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Issue 24 | Summer 2013/14

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Enterprise mobility THE NEXT PHASE

HYBRIS LIFE AT THE ENTERPRISE COMMERCE FRONTIER

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CONTENTS

Editorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s note

News in focus: Moving towards cloud first

Licensing: Paving the road to the cloud

Startup springboard

Hot Topics Mobility special 7

Beyond BYOD: the next phase of enterprise mobility

The mobile consumer

Tactical vs strategic enterprise mobility

Developing mobile apps with SAPUI5

Finding the key to mobile app security

Events 35

SAP Leaders

2013 SAP Customer Awards of Excellence winners

Technology

Taking enterprise commerce to the next level: hybris

Partner profile: Clarity Consulting Group

On the Move

Case Studies 28

Simplifying government eBusiness: Office of State Revenue Queensland

Refocusing on the core: La Trobe University

Time to get your Jam on!

Supporting decisions and documentation with enterprise collaboration tools

SuperStream: will you be ready?

Achieving best practice for account reconciliation

Vendor spotlight

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MOBILITY HOT TOPICS

Beyond BYOD: the next phase of enterprise mobility

Multi-channel customer experience, security and the app economy – these are just some of the trends shaping the mobility arena. Freya Purnell reports. The consumerisation of IT is nowhere more apparent than in enterprise mobility. The move towards Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is simply the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how employees and customers want to interact with organisations. This demand has moved beyond the device, to now encompass tools and applications. It is a paradigm shift that has seen mobility become a crucial component of a solution’s fabric, rather than an afterthought. The opportunities are upon us: as Richard Absalom, Ovum senior analyst, enterprise mobility, says, “As businesses adapt to increasing consumerisation and extend the range of tools and applications available to employees on all devices, enterprises and supply-side vendors alike need to be prepared for these developing trends: businesses in order to realise the full business benefits of mobile working, and vendors in order to address enterprise demand and remain relevant in a crowded, highly competitive market.” There are several major trends in mobile consumerisation that are expected to have a big impact on businesses in 2014.

1. The true multi-channel experience – cloud, big data and mobility intersect As mobile devices become the first point of contact between a

business and its customers, suppliers and employees, businesses will need to provide a strong multi-channel experience, according to Ovum. User experience will be everything – companies must be able to successfully tackle this complicated task to give users a slick, integrated experience across every aspect of the business, from marketing, advertising, promotion and sales through to internal and back-office processes. Mobile commerce is a crucial aspect of this, and SAP ANZ head of mobile solutions Selim Ahmed says it is one of the main areas SAP is focusing on. With a mobile commerce platform already available, SAP is now looking to make it available in the cloud in the next three to six months. The platform enables the orchestration of key services, such as payment, loyalty and authentication services. SAP has partnered with companies such as Gen-i to provide mobile commerce services for retailers, banks and utilities, and already has some key applications available – for example, apps designed to help consumers interact with their utility by viewing bills, making payments, and manage energy consumption via their mobile device. Particularly when it comes to retail, the holy grail of mobility has been being able to target consumers with relevant and context-sensitive offers or information direct to their device, and that’s now a reality with SAP’s Precision Marketing solution.

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HOT TOPICS

MOBILITY

“The success of the mobile experience is ultimately underpinned by the analytics you can provide.” Selim Ahmed, head of mobile solutions, SAP ANZ

“You can actually, in real time, in store, with rich awareness of context, deliver a highly personalised and relevant offer to your customer,” says Ahmed. “That’s part of the whole mobile commerce suite being able to transact, being able to review and research, and being able to compare and evaluate products. “Our mobile commerce can support the sales transaction process end-to-end – from a customer trying to identify a need, considering an offer, making a purchase, and then receiving and evaluating the product. That’s probably the key differentiator for us.” And this is where the other major technology trends – big data, analytics, and cloud – combine with mobility to create a paradigm shift in consumer engagement. “The success of the mobile experience is ultimately underpinned by the analytics you can provide,” Ahmed says. “The key driving force behind our Precision Marketing solution is the ability to bring together structured and unstructured data to get an understanding of the individual – who they are, what’s their behaviour, what are their preferences, and then also being able to say, what time of day is it, where are they, and what are the kinds of offers that would make sense to them.” Ahmed says the outcome of bringing all this information together is a larger basket size for the individual, and enhanced customer loyalty, in terms of repeat business and having an affinity with the brand – ultimately leading to higher revenue per customer. It works because it’s what consumers are demanding – they don’t want to be a demographic or a piece of data; they want to be treated as an individual, with information customised specifically for them. Rahul Narain, IBM worldwide technical lead and chief architect for mobile appliance and BPM solutions, says context awareness and buying intent are two emerging areas where realtime analytics will facilitate greater engagement with consumers via mobile devices. For example, analysing the behaviour of consumers across a variety of scenarios may show that they prefer a company to assist them in different ways depending on the context. “The analytics would actually understand your likes and

