Newsletter June 2005

What is SAP CATS for?

SAP CATS is a cross application SAP component with different values. More precisely: the Cross-Application-Time-Sheet is a high flexible tool to transport time management data into different SAP modules to monetarily price them. The personnel input into products and services plays a considerable role in the calculation of costs, so that the measurement of the personnel factor is not only important but essential, because: „You can’t manage what you don’t measure“.


Figure 1

If you efficiently use the CATS module you can achieve a competitive advantage. Working hours from personnel time data are assigned to accounting objects according to the actual input involved and then priced with a rate from the Controlling module. The configuration is very flexible, thus making it possible to calculate different rates automatically, e.g. higher rats on weekends.

You can also directly invoice hours right after the data entry because of its high integration level with the finance module. This is especially interesting for organisations that charge for project work, maintenance and services, particularly service oriented companies. But you can put down make-to-order productions and custom productions to clients, too. Even if hours are not directly billable, it gives an important input to internal activity allocation or to the controlling of projects.

The data basis produced by CATS is also a considerable advantage for the future. Evaluating these data can help to forecast the effort needed for a future similar project or problem.

CATS can also be used in Personnel Administration to enter clock-in / clock-out data what saves time for administrators. That means CATS serves as an ESS scenario which has the same functional range including the necessary approval steps. Other personnel information like wage type information can be transferred to time management or payroll to be processed there.

Most organisations prefer an additional approval step for the entry of CATS time data regardless data is entered by each employee or central administrators. In our opinion there is a weak point in the design of CATS, because the standard process only provides the approval by the superior according to SAP Organisational Management. Many clients are not happy with this solution. They often ask for approval of the time data entered not only by the manager (per cost center) but also by the responsible person per cost object, e.g. the project leader.
Such scenarios can be implemented with the help of user exits provided by SAP CATS.

The authorization concept is close to the concept of the HR component, so that most of the requests can be fulfilled. Unfortunately the concept does not provide an authorization per cost object. It would be useful to have the possibility to assign employees to cost objects (e.g. WBS Elements). This is especially important considering the multiplicity of cost objects. Often there are more than 100.000 WBS Elements.

In addition to that, employees shall not have access to all available cost objects. Thus two aspects are neglected by CATS in the SAP standard solution: the danger of low data quality due to a high complexity (caused by the number and structure of cost objects) and the question of authorization.
For both weak points there have to be created a solution in your project. One possibility is to assign employees to cost objects in custom tables. CATS can refer to these tables for the list of available values in its entry mask. To minimize the effort of data entry additional programs can help with the assignment, for example mass assignment of employees to WBS Elements or mass delimitation of assignments.

In every CATS project you should also focus on a high usability of the user interface. Using different entry profiles you can implement many different scenarios. So every group of employees gets its own entry mask adequate to the group’s functions. Often there are more than one thousand employees per day or week entering their time data. Each employee must be able to learn how to use the tool by himself or via e-learning.

Figure 2 gives you an overview over the different entry scenarios of CATS.

Figure 2

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