Global Implementation

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User roles

Especially if you have an open architecture where users can access the entire catalog, you need to carefully evaluate what user roles must be established. It is highly recommended to leave the creation of certain object types to a "System Owner" type role.



This role will have the exclusive access to create or modify objects that will affect the entire user community. An example would be the creation of business event groups. Once you have your business event catalog in place, you do not want any user to be able to add, change. move or delete business event groups - because this will affect the "world". Hence, you should create a specific role that has the privilege of creating business event groups. You should assign this role to someone within production support or to the system owner, someone with a global view and perspective. If you allow all administrators to create their own business event groups, you will end up with an incoherent catalog, each portion only making sense to a specific training organization - but not to the rest of the user community.



The "System owner role" should also have the exclusive access to creating resource types and locations - again, users often do not pay attention and create locations twice or more times in the system, even though the object already existed. They might do the same with resource types.


Resource types have a multitude of relationships, which are prerequisites in order to use the resource reservation feature. Duplicate resource types will prevent you from using resource reservations properly. The same applies to duplicate location entries.



Next you will have the traditional training administrator role - typically these users create courses, events, book attendees and perform all the follow-up activities; they will have full T&E access - with the exception of the creation of business event groups, resource types and locations. You might also have a third role that will only perform booking activities - if you are a very large organization and have clerks that book attendees to events without actually creating events or performing any resource reservations etc, you might need this role.


ESS

If you choose to implement ESS in order to allow your employees to self-register for training courses via SAP's web enabled user interface, this will again impact the design of your naming convention and also of your business event catalog. The standard SAP ESS functionality for T&E does not actually display the training catalog to the user. Users can search for courses by name or location. This is why you need to be careful again when naming business event groups, business event types (courses) and locations - these names have to be searchable.

Alternatively, if you choose to enhance the existing ESS solution by displaying the business event catalog, bear in mind that the hierarchy you have chosen has to make sense to the students who are searching for courses. This emphasizes again the need to carefully plan the structure of your catalog, given the fact that it will be used by a very large number of employees who might self-register and an extensive administrator user group who will use it for course management.

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Data Conversion


In a global rollout situation where multiple legacy systems will be converted into SAP T&E, you need to plan ahead when it comes to data conversion. You might have to convert thousands of courses into SAP that all must fit into their logical place in the catalog hierarchy. It is very likely that you will encounter duplicate courses: courses that have similar names but are in fact the same course. At this point it would be good to identify these courses to avoid populating SAP with duplicate or triple entries. It is beneficial to bring business lines and training departments together as much as possible in order to try to centralize the management of certain types of training. You also need to identify courses that are owned by a certain training department but offered by others and who is responsible for which processes in the training cycle.



Before you can convert any course data however, your training catalog has to be in place first. Only then can you load business event types into SAP.



As far as other data are concerned, you might want to use a CATT to load resource types, locations, instructors etc. The more data you can load programmatically, the better. In a large-scale implementation, it reduces human errors and will save you a lot of time.



You also need to think about historical data - do you want to load them into SAP so that you have one reporting system or do you want to keep them in the legacy system? Once you have loaded the courses, it is not a difficult task to create training history for employees.

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Log-on Language

Global organizations operate in multiple countries with multiple languages. The issue associated with this is that if a user creates an object while he is logged on with for example German as the log-on language, then other users will not be able to see the object unless they log on in German too.
It is advisable to ask users to always log on in English - this way, you will have a common language across countries, it will help production support when receiving phone calls and you will have data consistency. You could ask users to always remember to create objects in both English and their native language but it is likely that they will forget.



In addition, if you have objects in more than one language, it is likely to cause you problems in other areas such as workflow and ESS. These custom applications usually look for the first language they can find and so you might end up having a user in the United States who receives a workflow email that contains the course name in German. The same issues arise with ESS. It is recommended to agree on the use of English as the log-on language to simplify things. This will also prevent you from having to translate all training materials into different languages and finding instructors that are both proficient in the language and in SAP T&E.

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Common Configuration and transactions

There are a number of processes and associated transactions in T&E that should be used in specific situations. For example the "Firmly book "transaction should be executed at a specific stage in the training cycle and so should the "follow-up" action. Each organization has to decide when these transactions should be executed, especially if they serve as triggering activities for workflow, correspondence or billing. If a large user community uses these transactions at will or chooses not to use them at all, it will negatively affect your reporting and you will not get the most out of your T&E system. Standards and common procedures will need to be implemented to make sure that training organizations across the globe use their shared system following the same set of rules.



It often is difficult to implement such rules and not all users will be happy but this re-engineering is necessary. There are a number of "switches" you can set in configuration to determine the system's triggering activities, messages or output but there only is one "switch" that once implemented, will be valid for the entire user community.



The global rollout team will have to communicate this to the users when they are getting ready to go live. With multiple sites, you should opt for a phased rollout rather than a "big bang" go-live for all. It is a good idea to send a team to one or a few selected sites at the time prior and until after go-live to help with outstanding data conversions or training questions. The lessons learnt at each site will reduce errors and issues at the next site and give you a chance to fix problems in between go-lives. You might want to keep your most challenging site until the end.

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Correspondence and Workflow

Another area where you will have to design a common template is correspondence. Whether you use SAPScript or Workflow, you need to create one letter (Registration, Booking Confirmation, Course cancellation etc…) in each language needed. This template will then be read and transmitted to the student. This means that all English speaking students will receive the same exact message across the globe, each French speaking student will receive the same message etc. SAP reads the language field of the enrolled student from his or her personnel infotype and this is what determines the language in which he or she received the correspondence. You can only have one template in each language for a specific scenario and so you will need to involve your training managers across the organization to agree on the content of the message.



Whereas SAPScript correspondence can be altered by the training administrator, workflow emails are sent out automatically and will end up in the receiver's inbox without any intervention from the training department. Workflow needs a trigger (time, transaction etc) and training administrators need to understand the implications of certain T&E transactions that are used by workflow to issue emails.



If you choose to implement workflow to lighten the workload of administrators, decide as to when emails should be sent, what the content should be and who should receive them (Student, supervisor, administrator). Workflow is very flexible but the triggering activities have to be chosen carefully.