SAP Portal as Mobile Gateway

Intro

This short post will give you an example of how SAP portal can provide collaboration tools with third parties. Click here to read more about collaboration through SAP Portal.

Before

This was my first mobile-oriented project, based on SAP portal. My customer (Sonol, gas station operator) was looking for a solution for insufficient workflow they had - all gas station malfunctions were processed manually by back office, interaction between all parties (gas stations, back office and technicians) was done by phone, which was unbearable. 

Gas stations had no tool to report malfunctions, technicians had no tool to process those malfunctions, and there was a back office in the middle, connecting between the two. You can imagine how inconvenient it was for everyone:

• Reporting malfunctions took a lot of time due to back office overload
• Assigning technicians required checking their availability and location
• Technicians' inventory was hardly maintained

After

The tool chosen for a end-to-end solution was SAP portal (Java WebDynpro applications), while system core is based on SAP ERP (CS module). Final solution included: 

1. Portal-based back office application to map service requests to technicians, monitor open requests and process them if needed
2. Convenient mobile application for personnel in the field

Integration of these components provides a perfect solution for all Customer Support requirements.

One of project goals was to provide a system convenient enough to be used by everyone without any training, without being familiar with SAP transactions and procedures, altogether with utilization of CS functionality embedded in the SAP ERP system. Nowadays the system allows the company to control all ongoing technical support routines.

Here is a general scheme of solution workflow:

Added values gathered as a result:

• Fast response time, and better Customer Support as a result
• More accurate problem descriptions, and faster malfunction resolutions as a result
• Control over inventory used by technicians in the field
• Work processes transparency and optimization
• On-line accurrate documentation
• Ability to fit SLA
• Strengthening the connection between involved parties

Vision

As part of portal upgrade and Portal On Device features, we are planning to add more functionality and improve the solution with new features. Subscribe to get updates about upcoming innovations, or contact me directly.

Short description (EN) at our company web site: click here

Project overview (HE) at People & Computes web site: click here

Portal task management unleashed

Intro

During my final project for B.Sc. I did in Holon Institute of Technology, I had to do a research. There were many topics to pick from, but somehow I ended up doing a research about short-term tasks management in  matrix-based organizations. 

The issue came up from my everyday work at customer sites: my ongoing work was managed with Excel. I will skip the part about Excel disadvantages, as you all know them better then I do. Anyhow, we had to study available task management tools, learn their functionality, and propose a best-fit solution for ongoing task management. 

We finished the study, proposed a solution, got a good grade, and none of proposed tools was implemented, mostly because it requires more than just a research: a budget, top management support, training and so on...

And then I thought, why not implementing standard portal UWL workflow, and complete it with a functional management report to achieve the desired result?

Keep it standard

UWL is a good tool for portal users to process tasks from SAP back end systems, as it is flexible enough, thanks to XML configuration. You can make tasks look different, process them in different way, add fields from back end and even develop providers from third party systems.

There is also a built-in workflow engine, which requires no configuration - you can start managing tasks based on portal workflow, and have several nice features there:

• Email notifications & reminders
• Due date management
• Group tasks creation
• Task forwarding and ad-hoc tasks creation
• Attachments
• Tasks approval upon completion
• Sequential tasks processing

The problem arises when you want to change the standard tasks creation screen, which looks like this:

There is no standard way to add a field here. And this is a huge problem for any customer, that wants to add subsidiary, company selection, or any other field. 

Of course we can take the source code, import it to NWDI, and start developing a new screen, but at this stage I decided to avoid such changes, for the sake of future SAP support and upgrades.

So, let's see what are we missing, and how we can extend this UWL to be a good task management solution...

Missing functionality

Additional fields
As mentioned before, there is no standard way to add fields to task creation screen, which makes UWL tasks information incomplete

Management report
Once managers are required to go over open tasks of their employees, they see only those tasks they are assigned to as trackers, or those they created themselves. You cannot expect employees to remember adding managers as trackers to all their tasks, which results in lack of control and transparency

Grouping of tasks
Issue is derived from missing option of adding fields: there is no way to assign task to some field and filter by this filed later on

Sending follow-ups
Standard workflow mechanism sends one follow-up email upon task overdue, but there is no way to initiate this process on demand

Due date monitoring
If users change due dates (and yes, task processors can do that) there is no central way to see all those tasks and check initial due date

Export to excel / PDF
Managers plan to take task list with them to some meeting, and there is no convenient way to export task list to excel and print it out

Statistics
There is no graphical tools to monitor tasks processing trends, such as tasks overdue time, task completion time and so on

A solution

In order to complete UWL task management with missing functionality, we can develop a report based on standard UWL tables. This approach keeps the tables structure and logic implemented in UWL, keeping our options of portal upgrade and maintenance open for the future:

• Additional fields: can be held in an SQL table, mapped to standard task by task ID
  
• Management report: can embed tailor-made logic with fields assignment, calculations and styling
  
• Grouping of tasks: can be made by creating UME groups in the portal itself, and then select tasks of employees assigned to UME groups
• Due date monitoring: we can load initial and current due dates and point out those that were changed
  
• Export to excel: we can do any export we like, making this truly important function available
  
• Statistics: we can use WebDynpro built-in graphic elements to provide analytic tools
  

Tables to use

There are several standard tables in the portal SQL database that should be used in order to build the functionality described above, and here they are:

• Our own table for additional attributes
• KMC_WF_WORKITEM - this table contains information about completion date (TIME_COMPLETED) and initial due date (DUE_DATE)
• KMC_WF_WFTASK_USR - this table contains task assignees
• KMC_WF_WFTASK - this is the table that contains tasks information
  
  Important note: don't use KMC_UWL_ITEMS2, this table holds cached tasks, and if you clear the cache all tasks will be missing from your report, until users access their UWL again.

Summary

The WebDynpro for Java application described above extends UWL to provide a good, user-friendly, full-cycle task management solution, with comprehensive functionality. Development of such a tool is a question of several days, and it's true value for any enterprise that have SAP portal.

You are welcome to download the solution for free.
Feel free to contact me directly.

Good luck!