Executive Summary Agility is the key to survival in todays marketplace. With swift technological advances and vast fluctuations in economic outlook, companies must continually adapt to new environments and find innovative ways to stay ahead of the competition. A business developer model provides IT departments with the desired flexibility to meet growing business demands while maintaining core IT integrity. In this paradigm, non-IT business developers are tasked with creating customized software solutions to advance business goals, thereby generating increased productivity and greater efficiency necessary for sustained success. To maximize the value of this model, companies must empower business developers with userfriendly tools that allow for creation of effective workflow solutions without compromising IT security. While companies utilizing complex data-processing systems like SAP face an especially tough challenge in upgrading system usability, investing in effective solutions such as those offered by Winshuttlecan enable business developers to build secure, SAPintegrated workflow applications that greatly increase corporate agility, productivity and value. This report discusses the requirements for successful implementation of the business developer model and the advantages of creating comprehensive, SAP-based workflow solutions using Winshuttle tools.
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Introduction
Ten years ago, mentioning the term end-user developers to an IT professional would elicit a response ranging from mere dismissal to quiet frustration or outright rage. Application development was serious business, and the bloated spreadsheets and rogue Web pages created by power users were at best a nuisance and at worst a liability. Advances in technology and the never-ending drive for competitive advantage have brought about a change in attitude, however, and many CIOs now regard enabling nonIT, non-professional developers to safely build and customize software applications as a component of an agile, business-driven IT department. The term non-professional developer covers a wide range of individuals with varying levels of skill and sophistication. What they all have in common, though, is motivation: They just want to get a job done. Forrester Research defines the term business developer (1) as: a businessperson, not a professional application developer, who develops or configures an application to support business functions. This definition captures the source of these individuals value: their day-to-day participation in and responsibility for business functions. It is this intimate connection to the business and the strong motivation to solve problems that allows a business developer to contribute to the organizations success.
In a January 2011 report titled Empower the Business Developer, Forrester Research analyst Mike Gualtieri developed a set of best practices for IT organizations wishing to get the most out of the new model, as listed in Table 1.
Table 1: Best practices for empowering business developers (1)
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Recognize business developers. Establish a policy that defines how you will support businessperson development. Create a Should this be a businessperson-developed application? checklist. Make businessperson-friendly data sources and services available. Help them overcome common hurdles. Adopt tools with caution. Collect and broadcast best practices for businessperson development.
Item 4 on this list highlights a dilemma for organizations that have deployed Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software like SAP as their system of record. The data and processes that matter most to the business operations of these companies are stored in SAP. However, the development tools for building SAP applications are far beyond most business developers capabilities, and the cost of mistakes is too high. Making SAP data and services businessperson-friendly is a tall order, and one that many companies simply reject out of hand. Declaring SAP off limits to business-driven development efforts is a major lost opportunity, however. For many companies, SAP is no longer just back-office software, handling complex processes limited to a small number of experts. SAP is the pivotal process component in sales, HR, plant maintenance and other employee- and customer-intensive functions. These are precisely the areas where business developers can have the most impact. Denying business developers access to SAP data and processes creates a business automation no mans land that limits both the potential effectiveness of business developers and the potential return on SAP investment.
Giving business developers the ability to build workflow applications that perform data operations increases the value of their work and extends the ability of SAP to automate business processes further out into the organization. Several common examples are illustrated in Table 2.
Table 2: Increasing value with SAP-based workflow
Workflow Alone (1+1=2) Creating a budget revision process to request moving money between budgets is a time-honored business process, which includes a workflow and related forms that gather employee information from an external database via a Web service. This information, which includes employees name, number, department and phone number, is used to auto-populate the required form. Pulling this information into the form reduces errors and saves time. Tracking and controlling complex engineering procedures is a daunting challenge for most companies. Leveraging existing SharePoint infrastructure to implement a multi-tier engineering change request process with enough flexibility to meet rapidly changing requirements and options leading to sub-options can be a challenging development initiative. Initiating requisitions for both direct and indirect supplies is an ongoing process for most companies. Ensuring that the right product is ordered for the task at hand while meeting corporate procurement guidelines is where the challenge occurs. Routing to the correct approver and being able to do conditional routing based on requisition amount or type of requested product is the job of a good process workflow. A leave of absence request process is not just about sending a request to a line manager for approval. In case of approval, the originator must confirm the actual used time off upon returning to the workplace. In case of rejection, the data needs to be routed back to the requestor for follow up. A good workflow process should take these considerations into account.
Workflow + SAP (1+1=3) Leveraging the same workflow plus SAP integration would result in the ability to pull specific cost centers, compare budget vs. actual data for prior year, and revise figures by uploading data back to SAP, using a specific FICO transaction code. Example SAP budget transaction codes would include IM52 (Process Budget Distribution), FMBB (Budgeting Workbench) and KO22 (Change Order Budget).
