photos of the recipes so it was abit more cumbersome but I managed to cope.
- higeorge13 4y ago
  Spendesk?
PascLeRasc 4y ago
SAP Concur somehow permanently kills the KeyPassXC extension for me on every browser, every computer. I think that's pretty impressive.
prepend 4y ago
The real reason is because the stackoverflow copypaste that worked didn’t sort the results. This stuff drives me crazy as there are people who just don’t care. I can’t imagine ever looking at those results and not doing something simple to make it better.
najdan33 4y ago
This thought deserves some admiration: >Assume that bad technical decisions are made rationally, for reasons that are not apparent. It could be generalized: >Assume that acts or behavior you don't understand are made rationally, for reasons that are not apparent.
SergeAx 4y ago
This is what you get with "corporate" software, when people making the decision are never actually use it, and people using it are never have a vote on buying decision.
newbieuser 4y ago
Enterprise software is the software that mostly lies and bullshit today. Companies spend a lot of money because at the end of the day, it's working. Who cares how it works.
donatj 4y ago
Another possible explanation is that the app wasn’t built in house. For a time our app was outsourced to a shop in Eastern Europe. They were not particularly pleasant to work with and were generally very bad at following directions. Getting revisions done, let alone done correctly was a struggle. None of us were mobile developers and thus none of us knew Objective-C nor Java so our ability to properly review or modify the code we received was pretty limited. Our app suffered for it, it became picking our battles and small things like the order of a drop-down fell by the wayside. In a perfect world we would have stopped working with them but in reality we’d signed some sort of agreement I’m not entirely privy to and we were going to use them for a set amount of work.

198 points by luu 4y ago

speps 4y ago

2022

tluyben2 4y ago

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

gnabgib 4y ago
Extensive discussion too.. 356 pts, 190 comments

haunter 4y ago

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

jimnotgym 4y ago
To be fair US companies have built some truly awful tools in this field. Can anyone remember the name of that awful booking system Oracle sells?
- bigDinosaur 4y ago
  Is there any mythos around US engineering in the way there is about German practicality, efficiency, and reliability?
  - jimnotgym 4y ago
    There is about software engineering yes, a myth that only the US can build great products
    - signatoremo 4y ago
      Only in your imagination. Many great products made by none US companies are used in the US and deservedly recognized — Redis, Jetbrains’ ones, Erlang, Lua, Scala, nginx, etc.
TMWNN 4y ago
I've heard it said that the truth behind the myth of German engineering and German efficiency[1] is that Germans are, rather, rule followers. [1] Example of both: The new Berlin airport
- croes 4y ago
  Wasn't the problem with the Berlin airport that they didn't follow the rules, e.g. fire protection?
  - ingomaro 4y ago
    Fire protection mess ... was a symptom. The root cause was that the local governments (city of Berlin and state of Brandenburg) wanted to split the pie for many small to medium businesses in the region. Noble idea but hard to execute as we found out later... So instead of giving it all to a contractor that actually knows how to build (large) airports they tried to managed it themself. Those people were unexperienced in this size of operation and it went all downhill from there. It's a common theme with big projects: Local administration is unexperienced but tries to do it anyway and they fail or get ripped off every time. What we should have is a federal unit that just does large scale construction/engineering projects.
seabird 4y ago
The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that German engineering is something they want. In automobiles, industrial equipment, electronics, software, etc. you can sense when Germans were involved. I've accepted that it's something I'll never understand, and that they probably feel the same way about American designs. Same planet, different worlds.
- zelphirkalt 4y ago
  In terms of software you are probably right, since we are behind in so many areas and education for jobs about creating software is not the best. About cars: Do you mean things like the VW scandal? Or do you mean actually shoddy engineering in cars? I think the reputation for engineering stems from darker times.
  - lstodd 4y ago
    Well, considering best german automotive engineering got left behind in early nineties and that for like 20 years already owning a BMW or Mercedes means constant hassle and tons of cash for trivial repairs - yes. German auto engineering just isn't there. VW scandal is different - it's what you get when you set unreasonable and actually conflicting requirements.
throwmeaway1112 4y ago
I recently found out it's not SAP native software - rather it's USA based company/product that was acquired by SAP.

