Software horror show: SAP Concur | Hacker News Reader

Software horror show: SAP Concur

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198 pointsluu181 comments

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.

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

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 :-)

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.

"generated estimates on how much material needed to be ordered for the next month" depending on how they doing it could be aching to training AI. IMHO this process taking hours is normal

Nah, it is just basic math based on the quantity and type of product that is ordered.

> Certified. SAP. Partner.

IME (not sap but adjacent) partners cert and “levels” only has to do with how much you earn for the company.

Competence only comes into play if you’re so egregiously incompetent you start sinking projects and costing product rep’, and neither is really a concern for SAP.

I've gone through 3 certification processes for a company. First was gained via licence sales, second via spend on training by the vendor, third via 3 blog posts about the vendor.

I’ve spent too long over the years working with businesses who use SAP to not get a clear picture of how it works there.

They are an extremely formulaic organisation. Progression paths are clearly defined, and practically everything is run by a management system. This sounds good, in principal, and does result in a general baseline of reliability.

The flip side of this is that everyone is promoted to the limit of their competence, product development and implementation are rapidly spinning revolving doors, from top to bottom, and roles, not people, own products and decisions.

The result is a sort of methodical malcoordination, and seemingly insane decisions being taken at every juncture - unless you view them all through the lens of an emergent process driven by a simple set of rules and constraints: cover your ass, don’t do it if it isn’t explicitly ordered, always follow the management system.

It’s terrible. It’s just that it’s very reliably terrible, and that has its own appeal to other reliably terrible corporations. It’s all minmax, least worst, etc. - quality does not matter in the corporate world - consistency does.

It is amazing that some how SAP has made Oracle software half decent in comparison - and that isn't saying much for either of them.

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

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

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

Most PLCs these days support 1131! My whole career in industrial automation was on older PLCs that were produced before 1131 existed. (And long before they added the "6"!) Lots of them are still running factories today. Not one of them supported anything like a for loop. The only loop is the whole program scan loop.

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

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

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

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

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”?

> which business ever called up their ERP vendor and said “we need to make it easier for our staff to claim expenses”?

Businesses that were fed up with fielding questions from employees about how to claim expenses?

In my experience it's reasonably common for companies to switch expense claim systems because their existing one was rubbish. I haven't worked for any SAP-using megacorps though tbf.

There’s Expensify which is supposed to have a very good UX and does about $200M annual revenue. So at least that much people are willing to pay for a better expense claim tool.

Expensify is much easier to use than Concur

But their sales team probably plays less golf, let's put it this way

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

That is the crux of it.

I have a background in finance, and I think everyone is missing the problem that this is trying to solve.

People are careless when they claim expenses. They claim for things they lost the receipt for and then they try and pressure some accounts clerk into forcing it through. They make careless mistakes like multiplying their milage by the wrong rate, because they don't see why they should have to look up the right one. Then their line manager doesn't get around to signing it off, so employee chases accounts team, and accounts team have to chase approvers. Senior people are usually worst.

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

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

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

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

Depending on jurisdiction, taxes. So it is most likely not the company responsible for the "torturing"...

This.

In the US, maximum allowable per diem rates vary by location and are set by the Internal Revenue Service.

https://www.gsa.gov/perdiem

In reality you end up dealing with a flat per diem... that you have to calculate to the hour with things like crossing borders (even funnier when you have to include work authorizations in there, like with Switzerland!), and you still have expense claims, which might or might not be discounted by per diem depending on type of the claim!

Even if you have a per diem you still need to expense things, just less of them. So the system still needs to exist.

Unless your per diem is completely over the top, you'll need to expense flights, hotels, team dinners, client dinners, etc.

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

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

I think you have the incentives backwards here. When you use your own credit card for company expenses, you can rack up tons of personal benefits. The company would prefer you to use their card so they get those instead.

A few years ago Google, for example, cracked down and started requiring company cards for expensive purchases like flights.

This particular form of embezzlement is legal so everybody can get it out of their system.

