Go Green and Get Rid of Expense Receipts Clutter with a Mobile SAP Travel and Expense Solution

Challenges in the Travel and Expense Management Process

COLLECTING PAPER RECEIPTS, SCANNING, ATTACHING

Desktop and Manual processes for Travel and Expense management involving collecting piles of receipts, scanning, attaching requisitions, invoices and poorly managed travel expenses   provides little or no ability for spend policy enforcement. The inefficiency in manual and desktop processes leads to many more challenges like employees over spending, lack of spend visibility creating difficulty in consolidating and negotiating better pricing with vendors and too much time in approvals. Delayed desktop expense report processing and approvals making it difficult to accrue liability and report on a multitude of performance indicators.

 ISSUES WITH ENFORCING TRAVEL POLICIES

Card issuer compliance is often high on the agenda, non-compliance could result in fines and damage to both bottom line and the reputation of the company. Companies are finding innovative ways to ensure expense reports are filed in a timely manner and adhere to travel policy compliances. However, most employees make travel and expense decisions without having the most up to date and accurate information available to them in real-time to make in-policy and out of policy travel expense decisions.

DELAYED SUBMISSION OF EXPENSE REPORTS

Travel and expense staff and managers have to often chase down employees and ask for the timely submission of their travel and expense reports. Delayed Submission of a travel and expense report, along with attaching scanned copies of the receipts after finishing their business travel delays the final approval of travel expenses incurred. The increase in overall processing time for expense report increases your cost per employee for managing travel and expenses and decreases productivity of your accounts payable teams, resulting in increased cost per travel and expense report processed.

    

EMPLOYEE PRODUCTIVITY LOSS

Desktop expense management system slows down business processes and creates elongated approval process and reimbursement timeline. Regular late submission of expense reports, sometimes weeks or even months late, due to unavailability of mobile tools decreases employee productivity.

GO MOBILE AND GET RID OF PAPER RECEIPTS AND ENTER SAP TRAVEL AND EXPENSE REPORTS ON THE FLY, AS YOU FLY

A mobile  travel and expense management solution can dramatically improve employee productivity with features such as on the go expense receipt capture, timely submission of expense reports and ensuring travel and expense purchases are made within policy by verifying the expense against company policy in real time. Mobile Travel and Expense management is the key for controlling and reducing operating expenses, eliminating untimely submissions of expense reports and reduces overall cost per travel and expense report. Using Mobile solution like mTravel from Innovapptive, employees in businesses in every sector can now avoid all of those tasks.

Features and Functionality  of the mTravel Solution.

Innovapptive’s mTravel mobile solution for managing Travel expenses, brings a level of flexibility for employees to easily capture, track, and manage travel expense reports on-the-go. Recent Aberdeen Group research shows that mobile-enabled expense programs:

• Increase compliance by 10%
• Reduce time to submit and approve reports by 28%
• Reduce processing costs by 40%

mTravel makes it easy to achieve the same results. Users can capture transaction data at the time they incur an expense. Cash expenses (such as tips or taxi fares) can be added quickly to an expense report, receipt images can be captured with the phone’s camera and credit card charges are automatically available in the mobile application for reporting.

With the mTravel Mobile Solution, businesses can:

• Keep control – travel content is determined by your policies
• Save time – convenient access speeds up submissions and approvals
• Improve accuracy – with receipt images and on-the-spot reporting
• Satisfy travelers – mobile access makes travel much easier

Are SAP Fiori Apps the right mobile solution for your Enterprise?

SAP Fiori is a collection of apps with consumer grade user experience (UX) for SAP software for multiple platforms like ABAP, HANA, SAP Portal and Cloud Portal. It supports a variety of roles in lines of business that include HR, Sales, Procurement, Finance and Manufacturing. The 300+ collection of apps from Fiori are light-weight and designed for routine tasks to improve productivity.

