It tells a lot that a piece of software is causing me to finally start a blog on SCN. Let me explain how that happened.
Just recently, I had this presentation in front of a quite savy group of master students who tried to grill me on SAP's plan to go to the cloud.
While I managed to excel in that discussion (no, HR people are no easy prey as such!), I was still lacking some own, tangible examples; I don't run our CRM apps as I am not part of Sales, I'm not a US hiring manager who can assess candidates online.
But: I am travelling for business purposes from time to time.
Just a week before my current trip, we rolled out Cloud4T&E internally and I installed my first real SAP process on my iPhone. I flipped thru a very short e-book to understand the rough idea and then - ready to go!
The instant response of the app is great - couple of days in advance, I had set-up a meeting request in outlook that turned into a expense report just as I wanted it.
At that stage, my developer husband was still smiling at my enthousiasm. But flight bookings found their way into that report automatically as well; and just 3 hours ago, I took a picture of my first taxi receipt and sent it to a certain email address.... took the time to open the app to see that also that receipt had been assigned to the right trip right away.
At some stage, I will need to remind myself that this is not about gamification and that I cannot hand in expenses just for the fun of testing the app 😉
But seriously. I have been a consultant most of my professional career and as part of that, have gone thru so many stages of process improvements in the travel and expenses process. I always used to say that the old system was the best,- I knew it inside out and knew how many times I had to hit the tab-space to get to the next relevant field (pretty much like cashiers at Aldi, for those who still remember the old world there).
This time, I dont need that ability of adapting to a system. This time, the system adapted. And they are prefilled where possible. I am really looking forward to test this in a more complex setting one day 😉 multiple countries, currencies, what have you. But that's the tiny little part of me that has started to become a geek to fit in here :smile: if that is how 'SAP runs SAP' feels like, I really want more of that. Fast.
PS: writing this has helped be to ignore the reality of travel - being stuck at Heathrow due to some accidents on the motorway. You can't solve it all, right 😉
