Content for a book on SAP on-premise Travel & Expense Management

[Former Member]

Hi all,

just embarking onto a new book project with a colleague. This time it's going to be Travel and Expense.

Any thoughts on what you'd expect from such a book and what you think about existing books in the market will be very welcome.

Obviously we can't follow them all and need to look at what a broad enough market wants, but crowdsourcing some ideas always helped a lot to get some fresh perspective.

It will definitely include the technical perspective, so describe best practice processes, but also takes readers through technical design and configuration.

kind regards

Sven

[Former Member]

Thank you all for your comments !

book concept is submitted and first feedback is positive. will probably start writing in December and make good use of the Xmas holidays. As always, ideas and changes will come as we go along and I'm sure we'll keep coming back to the feedback we got here and elsewhere.

[Former Member]

Hi Sven,

such a book should have (apart of the standards) the following topics covered:

- Document archiving (like add on solution from OpenText)

- Mobile solution via Sybase or other add ons.

- Integration of Online Booking engines like GetThere, e-Travel Management and Cytric (what can be done still with direct interfaces via PI to integrate other providers)

- Workflows for integrate travel agencies without automated interfaces

- What to do with SAP Cloud for Travel - maybe on Premise but Cloud for smaller affiliates?

- Credit Card CLEARING (most of customers does not use real clearing functionality.

- Web Dynpro for ABAP or already using FIORI for some parts of the process?

- Shared service center organization and how to integrate extra functionality for auditing different countries in one spot.

- random audit functions

- Shared service reporting

- BI/Business Objects for travel reporting or going to travel agency reporting only?

Only good book of technical description in the market which I know is:

http://www.amazon.de/SAP-Travel-Management-Prozesshandbuch-Verbuchung/dp/3898424073/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UT...

(unfortunately only in German from my knowledge and very old content)

Kind regards,

Sigi

[Former Member]

Hi Sigi,

thanks a lot for this comprehensive feedback.

All very valid points, but to be honest most will probably not fit into the book due to page limits and size of the respective target audience.

We'll probably look at parts, which are interetsing for a majority of T&E users and not subject to too quick a change speed.

But the good news is: the publisher provides genuine online forums for their books, where we can add more specialised material and also provide updates on things we expect to change fast (e.g. I'd see Sybase mobole already as a legacy technology for most cases and I wouldn't bet my house on FIORI still being around by the time the book is printed and also still have the same name - if there's one thing changing faster than technology at SAP, then it's names of technology, isn't it 😉  )

300 pages get filled up terribly fast, so please don't be too disappointed, if many of the points you mention won't be in, but we take them on board for online content, be it in context of the book or not, going forward.

kind regards

Sven

[Former Member]

Hi Sven,

just liked to think of some things around the "normal standard" which always in interest of customer solutions. Of course you will be able to fill 300 pages only on SAP standard but this is already there in most of the cases and documented to a certain status.

Is the focus on process or on technology?

Kind regards,

Sigi

[Former Member]

ambition is to link proces requirements to tech implementation and share some best practise as well as typical issues and resolution.,

Whilst most tech points are written down somewhere in standard doco, that link is usually missing. Something the myriad of often very basic questions here on SCN seems to prove.

[Former Member]

Yes you are right!

Than I would tell the story about online booking integration.

Also WebDynpro for ABAP versus SAP Gui -what is possible on these frontends to do differently.

And also Shared Service Center Framework would be a lot of interest for many customers.

[Former Member]

Hi Sven,

This is brilliant, I thought about doing the same couple of years back but then got busy with projects

I agree that 300 odd page will inevitably fill up with just an overview of the processes, standard configuration and some fancy webdynpro stuff. Siegfried has already mentioned a huge list of items that he wouldn't mind seeing in the book but I think there should be a small section on reporting and more importantly how to create Ad-hoc queries using logical database PTRVP. 

Wish you all the best.

Cheers

Ankur

[Former Member]

Hi Ankur,

Agreed. Standard reports and query are much underused, as not properly understood. Too much money spent on unnecessary custom programming.

I was the same. Not done a new book for a long time due to project work. But now my brilliant colleague Anja Marxsen (authored quite a few under her old name Junold is joining and that makes it feasible, particularly as we've worked together well in the past

Cheers

Sven

[Lukas_Weigelt]

Hi Sven,

I agree with Siegfried's post over here:

just liked to think of some things around the "normal standard" which always in interest of customer solutions. Of course you will be able to fill 300 pages only on SAP standard but this is already there in most of the cases and documented to a certain status.

You haven't explicitly said who the target audience is, but assuming it's not the idiot masses that is incapable of using Google or reading the existing documentation, I personally would like a book with best practice approaches covering standard process use cases (like Siegfried's list in his earlier post) with, and that'd be really important to me, existing restraints. There's nothing more infuriating than common **** saying 'It is possible to blah blah blah' concealing potential business-process- destroying restrictions. Just to put down a few examples:

• CCC doesn't work smoothly using company accounts clearing hotel bills --> if people knew this, they'd prolly use person-bound credit cards
• the standard PI-scenarios for third party planning systems are a mess and SAP has obviously not talked with any of the providers since, I'd say around 2005 --> if people knew this, they'd go for cytric or any other erternal planning right away
• Some of the available document archiving solutions are not consistently available throughout the travel process if you don't use the dogmatic approach from SAP (which nobody uses)

Maybe this all sounds way too conceited, but that's pretty much the thing I miss in specialist books (assuming your target audience is not etc. etc. ). Aside from that, it's always interesting to see approaches to organically manipulate the standard in some situations; however, of course you are right about the potential overuse of custom programming ;-/ ... probably has to be set 'in balance' with underrated/unused/unknown standard-content.

Cheers, Lukas

[Former Member]

Thanks Lukas,

very valid points, I'll take them on board.

I guess we'll not go without any overlap to standard doco, but hopefully make it clearer and relavant to real world business processes.

Obviously, the publisher would like "masses" as target audience, whilst I would from a pure marketing point of view prefer those who influence buying decisions, so, the experts decision makers hopefully listen to. But then the likes of you or Sigi will probably not find that much new stuff in the book. Even if I knew that much you don't (which obviously isn't the case), the top 50 or so T&E experts in the industry are to small a target audience.

But I hope we get at least as much positive response from project teams as we did from previous books - and hopefully have learned and improved since 

cheers

Sven