References

Six months of EU GDPR – a summary!

The EU General Data Protection Regulation has now been legally binding for six months and is now supplemented by the Federal Data Protection Act. The feared wave of lawsuits and warnings has not materialized so far.

Does this mean we can sit back and return to business as usual?

Our customers see things very differently. A large number of existing and new customers have inquired about this topic, and we have been able to support them in a significant number of projects involving the analysis of data stored in their respective SAP systems. The analysis was always accompanied by an assessment of how the stored data should be handled in the future. In particular, determining the respective retention periods for individual infotypes as well as for employee master data as a whole was a central issue for the respective HR and IT departments.

The results were recorded in a data destruction concept, which can be seen as the first step toward data protection compliance. Depending on the company, the concepts created were coordinated with the respective works councils or staff councils, as well as presented to and discussed with the data protection officers.

After submitting the data destruction concept, the next step is to implement it in the respective SAP systems, including SAP Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), and transfer it to productive use.

The requirements in the respective companies vary greatly. For example, we were able to implement the destruction concept for individual customers solely by customizing the SAP standard. Other customers had requirements that made it necessary to implement even the most complex requirements with regard to determining the respective retention periods within the framework of the SAP standard by using so-called Business Add-Ins (BAdI). It is important to note that in no case was it necessary to modify the SAP standard.

Information Lifecycle Management also enables the destruction of customer-specific infotypes and database tables.

We have also been able to support many customers in this second step toward an EU GDPR-compliant SAP HCM system in the current year. The scope of our support ranged from accompanying support and training of customers’ internal employees to map the requirements in the system to the complete implementation of the concept by CTH employees.

The third essential step involves training the respective employees. CTH also supports these training courses, which are naturally aimed at different target groups. Future users and internal module administrators may be affected, depending on who will need to maintain and support the necessary programs and customizing settings in later productive operation, or even carry out the implementation of data destruction concepts independently after the training.

In our projects, the first customers are currently completing the test phase and switching to productive use with ILM. In this context, we would like to point out very clearly that the productive use of ILM means the final destruction of employee data and that this should always be done with the appropriate caution.

Our recommendation is therefore that users should, no, must take plenty of time to test both the technical procedures and the associated processes thoroughly and reliably. In many cases, the processes also had to be redefined and made binding.

In conclusion, as different as the individual users are in their use of SAP HCM systems and as different as the respective requirements may be formulated, a reliable and customized implementation of the requirements of the EU GDPR was feasible in all cases without any problems.

In addition, from a commercial perspective, all projects were completed by us within the previously estimated time frame and thus sometimes remained below the set financial budget.

If your company is also faced with the decision of making its SAP HCM system GDPR-compliant or deleting personnel data in the system in accordance with the GDPR, we would be happy to hear from you.

info@cth.de

Has your SAP ERP HCM been running for many years?

Has your system been repeatedly adapted to new requirements and new subsystems?

Has the SAP standard increasingly faded into the background?

This was the situation faced by our customer, a highly successful international manufacturer and distributor of installation technology products, who decided to redesign their time management system.

Isn’t a redesign very costly?

This depends not least on the people involved, the project organization, and the desire for renewal.

Over the years of use, new requirements had been added repeatedly, while old, possibly obsolete functionalities remained in the system. Time management, in particular, had reached a point where further maintenance became very costly due to the obsolete solutions. In addition, users had “replaced” missing system functionalities with manual workarounds.

Our customer naturally needed to be able to perform retroactive accounting for old periods, but was otherwise willing to completely restart time management. The new solution was to be based as closely as possible on the SAP standard.

What was implemented and changed:

As a first step, three one-day workshops were held to develop the functionalities currently required for time management. During these workshops, we (users and consultants) also identified processes in the area of time management that had a direct or indirect impact on time management performance. These processes were successfully optimized because only those involved in the process and with decision-making authority participated in the respective workshops. The optimized processes could be documented and bindingly defined immediately. Within the scope of these workshops, the data flow between production data acquisition (PDA) and time management was a very extensive and important part of the task. The result: a new interface between the two systems was created and put into productive use.

Another special task was the highly variable resource planning for employees in one area of logistics. Resource planning is carried out outside of SAP ERP HCM and specifies target working times in such a flexible manner that they could not be mapped adequately with daily work schedules (table T550A) or substitutions (infotype 2003), or only with a high level of manual data entry. A solution was created using the Attendances infotype (2002) and the standard interface for supplying data from external systems. The manual entry effort could thus be almost completely eliminated. During the workshops, it became clear that there were still untapped opportunities for system-supported flexible shift allocation in 2-shift, 3-shift, and 4-shift systems, which also led to a further reduction in manual effort.

The desired automatic allocation of break times could not be mapped with “normal” customizing, but could be realized through creative use of SAP standard tools without the need for customer-specific coding. Using several proprietary calculation rules, the variable breaks requested by the customer could be implemented not only for normal cases but also for part-time employees and young workers. Overtime approval was mapped using the SAP infotype Attendance Quotas (2007).

To ensure the aforementioned restart of time management, the new time evaluation schema was built on the basis of a “fresh” copy of the standard schema TM00. The processing of employees with negative time management (time management status 9) was also integrated. Special customer-specific processing (e.g., dynamic specification of target time; dynamic break allocation) was implemented in sub-schemas and marked in such a way that the time evaluation log remains structured and clear. To ensure retroactive accounting capability, the previous and new time evaluation schemas were combined in a higher-level “start schema” and separated from each other on a specific date. Thanks to these measures, it is now possible to process all time management cases with a single variant of the standard report RPTIME00.

By choosing the project organization (involvement of process participants, implementation of small and decisive workshops) and the extensive and creative use of the possibilities offered by the SAP standard, the redesign project was successfully completed on time and within the planned budget (approx. 70 person-days). Despite an extensive test phase, the personnel costs were lower than originally expected by the customer. The cost of external support was also correspondingly lower.

The solution created in this way has now been running successfully for more than six months. The quick wins for the customer mainly consist of a significant reduction in manual tasks for time management administrators. In the longer term, the increased clarity of the new solution reduces the internal and external effort required to maintain the system. Initial adjustments to new requirements were implemented with little effort thanks to the clear structure of the new schema. The redesign also had a positive impact on the further expansion of the use of ESS/MSS scenarios.

Have we piqued your interest? We look forward to supporting you with your SAP ERP HCM challenges.