April, 2015
Welcome to the April Edition of the BW Newsletter
We hope that you find the Newsletter a valuable resource. If you have any thoughts regarding the Newsletter – topics for a future issue, ways to improve it, etc. – please let us know.
New Reports
HCM Employee Model Reports
OK, this isn’t really news, because it was announced in December, but it bears mentioning here. Why? Because we want to encourage employees who have access to the reports – payroll coordinators and managers – to try them out. We think many of you will find them extremely useful for applications that require HR data.
Among those who have used the reports, initial feedback has been very positive. The HCM Employee Model – background and detail is provided on this page – contains a wide swath of HCM data that BW users have requested, with a focus on employee master data and historical payments.
Here are a few examples of how the reports have been used:
- Develop a roster for all employees in a school / college or a single department. Available data includes (but isn’t limited to) name, title, email address, office address and phone number, and manager name.
- Find out which university department an employee works in, regardless of their organizational unit.
- Build a list of all employees within an organizational unit to view annual salary, basic pay per period, hourly rate, percent time, salary grade, etc. There are 180 available Characteristics in the report, so we won’t attempt to provide a full list of the possibilities here.
Training information for these reports is provided below.
Some of these Tips may be new to you, while others may be familiar. Regardless, we hope you find value in these and future Tips, even if we do no more than remind you of the existence of tools you once knew about but had since forgotten.
Note: all of the Tips that we post in our newsletters are archived on this page.
Calculated Key Figures
Did you know you can perform a calculation on the fly based on Key Figure data? Suppose you have a list of Limit Orders and you know how much you have spent against each limit. If you want to know how much you have left to spend, do you export the report data to Excel and perform the calculation there? Don’t bother; there’s a simpler way. You can create a new Key Figure column to show how much is unspent. Take a few minutes and read this document: BW How to – Create a Calculated Key Figure
Finding a Help Document
Here’s a dark thought for you: suppose a BW Newsletter containing a Tips & Tricks section isn’t available to you. How would you learn good stuff like how to create your own Limit Order report or how to create a calculated Key Figure? Take 3 minutes to view this video and learn how to find the help file you are looking for within the Document Library.
Employee Model Training
As we mentioned above, there are 180 Characteristics available in the Employee Master Data reports. That’s a lot of data! As a result, there are new recommended ways to find the data you are looking for or adding a Free Characteristic to your report. You can learn about these and other tips related to using the Employee Model reports by reading the Employee Model Distributed User’s Guide. For anyone who wants to attend an instructor-led training session specific to these reports, we will be offering two sessions in April:
Thursday, April 9, 2015 10:00am – 12:00pm – Charles River Campus
Wednesday, April 22, 2015 10:00am – 12:00pm – Medical Campus
Register to attend either session by visiting this page. Remember, the reports are available only to payroll coordinators and managers.
Training Path Grid
The Training Path Grid provides a broad look at all of the instructor-led workshops that are recommended for employees based on their business roles. The Grid is useful for anyone who needs help understanding what training they should consider. The Grid is available here.
Other Intermediate/Advanced Classes
At the risk of repeating ourselves (and boring you), we want to remind you that intermediate-level courses are being offered this month. In our experience, these workshops are really more like collaborative working sessions than they are like formal courses. Each session is driven by attendees’ questions. Based on input from members of the group and the instructor, the intention is to develop a solution to each question raised.
We believe that there is a lot of value in participating in these sessions. They are a great way to learn new things or to review techniques that you may have learned months or years ago but had forgotten. They also offer a great opportunity to share questions and answers with colleagues who have similar jobs and responsibilities. If you don’t believe us, here are some comments from attendees to recent sessions:
“[This session was a] great refresher and as always I have learned a lot.”
“[The current session structure is] a good format. We often come up with challenges and ideas as we go. At this level of specificity, it’s hard to generalize stuff for everyone.”
“I always benefit from these sessions. The instructor is always knowledgeable and responsive to the attendees and we learn from each other. The instructor is totally flexible and will follow whatever the needs of the group are.”
“Participants were very involved, and the training was tailored to the questions we had about using SAP to obtain the information we need in our work. I appreciate the opportunity to review known and partly-forgotten functions, and learn new functions in the context of my data.”
“This is the third session of [this topic] I have attended and, each time, I learn several new things I can apply in my job.”
Upcoming sessions
Funds Management (Intermediate)
Thursday, April 16, 2015 10:00am – 11:30pm – Charles River Campus (new 1.5 hour format)
Grants Management (Intermediate)
Tuesday, April 21, 2015 10:00am – 11:30pm – Charles River Campus (new 1.5 hour format)
Please visit this page to view a schedule of all upcoming BW sessions. If you don’t see a date or a location scheduled for the intermediate-level course you are looking for, send email to the BW trainer and let him know of your interest. If sufficient interest is registered, additional sessions will be scheduled.
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