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SAP Travel Management 12 Posts

Discussions and blogs about Concur are currently spread across various spaces including this one (SAP Travel

Management), SAP Cloud Solutions, SAP HCM and more. So, I was wondering where the best space for future

Concur discussions should be.

My preference would actually be to keep it in this space as far as Travel and Expense is concerned (Concur Invoice, if

going to survive for much longer at all as an independant sokution, probably fits into a Procurement space much better

- or maybe into Financials.)

My reasoning is: the T&E process is here to stay, whilst techologies and platforms will change, be merged together,

vanish completely or change names. So, there may be a time, where it will be difficult to discuss the currently seperate

3 T&E solutions from SAP as individual packages. Also: many members interested in on-prem Travel Management willalso be interested in Concur.

But I'm not posting this to just share my view. Would be great to hear from other members and eventually get some

guidance from moderators, which would hopefully consider members' / customers' views rather than the internal SAP

orgstructure :-)

633 Views 2 Comments Tags: travel, sap_cloud_for_travel, expense_management, concur

Where to discuss Concur Travel and Expense

Posted by Sven RinglingDec 21, 2014

Folks,

I've thought quite some time about whether I should write this blog or not. Fortunately, recent events led to "the straw

breaking the camel's back" so I now have the required amount of adrenaline to write this. Have fun.

DisclaimerThis blog is a rant. If you don't like rants, leave now. The blog is not representative of the SAP products that are

described in it (yes it is) and you should not take this blog as a recommendation for your strategic decision whether to

buy/use this product or not (yes you should). The blog contains slang, foul language, roasting and a little bit of

blasphemy. In case you are easily offended by this, be nice and leave now instead of reporting the blog. Thanks!

"What is FI-TV-PL?""FI-TV-PL" or "SAP Travel Management - Travel Planning", if you don't like module abbreviations, is or rather was

SAP's attempt to supplement their partially well engineered on-premise FI-TV module with Planning Solutions that

can be highly integrated into the overall process very organically. Some time later, unfortunately, SAP apparently

realized that the processes of external service providers change too fast to cope with. This then led to the statement

"FI-TV-PL will be maintained but there will be no further developments in the future". A bit later, SAP announced the

great new solution "SAP external Travel Planning" now doesn't this sound cool and fancy and innovative and

whatnot? Here's the deal: It's an application launcher for external online booking engines which then again don't have

the slightest integration with SAP at all. It's calling URLs, that's all the fancy new Business Function does. All this and

also the recent acquirement of Concur tells us that the major strategy in terms of development for on-premise Travel

Planning is the following: "For the love of god, leave us the hell alone and buy Cytric or something".

Well, it could be worse, right? At least FI-TV-PL is still being maintained, right? (pssssst: This is a well woven web of

lies)

"What is FI-TV-PL-BIB?"

Rant:Use at your own risk: FI-TV-PL-BIB / FI-TV-PL-HRS

Posted by Lukas WeigeltNov 26, 2014
http://scn.sap.com/people/lukas.weigelthttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/2014/11/26/rant-use-at-your-own-risk-fi-tv-pl-bib-fi-tv-pl-hrshttp://scn.sap.com/people/lukas.weigelthttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/2014/11/26/rant-use-at-your-own-risk-fi-tv-pl-bib-fi-tv-pl-hrshttp://scn.sap.com/welcomehttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/bloghttp://scn.sap.com/community/newslettershttp://scn.sap.com/community/getting-startedhttp://scn.sap.com/people/lukas.weigelthttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/login.jspahttp://scn.sap.com/people/sven.ringlinghttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/2014/12/21/where-to-discuss-concur-travel-and-expensehttp://scn.sap.com/community/uachttp://www.sapstore.com/http://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/tags#/?tags=travelhttp://scn.sap.com/actionshttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/tags#/?tags=concurhttp://scn.sap.com/contenthttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/tags#/?tags=expense_managementhttp://scn.sap.com/welcomehttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/2014/11/26/rant-use-at-your-own-risk-fi-tv-pl-bib-fi-tv-pl-hrshttp://scn.sap.com/people/lukas.weigelthttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/2014/12/21/where-to-discuss-concur-travel-and-expense#commentshttp://scn.sap.com/people/sven.ringlinghttp://scn.sap.com/community/downloadshttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/bloghttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/tags#/?tags=sap_cloud_for_travelhttp://scn.sap.com/community/developer-centerhttp://scn.sap.com/activityhttp://scn.sap.com/communicationshttp://scn.sap.com/login.jspa


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This submodule of the Travel Planning module is a purported standard API Interface for the "Bahn Internet Booking

Engine" (short: BIBE) which is the Booking Interface of the company Deutsche Bahn AG. This API works with a

standard Scenario for PI/PO. Here's a rough schematic to show how the technical process works.

