A Better Way to Run HR
As part of the world’s leading publisher of English-language newspapers, News International relies heavily on a single, invaluable resource – its people. To stay on top of employee changes throughout the company, News International also relied on various paper forms whose content would have to be reentered into the company’s information systems. This required duplicate manual effort and often resulted in erroneous data entry. The company needed a better way to manage staff-related changes. And given the company’s deadline-intensive environment, its people needed technology that’s intuitive to use and speeds workflow, rather than consuming more scarce resource – time.
News International deployed SAP Interactive Forms by Adobe, integrated with the company’s previously deployed SAP ERP applications, to deliver full error handling, simplified workflow, and status monitoring in a highly intuitive and visual form interface. Interactive forms created in Adobe PDF and generated directly from SAP systems allowed for immediate data capture and integration back to SAP ERP without the need for error-prone, manual re-input. And the forms could be configured to be clear and straight forward to business users. This decision also made sense from a sustainability perspective.
News International has achieved significant results, reducing cycle times for HR processes by up to 75%. With process and data controls built into the forms, they can shift critical staff time to more value-added activities. And given the success in HR, News International is taking SAP Interactive Forms into other back-office operations.
See how News International found a better way to run HR!
Bit surprised to see and article talking about the benefits of SAP Adobe HCM P&F when it is obvious SAP is moving away from the technology and to HR Forms based on WebDynpro for ABAP (WDA). The functionality by the end of the year will be extremely similar but the WDA forms will be easier to support and more importantly dont come with any additional licenses. It would be very hard for a customer to make a business case on HCM Adobe P&F going forward. For some additional information check out
New SAP HCM Functionality - HR Renewal 1.0
Cindy Morel - Thanks for posting the information. Would have been interesting to know some of the challenges (if any!) faced in implementing, how many processes they used forms in now, how they tackled change management and some more statistics to demonstrate the benefits achieved.
Jarret Pazahanick - All the benefits listed would be achievable with new WDA Forms ... perhaps with less pain in implementation/support and certainly less licence cost (as you highlighted). I guess HR Renewal (needing EhP6) maybe came a little late for them to consider.