Workday Financials is a meaningful competitor. I used SAP Concur at my last job and "horribly wicked thing" is accurate. It reminds me of that "evil UX" thing that was making the rounds a year or two ago.
The sad thing is that Concur used to be great. It was acquired by SAP and then "SAPified", now it's a nightmare. But it does /exactly/ what the bean counters want, which is to mindlessly and stupidly apply policies against business travelers who are just trying to get their job done.
Concur the software is OK though not great. What is distinctly often not OK is the mandatory fields that companies want, often arbitrary travel policies, and often needlessly nit-picky auditing. If putting in an expense report into Concur typically sailed through unless something was clearly wrong, missing reasonable documentation, or was significantly out of policy, Concur would mostly be fine.
Yup! A previous company starting using Concur (with a shitty, minimal effort setup) around 2011. It would push employees to book a train + bus to go from LA to Palo Alto because it was some % cheaper than a Southwest flight. Thankfully we still had p-cards and accounts payable didn't have a spine, so our department ended up ignoring Concur and booking travel directly on the carrier sites.
My firm started to dabble with Concur shortly before the pandemic. I think they presented it in some way where it was through a travel agency they contracted with.
They had evidently selected one approved hotel to demonstrate the process and never bothered to go further.
The hotel was some four-star facility 40km from the office and twice the price of the economy tourist-tier hotels 5km away (which also featured free wi-fi and breakfast). So the remote workers continued to stay at those hotels and had to waste effort poking the system to do an override.
Fortunately, they still did it as "pay with your own account and we'll reimburse you" so you weren't stuck waiting for someone to approve a "can I pretty please spend less money and avoid an extra two hours of travel time per day?" request.
At my prior job, we were trying to do marketing for a SAP consultancy firm, and it was just surreal trying to get a grasp on it. How will potential customers know they're ready for SAP, or ready for your services in particular? Where do you reach out to potential buyers? What sort of messaging are you trying to target? I never got anything resembling an answer. I think they basically just wanted us to write the HTML for the terrible email blasts they sent to their existing lead pool.
After a thought, I suspect there's a particular corner of the C*O universe that treats Gartner reports as some sort of Death Note: a supernatural document where once someone's name appears in it, their entire destiny and fate is fully programmed out. I think they pretty much believed they could ride being in the Magic Quadrant for Nasal Hair Removal Advisory Services in 2006 into golden retirement.
For me it's stupid audit stuff. The date entered as the transaction is a date sooner than it posted and stupid stuff like that. I've mostly trained myself but I still get stuff bounced for little things like that. I've mostly trained myself to follow all the nit-picky rules carefully but I still miss from time to time. As I say, it's mostly not Concur itself which usually warns you of missing fields/receipts.
For me the real pain was paying vendors or freelancers. They all had to be input as an additional vendor, which is reasonable, but there were dozens of fields within each vendor, many of which were esoteric in they're labeling (likely a fault of implementation on our side). Then I would get a rejection via email that a particular field wasn't filled out (why wasn't it a required field?), and it was often hard to find where to input that field -- very unintuitive. I think I even had to go through a company admin once to add an associated email address to a vendor.
Beyond that, just the philosophy of creating a "purchase order" to pay a UX researcher who did 10 hours of work over three months seemed goofy -- purchase order is what I think of when doing something like ordering printer paper, not getting an invoice paid.
> purchase order is what I think of when doing something like ordering printer paper, not getting an invoice paid
How can you pay an invoice for a service / item you haven’t purchased? If you buy a service from a supplier, you raise a po, you pay an invoice based on the po. As a supplier, I always ask for a po.
And there's often also an approved vendor process as well. Big companies are mostly not OK with just expensing some random new supplier.
And yeah, there's a lot of paperwork but maybe you're hiring this gal because she's your sister. Maybe she's really good. Or maybe you're just funneling some money to a family member. As companies scale up they need controls for a lot of things even if they're legit 95% of the time.
And, again, not a software issue. It's a perhaps necessary bigco process issue.
the funny thing about Concur is its origin was the internal expense reporting front end that Microsoft had built on top of their own SAP implementation.
Andrew Dent and Elena Donio were consultants on the internal MSFT SAP implementation. They took what they learned about building friendly procurement and expense reporting SAP front end apps to Concur.
I was responsible for a MS dynamics implementation at a public company. I would agree.
(This was also my motivation to start my own financial reporting startup: what if we designed a system in the year 2022 to be able to support big businesses without it being as awful as big business software.)
To be honest, i think that even if they offering overlaps with SAP R/3 or S/4HANA, they overlap at the lower end (500-5k employees) and not really at the top end (> 100k employees) where MS sits.
Furthermore, AFAIK Microsoft started using SAP well before they acquired Axapta.
MS uses Dynamics for a ton of internal processes, just not all of them. I suspect the SAP installation predates the existence of Dynamics as a product.
So that's what Dynamics is...thanks for that; I feel like I never hear about any ERP software other than SAP which I found weird, though not as weird as the fact that I've never met a developer at SAP, only implementation consultants...