This process is a bit odd because it doesn't fully work over the PI scenario. Instead there's a Portal Call for the booking

and a subsequent result interface call to poll the booking data from the BIBE into the SAP System, i.e. this is a simple

HTTPS connection in the browser.

The second bit of the process is a synchronous SOAP Request via the PI/PO.

"What is FI-TV-PL-HRS?"
http://scn.sap.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-117284-594998/train_icon.JPGhttp://scn.sap.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-117284-594870/BIBE_First_Step_Portal_Call.JPGhttp://scn.sap.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-117284-595000/BIBE_Third_Step_Result_Interface_Response.JPGhttp://scn.sap.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-117284-594999/BIBE_Second_Step_Result_Interface_Request.JPG


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This submodule of the Travel Planning module is a purported standard API Interface for the "Hotel Reservation

Service" (short: HRS) which is one of the Booking Interfaces of the company Hotel Reservation Service Robert Ragge

GmbH. This API also works with a standard Scenario for PI/PO. The technical process flow is identical to steps two and

three of the BIBE, i.e. this scenario works purely over the PI/PO.

"Lukas, why are you angry?"Documentation

Yes I know what you're thinking. "Haha, SAP and documentation, what did you expect?", but I beg to differ: A lot of the

SAP documentation has high quality in-depth technical information (for example PA-ESS, CA-MSS-HCM) with

practically relevant examples and whatnot people just fail at searching. Then there's the mainstream documentation

which most of the time lacks the "Why" and "How" which leads to most of the ranting concerning documentation and tohiring overpaid airheads with ties what was their "profession" called again? I forgot. Now, here's the deal with the

documentation for the interfaces:

Implementation Guide: The single steps are documented quite well, if sometimes a bit clumsily maintained.

Some of the IMG documentations simply say "refer the field help" and the field help then is surprisingly helpful

indeed. Fair enough. The problem however is, that, dependent on the overall process the IMG partially leads to

fallacious information and consequences you will only find out about when debugging. I will not point of the

details here, since it would kill the "fun".

Interface Documentation from the Service Market Place (reachable only with an S-Account via

service.sap.com/tm-downloads): The Documentation for the BIBE is 10 years old (from 2005), the one for HRS

slightly "newer" (from 2008), hence half of the documentation's contents by now are obsolete and fallacious (the

other half is pretty good actually).

Well, it could be worse, right? I mean to be safe you can still contact qualified SAP consultants who can disentangle

that whole confusion or ask other companies that already implemented these submodules, right? (pssssst: It's much

worse than you think it is at the moment).

Acquisition of Knowledge and available sources

This part is going to be very short and vague, because I don't want to skin and salt people openly by name. Let me put

it this way: There are a lot of success stories from other companies and consultant companies depicting the successful

implementation of these two submodules. Upon contacting these consultants and companies for advice (if need be,

against payment) there suddenly was a great silence and the attempt to shuffle out of the situation.

I've created several threads on the SCN forums addressing my questions (and subsequently following problems) and I

haven't received a single answer. With that I don't mean I didn't get a feasible solution for my problems, no, I mean

nobody ever posted in these threads of mine (that usually never happens).

Well, apparently people don't like us/me and don't want to talk to us/me, fair enough. Could be worse, right? At least

there appear to be other customers who use these standard modules so they should amount to something useful,

right? (pssssst: Oh, the humanity!)

First attempts of implementation on our side

We started our first implementation efforts in our DEV environment in 2011. What I found out while swimming in the

depths of the API and the source code and looking at the interface mappings in the PI/PO was horrifying:

a few nonsencial service calls here and there leading to random errors in the process flow

wrong navigation calls in the FPM of the WDAs and missing technical plausibility checks

tons of wrong and missing functional plausibility checks on ERP side

tons and tons of wrong cardinalities and wrong data types in the PI/PO message mappings

customizing tables read for their first entry instead for keys

incompatibility with non-unicode systems due to hardcoded validation rules in the XML Adapter on ERP side

leading to random unicode errors
http://scn.sap.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-117284-595001/hotel_icon.JPG


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Now, these are all fundamental technical errors which exclude my own stupidity to maintain the customizing correctly

or downtimes and bugs on service provider sides, i.e. this is all very basic functionality which did not work at all. I want

to lift out this one very disturbing thesis I've come to belief: These modules have never worked.Best of all, I can

actually prove this thesis with technical evidence.

What in the world happened to the most simplistic kinds of Quality Assurance? It seems somebody put them in sacks,

drowned them and just released the submodules. Well, here's your Customer Feedback: The product is bad and you

should feel bad.