dislikes a bit better than you may be able to articulate into the app,” Narain says. “If you analyse 50 transactions, you start seeing that this is what need to be done for [this consumer], and you can help in this particular manner. So it’s understanding the intent of the transaction. We have got technology that complements the SAP scenario for context awareness.” In the public sector, the pressure is on governments and agencies to improve service delivery and efficiency with the help of mobile, but again, citizens are demanding more than just a ‘one size fits all’ approach, particularly when it comes to sharing information across agencies. “Person A is not the same as person B. One person will say you have no right to share this information of mine just because I am getting public assistance, and person B says, see if other social service organisations would provide me assistance given the specific issue I have,” Narain says. “Privacy, security and non-repudiation of the data will all be very important factors [into the future].” The growth of mobile is also driving interest in cloud services, particularly for its high scalability and elasticity, according to Keith Murray, global SAP alliance leader, cloud computing for IBM. “A challenge for companies is mapping their IT in a very fluctuating environment. They might be looking for temporary resources to develop a solution, they might be looking for a way to provide that solution to a much broader audience,” Murray says. “We are seeing a lot of clients interested in moving away from one-time investments that are then depreciated over time into more of an ongoing cost structure which maps their actual requirements.” Another aspect of the ‘always on’ mobile consumer’s expectations is that solutions will constantly be available, highly responsive and very accurate – which can be difficult to deliver on. “Can you afford to have enough resources to meet those high expectations in a fluctuating demand environment? It might be a million [users] today, it might be 10,000 tomorrow. That’s another driver for companies to look for alternative ways of deploying and delivering those resources,” Murray says.

2. Maintaining security on devices and throughout networks While BYOD has been around for a while now, enterprises are still coming to terms with how to manage – and perhaps more importantly, secure – a proliferation of devices. Ovum expects more businesses to address the drivers of BYOD with more comprehensive corporate mobility policies in 2014 – either through CYOD (choose your own device) or COPE (corporate-owned, personally enabled) strategies, in which employees are given a choice of devices to use by their employer, and allowed to use them for personal purposes. Managing and securing the data on devices is also high priority at present. “There is a lot of corporate data stored on mobile devices now, and that’s really front of mind for the chief risk officer at the moment. How do they secure all that data on the device, and

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Syclo leading the charge

make sure people are complying with data management policy and strategy, especially when they are using their own devices on a corporate network?,” Ahmed says. Among SAP’s solution offerings in the mobile security area are the SAP Afaria mobile device management suite; ‘app wrapping’ with SAP Mobile App Protection by Mocana (the cloud version of which was released in December), to maximise security and maintain control of sensitive application data; and SAP Mobile Documents, a secure, enterprise-level Dropbox alternative for the sharing of corporate documents. Scott Davidson, general manager – Australia and New Zealand, HCL Axon, says the technology in this area is developing so rapidly that it is way ahead of what most enterprises are doing to control security on their mobile devices. “Most organisations aren’t even scratching the surface of that. They are having to completely change their way of thinking – identity used to be how to manage users’ ID and passwords, and grant them access to systems and applications,” Davidson says. “You can’t do the same things you might have used to do in terms of security and access inside your building.” He says this step change means enterprises are right to be very concerned about how to manage their security strategy as the device landscape further fragments and expands rapidly. “It’s not the technology that’s causing the problems, it’s adapting and developing a strategy to implement it,” Davidson says. “I think people are only really starting to get an idea of exactly what the long game is for that, rather than just being reactive.”

