Topaz Bridge Blog

September 10, 2009
Wrapping it Up: Driving Business Value by Leveraging “ESS 2.0″ (Part 7 of 7)
 In our final installment, I will summarize our findings and present a total comprehensive view of the ABC Corporation’s three year total cost of ownership model comparing ESS 1.0 to ESS 2.0, the associated net present value of those dollar savings, and a review of the cumulative annual ROI associated with deploying a unified portal that leverages ESS 2.0 HCM Self Service delivery.

Unlocking Employee & Manager (ESS/MSS) Productivity with ESS 2.0
In our second blog posting, I showed how to calculate the total transactions and ultimate productivity gains leveraging some example variables such as time savings associated with various transaction types; frequency of example transactions; estimated average salary and overhead for the majority of our employees. With our total ESS transactions for ABC Company running close to 3.5M transactions per year I estimated the time savings and then mapped the time savings to the average cost per employee. In terms of employee productivity alone a conservative estimate of nearly $1M per year in savings for ABC Corporation may be associated with ESS 2.0 oriented self service delivery for HCM.

The third blog posting dealt with estimated manager savings and again using example variables such as time savings associated with various transaction types; frequency of example transactions; estimated average salary and overhead for the majority of our managers – I was able to derive ESS 2.0 manager savings. In terms of manager productivity alone an estimate of nearly $2M per year in savings for ABC Corporation may be realized with ESS 2.0 oriented self service delivery for HCM.

As illustrated in figure 1, over $9M in three year total savings exists between an ESS 1.0 and an ESS 2.0 deployment.

Figure 1 Total Three Year ESS 2.0 (Employee & Manager) Productivity Savings Estimates $9,092,534

Figure 1 Total Three Year ESS 2.0 (Employee & Manager) Productivity Savings Estimates $9,092,534

Saving Shared Services Support Costs with ESS 2.0
In blog posting #4, I estimated shared service savings associated with ESS/MSS transactions at ABC Corporation leveraging variables such as # of employees – 30K; time associated with various transaction types; frequency of example transactions; estimated average salary and overhead for the majority of our employees; estimated average salary and overhead for the support personnel; and percentages of transactions requiring support in the ESS 1.0 environment as compared to the ESS 2.0 environment. In terms of shared services savings for employee and manager self service transaction of all frequencies, just over $1.7M per year in estimated savings for ABC Corporation may be realized with ESS 2.0 self service delivery for HCM.

Figure 2 Total Three Year ESS 2.0 Shared Services Savings Estimates $5,354,648

Figure 2 Total Three Year ESS 2.0 Shared Services Savings Estimates $5,354,648

End User Training with ESS 2.0
Now in blog posting #5, I modeled training savings associated with ESS/MSS transactions at ABC Corporation using variables such as estimated average salary and overhead for training personnel; and percentages of transactions requiring training in the ESS 1.0 environment as compared to the ESS 2.0 environment).  In terms of training savings for employee and manager self service transaction of all frequencies, the conservative estimate is over $1.1M per year in savings (or $3.4M for total of 3 years - see figure 3) for ABC Corporation associated with ESS 2.0 self service delivery for HCM.

Figure 3 Total Three Year ESS 2.0 Training Savings Estimate $3,484,440

Figure 3 Total Three Year ESS 2.0 Training Savings Estimate $3,484,440

Realizing Developer and Deployment Savings with ESS 2.0
As discussed, 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.  Modeling this information using development metrics such as total number of forms, the number of countries involved in the deployment, the costs for in-house and third party developers and support professionals, conservative estimates of nearly $1M worth of savings over the initial three year deployment period for ABC Corporation may be realized with ESS 2.0 self service delivery for HCM.

igure 4 Total Three Year ESS 2.0 Development, Deployment & Support Savings Estimate $1,385,721

Figure 4 Total Three Year ESS 2.0 Development, Deployment & Support Savings Estimate $1,385,721

