This newsletter brings you tips and insights about SAP HCM CATS, HR authorisations in payments, ESS, MSS, UK payroll, SuccessFactors integration, Employee Search Help, and Concur Travel & Expense.

Breaking news:

Meet iProCon at the SAP UK and Ireland Usergroup conference in Birmingham next week at our stand S23 together with our partner PIKON. Join our UK director Sven Ringling and Jyoti Sharma from SuccessFactors specialist HRIZONS for a workshop on SuccessFactors employee central on Sunday, 4:30 pm (Level 3, Hall 6b)
Save the date: we’ll host our iProConference, a 2-days SAP HCM event with >25 sessions full with practical tips and actionable advice on 6th/7th May 2015 in London. Apart from on-premise HCM, we’ll also offer sessions about SuccessFactors and Concur. Watch this space for agenda information and early bird registration
iProCon is now a Platinum Advisor for Concur Travel & Expense. If you are interested in a modern cloud solution to streamline your expense processes, get in touch.

Tips on SAP HCM

Can finance users or HR from other subsidiaries see your salary in the DME?

The other day I’ve been asked to do an HR authorisations review / training for a mid-sized international company. As ever so often, this wasn’t a pro-active measure, but triggered by unpleasant incidents of HR users in one country seeing and even involuntarily changing data with impact on payroll in another country. Whenever I’m looking for a quick win in this kind of workshops, asking about rights for the data medium workbench often hits the first issue – particularly in a setup, where module specialists are not involved in authorisations.

ESS in Travel and Expense: Custom System Alias Creates Navigation Issue

If you are using the Launchpad in SAP Enterprise Portal for Employee Self Services, you usually copy the SAP standard Launchpad Role ESS (instance MENU). Then you probably amend, remove or add folders and apps to match your requirements. However, in most cases you’d leave the system alias on it’s out-of-the-box value SAP_ESS_HumanResources. In that case, you won’t experience this issue and navigation within travel management works fine. The problem starts, if you want to use a different system alias for some reason…

MSS Homepage: Team Hierarchy not displayed full size after upgrade to EHP7

Are you using the MSS Homepage and have you set up a custom component configuration for the team hierarchy (component HRMSS_TEAM_HIERARCHY)? In that case you may experience the problem that the team hierarchy isn’t displayed full size anymore after the upgrade to Enhancement Package 7.

New Option for Global Subsidiaries: Side-by-Side Integration for SAP HCM and SuccessFactors

Recently, quite a few SAP HCM customers preparing or running a global rollout for core HR (e.g. some personnel master data plus Organisational Management) told us they are confused about the new cloud based options and whether they should go ahead with global integration or wait and see, whether a corporate decision to move core HR onto SuccessFactors might be made. Either way, a delay in global integration of several years could easily result. The new integration option presented by SAP at the SAP Insider conference HR2014 in Nice could be a good way out and forward for those customers, who aim at the cloud for their long term solution anyway.

SAP CATS: Validating Captured Hours Against Plan in CO / PS

Standard CATS time sheets do offer a variety of options for validation such as checks against employees‘ working time or whether WBS elements or internal orders are open for posting. However, what’s missing for some customers is a check against the planned hours or cost in CO. The SAP design assumes these checks are only happening with the CO analytics tools after the hours have been transferred into CO (and possibly PS). Some customers prefer these checks to happen before the transfer or even when an employee is just capturing the hours in ESS.

HR CATS Data Entry Personnel Selection

The Personnel Selection view on the Time Sheet initial screen allows a user to identify which personnel records they are editing the Time Sheets for. However sometimes the information for the Personnel Selection view can be lacking – it can lead to mis-selections when Time Sheets are being used by centralised data capture, or team assistants. It may be helpful for them to include extra fields – for example, full name; or Cost Centre – to be sure they are selecting the correct records to update. Conversely, you may wish to hide fields that might cause confusion, such as Employee Group. Here’s how.

How to Amend the SAP HR Search Help for Employees PREM

The so called „collective search help PREM is used in most SAP HR transactions, where an individual employee needs to be selected. PREM comprises a number of search helps (e.g. by name, by organisational assignment, by SAP username,…) and some of them include the date of birth (DoB). Many customers don’t like this, because they consider the DoB to be sensitive information not to be shared with everybody, who happens to enter a personnel number into some field in the system. Learn more.

UK Payroll in SAP HR

Learn about payroll issues and solutions faster:

Payroll topics in particular are often rather urgent, so you may want to be alerted as soon as a blog post is published. Apart from following the blog on our website, one option to do this is to join our SAP Payroll UK Linkedin Group. It’s a dedicated group. Spammers and people with no real interest in UK payroll are kept out.

Reduce Manual Work for Mileage even under new Tax-Saving Ruling

A new ruling may offer your organisation and employees an opportunity to reduce NI contributions and taxes paid on car allowances. Clever use of SAP HR standard features and some configuration in the Travel&Expense and Payroll modules will allow you to make use of this opportunity without creating extra manual admin work.