And then you have silly rules like "company credit card expires after 9 months of no use" coupled which basically prevents people who travel rarely from following the rules.

Oh ye I forgot kickbacks on CC is a thing in the US.

I even remember a colleague when I worked in California boast to me about his $10000 claim recipe and the kickback.

Since it was a 5 man startup at that point I don't think it was worth the credit risk though.

Ye well ... dunno who to blame then in the CC mess.

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

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

Yes, the company needs your receipts for tax compliance.

And you can still get stiffed if you loose the receipt

Credit card rewards typically represent around 1% of transactions. For a cross-country trip with a $500 flight, 3 night at a $200 hotel, 4 $25 taxi trips and 9 (average) $20 meals that works out to 1% of $1380 or $13.80. In exchange for this modest benefit you will need to keep receipts and do data entry for about 15 items. If you forget a single meal receipt or accounting disputes a single charge, you’re already in the red. It’s not even clear if this reward covers the theoretical cost of extending a loan to your employer (at consumer interest rates), which is what you’re doing.

This only adds up to a substantial benefit if you’re doing major international travel (carefully) or handling big-ticket hardware purchases on your card. Meals and travel is almost certainly a net loss.

People who travel a lot for work are often extremely attuned to the credit card rewards game, so getting only 1% back is unrealistic. You can eek out at least 5% back (and often much higher, depending on redemptions) on all travel expenses. So in this(extremely inexpensive, bare-bones) travel scenario it’s more like $65. With international or frequent travel, it’s not hard to arrive at a couple extra thousand dollars a year.

You can just use your personal card on the big ticket items (flight and hotel) and use the corporate card for the small ones, if you’re worried about forgetting something. And you can get 5% points for those expenses (with either airline/hotel brand loyalty cards, or something like Amex Platinum that works on any brand). If you’re traveling a lot and flying business class for work it can add up to thousands of dollars and pay for your vacations.

My credit card gives 5 miles per USD for flight bookings, between 3 and 5 miles per USD ofr hotel bookings (depending of direct or via an OTA) and 5 miles per USD for restaurant/food purchases. Now one can call a mile worth one cent or one and a half cent, whatever you want. Either way it's going to be closer to a 3-8% personal benefit rather than 1%. If you travel rather often it adds up.

> Credit card rewards typically represent around 1% of transactions.

This is a significant underestimate. Consider that the Citi Double Cash card gives unlimited 2% cash back on everything, and that a lot of other cards offer even higher rates (I've seen 5%) for individual categories.

The company doesn’t care about the non-monetary perks.

They do care about making sure they reach the volume commitment on the bulk airfare and hotel rooms they have prepaid for in order to receive a large discount.

Prepayment that only works for the airlines and hotels if they’re not simultaneously discounting this large corporate customer’s rates AND paying fringe benefits to the end user.

And since they can’t tell you to not travel, this is generally why large company CFOs have policies in place that mandate these categories of spend are done via their travel agency, which was dominated by Concur prior to the SAP acquisition.

> Workers need to stop giving corporation access to their credit card.

I haven't experienced that, though I presume you have.

First full time job I had a biz amex. Last full time job was a biz visa. Both with my name on card and neither were mine personally. I didn't pay the cc bill.

I had to do expense reports and categorize each item.

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

But it turns out you can actually have good UI on the systems with good controls. At work we used to use concur and then move to expensify which is naturally easier to use even though I have had some issues with it. Before concur we were using some ridiculously terrible Oracle solution which made the concur solution look decent by comparison. Honestly it really felt like Oracle was forcing their developers to use Oracle forms the develop the application.

(edit: terrible stt)

I think it's still not the problem being solved here.

To my understanding, from conversations with people on the finance side of things, the point of this game is that:

1. If you get everyone to do their own expensing; and

2. If you set up a system that's robust against mistakes made by people with no understanding of corporate finance, which is almost everyone in a given company (that's the "if you don't get it right up front, the computer won't let you through" principle you mention); and

3. If you tell everyone to use it and that it's their responsibility to be good stewards of corporate money they have the privilege of using, etc.; then...