jzwinck 4y ago

Concur is indeed a poor system. I suppose the thinking is that by having each employee of a big organization do a small amount of work, they can avoid hiring a central person who just accepts receipts in envelopes and deals with them. Or maybe that by putting up roadblocks like Concur, some employee expenses will not need to be reimbursed. The problem is that this requires educating every employee on how to use these systems. That's a waste of time and a drag on productivity. Better to hire that central person who will learn all the quirks of whatever system is used and let the other 99% of the organization do their jobs. When companies need photos of their employees they find a photographer who provides that service. They don't ask each employee to learn about lighting technique and do the post processing according to a written set of standards in hopes the photos will look consistent. But with Concur that's what happens.

notimetorelax 4y ago
I would argue that giving my receipts to an admin also requires a fair amount of input from me before they can file the expense report. I’d rather much prefer an expense tool that works.
- xupybd 4y ago
  Xero has a great tool but last I checked it was $5 per employee per month. With many not making claims every month that is too much overhead per claim.
  - a2800276 4y ago
    SAP is notoriously expensive. It's not conceivable that anyone chose SAP to save a dime. Or $5.
viraptor 4y ago
> some employee expenses will not need to be reimbursed. I don't think the savings would offset the system cost. But then again, I've definitely got a threshold where just spending my money without claiming is worth it for my mental health...

ramraj07 4y ago

Search is one place where mediocre engineers and even many good ones consistently seem to think they know what they are doing, and they know what is good enough, and worst of all, that all of this is super easy. The solution, universally, is “use elastic search” (though there’s also the puerile cousin where people say “use the like operator”) but elastic search has never solved search if all you did was learn and set it up in a day. The most important factor is to make sure you weight your results by two numbers - one that tries to score the match of the result to the search string and another which is a more absolute weight (which could be population here, simplistically). Without that search will look like this, and these engineers will always say, “this looks good to me? Just finish typing the city and it’ll give you what you want?”

themoonisachees 4y ago
Very true, but also consider: SAP is a billions of dollar corporation. They can afford to throw like 5 engineers who have specific experience in elastic search to fix this in a day. They won't because they have no reason to, but this is software that you sign a contract for, not some random OSS project on github.

beardyw 4y ago

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

ZiiS 4y ago
Pleasing 100,000 folks by inconveniencing 10,000,000.

tsujamin 4y ago

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

Moissanite 4y ago

Having to use Concur is one of the primary reasons I have avoided ramping up travel again after the COVID lockdown period ended. It also inverts incentives in other ways. I'm narurally inclined to be frugal, but that would often involve buying 3 or 4 smaller things to eat rather than a large meal. Since I know that would massively increase my own expense filing hassle, I instead tend to make individual purchases which are larger than I otherwise would.

jl6 4y ago

The most fundamental theorem of Enterprise software is that the users aren’t the the customer, and so UX issues fall to the very bottom of the priority list. So the explanation is very plausible. Furthermore, amongst the already-low-priority UX issues, I can imagine UX of the expenses application being rock bottom, because which business ever called up their ERP vendor and said “we need to make it easier for our staff to claim expenses”?

GuB-42 4y ago
This is something I never understood about enterprise software. No one should understand better than companies with employees that time is money. If your employees spend an extra hour each month dealing with bad software, that's an hour of unproductive time you are paying for. Even if your employees tend to work unpaid overtime (boooo), that's still an hour of unpaid overtime that could have been used to do actual work. And employees are definitely going to spend the time necessary to claim expenses. They may skimp on other tasks, but expenses are money, so they are definitely not going to miss that one. Big companies love metrics and spying on you, and the time spend on corporate apps is an easy thing to measure. So if you see that your employees spend countless hours on ERP, it should rise tons of red flags.
IshKebab 4y ago
> which business ever called up their ERP vendor and said “we need to make it easier for our staff to claim expenses”? Businesses that were fed up with fielding questions from employees about how to claim expenses? In my experience it's reasonably common for companies to switch expense claim systems because their existing one was rubbish. I haven't worked for any SAP-using megacorps though tbf.
- pavlov 4y ago
  There’s Expensify which is supposed to have a very good UX and does about $200M annual revenue. So at least that much people are willing to pay for a better expense claim tool.
  - 4y ago

