Seminar Agenda

Click here to view the schedule at-a-glance

Day One
7:30 – 8:30 Registration and Continental Networking Breakfast

8:30– 9:30
How leading SAP customers evaluate, implement, and benefit from employee and manager self-services
Based on lessons from recent and mature self-service implementations, this session details the strategies and best practices that have been most effective at meeting strategic HR and cost-savings objectives for employee and manager self-service initiatives.

You’ll come away with:

• Criteria to gauge the value vs. cost of self-service capabilities
  
  
• Best practices to set and achieve objectives for user acceptance
  
  
• Approaches that reduce HR administrative overhead
  
  
• Details of the 3 most significant ways SAP customers are saving money through their self-service deployments
  
  
• A comprehensive understanding of the technology, implementation and upgrade decisions that have the largest impact on support and maintenance costs
  
  
• Best practices to improve an existing SAP self-service setup
  
  
• The 9 factors that must be accounted for to ensure a successful SAP employee or manager self-service implementation
  
  
• Leading practices to ensure the usability and effectiveness of employee self-services
  
  
• Different strategies for providing managers with information and applications that make them more productive and better equipped to make decisions
  
  
• Criteria to verify that processes are good candidates for self-services
  
  
• Techniques to keep self-service deployments aligned with your organization’s strategic goals

9:30– 10:45
A comprehensive guide to SAP functionality and technical requirements for employee self-service (ESS) and manager self-service (MSS)
This session offers an updated and comprehensive guide to the expanded range of features that SAP now delivers for employee and manager self-services and the technical foundation upon which they run. You will also learn how recent changes to SAP self-service solutions and their technology platform profoundly affect new implementations and upgrades.

In this session, you will:

• See demos of the latest SAP self-service capabilities
  
  
• Drill down into the capabilities, enhancements, and requirements of SAP self-services functionality — both from a back-end SAP ERP Human Capital Management (SAP ERP HCM) and SAP NetWeaver® Portal perspective
  
  
• See how newer self-service functionality differs from what you’ve seen in SAP R/3® 4.x and SAP ERP 5.0
  
  
• Explore SAP enhancement package 4 in detail — its features, requirements, and impact on existing and planned ESS and MSS deployments
  
  
• Bolster your understanding of SAP NetWeaver Portal and the role it now plays in SAP self-service implementations
  
  
• Step through the latest functional and technical enhancements to SAP solutions for ESS and MSS
  
  
• Explore the technical prerequisites of implementing or upgrading ESS and MSS
  
  
• Get best practices to integrate your self-service portal with back-end applications, such as SAP ERP HCM
  
  
• Obtain decision criteria to determine whether you should enhance your existing ESS/MSS implementation or re-implement it from scratch as you upgrade to SAP ERP 6.0 — along with the time, effort, and functionality required for each option

10:45 – 11:00 Networking Break

11:00 – 12:15
Best practices for empowering employees to take charge of their personal data and transactions
This session offers strategies and best practices for employee self-service (ESS). Get expert advice to optimize SAP employee self-service functionality, put personal information and tools to manage their work life directly into the hands of users, and free up HR teams to focus on more strategic activities. This session offers:

• Strategies, best practices, and tactical considerations for setting up:
  • Payment administration
    
    
  • Salary verification
    
    
  • Leave requests
    
    
  • Work schedules and hours worked
    
    
  • Life and work event management
    
    
  • Benefits management
    
    
  • Access to corporate information and policies
    
    
• Insight into how HR responsibilities for these areas change once they are delivered as employee self-services
  
  
• Examples of how ESS extends SAP ERP HCM capabilities
  
  
• Guidelines for how much autonomy to provide end users and where the HR department should retain control
  
  
• ESS usage scenarios that illustrate how to get the highest return on your ESS investment
  
  
• Lessons to prevent or correct the most common mistakes that can compromise your ESS implementation
  
  
• Techniques that help employees gain a better understanding of policies, benefits, and processes
  
  
• Tips to improve the timeliness and accuracy of the information presented to employees

1:15 – 2:45
Best practices for empowering managers to groom, grow, incentivize, and manage a high-performing workforce
This session provides strategies and best practices for equipping managers with self-services to build, educate, train, and grow a productive, highperforming workforce.

