Mobile

1. 1
E-Business “Old Economy Style”:
Mobile Recording of Working Times and Travel Expenses
Mobile business applications that run on mobile devices and exchange data with ERP systems can simplify
and streamline business processes. They make the data entry process easier, reduce the risk of incorrect
entries, and enable follow-on processes for the data in real time. With the advent of offline solutions, the
advantages of mobile data entry are now accessible to all, regardless of cellular phones’ network coverage.
A prime example of how enterprises can profit from these advantages is the offline recording of working
times and travel expenses by employees in the field.
The current crisis in the New
Economy has given new meaning
to business concepts that have
actually been the tools of the
trade of management for dec-
ades. “Operative profitability” and
“cash flow,” to name but two of
the buzzwords of the Old Econ-
omy, had regained their place at
the core of entrepreneurial think-
ing while many companies were
still trying to shake off the e in
front of and the .com after their
name. However, although it may
seem prudent to revert to tried
and trusted strategies in times of
economic difficulty, companies
are now faced with the task of
gaining a competitive edge
through the use of value-adding
e-business solutions.
Business-to-business (B2B) and
business-to-customer (B2C) solu-
tions have demonstrated that
electronic marketplaces are highly
suitable tools for streamlining pro-
curement processes. And implicit
in the term “Employee Relation-
ship Management” is the recogni-
tion that human resources proc-
esses, too, can be optimized
through enterprise portals. Today
it is a reality: e-business solutions
that, together with traditional ERP
systems, are key factors in the
value-add process.
Alongside these e-business solu-
tions, there is now a third cate-
gory, which enables field employ-
ees to participate in electronic
business processes at any time
and any location: mobile applica-
tions. These applications can run
on various devices (cellular
phones, PDAs, notebooks) and
communicate with ERP systems
such as SAP R/3 either in real
time directly through the cellular
phone network or via synchroni-
zation processes using offline ap-
plications. In the latter option, us-
ers first enter and save their data
locally (on the hard drive of their
notebook, for example) and then
subsequently transfer the data to
the ERP system’s database when
they have an established connec-
tion.
Mobile Time and Travel
The recording of working times
and travel expenses for offsite
employees is one area in which
the use of offline applications of-
fers many advantages for both
companies and their employees.
While employees with a fixed
work center have now become
accustomed to using employee
self-service applications to enter
their working times and travel ex-
penses at their PC, field employ-
ees have, until now, always been
at a disadvantage because they
do not have constant access to
the ERP system. As a result, they
have been forced to laboriously
note down their details on paper,
then manually transfer the infor-
mation to the system once back in
the office, a procedure which is
often prone to errors.
This used to be the setup at TÜV
NORD GROUP. The company,
founded in 1869, is an association
of technical service providers
which carries out security checks
on the manufacture, installation,
and operation of technical equip-
ment and facilities. The Traffic
Engineering Division, for example,
sends engineers out to private
customers, company car fleets,
and driving schools to check vehi-
cles. Previously, engineers had to
submit documents recording the
duration of their work, journey
time, project expenditure, and
expenses. To do so, they could
either enter the data electronically
and then print it out, or send in
handwritten copies. Whatever the
method, the engineers had to
produce a paper form so that ad-
ministrators could subsequently
enter the data in the ERP system.
Gunnar Thaden, CIO of the TÜV
NORD GROUP, describes his
company’s IT strategy as one of
“consistent homogenization of the
IT landscape on the basis of SAP
software.” It therefore seemed
obvious that the SAP solution for
recording working times and
travel expenses offline, Mobile
Time and Travel, would also be of
considerable benefit to the com-
pany. Thaden states, “We are
convinced that Mobile Time and
Travel is a further important mile-
stone on the way to successfully
modernizing and optimizing our IT
landscape.”
The TÜV NORD GROUP was the
world’s first company to imple-
ment the new offline solution, and
now has 150 employees using it.
“Another 1700 users are due to
start in early 2003,” according to
Michael Friedrich, one of the ap-
plication managers responsible
for the implementation of Mobile
Time and Travel: “As the first cus-
tomer, we were involved in the
functional tests and were able to
suggest improvements to make
the program as user-friendly as
possible.” The TÜV NORD
GROUP therefore welcomes site
visits from other SAP users to
exchange their experiences of
Mobile Time and Travel.
Seamless Integration
There is much demand for solu-
tions such as Mobile Time and
Travel in other service sectors
too, according to Howard Beader,

