HR Expert - Employee Interaction Center: Six Key Learning Points to Consider in an Imp...

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SAP HR concepts, technology, and best practices

Employee Interaction Center: Six Key Learning Points to Consider in an Implementation

by Vinay Naithani, Managing Consultant, HCL-Axon January 10, 2011

Implementing the Employee Interaction Center (EIC) sometimes requires customized enhancements. With that in mind, use these six field-tested tips to better help you roll out EIC.

Key Concept
Enhancement packages for the Employee Interaction Center (EIC) have made EIC more stable and added new functionality, including the ability to search for related activities for a person, integration with HCM Forms, and additional authorization objects for controlling access. They also add resolution types, which allow agents to classify the kind of response provided while processing and closing an activity. These enhancements improve the analytic nature of the solution. In my experience in implementing the Employee Interaction Center (EIC), I have come across numerous business requirements that are non-standard. You can fulfill them only through custom developments and enhancements. In this article I will provide you with some of these requirements that your company may find useful.

1. Align Notification Numbers and Activity Numbers

Employees who have a query can submit a request via a self-service link. The self-service link opens an Adobe form in which they can enter details and then submit their request. All such queries submitted through self-services are treated by SAP as Web requests. These Web requests are received by EIC agents in their EIC inbox. The agents can process the Web request and create an activity with a unique activity number. When employees submit a Web request they receive a notification number for reference purposes. This notification number, however, is not the same as the activity number, which is generated once the Web request is turned into an activity by an EIC agent. Moreover, there is no way you can search an activity in EIC based on the notification number. This can be an issue if an employee refers to the notification number and is not aware of the activity number. One option to resolve this is to enhance the activity search screen in EIC to allow EIC agents to search an activity using the notification number. This requires custom development and enhancement of the Business Server Page (BSP) application for EIC. Here's an example of how we achieved this for one of our clients. We created a custom table that is updated with the notification number, creation date, and creation time every time an employee submits a Web request. Web requests are usually delivered to EIC agents in their EIC inbox, where the agent can process them and convert them into an activity. When an agent selects a Web request and clicks the Process button, the system calls a custom class to read the notification number from the custom table and updates the custom table with the activity number once the activity is created. We then enhanced the activity search screen to add a field for the notification number where an agent can input the notification number and search for an activity. We created an enhancement in the class CL_HREIC_ACTIVITYSEARC_IMPL_VP, which is used for activity search. Like all applications there is always more than one way of meeting a non-standard requirement and this is one example.

2. Allow Attachments in Web Requests

When an employee clicks the link on self-services to submit a Web request, an Adobe Form is launched that is used to capture details of the request. The standard forms delivered by SAP for the purposes of Web requests do not support attachments. This means that if an employee attaches any supporting documentation along with the request, the attachments are not delivered along with the Web request in the agents EIC inbox. However, if you would like your employees to be able to attach documents to Web requests you can consider the following alternatives. One option is to use HCM Form and Processes, which allows for attachments to an Adobe document that you can transport using workflows. Another option that we have used is developing a Web Dynpro ABAP application that you can design to look like a form. You can use it to allow employees to attach documents, which can then be delivered to an agent's inbox.

3. Make Web Form Enhancements Visible in the Preview Pane

The Web request form provided by SAP is quite basic. It allows the user to select a category and choose the option for a return call with a text field to input the telephone number. You may want to enhance the form to allow users to add additional information for example, a sub category and a free text box for additional information. While these changes may not sound complicated and can be delivered by customizing the form, it is important to understand the integration aspect with the EIC inbox.

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EIC agents can see the contents of the Web request in the preview pane in the EIC inbox. If you are enhancing the Web request form, you may want some of this information to be available in the preview pane so that the agent can take the appropriate action. To do this, you have to enhance the preview pane that is a part of the EIC application. EIC is based on a BSP application. The relevant BSPs are IC_BASE and HREIC_VP.