Understanding the User Experience (UX) needs is critical in selecting the right mobile solution

MOSTLY DESKTOP USERS	Expect to have consumer-grade applications on their desktop. Accustomed to having speedy network and excellent application performance. Know applications are secured by company network. SAP Fiori Apps or Personas are great SAP UX transformation tools that can be deployed to meet the needs of “Mostly Desktop Users”
DESKTOP AND MOBILE USERS	Alternate between desktop and mobile device. Need a consistent UX across all devices. Expect great performance for both mobile and desktop. Require mobile security. SAP Fiori Apps within a hybrid containerized mobile app is a great option to cater for desktop and mobile users.
MOSTLY MOBILE USERS	Accustomed to working with consumer grade apps on their mobile device. Expect to have native phone/tablet capabilities integrated with their mobile apps. Demand high performance from apps. Need strong security for apps. Pre-packaged or Custom Native Mobile Apps

If SAP Fiori addresses all the business needs why consider Native apps?

Native applications meet the need for users that predominantly spend most of their time on a mobile device, as opposed to a desktop. These users require a native mobile user experience as a native solutions are designed, compiled, installed, and executed on Mobile devices to deliver necessary performance and user experience.

For use cases that are “mostly mobile users”, a native mobile app with SAP Mobile Platform would be the ideal mobile solution for an enterprise. A native mobile app with an SAP Mobile Platform provides the following superior features for the end user to better run their business and achieve the highest level of productivity:

• Native features such as GPS, camera and bar code reader
• Advanced security and authentication
• Superior user experience
• Offline Access
• Improved data transfer speed
• Improved performance
• Third party integration
• Application usage analytics
• Push notifications
• Badges

In the future SAP is also releasing support for SAP Fiori Apps with the SAP Mobile Platform to create hybrid containerized native apps to support the above features.

Innovapptive provides pre-packaged SAP certified native mobile apps with a customization and extension cockpit to empower IT teams to tailor the app to meet their specific business needs. In addition, Innovapptive offers SAP Fiori implementation services along with custom native mobile app development. Depending on customer priorities, customers can use these facts to choose between Innovapptive’s SP certified native mobile apps, SAP Fiori Apps or custom build a native mobile app.

Does a Mobile Device Management (MDM) Solution secure your Mobile Enterprise?

Bring-your-own-device or BYOD continues to gain traction, as employees want to use their personal tech gadgets, such as tablets and smartphones, for work. The exponential rise in demand to use personal devices has pressured CIO’s and IT to support them. Gaining popularity of BYOD as a business enabler for enterprise mobility initiatives has increased the demand for more policies, making more flexible yet secure solutions mandatory. The situation started pushing aside enterprise mobile device management (MDM), in favor of  more user-centric mobile application management (MAM).

Importance of a Mobile Application Management (MAM) within an enterprise mobile strategy

MDM as a tool to set up a strong mobile device management is being more reserved for corporate-liable devices.  MDM functionality   distributes  applications, data and configuration settings for all types of mobile devices over-the-air. This applies to both company-owned and employee-owned (BYOD) devices. IT can secure access to the device by authenticating the use of a passcode and by remotely wiping lost or stolen devices to keep sensitive data out of reach of wrong hands.

The full-device approach is not acceptable by employees looking to use personal devices within an enterprise BYOD programs. To compliment your corporate owned device policy, it is imperative that enterprises start recognizing the need to evaluate comprehensive mobile application management (MAM) solutions that can work cohesively with your enterprise MDM system. Mobile application management (MAM) offers more granular controls giving IT the ability to access and secure only the enterprise apps that were specifically installed on employee devices. MAM is becoming more important for enterprises with increased focus on app security along with usability and scalability.

According to ABI report, MDM currently has 60 percent of users in “enterprise mobility management solution users”. The gaining momentum of MAM estimated to surpass MDM by 2019, will drop to 30 percent, with MAM accounting for more than 60 percent.

To meet this growing demand and trend of enterprises supporting BYOD policies, Innovapptive offers a cloud based mobile application management (MAM) solution that provides a best in class MAM Solution to support the following functions:

• A private enterprise branded app store
• Administrator portal to manage groups, users and security policies
• Integrated app wrapper security features
• Basic mobile device management
• Mobile remote control functionality

Innovapptive’s MAM solution enhances any managed app, without requiring code changes. The functionality provides remote interaction and troubleshooting to company apps, leaving employee personal apps untouched. For more information regarding our cloud based mobile application management (MAM) solution, or to schedule a demo, please email us atsales@innovapptive.com or click here to complete our contact form.