3. Getting appy The recognition that mobile applications now must also be secured is a reflection of the growing importance of apps for the next phase of the evolution of enterprise mobility, which is expected to create new ways of working and transform existing business processes. Ovum predicts in 2014, enterprise mobile apps will become a core part of the enterprise IT application stack, creating challenges for enterprises such as getting the user experience right and enabling tight integration with internal systems – but presenting a world of opportunity for app developers, systems integrators and mobility management vendors. “For organisations that already have a mobility strategy in place, the next step is for them to start mobilising as many internal processes as possible to allow workers to perform their core tasks from whichever device they have to hand, from wherever they are,” Ovum says. To assist enterprises to move towards this, SAP is in the process of releasing Fiori Wave 2, which expands the number of apps from 25 to over 200. “It is simplifying and improving the user experience for access to key functions such as HR and finance,” Ahmed says, adding that as Fiori progresses, it’s becoming an “interactive desktop of choice”. By presenting key information such as leave balances, updated organisational news, and approvals and workflows that require action, organisations can engage with their employees better.

Enterprise asset management tool Syclo continues to be a very strong performer for SAP, representing around 50 per cent of mobile sales. It tackles some of the most intractable pain points for mobile workers involved with maintenance and service in asset-intensive industries. “For all those jobs, traditionally there is a significant amount of administrative overhead where they had to go back to a corporate centre to input data,” Ahmed says. “There were issues with data quality, and clearly the productivity of employees was low because they wasted time driving back and forth between head office and remote locations, and on data entry after the event.” Another issue was that data wasn’t being recorded in real time, which affected asset utilisation or maintenance lifecycles. In addition to enabling greater employee productivity, Syclo is helping companies reduce asset downtime production delays because there is better lifetime maintenance and service. “Our research shows a reduction in downtime of 20 to 30 per cent; preventable failure is reduced by up to 90 per cent; maintenance backlog is reduced by 60 per cent, so it’s really improving the way assets are managed,” Ahmed says. “One of the key things we are looking at is the workforce capacity, so labour productivity is up by up to 50 per cent in some of our studies. By improving your data and the support for the individual out in the fields, you reduce the rework by 15 to 20 per cent.” Syclo also assists in maintaining compliance and improving safety, and SAP is looking to take this further by making the solution even more visual. For example, a work order to dismantle a pump will include a sketch of the pump and highlight any hazards. “The more information you can provide someone proactively at the site where they are performing their asset maintenance, the more that reduces the risk of a workforce incident happening, as they are aware and prepared,” Ahmed says. With results like these, it’s perhaps not surprising that Syclo is leading the way in mobile sales for SAP. “The return on investment from Syclo is just so large that it’s irrefutable, and hence organisations are moving quicker because the ROI is justified and clear.”

“They are making it easier for the employee to be productive, and at the same time, making it clear for the employee what their expectations are in terms of their corporate duties,” Ahmed says. Mobile learning is another important play for SAP. “Organisations are really struggling to cope with making sure people are continuously learning about new corporate policies, guidelines and procedures,” Ahmed says. “So there is a lot of value [in mobile learning] because people can then learn when they want, where they want, but synchronise and confirm that

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they have completed all their mandatory learning and courses.” Davidson says from a process perspective, customer experience management, human capital management and employee engagement, and enterprise asset management is where most interest lies for apps across different sectors. At the application level, solutions range from enabling very simple employee transactions via mobile devices, to allowing salespeople to take quotes for $50 million aircraft from an iPad, to providing engineers with three-dimensional graphics of a component of plant equipment while they are on a field inspection. He believes the release of the 3.0 version of SAP Mobile Platform has made it much easier for customers and integrators to pursue a more comprehensive mobile vision. “A serious conventional change that we’re seeing is you don’t just develop little spot apps, but embrace mobility as a core part of the organisation’s whole approach to technology, and SAP has really got that platform idea in 3.0,” Davidson says. “So the lifting of constraints in being able to develop ubiquitous interfaces across different technologies and the ability to do their security strategy has been very positively received.”