2. 2
Director of Product Marketing,
mySAP Mobile Business: “Con-
sultants working offsite have to be
able to record their expenses, and
this has to be able to be inte-
grated with the backend system to
ensure accurate, seamless invoic-
ing for customers.” The seamless
integration of the offline solution is
provided by the SAP Mobile En-
gine, which is the technological
basis used to connect offline ap-
plications to SAP R/3.
The SAP Mobile Engine controls
the automated installation of the
offline applications on employees’
notebooks and the synchroniza-
tion of master data and transac-
tion data. “Administrating several
thousand terminals in the field is
no problem at all,” according to
Dr. Claudius Fischer, Director of
Mobile Infrastructure, SAP AG.
“The SAP Mobile Engine, being
an entirely Java solution, is plat-
form-independent so that custom-
ers are not bound to particular
hardware.”
Advantages for
Employees
Recording their working times and
travel expenses offline offers field
employees many advantages.
They can transfer their travel data
to the ERP system directly from
their hotel room, with the result
that their expenses are already
being processed and reimbursed
during their return journey. They
also do not have to invest time
and energy in noting down their
working times and travel data in
such a way that entering the data
into the ERP system subse-
quently is as easy as possible.
The offline application can sim-
plify data entry a great deal by
providing users with regularly up-
dated templates and dropdown
lists for account-assignment ob-
jects (such as cost centers, or-
ders, and networks). In addition,
employees can transfer to the
ERP system data that has still to
be released for further process-
ing. This enables a backup of
data without users having to cre-
ate a local copy on CD-ROM or
other media. This means that it
would not be a problem if data
were to be lost on the notebook.
Advantages for
Companies
The aforementioned advantages
for employees are reason enough
to merit offline entry of working
times and travel expenses, yet the
benefits to be reaped by compa-
nies are even more significant.
First of all, offline solutions enable
employees to make good use of
their previously unproductive –
and therefore expensive – travel-
ing and waiting times. They can
enter their project times and travel
data en route from one customer
to the next, or during their return
journey. This means that they can
complete one customer visit be-
fore starting the next one.
The real advantage, however, of
mobile data entry is being able to
transfer working time and travel
data in real time while en route,
because the data is subject to
various business processes that
all have one thing in common:
Time is of the essence. This is
true not only for financial account-
ing and cost accounting, which
require data to be submitted at set
intervals. In addition to expense
accounting – where swift process-
ing is primarily in the employee’s
interests – rapid invoicing of em-
ployees’ work is a key factor in
improving companies’ cash flow.
And it goes without saying that
precise monitoring of project costs
and providing reliable data for
invoicing can only improve a
company’s customer relation-
ships.
All these advantages can be real-
ized with comparatively little effort
for an existing SAP R/3 installa-
tion. The TÜV NORD GROUP’s
implementation project was com-
pleted within around three
months. The amount of training
required for the users was mini-
mal, as Michael Müller, another
application manager responsible
for implementing Mobile Time and
Travel, confirms: “Employees who
were familiar with entering their
data online using the SAP solu-
tion required next to no training.
And for those who had never
used the online data entry solu-
tion, one day’s training was gen-
erally sufficient.
Data entry using SAP Mobile Time and Travel

3. 3
Data Exchange with
SAP R/3
SAP Mobile Time and Travel is
closely linked to the applications
that have long been used for
online entry of working times and
travel costs with the Cross-
Application Time Sheet (CATS)
and Travel Management. How-
ever, for any scenario involving
data being exchanged from an
offline application to an ERP sys-
tem, there is one basic problem:
An offline application is not able to
reproduce all of the extensive
checks normally carried out by the
ERP system’s applications for
data entered online. For example,
information about the availability
of account-assignment objects
are completely up to date only in
the ERP system. Nevertheless, it
is in the users’ interests to have
data transferred that contains as
few errors as possible.
Mobile Time and Travel gets
around this problem by using its
own application logic, which is
derived from the ERP system and
contains restricted check mecha-
nisms, to catch the majority of
errors on the notebook. When the
data is subsequently synchro-
nized, SAP R/3 then subjects the
transaction data transferred from
the notebook to the same range
of data entry checks it carries out
for data entered online. Should
errors occur that Mobile Time and
Travel did not pick up, SAP R/3
automatically sends messages to
the notebook so that the em-
ployee can process them offline.
This guarantees that only error-
free data is passed on for further
processing. In addition, SAP R/3
supplies the offline application
with updated master data (ac-
count-assignment objects and
picklists) in the course of each
synchronization. Ideally, there-
fore, employees only have to work
with the offline application – data
has to be corrected or supple-
mented in the online system only
in exceptional cases.
Why Not Online?
When deciding to opt for a solu-
tion enabling recording of working
times and travel expenses regard-
less of location, companies are
faced with the choice of an online
or an offline solution. At first
glance, an online solution may
seem to be the more sophisti-
cated alternative, since the data
can be transferred to the ERP
system directly after it has been
entered in the mobile device. In
addition, an online solution ideally
does not require software to be
installed on the mobile device.
The SAP Mobile Engine, how-
ever, is designed exclusively for
offline solutions. According to Dr.
Fischer, “This is crucial for areas
that have no network coverage.”
The TÜV NORD GROUP is a
prime example of the importance
of having independent online
connections such as WLAN,
GSM, and GPRS. If the company
had opted for an online solution,
the testing engineers would have
been constantly faced with prob-
lems due to insufficient network
coverage, given the thousands of
customer sites they visit. This
would have meant them having to
first note down important data on
paper or using other tools – they
therefore would not have been
any better off. An offline solution,
however, enables users to enter
data anywhere. In addition, fre-
quent, if not continuous, online
connections involve significantly
higher costs when compared with
a one-off synchronization of data
at the end of a day or journey.
What’s more, if data is synchro-
nized over a company’s own net-
work, the connection costs are
negligible.
Summary
Companies and external service
providers alike can profit from off-
line entry of working times and
travel costs. Mobile Time and
Travel is integrated with SAP R/3
via the SAP Mobile Engine, which
enables the application to be im-
plemented and administrated effi-
ciently. The minimal amount of
training required means that even
large groups of employees can
quickly be up and running with the
application. Consequently, even
in a short space of time, offline
data entry can make a significant
contribution to the value creation
process
Author: Hendrik Achenbach, M. A.
(Technical Writer, SAP AG)
This article was first published in
German as "E-Business nach Art
der Old Economy: Mobile Erfas-
sung steigert Wertschöpfung" in
CoPERS SPEZIAL SAP HR/2002,
pp. 52-53.