jbk 4y ago

Have you ever used SAP Ariba? Numerous large American tech companies are using that for supplier, including Intel, Google or ARM. They used to have their own system, and they moved to that abomination. Everything is counter-productive, the UX is insane, but to give you an idea: you have a list of PO or invoices, but you cannot click on them to see them, you have a three-dot menu that allows you to get an email to "act on the PO"... They broke the simple idea of an hypertext link... I'm not even talking about changing a bank account...

popotamonga 4y ago
The nightmares. I was a supplier for cocacola and it was so bad they had to do the invoicing for me because it was magic.
BenFeldman1930 4y ago
Maybe "SAP Dirty Sanchez" would be a better name?
sizzle 4y ago
Yes good luck trying to order from a vendor catalog using the SAP front end, enter the correct shipping info and get any UI confirmation or cues the order was input correctly and will be sent to you. Maybe our implementation is just broke, but there are so many unintuitive backwards UX patterns I shudder to use it every time.
BostonEnginerd 4y ago
I'm currently dealing with multiple customers moving to Ariba. What a pain -- it doesn't work in Safari reliably, finding out where anything is takes several minutes.

manholio 4y ago

What happened here is that a 1000 ton gorilla is entrenched in the business operations market and it's irrational for managers to phase them out since it's very risky for their careers. This poisons the field for startups who can't grow to the critical mass to be viable on this market, which in turn lowers competition, witch leads to monopolistic practices, inefficient bad software and broken drop-boxes. The drop-box looks like it does because it's good enough and there there are no business pressures on the market for SAP to fix it. The manager gets to keep their job by buying SAP and the low level staff needs to deal with such stupidities (and much, much worse ones) ad infinitum.

irusensei 4y ago

My personal experience so far is that the whole SAP ecosystem is a great way for incompetent people to print money. I’ve worked for companies that ran SAP and paid obscene amounts of money for SAP consultant and developers to write terrible code using their proprietary language. We had this issue with a certain report that was outputting weird values. Company had to pay the partner for support. I’ve skimmed over the code and it was processing hardcoded index positions. I repeat the person who did that had no concept of a loop. Since the query was returning more than 250 results the remaining rows were being ignored. The solution? They increase it to 500. Certified. SAP. Partner. Other issues like having to create folders on the shared NFS volume because developer couldn’t arse to create parent folder if it doesn’t exist. New supplier? Need to mkdir otherwise those long running reports would be inconsistent. Ah… let’s not forget CHMOD 777 EVERYWHERE when handling file systems. Don’t even let me start on the “move to standard” utopia and the horrors that come with it. I didn’t dare to touch that thing. First it was the company could lose support if the supplied code was modified and second if they knew I could fix stuff they would treat me as some cheap labor alternative.

HyperSane 4y ago
I worked for a company that uses Syteline ERP and it was a similar horroshow.
- noAnswer 4y ago
  I worked for a company that uses Microsoft Navision. The consultant/dev wold remote work via Teamviewer directly on the production system. Build in editor had no syntax highlighting. No version control possible, since the code is in the database. (Unless the dev copied the code into Notepad and saved it separately.) Certain reports would block all clients company-wide. To print something one would need to click ~6 buttons with super long mouse movements. I programmed AutoHotkey-Scripts to ease the pain. "Fun" times :-)
  - HyperSane 4y ago
    Syteline would take HOURS to run a report that generated estimates on how much material needed to be ordered for the next month. Year end reconciliation would take over 12 hours. It was just absurdly slow.