How to choose the right SAP User Experience (UX) Transformation Platform – SAP Personas or SAP Fiori?

User Experience: The Case for Change

SAP User Experience (UX) Solutions

For enterprises looking at making SAP attractive, aiming profits by creating easy user adoption of SAP, the news about SAP Fiori and Personas at Sapphire Now 2014 is a great news. The exciting news is that, the two user experience (UX) products,are now included free for SAP customers. Each of these complementary solutions helps today’s business users by making SAP more intuitive.

SAP Fiori applies modern responsive design principles for a completely re-imagined user experience. SAP Fiori UX represents a personalized, responsive and simple user experience across devices and deployment options. The ready-to-use 300+ role-based apps of SAP Fiori provide a wide range of choice for SAP users. The apps are categorized into three app types that include transactional apps that allow users to perform transaction tasks, analytical apps that provide users role-based insight into key performance indicators, and fact sheets that display contextual information and key facts about central objects used in business operations.

While, SAP Screen Personas is for customization of most classic screens in SAP ERP to increase personal Productivity. The simple, drag and drop approach to modify most SAP GUI screens. Using SAP Screen Personas makes simplifying business application screens quickly and easily for IT and business users without any programming knowledge. SAP Screen Personas improves the end-user productivity, visual appeal, and performance of SAP.

Comparison Matrix to choose between the SAP Personas and SAP Fiori

How to choose  SAP Personas or SAP Fiori?

For majority of SAP casual users in an enterprise, Fiori will be a right-fit to run routine and most common transactions. Fiori apps are ready to run apps with responsive designs that work in an intuitive way across smart phones, tablets and desktops, allowing users to update routine tasks from anywhere from any device. It helps in enhancing speed of business in every line of business. Updated information of inventory, leaves approval, sales and purchase order approvals, creating a dynamic supply chain management which can efficiently deal with challenging supply and demand situations allowing minimal changes for enhancement of look and feel, not allowing changes to the underlying transactions.

SAP Personas has do-it-yourself approach, primarily designed for desktops, helping in modifying specialized and complex screens, tabs or tables of any SAP GUI transaction quickly and easily. Requiring no programming, the most functional group of the organizations can simplify the processes by selecting the information they choose to appear in their own required context.

Based on your priorities, and addressing the below queries will help your enterprise choose the right SAP UI technology to assist your SAP UX transformation initiatives.

For more information regarding our services around SAP User Experience (UX), or to schedule a demo of SAP Fiori or SAP Personas, please email us at sales@innovapptive.com or click here to complete our contact form.

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Deconstructing the user types and full benefits of SAP Enterprise Mobility

Mobility as a revolution is playing an ever-increasing role in the business world. Unlocking new capabilities for consuming and processing information is radically changing the way enterprises conduct business. According to leading industry analysts 50% of business applications will be accessed through mobile within two years. As your enterprise embarks into the mobile revolution, it is important to deconstruct your user base right at inception to reap the full benefits of Enterprise Mobiliy.

Businesses using SAP and opting for SAP Enterprise Mobility, need to understand the diversified users of business mobile community to achieve the benefits of SAP Enterprise Mobility.  Mobile solutions vary depending on the specific business and functional needs of a particular community.  Business mobile community can be broken into three distinct groups:

• Casual users:

  These users very rarely have the need to use an SAP system and rarely tend to adopt SAP on their desktop/laptop. Casual users in your enterprise are constantly looking for easier, consumer grade solutions to complete their casual functions with minimal training. Administrate tasks such as entering a travel & expense report, submitting their time sheets or approving purchase requisitions, purchase orders or invoices don’t necessarily require a casual user to be trained in SAP. Instead, if an enterprise can mobilize these functions with consumer grade and intuitive solutions likeSAP Fiori or Innovapptive’s mPower™ Apps Suite, the overall administrative cost per employee is significantly reduced.

• Professional users:

  These users are typically field workers where mobility plays a vital role to perform their routine day to day functions.Field engineers, technicians and service representatives have minimal access to a desktop and laptop but require access and process critical information at the point of service delivery. Usage of mobility by these professional users provides a superior and high level of service to customers with the ability to centrally update and look up information anywhere and anytime. Deploying mobile solutions to these critical users, lowers administrative costs, enhances integrity, improves customer satisfaction and helps faster decision making.

