Agenda

Prior to Concur, WCM Qatar used custom forms for entering travel requests, followed by the creation of a shopping cart for budget holder approvals. This process had numerous pain points, including lack of workflow approval steps, redundant transactional data in the “shopping carts” and lack of consolidated reporting for an end-to-end process.

The scope of the project includes implementation of:

• Travel Request
• Travel Expense
• SRE extract for Fund Reservation
• SAP ICS for Expense posting and FR reduction
• Workflow
• Security and Reporting

The project and third-party funding processes in universities and research institutions are becoming increasingly complex, especially the fact that contracts, grants and teaching assignments are associated with them. This overall process, in which documents and workflows also play an important role, cannot be mapped within SAP with standard functions.

Technische Universität Berlin presents its solution, which is based on top xRM, the Extended Relationship Management solution from the SAP Partner top flow GmbH. The process begins with the application for funding from the institutes, the forwarding of the application to the administration for approval, the involvement of scholarship holders and lecturers. The solution is seamlessly integrated into the existing SAP environment of the Technische Universität Berlin as an SAP AddOn without interfaces.

Owing to COVID-19, the need for digital approval workflow for all kinds of documents has increased enormously. Nevertheless, it proved to be more difficult to come to a widely supported solution. There were many questions to be answered:

Which processes require what type of electronic signature?
What is important to consider with regards to implementation?
What is the impact of a cloud application?
How to arrive at a valid truth with so many rules, regulations and opinions?
What is your experience so far?
What made the difference in achieving your goal?
What is holding you back?

We would like to discuss these questions and share our experiences in our ambition to select and implement an e-signature solution. Mind you: Ambition. Reality is something else. Join us in this round table session.

Student management processes remain traditional and have many tasks that are rule-based, repetitive, and time-consuming. The start of an academic year, for example, is always a busy time for admissions departments. To effectively meet current student expectations, real-time and proactive student support is expected across the enterprise and campus. Students and teachers need quick answers or resolutions. The information must be available in real-time. Effective student engagement will be predictive and responsive.

In this session, we will talk about how innovative technologies can help save time so your highly skilled staff can work on other critical tasks in student support and engagement. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) streamlines those everyday tasks and improves efficiency and productivity. We will explain what a software robot can do, where to start, how to identify a suitable process for RPA and how to build the first bot. Digital Humans combine the ease of human interactions with complete up-to-date knowledge. Digital Humans don’t replace team members, they free them from transactional and repetitive tasks so they can focus on more complex inquiries and superior student outreach.

Learn in this session how Anna, the Digital Human in Higher Education, bridges the gap between Robots and Humans in Student Support.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) have become increasingly important topics in higher education IT in recent years, as IT leaders have sought to better serve their increasingly diverse student and faculty populations, address a growing shortage of technology workers, and eliminate barriers to full participation in the technology profession for all.

Despite their acknowledged importance, limited progress has been made in achieving tangible DEI-centric outcomes. The work can be difficult, and it can take a long time to see results. Some IT leaders don't know where to begin, while others fear getting it “wrong”. The new, post-COVID work environment may pose additional challenges for IT leaders to consider in their DEI journey, but a remote environment also opens up new opportunities for rebuilding organizational culture in a more inclusive way. This session will provide IT leaders with practical steps they can take – online and off – to continue to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in their IT organizations.

Air University (AU), headquartered at Maxwell AFB, Alabama, is a major component of Air Education and Training Command (AETC) and is the lead agent for Air Force education. AU provides the full spectrum of Air Force education. It is accredited by the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools to award post-graduate degrees and serves over 270,000 students.

Air University is continuing its project to transform its student services and student information management processes with an integrated student information system solution for all elements of the organization. This project will use the SAP Student Lifecycle Management (SLcM) component of S/4HANA to provide a state-of-the-art platform for integrated management of the education process and records of all Air University constituents. This session will describe the challenges faced and strategies used to overcome them.

Join this session to learn how the University of Toronto is keeping pace with the latest technology and innovations to personalize the user experience, drive operational efficiencies, and preparing their digital enterprise for the next step to SAP’s intelligent enterprise. Members of the implementation team will share project lessons learned and how a step-by-step approach can assist university leadership to understand how investments can support faculty and staff in day-to-day work with a sensible approach.

During this session the team will provide:

• Project overview: objectives and timeline
• Functional and technical impacts
• User Community engagement and buy-in
• Project management and methodology
• Project outcomes and metrics
• Managing organizational change

DMU presented their project goals for their implementation of SAP for all Core Systems (HR, Finance, Student, Marketing, etc.) at the HERUG conference in Amsterdam. After five years, this next presentation will revisit the goals and especially the lessons learned. The session will discuss this from two perspectives: DMU and NTT DATA Business Solutions as the implementation partner.

After the successful implementation of SAP Cash Machine Learning a couple of years ago, Utrecht University started a new project with Conversational AI and iRPA. SAP Conversational AI is currently used for frequently asked finance questions answered with SAP back-end data.

iRPA is used for repetitive desktop automation for our accounts payable and receivable departments. In this presentation, we will show the path from design to implementation, administrative aspects, and lessons learned. We will also show the roadmap for further automation of these tools.

Universities and research institutions globally face the challenge that they need to compete for research funding. Hence there is a need to put much more effort into the acquisition of funds, prepare high-quality governance-led proposals and have data-driven insights in the expenditures vs budgeting.