pflenker 4y ago

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

samwillis 4y ago
That's the same with all enterprise software sales. However the counter argument is that there are multiple layers of "end user" and the executives who purchase it, but don't "use" it, are still recipients of the the output from the system. They will read the reports, and use it for insight. Point is though, you are right, the majority of users of these systems are very removed from the purchasing decisions. And therefor the UX for them is very often subpar.
- hef19898 4y ago
  Everybody but upper management uses ERP systems to literally keep the lights on. And some of those reports are to be published quarterly, you know, balance sheets and such...
hef19898 4y ago
The whole system, SAP is way more than expenses (!), is there to keep multi-national manufacturing networks running. And to pass all kinds of quality and financial audits. That people fail to realize that, and still think dumping on legacy UI and ERP systems, is just beyond me...
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  People do realise that. That doesn't mean SAP has a good UI.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Until we have a discussion about things like inventory valuation and write off rules across coubtries and business units, the use of production orders, demand forecasting, monthly closure across sites, countries and lefal entities, assets and corresponding write offs and how all of that is integrated in one sofware suite, and how those systems do one thing better than others, I highly doubt people do get it. So far, and the last time we discussed Concur here, we stop at comments about lines in reports, how bothersome it is to upload receipts and how all of that is taling away minutes of peoples othereise highly productive time on their job.

a2800276 4y ago

"And then the product manager didn't point at the screen and say “wouldn't it be better to alphabetize these?” And the UX person, if there was one, didn't raise any red flag, or if they did nothing was done." ...and all of the no doubt uncountable complaints by the poor sods being forced to use this pile of crap by senior executives, who have secretaries to fill out their expense reports for them and get invited to luxury junkets by SAP, were utterly ignored

LAC-Tech 4y ago

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

hef19898 4y ago
Which says a lot about both of you.
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  Be constructive with your feedback, please!

thayne 4y ago

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

Kiro 4y ago

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

Sebb767 4y ago
The list might be ordered, but it's not sorted, at least not by a criteria that would be obvious to me or the author.

sidcool 4y ago

I think it's a bit fashionable here at HN to lambast enterprise software (and companies). I myself find a guilty pleasure in doing so. We like to call them incompetent. But these companies do something right. If not software then in sales or marketing.

deely3 4y ago
Most people that criticizes SAP and other enterprise software miss the point that SAP and enterprise software is complex. Not because it made complex but because this area/domain is really complex. Finances are complex, role based access control are complex, ORM is complex. Now combine all these things and add different implementation in different countries/regions and you will probably understand why SAP is de-facto standard.
robertlagrant 4y ago
That's true. But no one is criticising their business abilities.

samwillis 4y ago

See also: "Lidl’s €500 Million SAP Debacle" https://www.henricodolfing.com/2020/05/case-study-lidl-sap-debacle.html?m=1 https://www.henricodolfing.com/2020/05/case-study-lidl-sap-d...

hef19898 4y ago
My personal favorite! And if you dig into it, exclusively Lidls fault. Also, Lidl wanted to do more than just expenses...
dx034 4y ago
Which shows how complex enterprise use cases can be and how valuable good SAP consultants are. With all its faults, for many large companies it's still much better and cheaper to have all processes on SAP than using dozens or hundreds of specialized (often self developed) applications. At least with SAP you always find someone who will help you, with your 20-year old in-house developed software, no one will want to touch that code again.

sidcool 4y ago

I remember a similar link posted a while back.

iancmceachern 4y ago

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

rwmj 4y ago

My particular annoyance is Concur "punishes" you for having the temerity to disable tracking cookies (which is a legal requirement to be the default, and they're based in Germany so there's no excuse). Every time you select this option, which is every time I do an expense, it sits there for many minutes pretending to update my preferences.

namdnay 4y ago
I don’t think the law on tracking cookies applies to your work tools on your work computer
- zelphirkalt 4y ago
  Why do you think that? Are working people not human beings covered by the law? Is an employer allowed to void EU citizen rights?
- raverbashing 4y ago
  Not if the tracking entity would be the company I'm employed to, not some 3rd party tool Anyway, for non-compliant cookie dialogs, I accept and then remove the cookies manually. Track that. They might enjoy a complaint to the relevant privacy authorities as well
- d1sxeyes 4y ago
  If that is indeed the case, then there would be legal problems associated with that. Either you are accepting cookies as a private individual, or you are representing your company. Very few companies allow (most) employees to enter into agreements on their behalf.

