Another success story - Keeping the core clean

SAP is telling us SAP consultants to 'keep the core clean'. This means in short: don't change the SAP system in ways that will make it harder to maintain (think: upgrade/convert to the HANA platform/move to the cloud). Whilst promoting this mantra, SAP is steering its customers towards side-by-side builds in the cloud, using its middleware platform for integration.  Here is a story where we did keep the core clean without introducing external development platforms and middleware.

Our customer was running operations in 400+ locations. Each location was run by a subcontractor. The contractor was paid based on the number of transactions going through the till. Historically, most locations were actually operated by salaried employees. Hence the situation we encountered was one where an HR system had been modified over and over again to enable it to pay employees as well as contractors. The most obvious challenge was VAT, which is a completely alien concept in the world of HR. The HR system had gotten so 'dirty' that the cost of operating it had spiraled out of control and worst of all, it took 40 hours to calculate the payroll. This meant that there was no time to correct mistakes in the current month's run and all mistakes had to be carried to the next month to be corrected. This situation led to mistakes upon mistakes upon mistakes.

We looked to replace the HR system with a solution to calculate the pay in a cloud platform but realized the ongoing license cost would be considerable and the build would be out of our hands and hence very costly too. Additionally, we would need to send sensitive data into the cloud.

Our customer was already running the Netweaver platform. We decided to maximize its value. Our approach was to bring all transactions from the sites (1M+) into a central table every night via file upload. We then built some summarization logic into a second much smaller table, summarizing the transactions by type and location. This job takes about 12 minutes. A second job calculates the pay for each subcontractor based on the summarized transactions. The result is available in 15 minutes!(compared to 40 hours previously). The resulting figures are then passed to standard vendor invoices.

So in the end we built an ABAP solution in Netweaver that does exactly what's required and because it is bespoke, it was running with optimal performance. The solution sits on top of MM and FI and does not modify the core of SAP. In terms of upgrading or converting to HANA, this poses zero problem.