Newsletter May 2006

Improve usability and quality within your SAP HR application

Part II: process automation and reporting

Under the pressure of tight schedules and budgets many SAP HR implementation projects end up with a system that works somehow and in most cases produces the correct payroll results … for the moment. However, most projects fail to provide an application that supports its users in the best possible way to ensure high quality of everyday processes, let alone procedures to support quality management for future changes, such as support packages, upgrades or new functional requirements.
In this article we want to give you some ideas to include into your own quality initiative. Similar measures have been implemented by the experts of AdManus in various projects and have proved to be highly beneficial.

1. Process automation

Where processes can be standardized to a certain degree, their quality will generally be higher, if the HR system actively supports the process flow. This might require a stronger commitment to standardized processes than your organization has shown in the past. In most cases however, this slight pressure from the IT-side towards standardization of administrative activities has proved healthy rather than restrictive. The good news is that such measures do not only improve quality but also efficiency. We want to show you some of the options you have:

• The most obvious technology here is workflow. SAP offers many preconfigured templates that represent the flow of tasks and information for business processes such as leave requests or the approval of budgets. Workflow (or Webflow) can be used within the R/3 or ECC as well as in portal applications. It is certainly a powerful tool to guarantee that the process flow reaches the employees, who are supposed to work with it. This is particularly true, if there are many possible persons who could perform a certain task. In this case the person available first can grab the task out of a common pool.
• We cannot go into details about workflow here as this would mean to write a book. But to smooth up your processes, it is worth considering this tool. First of all check, whether there is a workflow template from SAP you can use – otherwise a workflow expert can build a custom one from scratch.
• However, adapting SAP templates or building new workflows can be a large effort. There are other options we want to discuss in the following paragraphs.
• You probably know the concept of personnel actions to perform processes like hiring or retirement. They basically represent a number of infotypes to be processed in a predefined order. However, many companies do not fully use this concept.
  • It is possible to define variations of personnel actions. The customizing of the so called infogroup defines which infotypes are processed in which order. This can be configured flexible so that different infotypes are processed depending on
    • Some organizational characteristics of the employee to be processed (defined via the feature IGMOD)
    • The HR User group of the user performing the action (user parameter UGR)

    Accordingly, you can have one set of infotypes when hiring a white collar employee and another one when hiring a shop floor worker.
    We generally recommend using the first way to control the set of infotypes. If it is strictly defined which users are allowed to maintain data for which types of employees, the second alternative may be applicable too.

  • Actions are generally saved in infotype 0000. However, this infotype doesn’t allow to safe two actions at the same day. That’s why SAP introduced infotype 0302 (“additional actions”). All actions that do not change the status of an employee can be kept in this infotype.
    There is no difference in how the actions are performed. The customizing of actions determines which actions can be saved in infotype 0302. Many organizations have not yet activated this new infotype and loose some information when working with personnel actions. Note that this concept unfortunately is not available for applicant data (infotype 4000).
  • If infotype 0302 is used, it is a common mistake to use infotype 0000 only when reporting on actions, thus ignoring those actions that are saved in infotype 302 only. To have one point to get all actions from in queries or custom reports, we recommend to safe all actions in infotype 302 – and to save those who change a status additionally in infotype 0000. This makes reporting much easier, as you can get all data except the status from one source.
  • Some organizations never have had a redesign of their personnel actions. Make sure to check with the users that the actions contain exactly the infotypes that are required and that the menu of personnel actions (transaction PA40) contains exactly the actions required and that they are properly labeled.
• Dynamic actions are an even more flexible concept. They can perform a certain action depending on the data just maintained in an infotype. This concept is extensively used for applicant data but also in employee data. Here are some examples and issues to observe:
  • Depending on the content of a certain field, a new infotype can pop up. E.g.: if infotype 0007 is saved with the flag for time recording set, infotype 0050 is automatically performed to maintain the time recording ID number.
  • When a new infotype pops up as described above, some fields can have default values depending on the values of particular fields of infotype 0001 or the infotype just saved.
  • A function with custom ABAP coding can be performed.
  • An e-mail can be generated from the data maintained in an infotype. E.g.: if a person is hired, an e-mail to announce this can be sent to the technical department so that they know they must provide a telephone and e-mail address.
  • The e-mail function is particularly interesting. Usually there are many persons that have to be informed if certain personnel data changes occur. If your HR system is configured to send e-mails to other systems (such as MS Exchange / Outlook or Lotus Notes) this can safe you a lot of work and guarantee proper information.
    We recommend, maintaining no personal e-mail addresses in your customizing of dynamic actions but distribution lists (even if they contain just one address). This is much more flexible because these lists are easier to change than the customizing in tables and features.
  • In most cases it is no problem to send e-mails from your HR system to the outside world. With release 4.7 SAP supports the SMTP protocol, in earlier versions you need to install a special connector (please contact us if you want us to refer you to an expert in this field).
  • When using the mail function within your SAP system, you can even attach an infotype to be processed to the message. E.g.: the personnel officer performs a hiring action and when infotype 0007 is maintained, a message to maintain infotype 0050 accordingly is sent to the time administrator. The time administrator only has to click on the respective button in his message to have infotype 0050 popping up.
• Other automated e-mails
  • The e-mail function of dynamic actions has some restrictions:
    • You cannot easily influence when the e-mail is sent. It is generated just in the moment the respective infotype is saved. As some data is maintained far into the future, this is not always convenient.
    • Messages can only be generated based on infotypes, but not on other data such as errors in time evaluation or travel data.
    • The content is restricted to fixed texts and some variables from the infotype just maintained and organizational data.
  • One alternative is to use workflow to generate e-mails. This is more flexible, bust may sometimes be difficult to configure and much effort for small effects.
  • Another alternative may seem to cause even more effort at first sight but in reality proved to be very efficient, if used reasonably: It is possible to create a custom report that generates e-mails based on various kinds of data such as:
    • Errors in time management
    • Special dates such as birthdays or anniversaries
    • Business trips
    • Deadlines from infotype 0019 (“monitoring of tasks”)
    • Etc.

