In this morning’s discussion, we focus on how ESS 2.0 drives significant cost savings relating to a unified portal implementation and associated development, deployment and on-going maintenance.
SAP® Human Capital Management (HCM) and Microsoft® Office SharePoint® 2007 are industry standard enterprise software solutions that have been deployed in a broad range of companies worldwide. The integration of the two represents an ideal solution for self-service HCM applications. SharePoint, even given a relatively late start in the enterprise software market, is quickly becoming the de-facto industry standard for portal and collaborative solutions, especially for managing unstructured data (documents, images, etc.). As the requirement and benefit of managing and presenting unstructured data alongside structured information and business processes becomes more apparent, many companies are considering how to integrate information that resides in their line of business applications in unstructured, collaborative scenarios. Forward-looking organizations are evaluating a deeper level of integration, which enables reading and writing critical information and processes between the SharePoint user experience and their back-end Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and HCM environments.
In today’s economic climate, business and technical decision makers are also under more pressure than ever before to deliver value quickly. At the same time, these organizations cannot afford to compromise productivity and efficiency. Integrating SharePoint and SAP HCM presents a unique opportunity for a high visibility, low-cost success that improves employee productivity and creates measurable efficiency benefits, if delivered quickly on an accelerated development timeline.
How do you deliver productivity and efficiency while optimizing for the best overall return on investment and the lowest possible total cost of ownership? Do you build the solution by hiring and/or leveraging the skills and resources of your information technology team or do you leverage well-supported, off-the-shelf solutions to meet the needs of your enterprise. This blog posting is intended for business decision makers considering sponsoring a SharePoint/SAP self-service integration project.
User Experience – Ease of Use Critical
Strong user acceptance is a prime objective when maximizing the return on investment of a production self-service application. In many instances, poor usability prevents the wide adoption of these solutions and becomes a major roadblock to realizing the full potential business value of self-service solutions. In most cases, the alternative of relying on a shared services center (onshore or offshore) to provide the necessary manual data entry, reporting and updating of essential business data is an extremely expensive option.
The right answer for many organizations is to leverage a single portal environment, with contextual information and processes integrated with back-end SAP systems, to preserve existing governance, workflow and security.
Build vs. Buy – Be Prepared!
Given this goal, the next decision is whether to build or purchase this solution. ERP integration projects are generally known to be complex and expensive. Decision makers, no doubt, weigh the build versus buy decision carefully, evaluating potential minefields, including staff experience required and unforeseen integration challenges. Whether the decision is to build or buy, the resulting integrated application will contain significant amounts of new software. In spite of useful features provided by both SAP and Microsoft, integration remains a significant software engineering project resulting in custom or non-standard code that needs to be maintained for the lifespan of the created solution.
Who is going to do the work? This is a real challenge and one of the most significant factors to consider if you are going to staff an integration project. There are a lot of moving parts, many of which are new in the market, and not a lot of people have mastered all of the skills at this time. Required skill sets include .NET programming, SharePoint configuration management, and custom ABAP™ coding and customization experience. Additionally, one must account for the program and product management skills necessary to manage the usability specifications and overall project schedule to ensure the right product is built for the right employee and delivered at the right time.
Application Maintenance – Staying Current and Enhancements
Finally, the resulting solution must be maintained…this means keeping the solution working as SAP and Microsoft update their products and as your business priorities change. These steps include getting early access to future releases of SAP and Microsoft products, having a change management process and expensive technical staff available to keep your solution working at the level of reliability and availability required by your workforce. Supporting an in-house solution means establishing a support policy while implementing various quality assurance programs such as bug reporting mechanisms and hot fix escalation processes. Consideration should also to be given to product feature request prioritization and managing product roadmap plans, as well as the overall staffing requirements for these aforementioned programs. Finally, managing upgrades of internally developed solutions are very difficult in terms of managing the custom code integration with enterprise software upgrade releases.
Careful how you tackle building your own ESS/MSS Solution
In summary, organizations who are considering doing this should realize they are embarking on a non-trivial software engineering initiative. Resources and time used to develop ‘bolt-on quick and dirty solutions’ are not necessarily strategic differentiators for a company outside of the software industry and, therefore, may not be optimally applied to this project. Generally, internal software development resources should be directed toward strategic initiatives that build important competitive differentiation within the customer’s market. An alternative approach is to leverage an off-the-shelf solution to realize business value more quickly and avoid committing to long-term maintenance and support obligations for internal solutions.
Netting it out… ESS 2.0 Development Savings
The combination of SAP® ERP/HCM and Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server Line of Business applications has the potential to transform and unify a workforce by integrating - in a single portal - key corporate business processes (structured data) with relevant and process/role-driven unstructured content. The business value associated with unifying unstructured, contextually rich and role driven information with line of business operationally structured data results in a rapid-fire return on investment (ROI). As we have been discussing in this blog series on HCM Self Service Business Value, the ROI is measured by the significant productivity gains in terms of development savings as outlined in the following table. Additionally, a significant by-product of leveraging ESS 2.0 is the opportunity to redirect developer resources toward strategic initiatives (instead of “home spun” self-service applications).
ESS 2.0 provides numerous enhancements for developers and business analysts
THE BOTTOM LINE… The option to leverage an off-the-shelf solution significantly accelerates business value while avoiding the commitment to long-term maintenance and support obligations for internal solutions. So with this information we can now model estimated development, deployment and maintenance savings by comparing ESS 1.0 with ESS 2.0 ABC Corporation since we have the necessary inputs including variables such as total number of forms, the number of countries involved in the deployment, the costs for support professionals and the costs for in-house / third party developers. In terms of development and deployment savings for employee and manager self service applications at ABC Corporation, we can conservatively estimate $800K savings over the initial 3 year deployment period for ABC Corporation associated with ESS 2.0 self service delivery for HCM.
This afternoon “Wrapping it All Up – How ESS 2.0 Drives Significant Business Value”