BuckyBeaver 4y ago

Concur = unmitigated trash

pachico 4y ago

No CTO was ever fired for choosing: SAP, JIRA, SalesForce, Oracle, ...

hef19898 4y ago
Name one serious alternative for SAP, if you need a real ERP system?
- billwashere 4y ago
  Depends on the industry,Oracle Netsuite is similar to SAP. A lot of construction/professional services use Deltek Vantagepoint. Also Mircosoft Dynamics comes to mind.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Yeah, it really depends on the exact use case. And the availability of functional consultants with relevant industry expertise. SAP isn't great t project management, even if make-to-order works just fine, but that is still a manufacturing environment. SAP is also somewhat lacking in terms of logistics and warehousing (at least it was last time I checked / worked with SAP in that field 5 or so years ago). MS Dynamics seems to have some good ideas when it comes to field services (I never worked with that, so). INFOR is rather good when it comes to project management and project driven manufacturing and planning. So, pick your poison, because no system will satisfy all you wishes, but the decent ones will satisfy almost all your needs, one way or another. One of the big benefits of picking SAP is the huge pool of people with relevant experience, from developers over users (from simple employees over key users to super key users) all the way to those "controversial" consultants. And that across almost all industries, countries, regions and functions.
BlueTemplar 4y ago
The Lidl guy might be a counter-example ?? (Partially their fault though.)

hbarka 4y ago

I don’t understand the disdain here in Hacker News for enterprise software. Every now and then this type of post would show up, decrying how terrible the user interface is or how awful looking the fonts are and how they can program the same functions in 1000 lines of code and support thousands of users. These companies have revenue in the billions. They have enabled large companies, since before many of us were born. Your payroll and accrued sick leave and benefits deductions and AP/AR doesn’t miss a beat because of these companies. Apple runs on SAP (and Oracle and Workday), mind you. So does Google. Are they bad or is it the crowd here?

hef19898 4y ago
Thank you! I once had the pleasure (ahem) to work with a "solution architect" who shared the opinion around enterprise software you mentioned. He was in charge of getting the MRP running, but he had no idea how MRP works, e.g. he set thought having one (!) use case without (!) lead times life represents a successful implementation... Almost a year later, I still try to clean that mess up...
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  I have a similar thing with people who think snow is white. Joseph Stalin also thought that, and he killed 50 million people!
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Come again?
    - douglee650 4y ago
      It's an allegory OP is making to express their disdain for anecdotal correlation, illustrated here by the absurdity in which the story of a solution architect making a mistake based on a single case, is itself an anecdotal correlation …the purpose of which is perceived to paint an entire class of people (solution architects) as reactively decisive with incomplete information.

quickthrower2 4y ago

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

mrjin 4y ago

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

PascLeRasc 4y ago
That's a nice feature considering how much they go out of their way to override the native context menu and disable middle mouse button click so you can't open two expense reports in two tabs.

devniel 4y ago

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

johnwalkr 4y ago

I don’t mind using concur but there is one thing I hate about it. When you take an picture of a receipt, it used to overlay a polygon with four corners for you to crop it. Now it automatically crops it and half the time it cuts off part of the receipt. One time in 100 it falls back to the overlay so you can fix it, but usually you have to delete the image and try again. It tends to fail on similar images so you have experiment by folding the receipt and using different backgrounds until it works. Oh and each time you take a picture using the app, it requires several taps so you have to constantly switch one hand back and forth between handling receipts and tapping on dialogue boxes.

