The Oxygen Blog

I am writing this from a Security Consultant’s perspective. A UX (user experience) consultant, if there are such people, would likely talk more about the look and feel, the enhancements that can be made and improvements to the user experience. I would like to focus on the practicalities of getting NWBC up and running.
The latest version, NWBC 4.0 PL5, allows you to log in without having to assign NWBC menus to your user profile. So that gets everyone on to NWBC much faster than with version 3.5. The Search facility helps locate transactions and applications quickly and easily. For example, if I am looking for sales orders I can enter ‘Create Sale’ or if I know the transaction code starts with ‘VA’ I can enter that into the search. This will generally satisfy seasoned consultants who know their most used transactions by heart! They can also upload their existing SAPGUI Favourites to NWBC.
That’s our functional and technical team sorted, now to our end users. Here is where the workload increases for the Security Consultant. I say Security Consultant because the work is done in the Profile Generator (PFCG) and this is a restricted transaction. If you need to nominate someone else to build the menus then you need to restrict their access within PFCG.

Continues...

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, at the beginning of my career as an SAP workflow consultant, I read many discussions on the MIT SAP Workflow User Group on what constituted sophisticated workflow design. At that stage I wondered why so many basic workflow questions needed to be considered prior to the workflow build phase. (For example, who does what, to what, and in what order?) I thought SAP workflow was like any SAP technical component, just build it, code it, and that’s all. Apparently, young Padawan did not see the bigger picture.

These questions remain as relevant today as they did then and appear in the SAP Workflow Trainer Guide Line and in the latest version of SAP Workflow Book. Indeed these questions are essential to the very purpose of workflow, which is the collaboration of following dimensions:
• Business process
• People
• Information

The most challenging steps in any SAP workflow project are the acquisition of ‘good’ information, followed by the packaging and presenting of this information to business users in a manner that is understood by all parties.

Most workflow users are business users. They are not technical people, so workflow and functional consultants need to work collaboratively with them to help gather business requirements, understand the essential business process that is being performed, and be aware of all the people affected by the process.

Continues...

Oxygen’s BPC Consolidation SmartStart provides a simple solution to a complex business problem, delivering ‘out of the box’ IFRS-compliant financial consolidation with minimal development and integration costs. The SmartStart utilises SAP BPC to help businesses improve their consolidation process from a number of perspectives.

The solution comes pre-configured with a reporting suite complete with common financial statements and associated notes, plus a host of dynamic validation reports.

Oxygen received a fast track RDS qualification while attending the SAP FKOM summit earlier in the year. Oxygen was one of the first SAP partners in Asia-Pacific to licence and implement its own RDS solution, when it created a fast-track CRM solution for Integria in 2011.

RDS solutions are a major initiative by SAP; created to help organisations get up and running with SAP solutions rapidly using best practices and for a fixed scope and at a fixed price. Oxygen is RDS qualified for CRM, BOBJ Upgrades and now BPC.

The Oxygen BPC Consolidation SmartStart handles consolidation of investment eliminations, inter-company eliminations, automatic cash flow generation, proportional and equity method accounting adjustments are just some examples of the in-built functionality.

All of this is controlled through the highly friendly web-based UI, where the user is guided through their task list using the pre-configured business process flows ensuring that no step of the consolidation is missed.

For more information about the Oxygen’s BPC Consolidation SmartStart please email info@uxcoxygen.com

Given the competitive nature of business, organisations constantly seek more effective ways to improve productivity. Automating key processes and reducing manual workload are key to reducing processing times and producing more predictable results. In other words, organisations try and ensure that the right work reaches the right person in a timely fashion.

Deploying a workflow management system can provide this type of business process control.

There are a number of business processes which can be handled by a workflow system, ranging from small-scale tasks such as handling business trip expenses to large scale processing tasks, such as purchase order approval and master data maintenance.

Continues...

Oxygen won both awards in the ‘Best Run Analytics with Channel Partner’ category – the first for a complex business intelligence de-merger project at DuluxGroup and the second for an enterprise data warehouse project carried out at Australian infrastructure company, Jemena.

Oxygen Chief Executive, Stuart Dickinson, says the company is very proud the customer projects have been acknowledged with wins in the award program.

“This year our award winning projects involved complex integration and separation work across multiple company systems, drawing on our expertise in business intelligence – specifically SAP Business Warehouse and SAP BusinessObjects. In both instances we successfully deployed this software to solve specific reporting problems, and gave each organisation the ability to gain a single version of truth across multiple information sources.”

Continues...