 
Netting it out… ESS 2.0 Drives Business Value Now!
Figure 5 illustrates that ABC Corporation will be able to recoup their investment in less than 6 months based on these gains and savings.  
Figure 5 ESS 2.0 Cumulative Return on Investment for ABC Corporation

Figure 5 ESS 2.0 Cumulative Return on Investment for ABC Corporation

Additionally, the total ESS 1.0 three year total cost of ownership for ABC Corporation is $72,719,186 as compared to the total ESS 2.0 three year total cost of ownership $53,401,843 representing a net three year savings of $19,317,343 minus the initial software license investment and year 2/3 maintenance or $2,737,500.  The total net present value of ESS 2.0 three year savings is $13,652,294 using an annual NPV discount of 10%. 
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 in terms of 3 year TCO savings 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 I have been discussing in this blog series on HCM Self Service Business Value, the ROI is measured by the significant productivity gains and cost savings in terms of employee/manager productivity, shared services savings, training, deployment and development savings.  For a final illustration of this three year total cost of savings please note the following graphic generated using the Topaz Bridge Value Calculator (see Figure 6 below).  Please note the net annual savings, the various components of TCO and the initial investment figures.  For further information about how we can help model your business value for ESS/MSS Self Service delivery, just ping me at jim.ofarrell@topazbridge.com.
Figure 6 Topaz Bridge Interactive ESS 2.0 Business Value Calculator

Figure 6 Topaz Bridge Interactive ESS 2.0 Business Value Calculator

 

 


Filed under: Business transformation, Configuration, Self-service — Tags: , , , , , , , , —

james.ofarrell@topazbridge.com @ 1:35 pm

Realizing Developer and Deployment Savings with ESS 2.0 (Part 6 of 7)

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

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”



Filed under: Business transformation, Configuration, Self-service — Tags: , , , , , , , —

james.ofarrell@topazbridge.com @ 7:17 am

September 9, 2009
End User Training with ESS 2.0 (Part 5 of 7)

In this afternoon’s discussion, we focus on how ESS 2.0 drives significant cost savings relating to employee self-service application training.

Training – Manual vs. ESS 1.0 vs. ESS 2.0
Training – Usability… The more you have of usability, the less you need of training. As previously discussed, ESS 2.0 sets a new bar for self service usability, and thus significantly reduces training costs associated with application use. So, let’s now take a longer look at the costs associated with self-service application training and again as we have done in previous postings we’ll look at this from a ‘bottoms-up’ approach starting with thinking about the specific approaches to ‘learning to use’ an application from a knowledge worker perspective (e.g. employee or manager- deskbound).

Options for training range from traditional ‘classroom’ training, to online training approaches and now with ESS 2.0 ‘in-process’ training. Industry figures for typical IT classroom instructor led training peg the cost per seat at $500 per day (equipment, training hour pay, classroom lease, curriculum development). Advantages of the classroom training experience are spontaneous question and answer, careful instruction on the ‘how to’, controlled testing and evaluation of progress while the disadvantages include time away from work, costs, and something many times overlooked – knowledge retention. Knowledge retention tends to quickly evaporate once the user returns to the normal work environment especially for tasks that are completed on an irregular basis (think back to previous posts about medium and low frequency ESS/MSS transactions).

With the advent of the Internet and ESS 1.0, eLearning quickly took shape as the next generation of training where users could remain at their desks and run online training applications consisting of a multimedia course experience and various forms of online testing to ensure the knowledge was obtained. Advantages of online training include ‘in-time’ learning, lower costs per training module, repeat training (can rerun the training module at their convenience) while the key disadvantage is that this training normally occurs “out of process”. Think about this for a minute, the user needs to locate the specific training application, start it up, register, locate the specific module in question, run the training, shut the application down, then fire up the application, and execute the business process.