Keeping up with the pace of change With the continual adaptation and change occurring in the mobile space, enterprises face considerable challenges in establishing an architecture that can cope with the constant transformation, as well as deliver on ever-increasing employee expectations. “The biggest question we’re getting [from customers] is how they can come up with a mobility strategy that remains relevant with the amount of innovation that’s taking place,” Davidson says. “They are after solution resilience and the ability to constantly adapt, speed to market, continuous integration and inherent support of their business processes through minimal configuration and deployment.” Developing a framework where technology comes under the umbrella of a business-led strategy can help to ‘future-proof’ mobile strategy, but the smartest organisations are seeing the writing on the wall and pursuing a mobile-first approach. “Anything that they buy in terms of applications needs to be instantly available on mobile – they don’t want to have to go and develop this themselves. The laggards within the area are still just dipping their toes in the water, and I think that’s probably a fairly expensive exercise in terms of a lot of pain, and actually you are better off moving very quickly to a new approach,” says Davidson. “A good example of that is in the HR space. Those who are still using the SAP on-premise solution are having to make their own way with mobility, some are using Fiori, some are developing their own apps; whereas when you look at SuccessFactors’ cloud-based technology, it is all out of the box mobility. Certainly the more advanced organisations see the value in that new technology rather than trying to hack through and do it their own way on the more traditional platform.” Whatever the approach enterprises choose, mobility will certainly remain a hot topic and crucial competitive factor in the coming years. The independent magazine for SAP professionals

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SAP LEADERS HYBRIS

Taking enterprise commerce to the next level In August last year, SAP acquired hybris, one of the world’s leading enterprise commerce platforms. Freya Purnell spoke to Graham Jackson, managing director of hybris Australia, about what has been driving the company’s impressive growth. The demand by customers in both the B2C and B2B space for personalised and contextualised experiences across all digital and offline channels has been well documented. But it was an area in which SAP was struggling – its SAP Web Channel Experience Management solution was not challenging the market leaders in this category and was out of favour amongst analysts. This placed SAP at a disadvantage relative to competitors Oracle and IBM, both of which have successful solutions. With the enterprise commerce space entering a new phase of maturity and representing a market opportunity worth around $80 billion, from a strategic perspective it was a product line SAP had to address, alongside other key solutions such as ERP and CRM. In 2013, SAP moved to close the gap with the acquisition of hybris software. Headquartered in Switzerland, hybris had carved out a position as the number one independent omni-channel commerce platform in the world, having posted compound annual growth of 83 per cent since 2009. At the time of the acquisition, SAP said the companies planned to combine “the agile omni-channel commerce solutions of hybris with robust enterprise technology and industry-leading in-memory, cloud and mobile innovations from SAP to help facilitate new levels of customer insight and engagement”. While hybris’ B2C Commerce suite is among the best, the company also has a mature B2B suite, commonly used by manufacturers and distributors. In the most recent Forrester Research Wave report on B2B Commerce, issued in October 2013, hybris was named as a leader in this market due to its “modern Java-based architecture, embedded enterprise product content management capabilities, the embedded and rapidly maturing order management capabilities, and the flexibility of the framework”.

However, according to Forrester analyst Peter Sheldon, in a blog post on the acquisition, customers were increasingly finding duplication of capabilities between hybris – sometimes billed as the ERP of the front end – and their SAP ERP solutions, adding extra impetus for the companies to work together rather than compete.

hybris in the local market Graham Jackson established the company’s Australian and New Zealand presence last year, and hybris is now active across a number of vertical markets, including retail and telecommunications for B2C and manufacturing, distribution and wholesaling for B2B. hybris also has developing capabilities in digital and financial services. Jackson says the hybris software roadmap is really driven by changing consumer behaviour, whether they are business buyers or individuals. “Buying decisions are made online today. It might be actioned offline – for example, the actual purchase might take place in a physical store or over the phone – but the decisionmaking process is happening online,” Jackson says. Customers also demand a true omni-channel experience, expecting the organisation they are dealing with to provide a consistent experience and display the same knowledge of them as a customer, regardless of how they interface with the company. But from a systems perspective, this can be easier said than done. “Typically the systems that are responsible for delivering the touchpoint experience, whether it be a mobile platform, a website, people in the store with point of sale systems, or account managers on the end of phones, are not connected,” Jackson says. “We talk about the importance of customers having a single view of the business they are dealing with. They don’t want to be treated differently just because they