The strategic decision upon passing this information to my project management was: "Lukas, you're somehow going to

make it work". Fair enough.

SAP Support via OSS Messages

I'm sure you expect this part to be the peak of the rant. Way off the mark! One colleague from the AGS was always

fishing out my messages only hours after I sent them and forwarded them directly to a colleague in the development

section who was very friendly, helpful and competent. I was eternally grateful for that fact because the technical subject

matter was and is extremely complex because there are a lot of APIs and interfaces talking to each others, some black

boxes here and there, lots of packet sniffing needed, etc. I.e. Expensive and nerve-wrecking stuff.

So, Kudos to the SAP Support!

~ Three years later ~

After "finishing the devel opments" on the two submodules with the dev supp ort so they were actually capable of

functioning, things finally started working. It took me another six months to shape the business process to the standard

functionality and yet another three to get things working in production (another load of standard errors found in

between). So we're now in the middle of 2014, things finally turn out well and everybody is happy.
http://scn.sap.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-117284-594817/youre_awesome_dog.JPGhttp://scn.sap.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-117284-595013/too_many_errors.JPG


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"Lukas, in the end everything turned out just fine, why are you still

angry?"Let me elaborate on that and let's take a look at the term "Maintenance". Here's what I understand the term

"Maintenance" in the fancy SAP universe means: SAP is going to activelymaintain the functionality of the respective

subject but does not consider new functionalities. Here's what actually happens: SAP doesn't do a goddamn thing until

a customer suffers from a generic problem that could have been dealt with years ago.

Here's what recently happened after our systems worked smoothly for a couple of weeks after three freaking years of

nerve-wrecking work:

The Deutsche Bahn has recently implemented a new functionality which slightly changes the output from a service

consumption (yet it does not interfere with the service description!). As a consequence, yet another blatantly wrong

data type in a message mapping in the PI/PO causes the process to crash (it hasn't done so in the past and it hasn't

been detected because there were no possible use cases which would have led to a crash), i.e. the service is down in

our production. Here's the fun part: This is considered a new functionality! Yes! You know what that means, right? :-)

The Hotel Reservation Service has recently implemented a new functionality for payment purposes. The consequence

is, that we can't pay our bills with the "old" service interface because it doesn't provide the needed parameters! Woo!

New Functionality! :-)

Bottom line: Nothing works, yet again --> fallback to our non-SAP-integrated solutions we already used three years

ago.

My recommendations

If you have to make a choice whether to go for FI-TV-PL

I do not know whether there's a likewise cataclysm present within the submodules for Amadeus, Sabre, Galileo, etc.

But after my experiences with BIBE and HRS I wouldn't get my hopes up. If you have the luxury to decide whether to go

for FI-TV-PL or whether to buy a third party all-in-one solution like cytric (assuming this can't be any worse), for the love
http://scn.sap.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-117284-594788/do_not_want_dog.JPGhttp://scn.sap.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-117284-594979/double_facepalm.JPGhttp://scn.sap.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-117284-594816/snoopy_dance.JPG


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7/23



Bottom Line so far:Use the Internal Number Range Approach, Don't overlap your intervals and take care of the

Transport manually (careful, transporting number intervals after go-live is a no-go!)

My concrete recommendation:I'm partially copying from one of my posts of the following thread: Trip number range concept

Use Case:

Let's say you have a number volume of 1000 and 3 personnel areas

1.Example how it is NOT done:

Personnel Area 1: 0-1000



Why not? Let's say you have 3 Personnel Areas in that case you'd have a multiplication of the number

volume by 3, right? Wrong,because what happens when an employee switches the personnel area? Data

inconsistency happens, because the trip numbers of employee who switches the PA might already be taken

by another employee. That's why you don't do it this way.

Furthermore you'd have a Trip Number collision faster than you can say "Help me, Dietmar Hopp!".

2. Example how it should be done according to SAP (not good in my humble opinion):


Personnel Area 2: 334-666Personnel Area 3: 667-1000

Now we have nicely split number ranges for every PA and if an employee switches the PA, the trip number

can't have been given to an employee of this PA he switched to because it isn't defined there. So now

everything's fine, right? Wrong. Three things are certain in companies: death, taxes and reorganization.

Let's say, after you have used up all your numbers for the split intervals and went productive, there are

created 10 new personnel areas, also 90% of the employees in PA1 go to PA 2. number interval for PA2 will

overflow and on top you don't have any numbers for 10 new personnel areas resulting in chaos.