Now ESS2.0 takes training to a new level of usability by incorporating the notion of ‘in-process’ training. Instead of having to ‘fire up’ a separate learning module or register for ‘classroom’ training, the user would simply be ‘in process’ or for example, in the employee promotion business application/process and simply click on the training video that directly relates to ‘how to do this process’. There also could be updated corporate policy information about the process ‘embedded’ in the specific process. Or ‘first timer’ information… Or frequently asked questions – FAQs on the particular topic at hand. And with the ESS 2.0 environment, the help, video, FAQ’s and knowledgebase information are all easily manageable by the HR department analyst. There is no requirement for IT development or quality assurance staffing to maintain or update the ‘in-process’ training.

So how can we monetize this benefit? From a training perspective, this transaction takes on a couple of unique characteristics in addition to the previous discussion like the frequency of the transaction (e.g. hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually); the complexity of the transaction (e.g. time approval vs. pay increase approval; system processing such as read/write data - workflow); and the involvement of other employees and associated salaries/overhead, in the transaction (e.g. managers, employees, HR analysts, developers, support personnel). The additional critical characteristics here would be comparing the ‘in-time (ESS 1.0)’ training time vs. the ‘in-process (ESS 2.0)’ training time and the relative costs associated with each (e.g. online course development vs. quick ‘YouTube’ style training videos).

Again, to help our understanding of the business value of HCM self service delivery, we’ll continue to use our example, ABC Corporation, a fictitious 30,000 person organization that we refer to throughout our mini-series here on “Driving Business Value”. In the case of ABC Corporation, we have 26K employees and 4K managers that make up the workforce. To help us get a handle on how ESS 2.0 helps to mitigate training costs we will take a look at transaction frequency by modeling high, medium and low frequency employee/manager self service transactions and the comparative training times associated with each.

So let’s focus on the employee self service side of the training equation and zero in on a high frequency employee transaction, say ‘time entry’, which is a process executed by employees on a nearly daily basis. In the 2.0 world, the corporate portal is up on the employee desktop all day and that employee remains signed in to the system throughout the work day. Each and every day – the employee can quickly click on the time entry app, enter the time and cost centers for their activities without logging into completely separate systems to accomplish the task. Corporate Time Entry policies can be immediately posted to this screen making quick dissemination of new information easy, accurate and very targeted to the specific employee use case.

Now compare this to the ‘1.0 World’ and you can immediately see that by having to deal with separate systems, log ins, and processes, while considering the potential issues that you incur in dealing with these complexities and therefore the need for additional training, you can rationalize the fact that with ESS 2.0 you would experience significantly less time (e.g. 50% reduction of ESS 2.0 transaction training time) requiring training as you would experience in an ESS 1.0 environment.

The Bottom Line?

So with this information we can now model estimated training savings associated with ESS/MSS transactions at ABC Corporation since we have the necessary inputs to calculate total transactions and percentages of said transactions requiring support (e.g. # of employees – 30K; time associated with various transaction types; frequency of example transactions; estimated average salary and overhead for the majority of our employees; estimated average salary and overhead for the support personnel; and percentages of transactions requiring training in the ESS 1.0 environment as compared to the ESS 2.0 environment). In terms of training savings for employee and manager self service transaction of all frequencies, we can conservatively estimate over $1.1M per year in savings for ABC Corporation associated with ESS 2.0 self service delivery for HCM.

Tomorrow morning “How ESS 2.0 Drives Significant Savings in Employee and Manager Self Service Development, Deployment and On-going Maintenance”



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james.ofarrell@topazbridge.com @ 3:38 pm

September 8, 2009
Unlocking Manager Productivity with ESS 2.0 (Part 3 of 7)

In this morning’s discussion, we focused on how employee self service drives significant productivity gains from a bottoms up perspective. Now with our afternoon session we will take a look at how manager self service delivers similar levels of productivity gains.