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SAP LEADERS

HYBRIS

“We see companies coming forward for a new e-commerce platform talk about themselves wanting to be the Amazon of the steel buying world.” Graham Jackson, hybris Australia

happen to choose a different method of communicating with you.” The consumerisation of the business-to-business buying process is another factor at play in the enterprise commerce space, where buyers who are accustomed to great functionality and features, such as faceted search and personalised experiences and pricing, from consumer retail sites, are expecting those same experiences in their business interactions. “We see companies coming forward for a new e-commerce platform talk about themselves wanting to be the Amazon of the steel buying world. They want to give an experience that is Amazon-esque and they realise that they need some technology to help them do that,” Jackson says. The front-end customer experience is also becoming more important for companies to remain competitive, particularly as internet-enabled price visibility flattens out pricing, he says. “Price isn’t really driving a decision as to whether to use a particular supplier anymore. It’s more about providing a

robust process for a start, and an enriched user experience that differentiates you from the others. That’s what is being demanded by SAP’s customers’ customers.”

Partnering for growth hybris has an ecosystem of over 250 technology and commerce service provider partners, including premier partners such as Sapient, Deloitte and Accenture. The company provides training and certification for partners in various disciplines, and has a large and active channel and partner management team. “Locally we have a channel manager responsible for the relationships with those partners. We don’t necessarily expect partners to be experts in demonstrating the software close to the sale, we will always help them with that, but obviously we do expect them to be experts in implementing the software,” Jackson says. As the terms of the acquisition mean that hybris is still operating as an independent unit, tagged ‘an SAP company’, the company will also maintain a separate program to SAP’s partner program. “At some point those programs will likely start to come together, but that’s not in the foreseeable future. For the time being, partners will need to, independently of them being an SAP partner, become a hybris partner as well,” Jackson says. “We already have a couple of existing SAP partners who have become hybris partners in this region.” BluLeader, Ciber and Fair Consulting Group are amongst the local SAP partners that are also hybris partners, alongside global players such as Accenture, Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys.

Mobility and cloud continuing to grow One of the key trends Jackson expects to see continuing is an explosion in the use of mobile devices for transactions, particularly for business internet traffic. It is already having a huge impact in retail and B2C. “If I were to look at some of our customers in Australia and New Zealand today, we would see over half of that site traffic coming from some sort of mobile device. We have already seen that mobile including tablet has overtaken the traditional PC desktop as the preferred method of buying from a retail website,” he says. “We see mobile traffic as a proportion of business internet traffic increasing significantly along similar lines.” From an enterprise perspective, Jackson also expects to see more companies turning to cloud to manage their IT investments. “Companies are becoming more and more wary of spending money on software systems, and cloud becomes even more important as a method of delivering software.”

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CASE STUDY

OSR QUEENSLAND

Simplifying government eBusiness The Office of State Revenue Queensland has incorporated mining royalties into its SAP ERP system and built an innovative and simple front-end eBusiness application. Not only has it been a hit with clients, the project was awarded a Best Run Database & Technology Platform – App Development and Integration Award at the 2013 SAP Customer Awards of Excellence. Eleanor Reader reports. The Office of State Revenue (OSR) is responsible for the taxation aspects of Queensland Treasury’s Revenue Program, administering state duties, taxes and grants for the people of Queensland. It collects royalties, payroll tax, duties and land tax, and administers the first home owner grant. When the Queensland Government underwent a whole-ofgovernment change in 2012, the OSR was given responsibility for looking after mining royalties – a new revenue stream. To do so, they needed to build the mining royalties into the back-end SAP ERP system from scratch and design a new customer focused front-end application to address growing concerns from customers. “We had a number [of front-end applications] already in place for other revenue lines, such as payroll tax and duties in particular, which provided a service, but our clients were telling us that there were some issues they were facing using that particular way of lodging returns,” says Dave Elson, director of enterprise systems and grants management, OSR. The OSR took the opportunity to review the service delivery, and after an initial kick-off meeting, decided the interface should be very simple and intuitive, so the application didn’t require too much in-built help text.