4. ...you get to hire less people on the finance side of things.

I think it's another case of large organizations chasing legibility[0], to the detriment of everyone within. It's similar to what a lot of other office/business software does: it lets the company get rid of a class of specialist, whose salaries are clearly visible on the company books, by distributing their work more-less evenly across everyone else in the company. This, obviously, causes everyone to lose productivity, as they're being distracted with work that's outside their specialization/expertise, but that only adds up to an "unexplained" overall small productivity drop of the organization (and the frustration of most employees) and is not clearly visible in the company financials.

[0] - To borrow the term from Seeing Like a State.

Yep well described

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

SAP is notoriously expensive. It's not conceivable that anyone chose SAP to save a dime. Or $5.

> 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...

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

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

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

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

Which will be thrown out by finance, as they need either peoper receipts or a signed declaration of the correct amount (receipts indeed do get lost). Why? Taxes. So you 1x1 png hack will only get your expenses reimboursed later, and if accounting doesn't catch the empty png, well, you might have more serious issues.

They didn't, and it was like a 1 euro purchase.

Depends on country I guess. The rules between Germany and Luxembourg are really different. Ideally so, accounting should have caught it. Again that depends on internal rules...

> I suppose the thinking is that by having each employee of a big organization do a small amount of work, they can avoid hiring a central person who just accepts receipts in envelopes and deals with them.

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

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

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

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

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

Reminds me of my very first posting in the (UK) Civil Service working as an Admin Assistant for the Highways Contracts team. Beyond filing, and delivering post to people's desks, my main work was to check through the expenses claims made by our consultants. Expenses were submitted by letter and - surprisingly - most claims made sense and would add up to the last penny correctly on first check.

Except for one firm of consultants who seemed, to me, to be chaos personified. Their expenses would go on for dozens of pages and never tallied to the amount they were claiming. In the end I resorted to hand-drawing an 'evil eye'[1] and taping it to my in-tray to try and stop the worst of their excesses reaching into my working day. Getting a promotion away from that work also helped.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_eye

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

We have a whole Concur team of like 5 people at least. All fte's. Employees still have to declare their own expenses. Almost 30k employees. So your suggestion of having just 1 person handling all declarations won't work unless you are suggesting 5 fte's for just Concur isn't enough.

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

Yeah that will never happen. Overhead is already a few percentage points above the industry average. Self service is the industry trend as I see it in this business. Whatever vendor facilitates that will win our business.

I think that's precisely it; see my other comment about legibility here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34294834. That's the conclusion I reached from listening to overworked finance people complaining about their understaffed departments handling the "audit seasons" around expenses.

And I think there's a lot more of it happening, mostly thanks to software - starting with the ubiquitous office suite, that made everyone their own secretary, manager and graphics department.

> When companies need photos of their employees they find a photographer who provides that service.

Do they still? My last experience with this is the company asking every employee to please kindly submit a current photo by themselves.

Obviously, the error in this kind of thinking is assuming that "having each employee of a big organization do a small amount of work" is free, because "it's just a small amount of work". It is, but a) the more iterations of this happen, the more of it adds up, and b) it's disruptive to every employee, as it competes for time and focus with the specific jobs people were actually hired for, slashing productivity across the board.

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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...

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

Come again?

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.

Well, I did talk about one specific solution architect. One that got the fundamental basics of ERP systems wrong. And part of the problem was his superficial, at best, understanding of ERP systems and underlying processes. The last part is ehat said solution architect has in common with the vast majority of commenters under this submission.

Nice, i was trying to get into the motives of the "snow is white equals Joseph Stalin" commenter. Not a condemnation of your statement.

>> Not a condemnation of your statement.

I didn't take it as such. And you really helped, because was a total loss with OP's comment...

Sibling comment nailed it. It's just a brief analogous category error.