Manager Productivity – Manual vs. ESS 1.0 vs. ESS 2.0
As mentioned previously, to get a handle on self service productivity, we take a look at the issue from a ‘bottoms-up’ approach starting with thinking about the specific business processes or transactions that a manager would initiate and complete. This transaction can take on a few characteristics like the frequency of the transaction (e.g. hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually); the complexity of the transaction (e.g. time approval vs. pay increase approval; system processing such as read/write data - workflow); and the involvement of other employees and associated salaries/overhead, in the transaction (e.g. managers, employees, HR analysts, developers, support personnel).

To further help our understanding of the business value of HCM self service delivery, we’ll continue to use our example, ABC Corporation, a fictitious 30,000 person organization that we refer to throughout our mini-series here on “Driving Business Value”. In the case of ABC Corporation, we have 26K employees and 4K managers that make up the workforce. To help us get a handle on how ESS 2.0 helps to drive manager productivity we will take a look at transaction frequency by modeling high, medium and low frequency transactions.

Before we get started, an important word about manager approval delegation – the issue is this –> many managers find the process of approving time, or promoting an employee an onerous task in the manual or ESS 1.0 environment. Often times, these managers will delegate the responsibility for completing said tasks to their department’s administrators. With the advent of Sarbanes-Oxley this becomes an issue as SARBOX corporate compliance requires managers to adhere to strict policies as it relates to employee management. Managers are caught between SARBOX compliance, getting their work complete and spending more time than necessary in managing routine tasks such as approving time, promoting employees or managing annual benefits program enrollment. ESS 2.0 frees managers from this monotony by making these tasks quick, intuitive and extensively supported from a online help documentation perspective.

So let’s look at a high frequency manager transaction, say ‘time approval’, which is a process executed by managers on a nearly daily basis. In the 2.0 world, the corporate portal is up on the manager desktop all day and that manager remains signed in to the system throughout the work day. Each and every day – the manager can quickly click on the time entry approval app, review the time entered by the employees and cost centers for their activities without logging into completely separate systems to accomplish the task. Corporate Time Approval policies can be immediately posted to this screen making quick dissemination of new information easy, accurate and very targeted to the specific manager use case. Now compare this to the ‘1.0 World’ and you can immediately see that by having to deal with separate systems, log ins, and processes, you can rationalize a 20% time savings associated with this high frequency transaction – instead of say 10 minutes to accomplish this task you could get it done easily in less than 8 minutes. While this might not sound like much think about this - “2 minutes times 4K (managers) times 20 (working days per month) equals over 1,330 hours of saved time per month or at an average salary (fully loaded) of $75 per hour… or… nearly $100,000 that drops directly to the bottom line on a MONTHLY basis.

One quick word about transaction frequency is that you can really think of any daily (or every other day) online ESS transaction as a high frequency transaction – in other situations, a high frequency self service transaction may be approving purchase requests; or checking in on your group’s leave requests in your Time Approval system.

Now we can look at a medium frequency manager transaction, say ‘Onboard a New Hire’, a process probably executed on a monthly or quarterly basis (certainly slower in these economically challenging times). So we get the same advantage as the high frequency (e.g. single environment advantage of the 2.0 world) but we are also now dealing with the process knowledge support factor as we get into transaction complexity. Since this is more infrequent a manager probably loses context of how the transaction ‘works’. Leveraging ESS 2.0 integration technologies, the structured processes now are merged with unstructured support information (e.g. knowledgebase, policy documentation, training videos) whereby the manager can quickly ‘relearn’ the process and quickly & accurately complete said task thus rationalizing in our ABC Corporation example perhaps a 10-12.5% gain in time savings.

This same principle holds true for low frequency manager transactions, those that a manager may execute on a semi-annual or annual basis (e.g. promote an employee). The familiarity with transaction processing is very low, thus the ability of the ESS 2.0 environment to merge learning tools, supporting policies and help documentation, ease of use, single log in and links to external tools (e.g. Industry Wage Standards Calculators) helps to accelerate transaction completion time and accuracy thus freeing the manager to do more critical work (e.g. talent management, strategic planning). Again, we can estimate a conservative 20-25% gain in time savings.