3.How to do it right (in my opinion):

Now that I've explained how to NOT do it, look at what happens when you have one generic number interval

for all PAs:

You use all numbers in any case, this means roughly 10 billion numbers. So even if you have 500 Trips a day,

you'd last 10.000.000/500/365 = ~54 years with this. If you still use FI-TV after that time, you can eitherarchive or delete old trips and reset the intervall counter to 0 to last for the next 54 years

What happens if an employee switches the Personnel Areas? Nothing, doesn't matter, the number

interval is the same for all.

What happens when new Personel Areas are created? Nothing.

What happens when huge amounts of employees switch certain Personnel Areas? Nothing.

"How do I do this?"

1. Create a Dummy Personnel Area via Table T500P and maintain the subsequent dependant customizing

tables (like V_T500P, for exmpamle) accordingly.

2. In IMG activity Financials --> Travel Management --> Create Number Range for Trip Numbers, create

one single interval for your Dummy Personell Area "TRIP" from 0000000001 to 9999999999.

3. In the User-Exit Include MP56TFEX, maintain the Form Routine ex_get_number and hardcode your

Dummy Interval into the exporting parameters with means of a modification or an implicit enhancement

at the end (I prefer enhancements). Example:
http://scn.sap.com/thread/3267711


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4. If you are using the WDA scenarios in your business process, also implement the BADI

TRIP_WEB_NUMBER Method IF_EX_TRIP_WEB_NUMBER->USER_EXIT_NUMBER_INTERNAL

likewise.

5. You are done. Enjoy your eternally consistent TRIP Number Range

Useful Sources (Notes, Discussions, Wikis, help-links, etc.) covering

the topic:

Trip number Range - ERP Human Capital Management - SCN Wiki

KBA #1581701

SAP-Note #62077

Trip number range concept

Set up Trip Number Ranges - Travel Management - SAP Library

Include MP56RFEX for User Exits - Travel Management (FI-TV) - SAP Library

Number range object read and maintain services - BC Extended Applications Function Library - SAP

LibrarySAP Notes #504875 and #678501

FAQ:

Q: We think of using a dedicated number range for each Personnel Area, is that a good approach?

A: No. Use one number range f or all personnel areas s tatically. The reasons f or this are posted above.

Q: But if we only have one number range we cannot report on different personnel areas!

A: Yes y ou can, by using other means of customizing. For example you can use one of t he freely

maintainable indicator fields, for example KZREA

BEREI or KZTKT or even derive the personnel area directly from the PERNR. The last thing you want to do is

misconfigure the basis of the FI-TV application for mere reporting.

Q: There are "gaps" in the number range in our data. For example one trip has the number 400 assigned and the next

one has the number 405. What happened to the other 4 numbers?

A: In standard, the buffering for number intervals is activated to all ow for less da tabase acce sses. Normally there are

around 10 numbers in the buffer and sometimes some of them are dopped so you get these "gaps". This is good to

know especially when the audit department is visiting . It is possible to deactivate the buffering but in my opinio n

you should never do that, because it's a modification without any technical or functional benefit and the load on the

database will increase, i.e the performance will suffer.

Q: The numbers in one of my ranges are used up, what should I do?

A: Reconfigure the Interval, i .e. use a n in terval at the end of the range of all intervals a nd rea ssign the Personnel Area

to it so you have a "fresh" interval for it. Of course this only works out if you haven't initially taken every single number

that's available into account. If you have, and there are no numbers "left" to revert to, you should have read this blog

earlier . Careful: Dependant on your infrastructure, it might be cleaner to actually open the production system and

configure this manuall instead of transporting the new number ranges and their counters transporting number

intervals after go-live is NEVER a good idea.

Q: I have created several number ranges for several personnel areas. Now a lot of employees have switched

personnel areas and the database entries are inconsistent, what should I do?

A: Fortunately the PCL1-TE Key still a lways is the PERNR and the overall key for the module is a combination of

PERNR and REINR so there is no actual inconsistency. The problem can only be sustainably avoided if you use one

number range for all personnel areas.

That's it, folks. Feel free to promote content that should be included in this blog via the comments.
http://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/ERPHCM/Trip+number+Rangehttp://help.sap.com/saphelp_46c/helpdata/en/e2/d22fe48435d111950d0060b03c6b76/content.htmhttp://scn.sap.com/thread/3267711http://scn.sap.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-114934-561953/ex_get_number.JPGhttp://help.sap.com/saphelp_46c/helpdata/en/b6/cda03f49e911d189060000e8322f96/content.htmhttp://help.sap.com/saphelp_47x200/helpdata/en/2a/fa0365493111d182b70000e829fbfe/frameset.htm


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Cheers, Lukas

P.S. Check out my other FI-TV content:

Reverting the process of Assigning POWL Travel Assistants

Adding fields in Travel WDA Appli cations

386 Views 6 Comments Tags: travel_management, trip, fi-tv

When I heard about the SAP's acquisition of Concur Technologies, it was like an old acquaintance crossing my path

again after some time and I was positively surprised. I knew Concur from a project a few years back and it was clear

that this acquisition could have huge impact on all SAP customers using Travel&Expense or Concur. But let's start at

the beginning...