• Transactional users:

  These users use business applications on a daily basis and need the ability to query and enter new data.  As full access to the entire suite is necessary and a simple business app may not full fill the requirement of a transactional users. Enterprise mobile solutions have to be designed to handle a quick-to-complete task, which thereby increases more professional level of customer related services by introducing new business practices and making full use of the ERP capabilities.

The road to mobilizing the above users should consider the below 3 critical aspects:

Step 1: Innovate and create a strong and foundational value road map

Innovate by understanding and prioritizing use cases by business value, type of apps, devices, simplicity, and ease of adoption. Ensure security and platform requirements are not compromised through this journey.

Step 2: Transform by introducing new levels of automation and productivity

True transformation can be achieved when the mobile solution has the ability to re-engineer core processes by automating routines to bring new levels of flexibility to the workforce, The use cases that are about to be deployed shall have the ability to move beyond industry norms and ‘business as usual’ engagement with customers and suppliers. It enables to transform partner, staff, and customer/supplier relationships.

Step 3: Empower your workforce to do more with less.

The results of mobilization should empower your enterprise with concrete returns on investments. Enterprises must find effective tools like the SAP Mobile Platform to monitor adoption, usage and other KPI’s that improve employee productivity at lower cost, improve data quality, and remain ahead of competition.

SAP Mobile Transformation: RFID and Bar Code Peripheral Solutions for Smart Phones and Tablets are revolutionizing automatic data capture and processing in SAP

Implementing a mobile handheld device to automate and process your SAP transactions can be an expensive and complex affair. Automating critical SAP transactions such as work orders, inventory management or a point of sale solution require the ability to scan bar code through a mobile handheld device. However, these mobile handheld devices can be an extremely expensive proposition with devices ranging anywhere between $2000 – $6500, depending on your configuration and requirement with associated complex infrastructure to support offline requirements. A cost-complexity-benefit case analysis has traditionally limited the use of handheld devices to automate critical business locations, users and SAP transactions. However with the advent of smart phones, tablets and secured bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies, your employee’s smart phones or corporate owned devices can be converted into handheld devices using disruptive RFID peripherals. These RFID peripherals now provide the ability to further automate SAP transactions that fell through the cracks in your cost-complexity-benefit case analysis of a handheld device.

What is an RFID/Bar Code Scanning Peripheral?

Companies such as Infinite Peripherals are redefining the mobile handheld devices by simply converting your smart phone or tablets into bar code scanning devices to assist processing automation of your SAP data.  Handheld vs. RFID/Barcode Peripheral Comparison Matrix 

 Compatible Mobile RFID and Bar Code Peripheral Solutions

Innovapptive’s offers several pre-built, SAP certified mobile solutions that run with these RFID and Bar Code Peripheral Solutions. Several of our Fortune 500 customers are using these devices to transform and automate a variety of their use cases. I have listed few examples below:

MOBILE QUALITY MANAGEMENT

Innovapptive’s mQuality mobile solution allows quality managers to create SAP quality notifications in real-time in plants, warehouses and inventories. Capturing product defect details and images using their mobile device integrated with RFID peripherals is much easier in asset intensive industries. The recorded information is then assigned to a coordinator for faster processing of the defect resolution, thereby improving product quality and customer satisfaction.

MOBILE ASSET TAGGING

Innovapptive’s mAssetTag solution allows automation of your fixed asset physical inventory reconciliation by simply scanning fixed assets using these peripherals and using the smart phones GPS functionality to record it’s most current location to meet regulatory requirement of completing a 20% reconciliation of your fixed assets.

MOBILE INVENTORY AND WAREHOUSE MANAGEMENT

Innovapptive’s mInventory solution uses RFID peripheral to automate critical inventory transactions such as inventory cycle counting, goods receipts, goods issue and stock look ups, resulting is accurate and up to date inventory information in SAP. With mPower™ mInventory mobile app, precise tracking and paperless management of inventory helps you increase productivity, lower costs, optimize your supply chain, and improve customer service.