In order to accurately follow-up on this extremely complex process, and closely manage financial data in each phase of the project, the University of Ghent and Tilburg University have implemented this process into their organizations in cooperation with Flexso. This new process, including the implementation of integrated workflows, Fiori-apps, and a view on budget and actuals in every step of the project lifecycle, has led to new efficiencies. Needless to say, the results are mind-blowing.

Using an Agile approach and limited consulting, the University of Toronto successfully migrated its entire SAP workload from its on-premises data centre to Microsoft Azure. Extensive planning, design and execution occurred over three phases, resulting in the transformation of our SAP infrastructure.

This presentation will focus on our journey and our lessons learned, followed by questions for commentary from the project leadership team. At the end of our presentation, we expect participants to have a better understanding of what it takes to migrate SAP to the cloud in the Higher Ed context, with particular attention to methodology, cloud management, and how to engage business on what is ultimately a “technical” project.

In recognition of the importance of the special needs of public services organizations, including those of Higher Education & Research, SAP has continued to invest in enhancing SAP SuccessFactors to better support the requirements of this important industry. In this session, we will highlight the latest innovations and enhancements for Public Services in SuccessFactors. We will also share our roadmap and discuss opportunities for collaboration. This will be a dynamic session and will include a demo of key features that are of interest to our Higher Education customers.

The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) has embarked on a new era in budget management where year-to-year budgeting processes and practices are evolving to align and promote strategic institutional goals using SAP’s Budget and Planning (SBP) software. This initiative falls squarely within the HERUG 2021 theme of adopting Innovative Solutions for the Intelligent University.

In this 30-minute presentation, representatives from Penn State University and LSI Consulting will present and discuss the university’s strategic budgeting initiative and how SAP’s Budget and Planning product is being adapted to support the university’s long-term goals of transparency and accountability in budgeting.

Last year, the KU Leuven Association (consisting of the university and five university colleges) launched a new online registration tool for their prospective students. Together with the key players, different requirements were implemented in an incremental and Agile approach. The primary requirements were an easy but secure log-in mechanism (without yet being a student), a user-friendly interface on different devices and a configurable tool based on the needs of the different institutions.

In the following phase, extra features were added, for example, the upload of a picture and an online check of the validity of this picture via facial recognition software. During the development process, emphasis was placed on building reusable components and automated testing.

Weill Cornell Medicine was sending new hire data from SuccessFactors Onboarding to SAP HCM manually, using the SAP provided integration. With manual integration, HR had to continuously monitor the staging table for new hire data and also process new hires manually.

The process was time-consuming and was totally inefficient. Weill Cornell Medicine has now implemented an automated solution, which processes new hires from Onboarding into SAP HCM without any manual intervention, and automatically creates all required new hire data on HR infotypes. This solution has made the employee hiring process more efficient, less time-consuming and more timely. Join this session to learn more about developing your own automated solution to realize similar benefits.

In the context of the digitalization ambition of the UL administration, considering the growing proportion of externally funded projects, and in anticipation of the CRIS solution that will, for research projects, capture project data from the pre-award stage, the “Budget Envelope request forms” initiative has been addressed with four ambitions:

Digital: Replace an excel/email-based ‘OTP Request’ solution with a digital and integrated ‘Budget Envelope Request’ solution, including clarified roles and responsibilities for each group of information related to a new budget envelope.

Simplify: Provide, wherever possible, a predefined list of values using SAP master data sources and directly reduce double inputs.

Enrich: Increase the quality of project data, add new fields of information requested by several stakeholders (entities, statistics…) and perform sequential quality controls.

Visibility: Increase the visibility on ongoing project requests, on created projects, and aim to reduce the overall lead time. Harmonize the reporting is a subsequent benefit.

In a Higher Ed world where ‘Cloud First’ is the path forward, SAP S/4HANA Cloud is taking ERP into the digital age. SAP’s intelligent public cloud ERP delivers the latest innovations and acts as your copilot, eliminating repetitive tasks, providing real-time analytics all with great Fiori-based UX to drive operational excellence and institution-wide administrative and IT simplification. In this session you will learn more about SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud on the WHY, WHAT and HOW in the context of Higher Education & Research.

The broad goal is to provide students easy access to personalized recommendations on courses and other engagements. The recommendations are deduced from the broad trends across students’ behaviour and tailored to each individual. Recommendation engines are everywhere on the internet (Netflix, Amazon, Google) and provide ample opportunity for investigation of what is possible and what are potential pitfalls.

This discussion will address the technological feasibility, the lessons learned from a live POC, and the opportunity for future development. Dr. John Santerre, a senior data scientist, will speak about his experience building such a system with a customer in 2020.

MSU and SAP had a successful collaboration of over nine months to release Fiori-based HCM Processes & Forms. We would like to share the experiences gained during the implementation and also highlight the benefits of using the product. A product demo is planned to give a hands-on experience of the product, its user interface, as well as its flexibility in handling complex business process requirements of MSU.

Johns Hopkins usage of Fiori to improve data quality, policy compliance, and delight users in the entry of Non-PO Invoices.

Johns Hopkins embarked on a complete refurbish of the Non-PO Invoice entry process, known as the Payment Request transaction. Usage of the SAP-provided transaction did not provide guardrails to keep users within the policy, or limit General Ledgers used to those most appropriate. The user experience with the SAP-provided transaction was not intuitive for the occasional users, and information related to workflow approvals was buried.

Johns Hopkins conducted surveys, user outreach, pilot groups, and user monitoring tools to create and evolve a solution that truly delights users, keeps users within policy restrictions, and ensures standard financial postings to the delight of financial leadership.