What happened?

SAP and Concur announced that SAP will acquire Concur Technologies for an amount of ca. USD 7.4 billion. Concur

is the leader of software for travel and expense management by a huge margin. SAP CEO Bill McDermont put it this

way: "There is no No. 2 to Concur -- they essentially own this market. (The Washington Post, 19th Sept. 2014). It is

certainly a very good addition to recent acquisitions Ariba and SuccessFactors as well as Fieldglass. It is still early

days and I'm sure we'll hear announcements about integration strategy with SAP's on-premise package as well as

existing cloud services in the not too distant future. Customers will also want to know about the plans for the current

SAP travel on demand product. By my gut feeling, I wouldn't bet on a long life for this still very young product. Given it's

moderate success so far and the fact that SAP just splashed their largest ever acquisition budget on a mature

replacement, it would only make sense for SAP to phase the existing travel on demand product out asap. But of

course, at this stage, these are all assumptions and SAP may well have some surprises up their sleeves.

What does this mean for SAP Travel&Expense users?

The situation is a little bit different for on-premise Travel&Expense. It's quite a mature product, well integrated with

other elements of the business suite like Financials, Payroll, HR or CATS. Many customers also have invested in

bespoke development and for some the idea to have this data in the cloud is still an absolute no-go. SAP knows that,

so they will provide support for a considerable period of time. How much innovation we are still going to see in on-

premise T&E is everybody's guess. But given the fact that they will have to dedicate a lot of resources to build first class

integration features between Concur, other cloud products and their on-premise system, it's a legitimate guess to

expect development in on-prem T&E features to suffer. So, customers currently using or implementing on premise T&E

will have to make a conscious decision about their future roadmap. That doesn't mean on-premise Travel Mansgement

rollouts have to be stopped or any further development for live systems should be frozen. Don't forget the acquisition

hasn't even happened yet. And if the SuccessFactor acquisition is anything to go by, the full development of integration

features may take a few years and many organisations will have sound reasons to prefer an on-premise solutions for

quite a few years more. Yet, there will be other SAP users, who'll find Concur already a great solution to start with, as

it's meeting most of their requirements, and the prospect of further integration in the future is enough for them to tip the

balance even now. At this point, we are very much left to speculation until such time as SAP announce their licencing

strategy, product roadmaps for on-premise T&E as well as Concur and a reliable development schedule for

integration. So, watch this space.

My own Concur journey

Some of you may now be asking why I'm referring to Concur as an "old acquaintance". Well, that goes back more than

3 years, when cloud was still a mere dream - or nightmare - for SAP. I happened to lea d a global T&E project with the

deployment of Concur expenses management and their travel booking module, called cliqbook at the time, being the

backbone of the whole endeavour. Rolling out an end2end T&E process across 9 countries in 11 weeks would have

been quite a feat with the SAP on-premise solution, but impossible within the context of the project, which involved the

selection and integration of a global travel agency and rollout of company credit cards amongst other things and was

sandwiched in between ongoing implementations of the Workday HCM system and SAP FI/CO modules. I got into this

project with about 10 SAP T&E projects under my belt, but I had to a knowledge I couldn't have taken on this task, if

SAP rather than Concur had been the system of choice.

The process to be implemented was not that unusual:

Employees defined their trips, picked appropriate transport online and submitted it for a quote from the agency.

Once that came in it was sent to line managers to approval and then booked.

After the trip receipts where scanned and original s sent to a handli ng agent, who also submitted them to a VAT

reclaim service to recover a percentage of international VAT, expense reports were captured by employees

online with credit card data added through an interface and then submitted for approval again.

As you can imagine, there were quite a few small peculiari ties to cover along the way, but Concur coped quite

well. The biggest challenge was the trip approval: as the customer decided to require approval for the exact

amount, approvals needed to happen, while the ticket price (most trips involved air travel) was held by the

agency. So, we had between 24 and 48 hours. That was only feasible with an agile substitution rule in place and

mobile approval (at the time done through a reply-email on Blackberry).