The challenge Mining royalties, by nature, are extremely complex. The

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front-end application needed to show the clients what their obligations were, what they had lodged and what they needed to do, all the while doing the basic calculations through the whole process, so they could actually lodge a return. The OSR chose UXC Oxygen (formerly Stream Technologies) as its implementation partner on the project. However, to build a solution which could handle the level of complexity involved in mining royalties and make it simple was going to be no mean feat. There would only be a small group of companies using the system, but they are very, very large players. To build an application that satisfied these large organisations, it was critical that OSR spent a considerable amount of time with them working through the application process. A group of 20 were chosen to give feedback. “We actually sat down with them and said, ‘This is what it looks like, give us your feedback’. I think we incorporated around 40 per cent of their changes into the final design,” says Elson. Gough Venter, director of innovation at UXC Oxygen, says he found the OSR’s ability to engage customers at an early stage with co-design sessions interesting and very progressive for a government department. “They are really customer focused,” he says. “It’s almost as though the customer themselves were designing their own experience.”

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The OSR initially engaged SAP, with whom they have a close working relationship, for the project. However there were some concerns that what they were proposing didn’t actually meet their needs. “UXC Oxygen met our requirements regarding the build and also they had a track-record in developing custom frontend applications which were web-based and very intuitive. And to be perfectly honest, they offered us a great price, which meant value for money for taxpayers,” says Elson.

The solution The solution was built using a similar approach that SAP has taken with CRM Web Channel. “SAP were moving in that direction for the CRM Web Channel framework. We looked at how it was constructed and used that approach with Java, because it seems to be the way that customer-facing applications are going,” says Martin Costello, applications manager of enterprise systems, OSR. The back-end ERP remained as standard as they could make it, while all their energy was directed at building the best front-end client application they could. “The back-end system, which is doing all the heavy lifting, is standard, whereas we try to customise the front-end as much as possible because of the client,” says Elson. Venter adds that it was good to be able to build the solution using the administration of royalties as the starting point, because they are the most complex aspect of OSR’s business. “It’s rare to build a framework that we could replicate to other revenue streams and other kinds of returns. The framework has subsequently been used for payroll tax, insurance duties and so on, and eventually maybe down the track for grants. There is a big focus on a robust design when building a repeatable solution,” says Venter.

The implementation The solution was implemented in 10 months and the first batch of royalties went live in September 2012. Considering the complicated nature of royalties payments, Elson says it was quite an aggressive timeframe to put in place, especially considering government traditionally doesn’t necessarily have the best delivery track record. “Within OSR, we do deliver on time and budget. Some of the comments after the project went live were that it was probably the smoothest implementation they have ever had,” he says. A team of 30-40 people worked on the project, and although there were no particular dramas during the implementation, the team did need to put change control processes in place, as well as learn how the whole Java environment works. One of the critical factors for the successful implementation was that OSR had UXC Oxygen on-site and had a very strong project management framework in place, according to Elson. This allowed the team to simply work through issues as they arose, with communication being hugely important. “There is always going to be issues on any project – it was

just a matter of sitting down and trying to find a solution,” he says. The OSR rolled out the same framework for payroll payments in June this year, which only took eight weeks to build, test and implement. Having the initial design time to really get it right the first time and then be able to replicate that framework made the process as efficient as possible, says Costello. As opposed to royalties, which are complex but limited, the size and scale of payroll was the challenging element. Every business that does any work with any business in Queensland or had large returns through the payroll tax forms are included – resulting in the system needing to service 21,000 users. The client-facing application offers two new features: authentication via the AUSkey credential and a Twitter feed. “We tightened up some of the authentication in the frontend using AUSkey. Because it’s critical and very marketintensive information, our royalties division is very concerned with security and access,” says Elson. “We also built into the application our Twitter feed as well, so when they log in they can see that feed, whether it’s about training or allotment dates, which is quite unique. I don’t think there are any other return applications which do that.” The OSR has just been through its peak period for the year – the annual payroll return lodgement. While all 21,000 users are now on the solution, they started with a pilot group of 900 users, who were known to have had issues previously. “We targeted users who were still using paper lodgement and weren’t embracing the e-business channel, as well as clients who experience compatibility issues, whether that be with Internet Explorer or Adobe, which numbers around 400500 each month,” says Elson. “Out of the 900 pilot users, we had no system issues at all. The only issue we had was against one client and that was an existing back-end service which we believe is somehow related to volume, and we haven’t completed our stress and volume testing.”