MOBILE SALES EXECUTION

Innovapptive’s mSalesExec solution allows Sales reps need access to SAP CRM to have up to date information on the in-store placement which may be remotely located. The app is integrated with RFID/Bar Code peripherals to automate sales order creation by simply scanning SKU’s within an order guide to quickly create a sales order.

MOBILE WORK ORDER

Innovapptive’s mWorkOrder mobile solution is integrated with RFID devices allowing companies to share work order information with service and maintenance technicians in real time to help them get organized, record start and end time, review detailed work order information, analyze service routes, record notes, add components and upload relevant pictures and documents.

Security Challenges in Enabling SAP Enterprise Mobility. How does your Enterprise Prevent Data Breach and Data Leakage?

The usage of mobile devices and their adoption into business is ever-increasing. Improved hardware performance, a robust platform feature set and increased communication bandwidth, contribute towards expanding mobile capabilities beyond voice and email. Usage of smart phones in companies have created new strategies in business processes as never before because of their capability to access back-end information from anywhere anytime.  As a result enterprises want to seize every opportunity using mobile to speedup business processes, increase productivity and create a best ROI. The overwhelming enthusiasm of industries towards mobilizing their enterprises involves security risks. Overlooking these security vulnerabilities may lead to serious data threat to an enterprise.

According to enterprise security expert Jack Gold, organizations will lose three to four times as many smartphones as notebooks each year. Gold (rhetorically) asks us “with 32 or 64 GB of memory, how many records does a lost smartphone or tablet contain?” At an estimated cost of more than $250 per lost record, a data breach can be expensive. In fact, some research estimates the cost of a mobile breach at more than $400,000 for an enterprise and more than $100,000 for a small business, and in some cases these costs can range into the millions.

This concern resonates as an increasing number of smartphones and tablets not only connect to the corporate network but also access an increasing number of business applications and content repositories. Beyond data, enterprise IT and security departments are concerned about the risk of opening up the internal network to a diverse array of mobile devices. In many cases, smartphones and tablets are neither governed nor monitored, meaning that they can introduce network threats and negatively impact an organization’s compliance status.

What layers of an enterprise mobile solution should an enterprise secure?

To answer this very important question, you need to peel the different layers of the enterprise mobility onion. SAP is a back-end for large number of enterprises across the globe, here are few Security Challenges in Enabling SAP Enterprise Mobility. Enterprises must secure their corporate data and prevent any security vulnerabilities/threats around three different layers:

1. Components Security

Enterprises much secure the different components of an enterprise mobile solution:

Data - Protecting corporate data from breach and leakage is of paramount importance. Securing, controlling and protecting integrity of the enterprise data, data at rest and data during transmission need to be monitored. The mobile security solution your enterprise implements must ensure that the data is protected at an application, cache and messaging database level.

Device - A robust mobile device management (MDM) solution is critical in securing corporate owned devices and data. Managing, monitoring, controlling and protecting the data/configuration settings reduces costs and business risks. In situations where a device is lost or stolen, it is important your enterprise has the capability to remotely wipe data and lock devices.

Servers - Hardening of servers, platforms and infrastructure of enterprise servers such as SAP Mobile Platform, MDM, MAM and Licensing Servers is critical in avoiding security vulnerabilities on the server layer.

2. Application Security

Enterprises must look into mobile application security to enable bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies. Comprehensive mobile application management (MAM) solutions encrypt app data at rest, creates per-App VPN, app data wipe, app expiration, jail breaking, and geo fencing etc.

3. Authentication & Authorization

SSO (Single Sign On) - With this property a user logs in once and gains access to all systems without being prompted to log in again at each of them.

SSO2 - The purpose of SAP NWBC is to having all the required applications, traditional SAP transaction at a single platform. To allow access for the client to the backend, activating SSO2 cookies is requied as the NetWeaver Business Client(NWBC) uses SSO2 cookies for authentication.

HTTPS - The main motivation for HTTPS is to prevent wiretapping and man-in-the-middle attacks.

SAML - It is an open standard data format which is XML-based for exchanging authentication and authorization data between an identity provider and a service provider.