The Bottom Line?

So with this information we can now model estimated manager savings since we have the necessary inputs to calculate total transactions and ultimate productivity gains in USD (e.g. # of managers – 4K; time savings associated with various transaction types; frequency of example transactions; estimated average salary and overhead for the majority of our managers).

With our total MSS transactions for ABC Company running close to 580K per year we can now estimate the time savings and then map this to our average cost per employee. In terms of employee productivity alone we can conservatively estimate nearly $2M per year in savings for ABC Corporation associated with ESS 2.0 oriented self service delivery for HCM.

Tomorrow Morning “How ESS 2.0 Drives Significant Savings in HR Shared Services Support Centers”



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james.ofarrell@topazbridge.com @ 2:06 pm

August 24, 2009
Myth #4: Figuring this out will take a lot of time and a lot of money!

While it’s true that some companies spend a lot of time, energy and money figuring out their ESS / MSS strategy, it doesn’t have to be that way. By intently focusing on several key strategic decisions and building a strong business case, it is possible to come up with a go-forward strategy and detailed plan in as little as 4 - 6 weeks. Many companies spend months (or years!) trying to come up with an exhaustive set of ESS / MSS requirements that will satisfy all users in every region. As a result, these projects never achieve their full ROI potential. Conversely, by starting with a relatively small set of core functionality, it’s possible to rapidly build an easy to use, ROI-producing application that can be easily expanded to more complex areas over time. The key is to quickly come up with your strategy and stick with it.

    Netting it out.

Empowering employees and managers with the content and business processes to accurately and quickly complete enterprise functions will help drive productivity, cut support costs, and reduce development and training costs associated with application deployment. Delivering robust SAP® ESS / MSS functionality through your corporate SharePoint platform provides employees with one, centralized location for all corporate knowledge and employee self-service business processes – a truly unified portal strategy. This approach to unified content, knowledge and business process will accelerate your company’s productivity and profitability goals.

    Let’s get started!

Start today on the road to an estimated 300% ROI for deploying a Microsoft® SharePoint® based SAP® ERP Human Capital Management (SAP ERP HCM) self-service delivery environment. Our company offers a special “HCM Self-Service NOW!” program designed to jump-start your ESS / MSS strategy. This 2 day engagement includes prioritizing self-service application business and technical requirements; preparation and delivery of a high-level project approach (‘how do we get there?’); and a comprehensive financial justification summary (‘how do we fund it?’) - All of which may be used as a basis for you to pilot an employee self-service solution. The cost for this program is $15,000 plus travel & related expenses and includes a satisfaction guarantee or Topaz Bridge will refund your entire expenditure.

Next month we will begin a series on HCM Business Value - What are the Five Core Elements of ROI associated with HCM Self Service Delivery. Until then…



Filed under: Business transformation — Tags: , , , , , , —

james.ofarrell@topazbridge.com @ 6:10 am

August 17, 2009
Myth #3: Technology alone solves this problem.

So this week we take a closer look at the role of technology and how it may potentially hinder SAP/SharePoint interoperable HCM solutions deployment.

Yes, corporations worldwide are standardizing on portal technologies such as Microsoft SharePoint® for their corporate-wide portal platform. And yes, SharePoint’s power in managing unstructured data, its robust content management offering, comprehensive enterprise search and wide range of business services, make it an obvious alternative for companies considering a standardized approach to SAP HR Portal solutions.

However, out of the box, SharePoint does not deliver any business solutions – especially SAP HCM line of business applications. It is a platform for collaborative applications, a horizontal layer that sits behind your desktop applications. To take advantage of SharePoint’s usability features and SAP’s powerful HR transactional engine, each business process must be “exposed” in SAP (either via enterprise services, RFCs or other means) and presented back to the end user in SharePoint. Only after that detailed process integration is complete can SharePoint deliver the true value of SAP HCM transactions.

