SAP Improvement Finder & Customer Influence Programs

In the classes that I teach I always seem to have students ask about small enhancements to SAP that would make a big difference to them in their day to day use. My recommendation to them is to take a look at the SAP Customer Influence program. However, It seems that a majority of them are not aware of the SAP Customer Influence Program nor the SAP Improvement Finder website to find out about improvements that SAP has released via Improvement Notes. In many cases these improvements are already in their system from Support Packs and they just need to be activated by flipping a switch or by simple configuration! I wanted to write this blog post with the hopes that we can get more awareness of these programs.

Here are the links to the respective websites for each.

SAP Customer Influence: Enterprise Home

Improvement Finder

Here is a list of some of my personal favorites in terms of functionality created by this program as well as the description from the improvement request. I have seperated them by functional area within HCM. I have also included a link to the improvement to provide more information as well as any related blog posts that I have seen for the functionality.

Personnel Administration

• PA30; PA40; PA61: Automatic toggle to display mode – Note/Improvement 2110196
  • You now have the option to specify time periods after which transactions PA30, PA40, & PA61 automatically toggle to display mode and transaction PA40 automatically toggles to transaction PA20 if the user does not perform any activities in these transactions. In this way, you can prevent the system from locking the employee data displayed in these transactions for further changes over a longer period of time.
  • See this great blog post for more information on this functionality
    • New toy: Automatic toggle to display mode PA30, PA40, PA61

• PA20, PA51: Pushbutton for refreshing displayed infotype data – Note/Improvement 2099012
  • The new pushbutton Refresh Data is introduced on the toolbar of the initial screens of transactions Display HR Master Data (PA20) and Display Time Data (PA51). When you choose this pushbutton, the system rereads the infotype data from the database. As a result, the user can display the current data without having to call the transactions again.
  • How many times have you updated something and you are viewing it in PA20 and you have to go all the way back out and go back in to view the updates? Countless number of times for me.

• PA20, PA30: Errors when displaying subtypes for an infotype – Note/Improvement 2135764
  • In the list of data for an infotype, you can now see all data for subtypes for which you hold display authorization. If additional subtypes exist for which you do not hold the required authorization, the system issues the message: At least one record was skipped (authorization).

• Validity Period of HR Objects – Note/Improvement 1883014
  • This is one item I implemented for many clients that was such a small thing, but provided a lot of value. This is especially true for people who have been live with SAP HR for many years and have a lot of old Personnel Areas/Subareas that need to be cleaned up.
    
  • If you activate the Validity Period for Organizational Assignments function, you can specify validity periods for the following objects:
    • Personnel Area,
    • Personnel Subarea.
    • Employee Group,
    • Employee Subgroup.
  • Remark: This improvement is also available for Webdynpro ABAP user interfaces in HR Renewal for Personnel and Organisation (PA-PAO) as of synchronisation package available in November 2014. Please refer to note 2022480.
  • See this great blog post for more information on this functionality
    • Validity Period for SAP HR Enterprise and Employee Structure

Time Management

• Enhanced Work Schedule Rule Finder in PA30 for IT0007 – Note/Improvement 1795844

  • This is one of my favorites and another one that I implemented for many clients that they absolutely loved! In the past, many people wrote custom programs in order to find work schedules, but with this it may no longer be necessary. It is such a small piece of configuration to turn on, yet provides terrific value! One of the complaints that I heard about this functionality was that it was only available in change mode (PA30) and not in display mode in case anyone wanted to search for a WSR without necessarily changing it. Well, SAP heard this complaint and answered it in the form of Note 2112174 which makes it so you can use this functionality in PA20.

    The search feature, available via the button WSR Finder, is now available in the planned working time (IT0007) screen in the block Work Schedule Rule. With this search feature, you can search for work schedule rules based on weekdays and one or more criteria.

  • See this great blog post for more information on this functionality.
    • Work Schedule Finder – OSS Note 1795844

Organizational Management

• PPOME, PPOSE, PPOCE: Refresh Data button – Note/Improvement 2094518
  • Very similar to the PA20/PA51 refresh above, but for OM
  • Enhance the user interface of the Organization and Staffing view (transactions PPOCE, PPOME, and PPOSE) with a function to refresh the data with the current data from the database.
• PPOSE, PPOME, PPOCE: Effective staffing percentage for an employee – Note/Improvement 2116998
  • Currently, the transactions for organization and staffing do not display any information about the percentage at which a person occupies a position in relation to their working time. This change is to display the effective staffing percentage for a person in the transactions Organization and Staffing Display(PPOSE), Change Organization and Staffing (PPOME), and Create Organization and Staffing (PPOCE)
• Organizational assignment infotype (0001): Navigation to “Display Organization and Staffing) – Note/Improvement 2097603
  • This is an update to navigation to OM directly from Infotype 1. It is a small change as far as just routing you to another transaction, but since being in infotype 1 is so common, it certainly helps.In the standard system, you can display further information about all Organizational Management objects assigned to an employee from the infotype 0001 view for the employee in question. Via a dialog box listing the objects, the user can jump to the structure overview of transaction PPOM_OLD in order to do this.
    • This transaction no longer corresponds to the current state of technology. For this reason, users tend to use the newer transaction PPOSE to display organizational data
      
  • Navigation from the detail view of the Organizational Assignment infotype (0001) in transaction PA20/PA30 to transaction PPOSE (“Display Organization and Staffing”) in order to display the data of all Organizational Management objects assigned to an employee

Payroll

• Wage Type Reporter – Enhancement for Rate field – Note/Improvement 2085137
  • Added the RTE (Rate) field to the report output. Please note that a switch is provided and it needs to be activated in the enhancement point “CHANGE_DRIVER_CODE” available in include h99cwtr0_forms for this functionality to be turned on.
  • Note 2210179 – Follow up note related to an issue with Currency for the Rate field not being shown was also released on 08/26/2015
  • Note 2116573 – Addressed an issue where “Short dump is observed if report is executed with comparision mode set and output is chosen with Excel format.”
  • See my blog post – SAP Payroll Reporting: Wage Type Reporter Enhancement
• Infotypes 0008, 0014, or 0015: Including information pushbutton for the Wage type documentation
  • You can provide an information pushbutton with the description of the respective wage types as they are defined in table T512W on the user interfaces of the infotypes 0008 (here in the wage type list), 0014, and 0015 next to the respective wage type field
  • See this great blog post for more information
    • New toy: Infotypes 0008, 0014, or 0015: Including information pushbutton for the wage type documentation

Enterprise Compensation Management

• View Compensation Planning after review period – Note/Improvement 2040271
  • Many of my past clients using ECM within SAP liked this functionality where they managers can review the compensation planning after a review is over.
    
  • The new functionality gives you the possibility to access the planning data of a review after the review end date by making it accessible in Manager Self Service.

I am sure there are other great improvements that I did not touch on or may not even be aware of (Especially in SAP Talent Management) but are out there waiting to be turned on in many customer systems so take a look at the improvement finder website and see if there are any ones that might be good for you!

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below as I would love to hear about things. Do you have any other small enhancements that you have turned on that provided a lot of value? Are there other small things that you would like to see? Would love to hear different thoughts on this.