ESS & MSS Add-On in EHP5: An implementation to entice non SAP savvy users

[Former Member]

Non SAP savvy users? There's such a thing? As it turns out, there are quite a few of these users at a large Australian postal and retail organisation. Actually, it's more accurate to describe them as non TECH savvy users, but that doesn't seem as catchy. In any case, this blog is about how we implemented ESS & MSS in EHP5 specifically for a set of users that would appreciate the simpler and more user friendly UI. The content of this blog is based on the assumption that all relevant business packages and add-ons have been installed as per SAP documentation here and here. 

As a background, there are approximately 700 retail post office managers at this organisation. These managers are in charge of an average of 10 staff in their outlet and most of these managers had an admin PC but only used it for email and Outlet Messaging. When ESS/MSS was implemented in August 2010, these managers were not included in the rollout and therefore had no access to online self service capability for themselves or their employees.

A few of the major pain points for these managers not being online with ESS/MSS were:

• no visualization of their team roster, so they had no capability to forecast schedules
• no access to online forms, with their only option being paper based
• after submitting a paper form, they had no visibility of the status of the process
• no access to leave balances for themselves or their employees
• no access to enter in timesheets for their employees, using their EPOS terminal instead which had to interface with SAP

So with enough drivers for giving these managers access to SAP, the question was: do we give them the same access as all other managers (namely the "old" ESS/MSS)? These guys had never really experienced SAP before, so did we want to give them the "old" ESS/MSS as their first? We didn't think so! Since we had upgraded to EHP5 in ERP and had half the prerequisites already there to use the new ESS and MSS Add-On, it was the perfect opportunity to give these users a better experience. Another benefit was that we could trial the new ESS before rolling it out to the existing users. 

We wanted to give these users a simple UI experience that would give them everything they needed at their fingertips, so to speak.Our existing ESS & MSS had a plethora of services that would not all be relevant to these managers, plus the UI was more difficult to navgiate. We decided to give the retail managers a cut down version of the existing ESS & MSS, but with the new UI and utilizing the WebDynpro ABAP applications instead of the Java ones (only payslip and payment summary were kept on the old version in the interest of time). On top of this, we had users with no pre conceived expectations, so it was like carte blanche for us!

For MSS, we chose to deliver the following services:

• Team Calendar (standard)
• Team Roster (custom)
• Team Leave (custom)
• Team Hierarchy (customized standard)
• Form Overview (standard)
• Reports (custom)

We also included some On Behalf of Employee Functions:

• Personal Profile (customized standard)
• Leave Request (custom)
• CATS (customized standard)
• HCM Forms (custom)

For ESS, we chose to deliver the following services:

• Personal Profile (customized standard)
• Leave (custom)
• Payslip (customized standard)
• Payment Summary (customized standard)

The anatomy of ESS/MSS in EHP5 has slightly changed, with the key difference the absence of the homepage framework. The following components are involved in EHP5:

• Portal content (drives role navigation as well)
• WebDynpro applications & configurations
• Launchpads for context menus
• OADP and Visualization configuration (only for MSS)

Here are the key steps in implementing this solution:

ESS

1. Create and customize WebDynpro configurations (add or remove UIBBs and use country specific versions)
2. Create ESS launchpad menu with services and references to customized application configurations
3. Create ESS role with the Overview page to access the menu

See below some screenshots of our ESS:

MSS

1. Create and customize WebDynpro configurations (add or remove UIBBs and use country specific versions)
2. Create MSS employee navigation menu with services and references to customized application configurations
3. In SPRO, transfer standard hierarchy visualization into customer version and enhance as required (in our case we only used MSSBIZVIEW).
4. You might also need to configure the following:
   1. Object selection and rules
   2. Column groups and data views
5. Reference employee navigation menu in copied hierarchy configuration
6. Create MSS role with access to team hierarchy and any other services

See below some screenshots of our MSS team hierarchy and role navigation:

Note: all data shown is dummy data

I hope this blog has helped give an overview of what needs to be done to implement ESS & MSS Add-On in EHP, and will help you achieve your own solution.

Many thanks also to chris.paine3 who helped significantly with this implementation.