How have you tackled this detailed process integration? Are there shortcuts that you could share?

Next week we will wrap up our MythBusters series with

    “Myth #4 Figuring this out will take a lot of time and a lot of money!”


Filed under: Business transformation — Tags: , , , , , , —

james.ofarrell@topazbridge.com @ 6:47 am

August 10, 2009
Myth #2: Building an HR Portal is easy!

So here it is August 10th and we’re back at it this Monday morning with our second in a series of four myths associated with SharePoint / SAP interoperable HCM solutions. Last week, we covered the myth related to ‘investing in HR systems during an economic downturn’. This week we tackle a second myth… and that is “Building an HR Portal is easy!” Let’s dig into this a little bit.

While the benefits of leveraging SharePoint to deliver SAP® ESS / MSS functionality may be undeniable, many challenges exist if you choose the “Build Your Own” approach, including extensive development requirements and the lack of communication between imported iViews and SharePoint Server. Additionally, many security and presentation challenges exists with respect to achieving proper integration between SAP and Microsoft® SharePoint® in a way that doesn’t compromise SAP governance. If you are considering global deployments, the challenges are compounded. Building and managing a SharePoint/SAP interoperability solution in a multi-country, multi-locale environment is more than a challenging IT situation, it’s a complex business problem since each region will likely require unique usability and localization features to ensure broad user acceptance. Finally, using SharePoint’s InfoPath forms entails a number of known issues including performance, application rendering, language management, role/security management, and deployment packaging. Using an enterprise-ready application that has solved these potential pitfalls will not only speed up your deployment, but will increase your long-term ROI.

So what challenges have you encountered? And do you think creating and maintaining an HR portal is easy?

Next week we will cover our third installment in this series “Myth #3: Technology Alone Solves This Problem”.



Filed under: Business transformation, Self-service — Tags: , , , , , —

james.ofarrell@topazbridge.com @ 6:21 am

August 3, 2009
Myth #1: Don’t invest in HR systems during economic downturns…

This first myth deals with some views related to the economic viability of investing in HR system updates, new business process automation and overall systems implementations. In particular, this myth deals with the decision to deploy self-service portals that deliver HCM functionality.

If done wisely, HR employee self-service (ESS) and manager self-service (MSS) projects can provide some of the strongest ROI of any IT project. Based on industry research1, companies today can recognize an estimated savings of $1K annual per employee (a 10K employee company = $10M in annual expense savings going directly to the bottom line). This translates to a one year return on your initial investment based on industry validated assumptions.

Companies can further accelerate this ROI by leveraging their Microsoft® SharePoint® portal platform to access the SAP® HCM ESS / MSS transaction data. The financial justification for leveraging the SharePoint solution for SAP delivery is found through a number of improvements including rapid and accurate resolution of employee-initiated transactions, the elimination of manual processing, rapid application development and deployment, as well as less training.

Automating mundane HR tasks can eliminate the need to have armies of HR support personnel answering the phone from employees lost in the HR process maelstrom, freeing them up to focus on more strategic tasks or projects. And, because of the familiar and persistent usability features found in a SharePoint environment, overall user acceptance grows from a small percentage of users to near-universal adoption.

The key is to develop an in-depth financial analysis highlighting the projected hard-dollars savings, the impact on productivity and related financial metrics prior to moving ahead with an HR Self-Service portal implementation. Equally important is a comprehensive post-deployment analysis of the project to ensure those results are in fact realized.

HR Systems Drive Efficiency - Profit per Employee
The equation is simple - if profit per employee can be increased without increasing capital intensity, the overall profit (after paying for all factors of production – including depreciation) will increase. The net result – HR becomes more strategic focusing companies on intangible-intensive value propositions and, in turn, on talented people – those who, with some investment, can produce valuable intangibles (e.g. patentable ideas, innovative business processes).