Someone thought SAP was bad and messed up an implementation, therefore people who think SAP is bad mess up implementations.

Someone thought snow was white and killed 50m people, therefore people who think snow is white are mass murderers.

Ok, you got me. I am no match to your logic nor your argumentative skills. SAP sucks, because its UI is bad. Doubly so because the UI of an expense solution SAP acquired through a third party is bad. You win.

Now someone has to come up with something that solves all the other challenges industrial enterprises have. And tell them whatever alternative was developed is actually so much better that an ERP system change is warrented.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The connecting thread through veganism, climate change, and enterprise software is that you can accrue significant personal benefits by causing suffering elsewhere, and you will never have to face consequences for that suffering. In fact, anyone who even shows you that suffering is a hippie bastard

The funny thing is that people are easily offended these days simply by including trigger words they don't like to see in a negative context. I'd invite you and other downvoters to re-read my prose again. The focus was not on someone's personal choices but how those catchphrases are (ab)used in a context to promote something "healthy", yet the next month that company will be ready to lay off 70% of their workforce without a problem due to their bad business model.

I was fortunate to be in touch with renewable energy companies (professionally and indirectly), and you'd be surprised how unhealthy those things are for the environment on a grand scale. But, YMMV...

Sorry, disagree. You put these words in your original comment with intent so do not be surprised when people respond to that. This kind of behavior feels weird and suspicious and in my eyes it's telling that you immediately default to calling others out about being "offended" when offending was your intent to begin with.

Otherwise why inject politics and talk about triggering? You are doing the framing.

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

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

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

I greatly enjoy my Tesla every time I drive it.

I have never enjoyed using SAP or Oracle products.

What are doing in SAP? Supply Chain, Production, Finance? I pitty you if it is logistics...

Right now nothing!!

But have used concur and been parallel to some of the other products…

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

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

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

I agree that the enterprise market does not value usability very much, and I would even agree that the enterprise vendors made the right choice to deliver anything at all, in the early stages of ERP (even the first two decades).

None of that means the software is good: we can recognize the smart business choices those companies made and also abhor their products.

They provide what Alan Cooper calls "Dancing bearware" - it doesn't matter how badly the bear dances, they're just grateful to have a bear that can do it at all.

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

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

They are bad, and the crowd is dismissive.

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

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

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

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

I don't understand the disdain here in Woodworking News for Ikea furniture.

(Business success and the craft of software development, or of user interface design, and so forth, are related, but not the same thing.)

As an ERP consultant, I love when these discussions come up. It spreads more hatred for Oracle and SAP among the developer community and keeps my jobs safe.

See also:

"Lidl’s €500 Million SAP Debacle"

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Previous discussion:

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

Extensive discussion too.. 356 pts, 190 comments

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

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?

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

There is about software engineering yes, a myth that only the US can build great products

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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...

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

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.

No, sorry to burst your bubble but the SAP UX is bad and it is proven by all the people trying to build their own front ends on top of it.

No bubble to burst, SAPs UI sucks. As does any other ERP system I saw. I never disputed that, but that is actually not the point. And all those front ends I know don't cover the core functionalities of ERP system anyway.

The fact only UX, which is different from UI, was again adressed, and none of the other points I mentioned, kind of proofs my point.

The other points you mentioned weren't relevant to the UI or the UX. That's why no one's addressing them.

I get you have some knowledge here and so want to talk about it, but should do so in the knowledge that you're doing so in spite of its relevance, not because of it.

In a similar way if someone criticises the Amazon UI, coming in saying, "But no one's addressed my comments on how hard logistics and warehouse management are" would be a non sequitur.

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

> 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.

Spendesk?

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.

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.

> 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...

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!

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.

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.

"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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Concur = unmitigated trash

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

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

No CTO was ever fired for choosing:

SAP, JIRA, SalesForce, Oracle, ...

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Which says a lot about both of you.

Be constructive with your feedback, please!

I remember a similar link posted a while back.

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.

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.

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

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?

2022

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