I liked that project very much. It was state of the art technology and it involved a considerable change management

SAP Acquiring Concur Travel and Expense: EarlyThoughts and a SAP Consultant's Concur Journey

Posted by Sven RinglingSep 23, 2014
http://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/2014/10/13/trip-number-range-concept--best-practice#commentshttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/tags#/?tags=fi-tvhttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/2014/09/23/sap-acquiring-concur-travel-and-expense-early-thoughts-and-a-sap-consultants-concur-journeyhttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/2013/07/12/reverting-the-process-of-powl-travel-assistent-assignmenthttps://www.concur.com/http://scn.sap.com/people/sven.ringlinghttp://washpost.bloomberg.com/Story?docId=1376-NC48ZY6VDKHT01-3SLAGEHIGGAGUI9LA4BU3KUNQ2http://scn.sap.com/people/sven.ringlinghttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/tags#/?tags=travel_managementhttp://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-41887http://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/tags#/?tags=trip


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effort: users came from an SAP context, so there was always the assumption that you can change anything, if you only

want it badly enough and have money to spend. The philosophy of a SaaS project was difficult to digest for some of

them. It also didn't help that the travel policy was still being reviewed during the project, so goalposts kept moving. This

often affected parts of the config that needed to be done by the vendor team and therefore depended on periods of

time agreed upon at the start of the project. These config elements could not always be quickly changed by the

customer team, whenever they wanted. However, the Concur team was very helpful and flexible enough to cope.

So, finishing with some thoughts about the software and the project. Please note that these are observations from one

particular project more than 3 years ago and only reflect my personal experience.

What did I like about Concur in particular?

1) It's a slick product, providing an excellent user interface and excellent reliability. It just does the job.

2) It provides enough flexibility for most sensible requirements without tempting the customer into over-customisationas happens so often in SAP on-premise.

3) Mobile approval works out of the box (the workflow does need some setting up and has its constraints, but is a

thousand miles ahead of SAP workflow for ease of set-up and maintenance.)

4) The mobile app for expenses was embarrassingly easy to deploy, but more of that later.

5) Concur, even at that time, just understood the Service element of SaaS extremely well. They offered further services

that came naturally with the package. This included a receipt handling and auditing service as well as a user hotline.

The first "S" in SaaS could therefore have been "Solution" as much as "Software".

What was challenging?

1) I already mentioned the change challenges faced with users as well as IT staff, who still struggled with the SaaS

concept.

2) What had almost blown the deadline was the difficulty the Procrement and Legal teams of the customer had with the

SaaS contract. If your organisation doesn't have a lot of SaaS experience yet, I can't emphasise enough how important

it is to start contract work early and get 3rd party experts to help.

3) As you would imagine, interfaces where a major challenge. The integration between the travel booking and

expense elements of Concur worked perfectly well, but the interface with Workday HCM and SAP FI/CO required more

effort than expected. We could also have done with some more help from Concur's side (as well as Workday's) at that

point. However, the worst part were the interfaces with the credit card company, who's technical experts were not

helpful at all to describe it politely. Documentation of their interface formats left loads of room for interpretation at best

and were completely outdated at worst. That didn't come as a surprise, as they proved as incompetent earlier in the

project, when they defined data and signatures required on credit card request forms in each country.

4) We could have done with some more documentation of the Concur software as such, most notably its configuration.

I understand this point has improved considerably by now.

How did we keep the tight deadline?

1) We had a large group of acceptance testers (4% of the total workforce) in key positions. Even though not all of them

were as engaged as we'd have liked them to be, they were extremely helpful in getting everybody on board.

2) A dedicated employee engagement manager, who did roadshows and training, but was flexible enough to play with

the tool and take on feedback from the tester group.

3) Postponing the legacy data analysis and renegotiation process offered by the travel agency until after go live.

4) Staging interface implementation in line with first run of each interface until up to one month after go live and run

some interfaces semi-manually in phase 1.

5) Keep the first scope lean and implement special processes, most notably candidate travel, expat family moves, and

group travel in phase 2 only.

6) We also planned to postpone the integration of the Concur mobile app for capturing expenses and scanning

receipts to phase 2. Alas, it turned out it hadn't been switched off by Concur and when employees found the mobile

app in the Apple appstore, it worked perfectly well without extra configuration or training. It was, I must admit, an

accidental go live in perfect shape. Given the hoops SAP users had to jump through at that time in order to use mobile

apps, this was an absolute stunner for me.

In our project, we didn't use the latest Concur servces:

Concur Invoice: an automation tool for supplier invlice processing

Concur Insight: a comprehensive analytics tool for expenses and invoices ( at the, we implemented some travel

and expense reporting, but this comprehensive tool wasn't available yet)

Concur Messaging: communication with travelling employees and travel risk management

So, in a nutshell:

Concur is a great product for Travel booking as well as expense management. It comes with the usual benefits

and constraints of SaaS but there is a reason, why it's the uncontested market leader.

