Growth of Teams

We have all witnessed the continued growth of Microsoft Teams – with its user base reaching 300 million last year.

Over one million organisations have adopted Microsoft Teams as their default messaging platform, making it a go-to choice for collaborative communication.

As many employees are now ‘live’ in Microsoft Teams, organisations are facing the challenge of bringing process tasks and notifications to employees in the most accessible way.

Working with multiple Inboxes

As the number of enterprise solutions has grown, managers now find they need to manage an ever-growing number of inboxes.

Perhaps they make spending approvals in S/4HANA or Ariba, approve expense claims in Concur, absence requests in Employee Central. Perhaps they also use ServiceNow, MDG or a variety of other internal systems that push out notifications through email. Or perhaps they use a variety of Fiori apps to make approvals. Many of these solutions have mobile apps that handle notifications.

There are so many places to keep track of, that many users will simply rely on internal email notifications. But for many people there is no better place to hide a work item for action than in their email inbox, as it is constantly flooded with messages.

Critical business processes have a major point of weakness; many employees find it difficult to manage work across a lot of different tools.

Need to bring Work to Users

On the one hand, we have a tool that is being used all the time by users, and on the other hand, we have this confusion of apps and Inboxes that we’re expecting our users to manage.

The great challenge is to collapse or combine all those Inboxes, and bring the work to where the employee already is. For some users that might be BTP Work Zone, but for many others it is Microsoft Teams.

Exposing SAP processes in Teams

It’s now possible to extend your SAP processes into Teams, using Microsoft’s Adaptive Cards technology to provide a new user interface for key actions and notifications.

There are two types of use-cases:

• Actionable cards

There are so many different use cases. But perhaps the best place to start are the processes that require approvals by managers or budget holders who are not logged into SAP all day.

Examples include Purchase Requisition Approval, Supplier Invoice Payment and Leave Request. A mixture of financial and HR processes, or approval processes pertaining to master data management.

These actionable cards can contain ‘synchronised’ work items: In most cases, there is probably somewhere else the work could take place – like in the Fiori Inbox. But the cards are synchronised with the core process, such that the card is kept up to date, and it doesn’t matter where the work is actioned.

• ‘Active’ Notifications

Normally, however they are sent, process notifications are static. An email notification from a week ago shows me what the status of a process was a week ago – in a fast-moving world, any process notification might be out of date within minutes or hours of being sent.

You might therefore choose to send notifications more often in order for the user to be kept up to date, but this might mean drowning them in a pile of unwanted messages. It’s an uncomfortable balance to strike as there is no right answer.

Using Teams, you can send Active Notifications, which are notifications that can be updated or replaced after they have been sent, so instead of receiving lots of separate notifications about a process, I am just sent one, and it is always up to date.

You can also control if and when the notification appears and disappears, to keep the chat clean.

Business Impact

Using this approach can lead to a range of tangible benefits.

Process Acceleration

Users see their tasks immediately, and it’s so easy to action that they do. This means that approval and rejection steps are taken more quickly, so that the end-to-end process is accelerated. This increases process efficiency, which can reduce costs or increase customer service.

Process Control

Each user in a process can be provided with notifications in cards – you’re not inundating them with new notifications but updating the status on cards. This means that they can see who the action is with, what actions were taken, by whom and when.

And of course, the person who has the task knows that their response, and indeed their response time, is transparent, so they are more likely to get on with it.

Reduced Risk

Your enterprise products send a huge number of, frankly quite poor notification emails, that might have links back to inboxes or specific work items.

When you move to Teams, you can dispense with all these emails, as they quickly start to cause more harm than good.

Fewer emails is something that every worker wants – employees are better organised & work doesn’t get lost

Work is less likely to get lost or forgotten if it is in a single place.

So, you reduce risk by removing the reliance on multiple difference inboxes – the more work you can bring into one place the better

Increased User Effectiveness

Most enterprise products have greatly improved their UI over the past few years. However, multiple different systems mean multiple different UIs. Bringing work into Teams means standardising on a Microsoft look and feel; it’s really easy for users, which drives user engagement.

And moreover, because it is easier, and because it is faster, then key users get to spend more time on things that matter- so there’s a direct impact on user effectiveness.

Summary

Extending SAP processes into Microsoft Teams can deliver a wide range of benefits. Users can process work items with ease, and keep track of many different processes all in one place.

Find out more at www.arch-global.com/products/looply/.

Chris Scott is a director of Arch Consulting, delivering SAP services in the UK since 1997.