Extending the engineering change request (ECR) process to SAP takes workflow complexity to another level. Integrating with Production Planning and specific transactions, such as CC23, CC31, CC32 (Create, Change and Display Request, respectively), via a Webservices interface provides the value of a SAPbased, single trusted source of information with the accountability and auditability of a good ECR process workflow. SAP Material Management is a world-class solution for managing the acquisition of goods and services to companies worldwide. Using Web services to integrate configurable workflow with the SAP ME51N (Create Purchase Requisition) and ME52N (Change Purchase Requisition) is a good example of leveraging the SharePoint infrastructure for business-userauthored SAP process innovations.
SAP Human Capital Management (HCM) provides an array of options for managing leave of absence requests, including PA30 (Infotype 2006Leave Entitlement). Integrating externalized leave of absence process workflow in a SharePoint environment and into a SAP HCM environment brings together the best of both worldsa business-friendly authoring environment with SharePoint as a deployment platform and easy-to-use authoring tools, as well as a world-class system of record and timehonored governance and security framework.
Table 3: Top SAP Transactions for potential process improvements (To project potential capacity gains, multiply estimated records processed by the median seconds saved.)
SAP TCode VA22 FV50 VA21 FB50 CJ02 ME21N ME51N MIRO XD01 CS01 CL20N MM01 CA01 VA41 ABUMN PA40 FBL5N XK02 VT01N VA01
Description Change Quotation Park G/L Account Items Create Quotation G/L Acct Pstg: Single Screen Trans. Change Work Breakdown Structure Create Purchase Order Create Purchase Requisition Enter Incoming Invoice Create Customer (Centrally) Create Material BOM Object Assignments Create Material Create Routing Create Contract Transfer within Company Code Personnel Actions Customer Line Items Change Vendor (Centrally) Create Shipment Create Sales Order
Average SAP Records Processed per Winshuttle Transaction 74 33 5 93 24 28 5 39 18 163 328 520 10 6 146 10 411 223 4 19
Median Seconds Saved per SAP Record Processed per Winshuttle Transaction 152 193 178 111 147 125 48 169 268 108 79 150 78 202 128 184 162 98 148 130
Winshuttle Workflow and Winshuttle Designer allow business developers to integrate easy-to-use Winshuttle tools and Microsoft SharePoint to rapidly build innovative workflow solutions that perform SAP data operations. This business developer solution also satisfies IT requirements for security and control, as shown in Table 4.
Table 4: Winshuttle tools and business developer requirements
Codeless development
Winshuttle Designer uses a drag-and-drop tool set and a swim lane metaphor to rapidly build workflow applications. Winshuttles Run-Record-Map methodology lets users capture any SAP transaction and turn it into a spreadsheet template or XML Web service. Winshuttle Central lets IT managers set up and enforce security policies that map to existing SAP credentials. Applications built with Winshuttle Workflow use Microsoft SharePoint for easy, centralized deployment. Winshuttle tools let business developers build Microsoft Excel templates and Microsoft InfoPath forms that execute SAP transactions.
Flexible solutions
IT-managed security
With rapid technological advances and increased focus on streamlined productivity in recent years, organizations have begun to embrace business developers as valued contributors of agile, businessdriven IT. Business developers can increase enterprise-wide adoption of technology, enhance productivity and enrich innovation. Effective implementation of the business developer model requires a user-friendly platform that does not compromise core IT integrity. Usability enhancements are especially critical for companies that utilize complex data-processing systems like SAP. Providing appropriate tools and allowing non-IT developers to build workflow applications that perform SAP data operations can increase both the value of the business developer model and the return on SAP investment. Winshuttles innovative solutions let business developers build high-value, SAP-integrated workflow applications without sacrificing IT security and control. For more information about how Winshuttle can help your company empower business developers and get the most out of your SAP investment, visit www.winshuttle.com or email info@winshuttle.com.
Bibliography
1. Gualtieri, Mike. Empowering the Business Developer. Boston: Forrester Research, 2011. 2. Driver, Mark. Characteristics and Best Practices of Business Unit Application Development. Stamford: Gartner, 2011. 3. McGill, Tanya. The Effect of End User Development on End User Success. Hershey: Idea Group Publichsing, 2005.
Winshuttle is the ERP Usability Company, providing software products that enable business users to work with SAP directly from Excel, Web forms and other interfaces without any programming. Winshuttle focuses on a simple fact when using SAP applications, time is money. Winshuttles usability solutions radically accelerate SAP user transactions, saving and redirecting millions of dollars for SAPs customers every day. These financial benefits are achieved by significantly reducing employee and contractor costs and increasing resources to address more strategic priorities. Thousands of customers use Winshuttle to make their SAP lives easier. Headquartered in Bothell, Washington, Winshuttle has offices in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and India. For more information, visit www.winshuttle.com.
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