How SAP e-forms alleviate business pain

[chris_scott]

Although it’s common knowledge that all businesses require forms and that great cost savings can be attained by automating those forms, some businesses still find it difficult to make the business case of for e-forms.

What you need to realise is that if you have manual processes, or you have provided the wrong tools for your users, is that your business is already in pain.  The intelligent use of e-forms can relieve multiple ailments, through:

• Much greater usability;
• Improved data quality;
• More efficient processes

Can you recognise the symptoms of the problem?  Here are some quotations to self-diagnose...

Condition #1: Poor Usability

“I do banking on-line, book holidays, buy groceries and many other things. So why can’t I book time off work?”

“I use FaceBook and LinkedIn on my iPad, why can’t I get the same experience from my SAP portal?”

“I only use SAP to submit my timesheets.  Why is it so difficult?”

“I use SAP to approve purchase orders.  I log in perhaps once a month.  I have needed so much training for such a simple task.”

Condition #2: Bad data

“We continued to pay an employee for months after he/she left.”

“We didn’t pay our invoices because we didn’t know that the stock had arrived. Our suppliers put us on credit hold.”

“We don’t know exactly how many employees we have, as our HR department can’t keep up with the pace of the organisational change.”

“I never know which vendor master record to choose, the same one exists multiple times in SAP.”

“When I joined the company I had to wait for 2 days to get the systems access I needed”

Condition #3: Broken Processes

“Things stop round here when goes on vacation.”

“Managers don’t remember their SAP passwords so the ask their secretaries to log in for them.  This means we have very high-powered secretaries!”

“I carry an iPad instead of a laptop.  This means I can only process business forms from my work PC on my office desk.”

“Every form has to be checked by the Shared Services team before it is entered into SAP.”

These quotations may seem shocking, and that’s because they are shocking.  And what’s more, these are real examples I’ve collected from a range of customers.  But help is at hand;  If you recognise these kinds of symptoms, then SAP e-forms is just the shot in the arm you need.

So next time you are thinking about e-forms, don’t approach the topic from the direction of replicating a user-interface, or front-ending an SAP transaction, but instead consider the acute and damaging business pain that you need to cure.

E-forms Everywhere

SAP e-forms, involving the strategic combination of Arch FLM and SAP Interactive Forms by Adobe, provides an end-to-end solution to develop, deploy and manage e-forms.  Those forms simplify the end-user interaction with SAP business processes in on-line, off-line and mobile scenarios.