Process Review for Payroll and HR Administration

We found that many SAP HR customers using payroll have been in survival mode in the last few years. Tight budgets, RTI and Pension Auto-Enrolment haven’t left much breathing space to make sure processes are efficient and safe. For those customers, who know or suspect that the way they use SAP in Payroll and Master Data is far from best practise, we offer review workshops as well as help with implementing results. We’d usually find quite a few points for improvement, e.g. in pensions or absence valuation, which often pay for themselves, such as:

Higher degree of automation in calculation
Identifying and reducing the number of cases, where pay data is calculated incorrectly
More user friendly handling of data capturing and payroll processes
Standardised testing procedures and tools for test automation for fast and low-risk upgrades and support packages
Effective reporting and reconciliation processes
Targeted training of SAP users, where gaps have sneaked in over time
ESS and MSS solutions to reduce HR workload and empower managers and employees
Transforming your SAP HCM system to look like a 21st century tool using the latest SAP User Interface technology (HR Renewal, UI5, Mobility)
Etc.

Get in touch, if you want to learn more about improving your SAP HCM based processes.

SAP HCM and HRIS Strategy

SAP acquiring Concur Travel and Expense: early thoughts and a SAP consultant’s Concur experience

When I heard about the SAP’s acquisition of Concur Technologies, it was like an old acquaintance crossing my path again after a few years and I was positively surprised. I knew Concur from a project a few years back and it was clear that this acquisition could have huge impact on all SAP customers using Travel&Expense or Concur. But let’s start at the beginning…

What’s Your SAP and Concur Integration Wishlist?

Obviously, we are all expecting improvements in integration between other SAP solutions and Concur. But what is on top of your SAP-Concur-Integration wish list? And what makes sense?

iProCon is now Platinum Advisor Partner for Concur

With a strong track record in SAP Travel and Expense as well as a history in Concur projects, becoming an advisory partner of Concur was a natural response for iProCon to the announcement that Concur will be integrated into the SAP family. How can we help you?

SAP HCM Insights Podcast: Fieldglass, Concur, and Certification

In this podcast Steve Bogner, Luke Marson, Sven Ringling and Mark Ingram talk about recent developments in the SAP and Successfactors area – including SAP’s acquisitions of Fieldglass and Concur, and the changes around consultant certification.

Side-by-Side Integration with SAP HCM and SuccessFactors for global subsidiaries

Selected Posts from the SCN (SAP Community Network)

SuccessFactors Employee Central Organisational Structure explained. Interesting nugget for those new to EC: as opposed to the generic concept of „organisational units“ in SAP HCM, you can actually define what type each orgunit is (e.g. a department, team, division,…)
Discussion about an old topic: when do entry and leaving dates work in SAP Query or adHoc Query? It seems many people still find the truth difficult to believe ;-)
Standard UI5 applications in ESS and MSS
Release highlights for SuccessFactors – SAP HCM integration
User events in HCM Processes and Forms

Events for SAP HCM

SAP UK and Ireland Usergroup Conference

When: 23rd November – 25th November 2014
Where: Birmingham
Agenda and further infos
Where to find iProCon: stand S23 in a shared stand together with our partner PIKON
iProCon workshop „Implementing SuccessFactors Employee Central: Decision Making, Business Drivers, Challenges, Benefits and Lessons Learned“ on Sunday at 4:30pm
Visit us at our stand to:
- Discuss your SAP HCM roadmap including cloud solutions like SuccessFactors and Concur
- Ask any particular questions you may have from HR authorisations to Learning Solution to ESS/MSS or international rollouts
- Talk about your options to streamline your Payroll processes while reducing risk
- See some of our latest clever gadgets like a custom mobile app for line managers to answer at a glance „what is everybody in my team up to today?“ or a simple payroll tool to create as-if simulations with payslips showing the impact of changes like reducing working time without making any actual data changes.

iProConference SAP HCM 2015

When: 6th/7th May 2015
Where: London, Hilton Hotel Docklands
What: 25+ sessions about SAP HCM including SuccessFactors and Concur
Who: Customer speakers, iProCon Consultants and experts from partners
If you are interested and want to be updated, when registration opens, just get in touch.

SAP Insider HR conferences 2014

We have been speaking at this year’s events in Nice (France) and Singapore with 3 and 5 sessions respectively. Here are the topics of our sessions in Singapore and Nice. Please get in touch, if you want to discuss any of these topics.
A few trends from both events:
- SAP’s focus is very much on cloud solutions. Many customers miss new features, but even more so, new information on their on-premise solutions. Particularly in Singapore, we found that delegates where very keen on fundamental advice for their traditional SAP HR systems in basic, but crucial topics like Organisational Management, Enterprise structure or maintenance strategy.
- There are still a lot of improvements in SAP HCM on-premise, but they focus very much on „user experience“, i.e. user interfaces.
- There are big differences in cloud readiness and interest in cloud solutions between organisations and also between countries, but as a rule of thumb, organisations in Europe as well as in the Asia-Pacific region are less prepared than American organisations to jump into the cloud quickly and leave a well customized on-premise system behind, without a very clear business case and clarity about the available processes.

News from iProCon

iProCon is now a Concur Platinum Advisor

New Linkedin Group for SAP and Concur integration

We recently created a group on Linkedin to discuss integration between SAP and Concur and for the two communities to mingle. The group has already attracted a variety of SAP and Concur experts. If you are interested in Concur, you can join here.

iProCon SAP HCM Newsletter Autumn 2014

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