Today we’ll talk about you, business. You’ve already purchased the most expensive calculator in the world named SAP. Why SAP – it was your decision. Why calculator – you’ve never used it another way. I’m 100% confident you don’t use most of the SAP HCM benefits, and in 99% you even don’t know of them. You’re not curious enough, your consulting company was not experienced enough – it doesn’t matter. Here we have the result – calculator, not even MS Excel. Below I’ll tell you some functionality businesses all over the world usually don’t utilize and then lose money, confidence, the pace of changes today in the digital world. I intentionally don’t take into account so-called extended functionality like talent management, recruiting, performance management, learning solutions. Business usually pays attention to the face, frontend, interfaces than to the logic, extensibility, integration, and reporting. They don’t like SAP interfaces which were before SuccessFactors. They buy other solutions, pay much money for integration and support and blame poor SAP for all their bad.
Want to notice everything being said below is free of charge, is not licensed, you’ve already paid for this. All you need is to implement and use these SAP HCM features.
Personnel cost planning
From my point of view, is the most labor-intensive process, which takes a good piece of time in large companies. Budget campaigns make take months with huge variations like “what if” inquiries. Doing this or that way, drilling down, screwing up all day long. I understand the process is heavy and complicated but not that much you wouldn’t be able to write down some math and use system provided figures in fine-tuning, not in a foundation. The system can do, I’m positive, routine for you.
Administrative processes
Or Process & Forms. Perfect and flexible tool to visualize HR processes, which involve more than one participant (approver or just somebody needs to stay informed). We’ve moved all HR personnel administration processes to P&F in one company. Everything was web-based and good looking. Double data verification principle, timely communication to all interested in departments, several departments involved in the approval processes. Everyone was happy, just happy! Once I’ve seen outstanding implementation, where they used P&F to create job positions. A manager was an initiator who started a process with position description, money, requirements. Then other departments added their info like certification, work condition, reporting features, etc. Once everybody added information and big bosses have approved new position it appears in HCM. Absolutely transparent process with all communications setup and participants involved in a decision making.
Correspondence in SAP HCM Benefits management module
A lot of companies use benefits functionality either for insurance plan list or taxation. Very rarely we use this functionality as a service for our employees when an employee can choose benefits within policies and eligibility. Even more rarely companies use SAP to communicate benefit policies, changes, contact data to employees. It’s that simple to set up SAP to send brochures to the employee once he or she is eligible or has chosen a plan. Why not allow the system to notify employees to enroll, adjust or whatever do with their benefits? Why not send all benefits data to providers through EDI but plain files. We persistently use the system as a large calculator and do not want to negotiate with the outside world for the transition to an electronic workflow.
Payroll Period Close Solution
The most painful topic for HR users and consultants is a payroll cockpit: PUST ? Payroll Control Center. 99% consultants don’t know and even don’t want to know about payroll close process automation. It’s that easy to setup and such beneficial for the end users, that looks really stupid when we obey users to run all these strange transactions one by one with almost same parameters. The end user wants a large green button to start a rocket into space. And PUST could be set up in a day max. But no, we’d better run preDME programs with mistakenly wrong params, lose employees in bank files and blaming SAP for that.
SAP Analityc reporting
BW/BI reporting is the most painful topic on the projects. Everbody needs predefined ad-hoc reports and the very few uses OLAP cubes to get the same info in different dimensions. For the same funds, comparisons, one-time reports. What stops you from automatic pushing already calculated payroll to BW system, building predefined reports with all deviations and getting that in your inbox in 5 minutes after you’ve brought a cup of coffee for yourself? Error fixing and data investigation time would be reduced dramatically. Much less if you’re on HANA. BW/BI/BO can run PDF, XLS, interactive reports for you, send them to emails with any analytics you want, any recipients, any schedule. Just ask your BW team and you’ll be surprised how these complicated and complex routines could be done in Analytics tools, which is free for you. Do not do a dozen of reports to combine, match and make errors while manipulating data in MS Excel. Do you know that performance bonuses could be easily calculated in BW and retracted back to SAP HCM infotype 0015? Just in a click for you – end and key-user.
Workflow
Is a huge and I’d say absolutely unknown topic for 99% of HCM implementations. Everywhere we have more than 1 person involved in a process we could use SAP workflows. It’s just developed for this. Even send several emails to different departments with different content is an easy job for Workflow. Everywhere you need approval, comments, informing you’d better thought how to utilize workflows as the most flexible configuration tool in SAP. Even incoming employee inquires could be taken by workflow from Enterprise Portal or email and directed to the right person with real-time status for any participant. This is the right way to automate and make your business processes manageable.
Travel management
It is made of travel policies, advances, credit cards clearing, approvals, travel requests, tight integration with time management and General Ledger, and it’s all free of charge. Including Mobile apps in Fiori. And 90% of you don’t use it as a travel management solution, but for taxation.
I’d understand if SAP has stopped supporting these things, functionality, But they continue to support and didn’t tell the world they gonna stop it very soon. Take everything out of the system and the investments you’ve already made, ladies and gentlemen, will pay off. Don’t know how or where to look – ask me, it’s usually free.