You will:

• Find out where an MSS portal is most likely to save money and improve managerial processes
  
  
• Step through demos and explore the capabilities and requirements of SAP functionality for:
  • Performance management
    
    
  • Compensation management
    
    
  • Recruiting
    
    
  • Learning and training
    
    
  • Succession planning
    
    
• Get guidelines to determine if, when, and how to transition to SAP ERP HCM performance management functionality from your existing solutions or methods
  
  
• Examine techniques you can use to cascade performance goals
  
  
• Understand how to take advantage of new tab and scrolling functionality
  
  
• Learn how to set up a proxy that allows managers to delegate tasks to administrators or peers
  
  
• Gain insight into how to manage employee bonuses and long-term incentives
  
  
• View examples of how to set up job postings, parse resumes, and fill personnel vacancies from within
  
  
• Understand the requirements for using the SAP Enterprise Learning environment, such as the need to set up and maintain a qualifications catalog

2:45 – 3:00 Networking Break

3:00 – 5:00
Principles of successful ESS and MSS configuration:
Lessons for new and existing implementations
Whether you are newly implementing self-services or seeking ways to improve the delivery and performance of your existing self-service installation, you’ll find the portal configuration lessons, best practices, and “how-to” tips in this session invaluable.

• Get practical guidelines for sizing and planning your ESS and MSS hardware needs, depending on factors such as:
  • How highly available you need your portal to be
    
    
  • Whether your portal is external facing
    
    
  • Whether you plan to run ESS or MSS as part of an SAP ERP 6.0 implementation
    
    
• Acquire tips to properly set up and modify SAP delivered portal content structures, such as:
  • Worksets
    
    
  • Pages
    
    
  • iViews
    
    
• Obtain configuration best practices that will give you the greatest control over ESS and MSS performance, security, and user adoption
  
  
• Explore important architectural changes between ESS and MSS in SAP R/3 4.x and SAP ERP 6.0 that dramatically affect your portal configuration
  
  
• Learn what type of configuration documentation SAP provides and how to navigate it
  
  
• Find out why SAP NetWeaver Development Infrastructure (NWDI) is required for new ESS/MSS implementations, upgrades, or re-implementations
  
  
• Explore the unique roles of SAP NetWeaver Development Infrastructure and SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio in a self-service environment
  
  
• Understand the configuration required to properly integrate Adobe Document Services with your SAP ERP HCM applications for scenarios using Interactive Forms by Adobe

Day Two
8:00 – 8:30 Continental Networking Breakfast

8:30 – 10:00
Branding and navigation techniques that improve usability and boost user adoption of employee and manager self-services
This session highlights the dos and don’ts of self-service portal branding and navigation and provides a detailed guide to the design tools SAP makes available.

• Understand how to balance the 3 elements that can make or break end-user adoption of an ESS or MSS portal: content, branding, and navigation
  
  
• Examine key differences between SAP development tools and platforms — ITS, BSP, HTML, and WebDynpro for Java — and their impact on the look and feel of your portal
  
  
• Step through an example of how to create or modify your ESS or MSS portal brand using the new SAP NetWeaver Portal 7.0 business package for SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) 6.0
  
  
• Assess the pros and cons of allowing users to personalize their own iViews (Hint: Find out why SAP recommends that you turn off this feature)
  
  
• Gather tips and tricks to create an intuitive navigation path for your users by using breadcrumbs and steps within the floorplan manager
  
  
• Determine if and when to federate multiple portals to provide your users with a single navigation path across content
  
  
• Understand to what extent you can brand ESS and MSS using the portal theme editor, and when to turn to SAP NetWeaver Development Infrastructure (NWDI) tools for advanced customization — along with the skills required for using each tool
  
  
• Obtain branding and navigation best practices to adopt — as well as worst practices to avoid
  
  
• Get a sneak peek into how SAP’s planned user interface enhancements will affect your portal design and branding approach

10:00 – 10:15 Networking Break

10:15– 11:30
Security guidelines to ensure that only the right people have access to the right applications and data
This session shows you how to obtain all the benefits of open access that an employee or manager self-service portal provides without compromising sensitive or confidential HR or organizational data.

