Overview

Organization – Water Irrigation Company

Sector – Agriculture

Problem – Hundreds of sensitive customer & vendor data-modification pending requests were not updated in SAP database since the 2nd layer of approval hierarchies did not complete the process. This resulted in customer service issues as well as with exposing the company to unnecessary risks.

Solution – Using InsightZAP (formerly known as InsightSAP) the company has created a new automation process that finds all items that need to be approved, comparing their values to existing items and external reports in order to verify their accuracy. Lastly, the automation confirmed the data and also created reports so the organization can keep track of modifications.

Background & Pain Points

A Global Water Irrigation manufacturer needed to monitor the completion of a double-signature approval process when modifying sensitive customer and vendor data fields subject to Dual Control Functionality in SAP. The objective of automating the control over this process was mainly needed to prevent Fraudulent behavior (e.g. Employee replacing a supplier’s bank account with a personal bank account), as well as to adhere to SOX regulations.

Pain Point

Hundreds of sensitive customer & vendor data-modification pending requests were not updated in SAP database since the 2nd layer of approval hierarchies did not complete the process. This resulted in customer service issues as well as with exposing the company to unnecessary risks.

Solution: 

Within less than 4 hours, a InsightZAP full-blown Business Process was created ready to use in the Production system.

1. The standard SAP report FK09 (Confirm Vendor List) was used as the process baseline
2. A new Insight Report was created.
   
   • The report was enhanced with a new formula column: Elapsed days (#days elapsed of the sensitive field change date).
   • New Snapshot was created, uploading an external Excel file containing pairs of Company code and its corresponding CFO’s user name.
   • The report was enhanced with a new Snapshot LookUp column: CFO_Username (SAP user name of the CFO in charge of the company code to which the sensitive field is related to).
   • New painting rule (conditional formatting) was applied to color the Elapsed-days field: yellow for over 7 days delay and red for over 14 days delay.
   • The advance filter was applied to colored records and a corresponding display variant, name Problems, was created.
   • A new Business Object was created under SWO1 (Business Object Builder) to enable drilling down from the vendor number to the correct change via T-code FK08 (Confirm Vendor Individually).
3. A new Publisher variant was created based on the above-described Insight report.
   
   • The publishing format was set to HTML in the message-body.
   • The links checkbox was checked, to enable direct access from the email to SAP t-code FK08 using the ITS (Internet Transaction Server) framework.
   • The Publisher was configured to split the report records according to the CFO User name. That is to say, all records related to the same CFO, were accumulated together and were sent to the email address (automatically taken from SAP user master) of the CFO.
   • A new employee signature picture was uploaded using t-code SE78 (Administration of Form Graphics) to which Publisher’s Graphics File pointed at.
   • Last, the Publisher was scheduled as a weekly job

Result

within two weeks, all pending sensitive customer data modification requests were resolved. Following, a weekly email containing any future un-resolved modification requests, personalized to the recipient and in context, has been shared and published to relevant stakeholders (only in case new pending requests).