When I worked with Concur very closely 3 years ago, interfaces to SAP as well as other cloud products where a

huge challenge. This is where the acquisition by SAP will most likely add a lot of value, but it'll take some time.

Integration will not only be required for on-premise FI/CA, HR and Payroll, but SuccessFactors, Fieldglass as well

as Ariba would benefit form close integration.

Back then Concur also had a very good choice of extra services beyond just providing access to the software.

They were taking software as a service to the second level, when SAP was still struggling with level 1.

It's definitely a valid alternative for SAP on-premise Travel&Expense, but customers should consider SAP's

roadmaps once published and then decide whether and when to switch in their own time. As in transactional HR

there will probably be many customers,who still feel served best by a well customized on-preimse system for

some years to come.

It's most likely going to be different for Travel on Demand customers. It's probably a good idea to check with your

SAP key account manager asap before investing any more into this product.

And finally, one point we missed so far:


11/23



I haven't talked about the tripit yet. Tripit is a social media stype online travel organiser to help you keep track of your

itineraries. It has been acquired by Concur in 2011 and I'm sure some innovators at SAP already think about how it

can work with SAP Jam.

1699 Views 9 Comments

Tags: cloud, saas, acquisition, sap_cloud_for_travel, t&e, concur, tripit, cliqbook, sap_concur_interface

1. i want to make the cost assignment percentage 100 % field (under cost assignment button) as display only. the user

should not be able to change the percentage other than system defaulted percentage 100%

Kindly let me know. your help will be valuable.

99 Views 0 Comments

cost assignment percentage to be display only always.

Posted by Baleeq Ahmed MohammedApr 17, 2014

This blog shows a compact custom approach of reverting the process of the assignment between a traveler and a

travel assistant via POWL Personalization. What follows has been done on a system on NW 7.03 (731) ECC 6.06.

Since I got an overall good feedback on my latest (and first ) document over here Adding fields i n Travel WDA

Applications , I decided to stash away some more knowledg e on the forums , so here we go.

You don't really need any in-depth technical knowledge to understand the following, though basic understanding of

how POWL works won't hurt.

1. What SAP providesThe basic idea of POWL is pretty much "Person A assigns an amount of people to himself on certain conditions for

particular business processes". POWL-experts might want to burn me alive now for summing it up so generically in

one sentence, but that's just how it is in my opinion. In case of FI-TV, for example, we have the role of a Travel

Assistant who can a ssign a n amou nt of Travelers to himsel f to al low for the creatio n of Travel Req uests/ Plans and

Expense Claims on behalf of those Travelers. Alternatively to this way of assignment, it can be done centrally in the

backend using the transactions FPB_MAINTAIN_PERS_S and FPB_MAINTAIN_PERS_M ( refer to Sally

Redmond's KBA #1622954 ).

2. What some people (I myself amongst them) expectedInstead of the Travel Assistant deciding himself who he is an assistant for, in my company there was the requirement

for the travelers being able to freely decide who'd be supposed to be a travel assistant for them (central maintenance

was no option due to TCO). The idea of SAP's designed assignment-process inevitably resulted in the fear the

assistant would be given too much power and might abuse it (given the fact that structural authorization is not

supported in FI-TV even if it was, it would still cripple the flexibility from a different point of view where some relations

might stretch across the regulations of structural authorization).

Bottom line our business process was turned upside-down.

Reverting the process of Assigning POWL TravelAssistants

Posted by Lukas WeigeltJul 12, 2013
http://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/tags#/?tags=cliqbookhttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/tags#/?tags=cloudhttp://scn.sap.com/people/lukas.weigelthttp://scn.sap.com/people/sally.redmondhttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/2014/04/17/cost-assignment-percentage-to-be-display-only-always#commentshttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/tags#/?tags=sap_cloud_for_travelhttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/tags#/?tags=tripithttp://scn.sap.com/people/lukas.weigelthttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/2013/07/12/reverting-the-process-of-powl-travel-assistent-assignmenthttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/2014/04/17/cost-assignment-percentage-to-be-display-only-alwayshttp://scn.sap.com/people/baleeqahmed.mohammedhttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/tags#/?tags=saashttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/tags#/?tags=acquisitionhttp://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-41887http://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/tags#/?tags=sap_concur_interfacehttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/tags#/?tags=concurhttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/2014/09/23/sap-acquiring-concur-travel-and-expense-early-thoughts-and-a-sap-consultants-concur-journey#commentshttp://scn.sap.com/people/baleeqahmed.mohammedhttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/tags#/?tags=t%26e


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3. How to rebuild what SAP provides into what we neededBasically, there are three sources in the system that are relevant for this approach, these are the Function Modules

FPB_PERS_READ_FOR_DIALOG, FPB_PERS_POST_FOR_DIALOG and the transparent table FPB_PERSPARM

(which holds the very personalization data). What I did, was create a custom WebDynpro which provides the following

logic/process steps:

When the Application is started, FPB_PERSPARM is read with a mere database select for LOW = the PERNR of

the User that is logged on for the Travel Approval Dialogue (used for both, Approvers and Assistants in FI-TV).This selection itself already is kind of 'backwards' concerning the actual SAP process. The output is presented in

a table (record sets for the single Assistants).