HR Systems Increase Employee Satisfaction by Enhancing Shared Service Support
Deploying Employee Self-Service can dramatically reduce the amount of work across the board (Figure 1) especially in the HR Self-Service support area. HR personnel may be redeployed to pursue more strategic HR initiatives such as talent management and performance management.

So, what do you think? Are there other areas of economic return related to self-service? Post your opinions and let’s have a discussion. FYI, next Myth Monday we will cover

    “Myth #2: Building an HR Portal is Easy!”


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james.ofarrell@topazbridge.com @ 6:38 am

July 29, 2009
Common Myths Associated with Microsoft® SharePoint® / SAP® Interoperable HCM Solutions
    Introduction

G’day Topaz Blog Readers and Contributors,

It has been a bit of a spell since our last blog posting, so I am going to make up for it hopefully in the next couple of weeks. For those who don’t know me, my name is Jim O’Farrell and my role here at Topaz Bridge is Director, Product Marketing. My background is in product, marketing and business development in the enterprise software application space. My interests are in how people use software to improve their productivity and how this productivity impacts an organization.

That said, I will be writing about some of the myths (I have four general myths) relating to SharePoint/SAP HCM Self Service solutions. Over the next few weeks (every Monday - let’s call them “Myth Mondays”) I will publish and hopefully, you will respond to and we will have a lively discussion about this new world of unified portal content - e.g. the merging of structured and unstructured data. And together our goal will be to “bust a few myths” about SharePoint/SAP interoperability.

So, MythBusters… let me do an introduction and I’ll see you next Monday with the first of our myths…

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. 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.). SAP’s HCM application is the HR backbone for thousands of companies worldwide and a logical foundation for applications requiring employee data. As the requirement and benefit of managing and presenting unstructured data alongside structured information and business processes become more apparent, many companies are considering how to integrate information that resides in their line of business applications such as SAP HCM in unstructured, collaborative scenarios hosted in their SharePoint environment. Best of all, integrating these two marking leading solutions can offer a quick payback, making it an ideal project for today’s tighter budgets.

Unfortunately, few companies have managed to successfully integrate SAP HCM and SharePoint and experienced resources can be hard to come by. As a result, there are several prevalent myths in the marketplace which can derail self-service projects before they even begin. In this document, we address four of the most common myths and offer suggestions for properly dealing with them.

Next Monday, we will explore

    Myth #1 “Don’t Invest in HR systems during economic downturns…”


Filed under: Business transformation — Tags: , , , , , , —

james.ofarrell@topazbridge.com @ 1:30 pm

April 1, 2009
5 Ways Business Analysts Can Configure Self-Service Applications with Topaz Bridge S2

One of the highest impact cost drivers for SAP® HCM self-service in a large organization is ongoing custom development. Seemingly simple things like changing the appearance of a screen, re-labeling a field, or adding topical company information to a page (“It’s Open Enrollment Season!”) constitute major development efforts.

In fact, in a recent presentation at SAP HR 2009, a consultant with a systems integrator estimated that a moderately complex custom HCM form using Web DynPro required over 450 hours of work. Multiply this by different locales, languages and business units and very soon customization costs are tallied in millions of dollars. This is one situation where typical economies of scale work in reverse…customization costs are much higher for global, diversified companies because of the number of configurations required.

Topaz Bridge S2 gets around these costs by building on Microsoft® SharePoint® and its simple-to-configure interface, so that business analysts can make these kinds of changes without involving expensive J2EE or Adobe programmers. In this article, we discuss 5 ways that Topaz Bridge S2 lets business analysts take advantage of SharePoint customization features to quickly configure custom versions of employee and manager self service for a diverse, global workforce.

Best of all, because these customizations are implemented in SharePoint (not SAP ERP), they don’t alter the customer’s service agreement with SAP, they are easily upgrade to new versions of SAP ECC, and all aspects of SAP governance (business process, rights and authorizations, single system of record, etc.) are preserved.

So here they are: the top 5 ways business analysts can use SharePoint to configure a front end to SAP, using Topaz Bridge and SharePoint’s own customization tools.