Business beneﬁts As a result of implementing this new web-based system, the number of calls to OSR’s support area have reduced, which will be a significant benefit to the department in the future. The project has also been awarded a 2013 SAP Customer Award of Excellence. “A number of pilot clients that have complete a return in June have come back in and started lodging their annual return, which is a much more complex form, without any support from the business at all. So essentially with no training, people have been able to come in and lodge a relatively complex form, which just goes to show the simple, easy and efficient mantra that we had has probably hit the mark,” says Costello. Transaction time has also been reduced. “We have kept the calls to the back-end to a minimum; there may have been five to seven calls to the back-end previously,

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now we have restricted that to two or three. The time from starting a transaction to finishing it is a lot less now as well – that’s always been one of our issues,” says Costello. The decrease in calls to OSR’s contact centre was helped by the addition of hover text help notes, which have made the interface much more user-friendly internally and externally. Previously the OSR business has required a significant amount of training material, but this has been simplified to just a basic user guide, “and even that is probably not going to be needed as much”, Costello adds. The solution can also be deployed outside the government networks for when the OSR wants to demonstrate it at training seminars. Although the OSR hasn’t followed the exact approach that SAP would have when delivering the user interface (UI), opting for the Java-based solution instead, this could be a benefit for the business. “I think one of the advantages of having a more open platform is that we protect ourselves, because that’s what’s widely used by the community and it’s actually a good way of actually it out there, because you are not using proprietary front-end UIs that may change if SAP changes direction,” says Elson. “We haven’t got that issue any more, we’re using something which is fairly commonly used and it’s as simple as you can get.” Another benefit of the chosen UI is that visually it seamlessly blends into the OSR website, rather than looking like an SAP system.

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The OSR has also adopted SAP HANA, and in the future would like to see some leverage between the in-memory platform and royalties regarding its front-end compliance activity, which at the moment is a back-end process. Because the OSR is a revenue agency, it captures a large volume of information, and the department is excited to do much better business intelligence than they have previously. “It provides a new opportunity for us regarding auditing of royalties clients. We can do some front-end validation on that information, which we probably wouldn’t have been able to do in the past,” says Elson. The OSR has been achieving a very high usage rate with eBusiness – around 96-97 per cent of transactions – for a long period. While it is difficult to improve on this, they are hoping to eliminate a number of issues they have faced previously and that will push the usage level even higher. “We are very happy with what we have got and we are very happy with where we are going,” says Elson. “I think this is a good benchmark and I think it allows us flexibility; we are looking at other areas that we hadn’t previously thought of to put online now, so it has opened up a few things for us.” The independent magazine for SAP professionals

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TECHNOLOGY ENTERPRISE COLLABORATION

The 2 Ds: supporting decisions and documentation with enterprise collaboration tools In any project, be it a greenfield or an additional module implementation, being able to easily access decisions and documentation – or the 2 Ds – are the project’s lifeline during set up, implementation and beyond into support. Peter Stulcbauer looks at how new tools can simplify this process. Imagine you need to remind yourself why a crucial decision was made or locate key information that’s buried in documentation. Hands up how many of you have had a problem fi nding it? This article explains how you can make that problem disappear by using social business tools.

The 1st D: Decisions From the inception of a project, decisions are made including which architecture to use, where to house the teams, which modules to implement, how the go-live procedure will look, how to perform a cut-over and what the warranty/support will be. These decisions are made by holding official steering committee meetings, running working parties, having coffee chats and by email. Some decisions are made and retained in email correspondence, while others require white papers to be produced. White papers or decision papers are written and circulated by email for input and fi nal approval. Once approved, they are often siloed within a server folder or a document management system. This precludes ready access for users. Where decisions have been made and communicated by email though, they may have been sent to a select number of people for feedback on a topic. They are then forwarded to others, but perhaps one person in the group hasn’t been included on all the toing and froing before it reached them and they, in turn, forward the email to another person. They may ask the same question as one of the original reviewers,

which has already been answered. Since they are unaware of previous discussions and agreements, this may block any new decisions until prior discussions can be located and verified. During a recent SAP Support Pack Upgrade project, I used a business collaboration tool known as Jive. It allows the user to set up groups for internal and external members and for them to receive notification of any activity in that group. Instead of creating emails, discussion threads are created and as members think of someone else to invite, they are added to the discussion. Since the complete discussion is located in a particular thread, the new group members can read the discussion from inception to the current point. With this historical background, they are equipped to make a better informed decision and not hold the group up.