4. Match Employee and EIC Agent Category Choices

Employees can select a category while submitting the request form in EIC. Likewise an EIC agent can also select a suitable category while creating an activity in EIC. By design, these categories are different and are defined separately. You can define the categories available to employees in the view V_HREIC_GRP_CAT. These categories do not have any sub levels. When an employee submits an EIC request form, it is routed to the appropriate EIC agent based on the routing rules defined in the system. The EIC agent reviews the employee request upon receiving it in the EIC inbox and clicks the Process button to create an activity in EIC. The agent needs to select an appropriate category and sub category if required, at the time of creating the activity. The category and sub category available to the EIC agent are different from the categories available to the employee while submitting the request form. EIC agents can access the categories available to them in the activity screen. These categories are stored in the view V_HREIC_CATEGS. The best ways to maintain them are to go to transaction HREIC_CATEGORY or to access the relevant node in the IMG. The categories defined for EIC agents can have up to four sub categories. There is no direct relation between the two sets of categories. Therefore, it is important that users bear this in mind while defining the categories. The categories should be defined so that employees and EIC agents can use them effectively. The same consideration should be applied while making future updates. An activity available in self services should be meaningful to help the EIC agent in processing it appropriately.

5. Define Roles Through Authorization Objects

One way to manage access for EIC agents is to define different profiles for different groups of employees. The profiles are IC WebClient profiles that define the EIC view and access to different services for an EIC user. You still need to define roles and authorizations for your EIC agents. If you are on enhancement package 3 or below, you do not find a lot of standard SAP roles. SAP delivered one standard role, SAP_EP_HR_PAOC_EIC, which was basic and did not contain enough authorization objects to allow its use as a template for creating custom roles. It only contained the transaction HREIC, which posed a challenge for users implementing EIC on enhancement package 3 or below. They were left to their own means to determine the appropriate authorization objects required for creating the role. SAP realized this issue and released SAP Note 1254235 (HREIC: Required Authorization for running HREIC), which gives you information on how to define your roles using the different authorization objects available. The standard role has now been improved in enhancement package 4. You have additional options to define your roles and authorizations if you are on enhancement package 4. SAP provides a new authorization object, P_EICAU, which you can use to define access levels based on the employment status of the affected employee, category, and any other sub category. You can also find additional documentation on this subject by looking up the online help documentation provided by SAP at http://help.sap.com. You can read more about P_EICAU in HR Experts article, Protect Your SAP ERP EIC Data with New Authorization in Enhancement Package 4.

6. Integrate with Portal

EIC is a BSP application, and there is no direct integration available with SAP NetWeaver Portal. This has been resolved by SAP in enhancement package 4 with a business package for EIC Business Package for Employee Interaction Center (SAP ERP) 1.4. If you are on enhancement package 4, you can install this business package and benefit from pre-delivered EIC services and functions, such as a separate portal role for EIC agents and the ability to transfer email attachments directly from an email to an activity. If you are on enhancement package 3 or below, you need to manually integrate the EIC application with your portal environment. A portal expert needs to carry out the integration. That person needs the URL for your EIC application, which you can find by going to transaction SE80 and selecting the BSP application HREIC_VP, as shown in Figure 1.

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Figure 1

Determine the URL for the EIC application

Another way to quickly determine the URL is to enter transaction HREIC in your SAP GUI session, which launches the EIC application in a browser. Click the Cancel button in the authentication pop up that appears when prompted for your user ID and password. The URL in the browsers address field is the URL you can use to call the application.

Vinay Naithani is currently working with HCL-Axon as a managing consultant. He has more than seven years of experience working in SAP ERP HCM in areas such as payroll, personnel administration, performance appraisal, enterprise compensation management-recruiting and employee interaction center. He has worked on implementations, global rollouts, and support assignments providing consultancy in SAP ERP HCM. He enjoys learning about new areas of technology and the thrill associated with learning something new every day. You may reach Vinay via email at vinaynaithani@gmail.com or vinay.naithani@hcl-axon.com.

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