fetzu 4y ago

Fun fact: last year I had to re-input a whole expense report because of a greyed out mandatory field (I wish I was kidding). So I naturally made screenshots of every position to re-enter them. The amount of the second expense report was not the same as the first (it was less in my local currency): apparently the conversion rate is not fixed (for a given day) but can vary on the whims of the system (RNG?). I emailed our “concur people” about it, and they did not even understand what the issue was. I have since forwarded the case to our finance and IT, but am not holding my breath on getting some kind of answer.

masklinn 4y ago
> apparently the conversion rate is not fixed (for a given day) but can vary on the whims of the system (RNG?). Assuming all the dates were set up the same, it could be that the exchange rate are "latest at creation of expense" (or just "latest") and the rates had been updated in the meantime. I'd usually expect the exchange rate to be the rate at the date the expense was incurred but...
- fetzu 4y ago
  You might be right! This would be hilarious but totally in line with the rest of the tool. Takeaway would be to do the expense reporting when the conversion rates are advantageous!

iconcur 4y ago

My employer recently switched to Concur, and it's the first time I've thought that we're now large enough that teams that are making software decisions for the rest of the company are either insulated from or don't care about the feedback of the people who actually have to use it. The UX is completely atrocious and the help is even worse. It took far too long to figure out how to make an expense request and they wouldn't accept my valid bank details. Our accounting team even had to send out a company wide message telling everyone to change their password, because apparently you can have both SSO and password logins with the default password set to something like expenses1234. There are no easily accessible documents. Instead you have to watch videos or wait hours! on hold to speak to someone. We came from Spendesk which was completely intuitive. On top of all of that, many people had to wait weeks for a reimbursement. I can't garantie that it was because of Concur but I wouldn't be surprised.

LightG 4y ago

OMG sorry this is so relevant ... we've just been dealing with a client with SAP software that is supposed to automate on-boarding suppliers/customers. It takes 2 people client side to hand hold third-parties through the labyrynth, and 1 person at the third party to desperately go back and forth to those 2 people to check if everything is ok and to answer questions about why things aren't progressing. Literal facepalm. Have had the same experience with two other clients recently. What is going on with SAP?

99failures 4y ago

SAP Concur is weird. Supposedly the best solution in the marketplace (got any alternatives?) and 50% of the functionality is pretty good, the remainder 50% is questionable. And the complexity reminds me of mainframes' UX.

PaulAJ 4y ago

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

voidee 4y ago

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

rightbyte 4y ago
> Can anyone recommend better alternatives to lobby my company to try? A stapler, a letter, a pen, an envelope and a secretary. That is how I always done it were I worked and it worked flawlessly each time. During Covid WFH I had to send email and take photos of the recipes so it was abit more cumbersome but I managed to cope.
higeorge13 4y ago
Spendesk?

PascLeRasc 4y ago

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

prepend 4y ago

The real reason is because the stackoverflow copypaste that worked didn’t sort the results. This stuff drives me crazy as there are people who just don’t care. I can’t imagine ever looking at those results and not doing something simple to make it better.

najdan33 4y ago

This thought deserves some admiration: >Assume that bad technical decisions are made rationally, for reasons that are not apparent. It could be generalized: >Assume that acts or behavior you don't understand are made rationally, for reasons that are not apparent.

SergeAx 4y ago

This is what you get with "corporate" software, when people making the decision are never actually use it, and people using it are never have a vote on buying decision.

newbieuser 4y ago

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

donatj 4y ago

Another possible explanation is that the app wasn’t built in house. For a time our app was outsourced to a shop in Eastern Europe. They were not particularly pleasant to work with and were generally very bad at following directions. Getting revisions done, let alone done correctly was a struggle. None of us were mobile developers and thus none of us knew Objective-C nor Java so our ability to properly review or modify the code we received was pretty limited. Our app suffered for it, it became picking our battles and small things like the order of a drop-down fell by the wayside. In a perfect world we would have stopped working with them but in reality we’d signed some sort of agreement I’m not entirely privy to and we were going to use them for a set amount of work.