  1. Every page or report inherits the same look and feel, (unless of course you want something else)

    2. Topaz Bridge S2 makes use of consistency features in Microsoft SharePoint called Master Pages and Layout Pages, frameworks described in more detail on MSDN. This means that when a business analyst creates a new page, it looks like any other page in the corporate intranet. Alternatively an analyst can also make use of a different look and feel standard for different countries or divisions. Pages created for a business unit using separate Master and Layout pages will look consistent across that unit as well. The same is true for pages created with Topaz Bridge custom web parts (which give you access to SAP HR data and business processes…more on this later).

  2. Easily add or edit content and functionality

    3. Imagine being able to add additional information to a self-service page based on topical or organizational needs, without using development resources. For example, let’s say it’s benefits open enrollment season. You want to highlight to the workforce that time is running out, and include a daily update on the number of days left and the number of employees who have yet to file. With Topaz Bridge S2 running in Microsoft SharePoint you can add an additional content Web Part to the screen, and then update the text daily in the web part. This update is as simple as adding an object to a Microsoft PowerPoint slide or editing a Microsoft Word document.

  3. Modify or create new Microsoft InfoPath® forms

    4. Topaz Bridge S2 makes use of Microsoft InfoPath Forms Services. This feature allows you to create rich, dynamic forms which run in any web browser without downloading an additional downloadable runtime engine. Office InfoPath 2007 provides a simple drag and drop interface for creating forms or for modifying the forms Topaz Bridge S2 provides. In addition InfoPath supports the use of different data masks (for phone numbers, employee ID’s, Social Security numbers, etc.) for different formats in different locales. Business analysts can also use InfoPath to impose another layer of data validation on data entered into the form within the browser itself, giving users immediate feedback on invalid entries and improving overall usability.

    Topaz Bridge S2 lets label data fields in ways that make sense for your employees

    Topaz Bridge S2 lets you label data fields in ways that make sense for your employees

  4. Compose new interfaces using Topaz Bridge built-in HCM-aware web parts

    5. Topaz Bridge S2 provides a collection of HCM-aware web parts that business analysts can compose and configure to create custom screens and reports. For those unfamiliar with web parts, they are reusable, pre-packaged components that can be combined into web pages. More details on web parts can be found in this article on Wikipedia. The HCM-aware web parts provided with Topaz Bridge let business analysts directly create custom web pages. These web pages can be used to to view employee directories, update personnel or benefit information or view and access a manager’s task list, among other functions. The bottom line: Business Analysts can design, prototype and deploy new pages in hours or days, rather than weeks or months.

  5. Custom Reports

    6. Topaz Bridge S2 includes filter-able, sort-able data web parts that users can leverage in the same way they use Microsoft Excel. Say for example you’d like to see a list of employees in a particular department, who work in a particular building, sorted by hire date. In Topaz Bridge S2, this and other reports are a standard feature. If you’re using S2.m (the manager self-service interface to Topaz Bridge S2) and have appropriate authorization, you can request the same report for the employees for whom you are responsible and add-in the amount of time off accrued. All these features and more are “built-in” to Topaz Bridge S2, which not only cuts down on custom report creation costs, it also increases worker and manager productivity.

…and So Much More!

In reality, these five options, selected because of they can be used by business analysts with minimal training, just scratch the surface of what’s possible with Topaz Bridge S2 and Microsoft SharePoint. Tools like Microsoft SharePoint Web Designer and Microsoft Visual Studio give web designers and developers ways to provide virtually unlimited customization and integration to Topaz Bridge S2, at a much lower cost than typical J2EE portal development. To get some idea of the possibilities, take a look at this list of the 100 Best Looking Web Sites Hosted on Microsoft SharePoint. The sky really is the limit!



Filed under: Configuration, Self-service — Tags: , , , , , , , —

cornelius.willis@topazbridge.com @ 10:08 am

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