X509 - To secure data which is intended restricted visuality X.509 certificates can also be used so that others will not be able to see it. It is done by using a mathematical concept known as asymmetric key cryptography.

DATA vault -  The data vault provides encrypted storage of occasionally used, small pieces of data.  Data in data vault are encrypted with an AES-256 bit key. Content can include user and application login credentials, encryption keys, synchronization profile settings, and certificates. It requires a password to unlock the data from the application.

App Passcode - Setting a passcode for the device can go long way towards improving the security of the device.

How to customize SAP Mobile Apps without Even Changing Code?

As your enterprise is constantly searching for new ways to outshine your competition, the demand for enterprise mobility apps is exponentially rising. The quest to find solutions to improve overall employee productivity, increase sales revenues, and optimize your business processes, lead each one of your lines of businesses to think different and run better.

Thus they are constantly reaching out to your IT teams to achieve “instant mobilization”. Corporate IT teams are inundated with these requests and are faced with a daunting challenge to accelerate their enterprises’time to market and value. However, enterprises IT teams are crippled with lack of budget, man power, and cutting edge skills to meet this demand.

How is it humanely possible to meet this kind of demand?

Innovapptive has found a way to Customize SAP mobile apps, it is as simple as a SIMPLE SAP Configuration, no code change required.

Via the SAP store, Innovapptive offers a wide portfolio of configurable pre-packaged SAP certified mobile apps that can quickly meet your demand, accelerate your time to market and reduce support and deployment costs by over 70%.

How is this achieved?

Innovapptive offers a proprietary “customization and extensions” cockpit to achieve an infinite number of customizations through SIMPLE SAP Configurations. Yes, simple SAP Configurations and no code change required. This simplicity in customizing SAP mobile solutions to provide a strong value proposition to our customers will dramatically improve their overall ROI:

Which configuration features does the Customization and Extensions Cockpit offer?

• Add, remove, prioritize order of the fields
• Activate and deactivate modules specific to your company or industry.
• Add additional custom business logic during data retrieval or data posting with out-of-the-box Business Add-In’s (BADI’s)
• Apply security authorizations at the field level to meet security & Segregation of Duties (SOD) requirements
• Apply custom validations logic

Customization and Extensions Cockpit Features

How can those features be applied in practice?

• Add, Remove, Hide or Display Fields: By using simple SAP configurations for customizations, SAP functional consultants can make required fields available on-demand, and remove unwanted fields as per evolving business requirements, all without changing a single line of code.
• Field Mappings to SAP: Map newly added fields on the mobile app user interface to SAP table fields (including custom fields) with simple SAP configurations,
• New Business Logic Addition: Add new business logic either during posting or during data retrieval from the mobile app to meet current and evolving business requirements using Innovapptive provided SAP Business Add-In’s (BADI’s)
• New Screens Addition: Ability to design your own screens within Innovapptive’s framework and then placing them in a convenient sequence and decision tree, based upon your priority.
• New Transactions Addition: Ability to add new SAP transactions to existing functionality by creating a new module on the app.
• Security Configuration: Newly added fields can be made authorization relevant and the mobile app automatically checks against your existing SAP roles authorization data.
• Standard Security Validation: Depending on your SAP roles, the mobile app automatically updates its view and also validated data based on your existing SAP roles.
• Standard and Custom Business Validations: All standard and custom validations applied in SAP are automatically transpired into Innovapptive’s mobile app through the customization and extensions cockpit framework.

What value does it hold for IT and business?

Globally, 2,000 companies are already leveraging our extensive portfolio of SAP certified mobile solutions and our customization extensions cockpit to:

• Dramatically decrease implementation timelines and cost: Go mobile in less than four weeks
• Dramatically reduce on-going support and maintenance cost
• Avoid hiring any additional skill sets (Mobile UI/UX designer, iOS, Android, Appcelerator developer, project managers, security consultants, functional consultants)
• Receive OS upgraded versions for iOS, Android, Windows, etc. at no additional cost

If you would like to request a demo for the “customization and extensions cockpit”, please click on the link below.

Alternatively, if you would like to discuss with an Innovapptive associate, you can reach out to us by emailing us atsales@innovapptive.com or you can reach a customer service representative at (713)-275-1804.