Overview

Self-services in HR: top xRM closes the gaps in SAP

How top flow’s software supports remote HR processes

Working from home has become the norm for many people over the past few months. A normality that will certainly continue once the coronavirus pandemic has come to an end. After all, it has turned out to work extremely well when employees are not constantly meeting on site. In fact, remote working often has a positive effect on results – for example, because concentration is higher and distractions are fewer. In the long term, companies can also cut costs by reducing their office space. And the climate benefits from less commuter traffic.

It also emerged what is important for a successful home office culture: binding communication, careful use of other people’s time and IT tools that enable everything that is usual on site from a distance, especially collaboration. People need to be able to access their usual software from anywhere, retrieve and store files and exchange information conveniently and clearly. And they need to be able to manage administrative processes remotely, away from their value-adding tasks. This affects a whole range of HR processes:

• Applying for vacation and overview of taken and outstanding vacation days
• Updating your own personnel data
• Notification of pregnancy (maternity protection calculation)
• Notification of the birth of a child
• Request for a change in working hours (incl. generation of a confirmation document with signature)
• Applying for certificates
• Requesting certificates
• Requesting the loan of the personnel file
• Application for qualification measures and overview of completed qualifications

Exchange and workflows with employee self-services

Employee self-services make all this and more possible. These not only organize the exchange of data and documents, but also map workflows for the respective projects – in particular for approvals, acknowledgements or the dual control principle. It is important to define or expand the workflows according to individual requirements as part of the customizing process.
Overall, self-services give employees a high degree of autonomy and flexibility. For many, this contributes significantly to satisfaction. At the same time, self-services relieve the burden on the departments that previously dealt with employees’ concerns – above all the HR department. The time gained can then be used for productive tasks.

Relief for employees

In our experience, when establishing such employee self-services, it is particularly important that employees actually perceive them as a relief. If they get the impression that they are expected to take on additional tasks for free, this is problematic for acceptance. A positive perception is therefore helped on the one hand by selecting the tasks that are implemented as self-service with a sense of proportion. On the other hand, an excellent user experience is helpful: the tasks should be completed with just a few clicks.
In addition, the self-services must be properly integrated into the existing process and IT landscape. The front end must be absolutely convincing (Fiori/UI5 interfaces), but the data must also be transferred correctly to the back end or retrieved from there. In this respect, employee self-services should be technologically closely interlinked with the ERP or HR systems used. In the SAP environment, it is therefore extremely advantageous if the HR master data, personnel files and employee self-services run on the same platform and therefore have the same database. With top xRM, the disciplines can be merged in SAP HCM – without additional interfaces or the need for synchronization.

Unlock the full data potential with the Dashboard Designer

A large number of widgets display predefined key figures – including their calculation with direct access to the data in the respective SAP database tables. The key figures can be flexibly set with parameters and visualized in different variants, creating individual views. This means that results can be prepared in a targeted manner for different target groups and use cases: from aggregated statements for top management to detailed information and real-time displays for those responsible for operations in production to info boards on the store floor or order-related data at individual workstations.

Where the desired findings cannot be made with the predefined key figures, i.e. individual data and calculations are required, these can be made accessible to the Dashboard Designer with the help of specifically created OData Services – including almost any graphical representation and visualization. The entire database of the underlying SAP system can then be accessed, which also enables evaluations far beyond the production sphere. Other components can also be integrated – from photos and documents to content from the Internet and third-party applications.

Dashboards and reports are typically made accessible to user groups via the SAP Fiori Launchpad. The user experience therefore fits seamlessly into the SAP Fiori standards.