Academy of Better Business

GUIDE | Author: Marcin Kraska (BCC)

Prepared in 2005 r. | Hits: 1015 | Average rating: 3

What can be better?

Every user of an IT system in a company can work on SAP EP. Below we present only some examples of functions and activities that can be supported by the portal:

• ESS - Employee Self Service; these arethesolutions that help employees independently (e.g. without the personnel department) review and enter selected data concerning themselves. Examples of such information can be registration of time work, entering business trip forms or holiday forms, changing basic personal data, like contact numbers or bank account numbers. ESS helps shorten the time of some processes related to personnel and reduce their costs (both the cost of personnel department work and document flow).
• MSS - Manager Self Service– a set of tools for team managers. Thanks to MSS managers have access to information on subordinates. Through the portal they can handle absences, holiday forms or business trips. Based on the data concerning their skills and training they can plan employees’ development and assign tasks.
• Access to analytic SAP BW reports. One of the widest uses of SAP EP is presenting reports from SAP BW data warehouse. The scale of solutions ranges from the simplest, like electronic presentation of the reports already in existence to entering complex mechanisms of data interchange between particular elements of reports.
• Knowledge Managementis a set of tools which are to ensure environment for storing, flow and use of employees’ knowledge. The portal boosts natural processes of organizing teams and spontaineous processes of employees’ learning. Easy search makes the knowledge gathered easy to reuse. When we add the possibility to integrate SAP EP with an e-learning solution we obtain an integrated training and educational platform which, when used in an organized and planned manner, will lower personnel training costs.

(Almost) everybody can create a portal

Portal solutions in a company do not have to be created from scratch. SAP provides a set of tools which greatly limit the effort and costs of starting SAP EP. This means in particular tools available through Portal Content Catalog, which can be used by all registered users of companies that work on SAP and also specialists from implementation companies.

Portal Content Catalog gives access to tools which are used to create portal solutions from ready-made “blocks”. Currently the above service has almost 10,000 functional components, grouped in several hundred packages divided into more than ten categories, thanks to which in virtually every company one may find portal applications ready to use immediately.

Portal Content Catalog is available on SAP Developer Netwrok - general SAP Portal for developers, http://www.sdn.sap.com/ 

Not only for programmers

Technical solutions of SAP Enterprise Portal make it possible not only for the most advanced and experienced programmers to create and develop functionalities of the portal.

The tools for creating provided by SAP are adjusted to three most frequent roles fulfilled by employees or areas of interests:

• administrative skills. In order to use portal packages, eg. those obtained from the site www.iviewstudio.com, it is enough to possess administrative skills of a portal platform administrator and the knowledge of IT systems used by the company. In the standard offered by SAP EP 6.0 there are more than 30 types of possible iViews, i.e. portal’s functional components which enable to put together elements of user’s work environment.
• the knowledge of business processes and IT system landscape. SAP provides more advanced user with Visual Composer, which frees them from purely programming work and allows to create more advanced solutions, for example based on currently used functions. Providing this middle layer increases possibilities of developing applications provided by the portal platform. It also helps better organize the cooperation between employees responsible for business and programmers that perform the most advancedtasks.
• programmers. For this most advanced group there are possibilities included into the global environment of SAP NetWeaver platform development, namely SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio. It helps create any complex solution (based either on SAP WebDynpro  technology or open WebService services). Moreover, the fact of using Java platform as a base for creating solutions in SAP EP gives practically unlimited possibilities of integration with commonly implemented standards, thanks to which the way to create any portal applications is open for all people who know the technology.

When deciding on using SAP EP, the company opens wide possibilities of better work organization for every user individually as well as team work. Human work becomes more effective, and using different elements of IT infrastructure becomes more convenient.

Hits: 1015 || Average rating: 3