    A straightforward scenario can be implemented in as little as one or two days and provide a reasonable return on investment through time savings and higher quality of information processes. If there are many standardized e-mails sent manually by your HR staff, it may be worth asking your IT department or consultants for a custom solution to generate them automatically, if dynamic actions don’t suit your requirements.

• Other examples of process automation we will not discuss deeper here are:
  • Job management to guarantee that individual reports of sequences of reports run in the background at predefined times or at predefined events. In many organizations, the definition of these jobs and particularly their monitoring could do with a redesign.
  • The HR process workbench is designed to define and control the process of the payroll run and all other reports involved in it.
    
    (Click on this thumbnail picture to see a full picture in a new window)
  • And many more…

2. Effective reporting

• When people talk about quality in an IT system, the focus is mostly on the input of data. While it is certainly true that poor quality of reporting is mostly due to poor data quality (following the well known “scrap in – scrap out” principle), the proper use or reports is also an issue.
• Typical problems occurring in the usage of standard or custom reports in HR are:
  • Users choose the wrong report or do not find the report they need, because they can freely select reports from the complete SAP menu or – even worth – via transaction SA38. It is strongly recommended to define clearly which reports should be used for which purpose and to include only these reports in the user menu. Transaction SA38 mustn’t be accessible for functional users.
  • Many users do not know how to use and create variants. However, using variants is a very important means to make sure that lists distributed on a regular basis are created in the same way every time.
  • Only few users fully exploit the possibilities of variants. When saving the variants (see picture) you can
    • Include variables – especially for dates
    • Make sure that a particular field no value is saved
    • Make a field mandatory
    • …

    

  • Some users do not even know that each report has got a documentation. It can be accessed via the “i” – button: . Make sure that custom reports provide reasonable documentation for the users.
  • Generally, users are not properly trained in the usage of reports. The selection screen, the content, and working with the output list are areas where a few hours of training will pay off quickly.
• This last point is particularly true for the Query. However, in most cases it’s not only the functional side but also the IT department that doesn’t know much about it. Some companies do not use it at all, because its possibilities are undervalued. In this article, we only ask you to consider this instrument to give your users a flexible reporting tool which also can help them to check the quality of the data maintained. As it is not possible to get any deeper into the subject here, we want to mention some major points here, we consider worth further thoughts:
  • Queries are based on infosets. Make sure these exactly match the requirements and do not contain unnecessary or poorly labeled fields.
  • Decide on what should be done in the development system. We recommend building the infosets there while the queries themselves may be done by the users in the production system.
  • As of release 4.7 you can maintain a documentation for queries. Do this for any query which is not used temporarily only.

  …to be continued

• We now covered some of the most important aspects of quality management in an HR system. But two crucial elements are still missing: testing procedures and the aspects that are dealt with outside the system itself - such as documentation, checklists and naming conventions. In the end you will be able to build a complete Internal Control System and your auditors will be delighted.
• If you want our experts to help you with any issues concerning quality and usability, internal control system, contact us via e-mail: kontakt@iprocon.com

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