• Learn how to avoid the top 4 security vulnerabilities that commonly occur in ESS or MSS implementations, including conflicting portal and backend authorizations
  
  
• See how you can ensure that managers and employees access only the data that is relevant to their jobs by unifying SAP NetWeaver Portal roles with SAP ERP roles
  
  
• Examine the different options for authenticating to your employee or manager portal, such as LDAP, the user management engine (UME), or an X-509 certificate
  
  
• Learn how to launch and authenticate to your ESS or MSS portal from a corporate portal or intranet
  
  
• Get criteria to determine whether to enable single sign-on across your whole IT network or solely within your SAP environment
  
  
• Find out how to achieve the right level of access control and compliance through the proper use and provisioning of roles
  
  
• Determine when it makes sense to automate role assignments (for example, when bringing new hires onboard)
  
  
• Step through the options for securing your portal and back-end data when allowing employees and managers external access
  
  
• Get tips to validate the security of your ESS or MSS portal using negative testing
  
  
• Understand the impact that integrating SAP and non-SAP applications has on single sign-on

11:30 – 12:30 Networking Lunch

12:30 – 1:45
Expert tips for process efficiency and proper setup and delivery of forms and workflows in your SAP self-service environment
In this session, learn how to simplify task execution and streamline business processes by using your self-service environment as an entry point into forms and workflows.

• Evaluate the time, effort, and cost of designing new business processes to conform to standard workflow templates versus customizing the templates to fit your processes
  
  
• Understand the benefits of designing forms to fit specific business processes, rather than trying to use general purpose forms across multiple processes
  
  
• Walk through the steps required to design a form, and understand why it’s key to execute those steps in the proper order
  
  
• Obtain advanced techniques for triggering workflow processes with a form
  
  
• Gain familiarity with the standard workflow templates SAP provides that can be used with ESS or MSS
  
  
• Find out how to overcome common challenges involved with workflow configuration for the portal, such as complexity of business rules
  
  
• Learn how to escalate MSS workflows and how to change an approval chain mid-process to adapt to real-time change requests
  
  
• Understand the scenarios in which SAP Interactive Forms software by Adobe can provide the greatest value, including employee benefit statements and 401(k) change requests

1:45 – 2:00 Networking Break

2:00 – 3:15
Preventing, diagnosing, and resolving the 5 most common ESS and MSS performance problems
This session shows you how to solve problems that can cause performance issues and timeouts, and gives you battle-tested methods to diagnose the problems through the use of alerts and aggressive monitoring.

• Understand how to prevent or correct the most common causes of ESS and MSS portal timeouts and learn where they can occur — at the portal, application, or network layer
  
  
• Learn strategies for effective performance testing and load modeling
  
  
• Step through the proper ways to set up session management so that the portal is not attempting to run too many open sessions at the same time
  
  
• Find out how to diagnose whether user behavior, such as improper login or logout, or heavy usage during peak periods, like paydays, is causing portal performance issues
  
  
• Learn how to use monitoring and traces to determine where load bottlenecks are occurring Explore how SAP Solution Manager tracking tools can provide you with metrics to diagnose your own ESS or MSS portal performance problems
  
  
• Find out how to activate or build your own AutoSave functionality to ensure users’ work is not lost in the event of a timeout
  
  
• Get insight into why a tight collaboration between HR and IT is the key to streamlining maintenance and lowering the TCO of your ESS or MSS portal
  
  
• Get criteria to decide when to take your ESS or MSS system down for maintenance, such as applying patches
  
  
• Assess the pros and cons of maintaining your portal internally or outsourcing maintenance
  
  
• Understand how applying a patch can have complex ramifications for the multiple components in your ESS/MSS implementation
  
  
• Identify key expertise you should have on your ESS/MSS support team, such as Basis, ABAP, Java, and functional skills

3:15 – 3:30 Networking Break

3:30 - 4:15
Bonus Session
The top 5 things you need to know when going global with ESS and MSS
This session provides practical advice to help you avoid common pitfalls and “gotchas” that can arise when rolling out an ESS or MSS portal globally.