The 2nd D: Documentation We also maintained all documents and spreadsheets within Jive and therefore the same group. This had a dual purpose: 1) version control was maintained, meaning we could revert to an earlier version, if necessary; and 2) other team members were able to open the document or spreadsheet in Microsoft Word or Excel and follow the changes as they were published. Having the communication contained within Jive meant that new discussions could easily point to earlier discussions and/or reference a file. Also, as spreadsheets appeared as new versions, comments could be added with useful facts about the addition in the new version. Any comments related to the document stayed within it and anyone new was able to

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By reclassifying emails as an asset, businesses retain important decisions that contribute to documentation.

understand how and why it had progressed the way it had. The support pack project was to upgrade the SAP system to the latest set of notes from SAP. I took advantage of Jive’s fast search facility to store all the notes in a special group. Entering in the search engine a note number, word or phrase quickly highlighted all notes, documents, discussions, and files matching the search term. The field can be further refi ned to only search documents.

Centralising emails duplicates, triplicates and so on the same information every time it is forwarded to another person. Searching this centralised email storage would create a list with many more emails with the same information. By reclassifying emails as an asset, businesses retain important decisions that contribute to documentation. This is created during the project and towards the end of the project. Even though the documenter tries to capture the most important information and decisions, it is hard to remember all the decisions taken. Even those that are captured do not allow the user to retain any history of how a decision was reached. The added benefit of centralising discussions means they become a natural part of the prepared documentation. Documentation once prepared is rarely updated, either because it is ‘lost’ in some multi-level folder or on some drive that isn’t accessible or forgotten. Storing it in an enterprise collaboration system allows a new member of staff to search for the document or be led there by a ‘pointer’ to the document.

Collaboration and version control

Streaming and the 2Ds

The project manager could monitor the status of discussions and documents at a high or granular level, as required. A particularly interesting document was the issue register. Having a simple spreadsheet logging any issues found during the testing would send a notification when a new version was published. The project manager would therefore know when to check the sheet for new changes. Using the Microsoft Office plug-in from Jive meant that the project manager (or anyone else with access to the group) could have the issue register open and be a co-editor with any other parties who had the same file open. Once any of these members published a new version, the others received a notification within Excel that a member had made changes. They could then choose to merge the changes, replace their file or ignore the changes. By choosing merge, the project manager is able to see which fields and rows have changed. This is the same for Word documents.

Futureproofing Now that the project has gone live with the upgrade, whenever a question is asked about why a certain decision was made, the team can search Jive and fi nd those references to the decision. Searching emails is dependent on retaining all of your emails, something that isn’t always the case when you begin to exceed your email quota. Getting a list of emails then means you need to open each one and read through it and if it isn’t the one you were looking for, you move to the next to only fi nd it is about the same subject. That is because every reply is treated as a separate email, while in Jive, searching shows all references in a discussion, saving time searching for the correct information. Businesses do not consider emails to be an asset because they are between individuals and are classified as a personal communication, with a large volume considered to be noise.

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Another benefit of using the enterprise collaboration tool is the ability to set up different groups or segregate discussions into specific streams. When working with several clients, I had a stream for each client, showing when a client started a discussion, responded to a discussion or updated a document. Their updates went into the stream I had set up for their group. This meant that I could focus more of my time on the client without having to trawl through emails, especially from colleagues who were working with me across several clients, searching for responses relevant to the client I needed to focus on. During my time using this enterprise collaboration tool, I noticed efficiencies in reusing documents and discussions. Starting discussions in the applicable group meant that all members were aware of the topic without the need to re-email the document or discussion to another member who was included later. Pointing a new arrival to the group allowed me to quickly refer them to the discussion that needed their input. Overall I fi nd the enterprise collaboration tool easy to use and structured. It allows me to focus on the client at hand, creating efficiencies in use of time on both sides. When I need to revisit discussions, I can quickly refresh my memory on the status. I suggest you seriously consider how you can use enterprise collaboration tools in your business and projects. The independent magazine for SAP professionals

Peter Stulcbauer is an experienced payroll consultant who has been assisting clients in SAP for over 15 years. He operates through his company, Martarna, providing freelance services at client sites around Australia. He can be reached by email on peter@martarna.com.au or by phone – Perth: 08 9467 4997; Brisbane: 07 3503 6733; Sydney: 02 8022 8411; Melbourne: 03 9948 4033.

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