• This session provides expert advice for global deployments of ESS or MSS and best practices for addressing differences in:
  • Language
    
    
  • Country-specific processes
    
    
  • Regulations
    
    
  • Culture
    
    
  • Time zones
    
    
  • Project and support team composition
    
    
• Find out which SAP ERP HCM functionality SAP supports in other countries
  
  
• Understand the Unicode requirements for setting up multiple languages, along with legal mandates that may require you to run a bilingual portal in certain countries
  
  
• Learn how to tap into country-specific iViews that can simplify the configuration of a global self-service portal
  
  
• Get advice on how Safe Harbor laws come into play when data crosses borders and servers are in multiple locations
  
  
• Gain insight into how to factor time zone issues into your backup and maintenance strategy
  
  
• Obtain expert guidance on how to form an international ESS or MSS team that includes champions from the countries in which the portal will be deployed
  
  
• Find out how your global rollout strategy — single or multiple countries — will drive key design decisions
  
  
• Get tips for training your central IT team to support international employees
  
  
• See how to factor time zone issues into your backup and maintenance strategy

Day Three
8:00 – 8:30 Continental Networking Breakfast

8:30 – 9:15
Policies, quality checks, and best practices for ESS and MSS governance
This session offers proven techniques to properly govern the functional, administrative, managerial, and technical aspects of an ESS or MSS deployment. This session outlines:

• The 5 key factors that must be part of any self-service governance model
  
  
• The roles to include on your governance team and what type of input each role should have
  
  
• Ways to set up quality checks and balances and development standards
  
  
• Criteria to determine who within your organization owns ESS and MSS
  
  
• Techniques to reach agreement and set policy on a common look, feel, and navigation path
  
  
• The best ways to route and get approval for ESS and MSS portal change requests

9:15 - 9:30 Networking Break

9:30– 10:15
Preparing end-user, HR, IT, and support organizations for self-service operations:
Critical change management and training considerations
For many end users and managers, self-services represent a new way of working. For IT organizations, it changes the support model dramatically. This session offers:

• Expert guidance on building an organizational readiness strategy for ESS and MSS
  
  
• Insight into how your change management strategy will vary, depending on whether you’re upgrading, enhancing, or implementing ESS and MSS from scratch
  
  
• Lessons to prepare your IT team for making changes, loading data, and supporting new users and functionality
  
  
• Benefits and tradeoffs of various ESS and MSS training options, such as SAP-delivered training, hands-on labs, webinars, and train-the-trainer sessions
  
  
• Insights on building the right end-user support — including options such as online documentation, help desk, or center of excellence (COE)

10:15 - 10:30 Networking Break

10:30 - 11:30
Expert advice to plan and execute your next ESS/MSS upgrade, implementation, or enhancement project
This session provides tips, tricks, and actionable advice to help you plan and execute your ESS/MSS upgrade, enhancement, or new implementation project.

• Find out how ESS and MSS projects differ from other SAP implementations or upgrades you may have done in the past
  
  
• Learn what it takes to build a solid business case for your ESS/MSS implementation or upgrade and how to win champions for your project
  
  
• Understand how the broad base of stakeholders — from developers and functional analysts to end users and senior managers — in an ESS or MSS project profoundly affect the requirements gathering process
  
  
• Determine which functionality to implement first if you’re new to ESS and MSS — or how to take an existing implementation to a more advanced, strategic level with new processes and functionality
  
  
• Get guidance on blueprinting your project in a way that accounts for the unique technical platform required to run ESS and MSS
  
  
• Get tips for scoping an ESS/MSS upgrade or reimplementation, depending on whether you’re adding users to your existing implementation or rolling out new functionality to existing users
  
  
• Obtain lessons to properly scope your project from end-to-end — how to target the right end users, and how to ensure proper service delivery after go-live
  
  
• Learn which skills should be included on an ESS or MSS project team and when to hire resources internally or outsource
  
  
• Get proven methods to shave time and costs off your project
  
  
• Find out how to ensure proper knowledge transfer when using outside consultants
  
  
• Learn the best ways to document your project for future reference

12:00 Seminar Concludes