The user is given the possibility to delete a record set of this presented table, after which a hard delete statement

on FPB_PERSPARM is issued. I conciously don't use FPB_PERS_POST_FOR_DIALOG here, since it tends to

bug out if there's only one assistant left and you try to delete it. After the deletion is done, I run a submit of

POWL_WLOAD for the Travel Assistant whose assignment has been deleted for, else the old query is still in the

POWL-Cache.

The enduser is also given the possibility to do a search for employees in the system who are authorized to be a

Travel Assistant (indicator is a particular R/3-Role) and then assign the selected person to be oneself's Travel

Assistant. This 'assignment' i s then done via FM FPB_PERS_POST_FOR_DIALOG. Just like wi thin the deletion

process, POWL_WLOAD is submitted for the chosen Assistant to refresh the POWL queries.

Of course I also coded a lot of plausibility checks as well as certain gimmicks, auth checks etc. etc. But the stripped

down process is really simple as you can see. The whole thing only took me a few days of work. The simplicity of this

particular development, though, also brings some inflexibilities the process only works as long as the personalizationsets are maintained with single LOW-Values (at least the way I coded it, of course you could make it more complex

and flexible), i.e. no intervalls etc, but it's sufficient that way for us. Here are some screenshots of how it looks like:
http://scn.sap.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-88655-245085/powl_what_we_got.JPGhttp://scn.sap.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-88655-245084/powl_what_we_wanted.JPG


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Links with stuff around the topics involved in the blog:

SAP Community Network Wiki - Web Dynpro ABAP - POWL

Demystifying POWL and Feeder Class in Travel Management

Personalization of Employee Lists - ESS and Mobile Use in Travel Management - SAP Library

Travel Assistant - Financial Accounting (FI) - SAP Library

That's all folks. I hope it's interesting for you or at least amusing in case you think this entire fabric is completely

ridiculous

Cheers, Lukas

P.S. I am aware of my horrible spelling in the pictures, but I'm too lazy to replace them


Tags: employee_self_service , powl, travel_management, enterprise_resource_planning, travel_and_expense_management,

travel_assistant

Before I begin this blog I want to thank SDN for all the new looks and features, which has inspired folks like me to

contribute more on the community. Great job by the SCN team. Being a SAP Portal expert it amazes and delights me

how SAP has used the SAP Netweaver Portal and built this world class Community Site. (Hope my knowledge that

SCN runs on SAP Portal is correct).

This is the third of the "Demystify..." series blog I am writing. The other two are Demystify FPM for T&Eand

Demystify UWL.

Now coming back to the main business. In this blog I would write about some frequently used operations when

working with POWL, and also talk about Feeder Class and how we can enhance them to achieve more complex

custom requirements.

Personal Object Work-list or POWL is used in Travel Management Traveler Work Center. The Traveler Work Center

has five tabs by default as shown in the screenshot.

We did some custom changes in the POWL to adapt it to our requirement. I will enlist the learning's I got while working

with POWL in Travel Management.

1) Where do I find POWL related objects for Travel Management?

All the POWL objects for Travel Manag ement can be found in the package "PTRM_WEB_POWL". The Traveler Work

Center is based on the component FITV_POWL_TRIPS.

Demystifying POWL and Feeder Class in TravelManagement

Posted by Sundeep SethiJul 1, 2013
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2) What is a Feeder Class and how is it related to POWL?

Definition of Feeder Class as per SAP Documentation:

"All properties of a POWER List can be specified via one central, standardized class called Feeder Class.

The feeder class communicates with the database selecting specific data, forwards the data to a POWER List's internal

cache and refreshes the POWER List on the user's client on demand. Moreover the feeder class includes the handling

of actions initiated by the user while pressing a button."

In simple words for each Standard POWL Type a Feeder Class needs to be assigned which will take care of rendering

the POWL and determines the content of the personal work-list.

3) How do I know the Feeder Class of a POWL?

For each standard POWL its corresponding Feeder class can be found using transaction POWL_TYPE.

e.g. For Traveler Work Center POWL "FITV_POWL_TRIPS" the Feeder Class is "CL_FITV_POWL_FEEDER_TRIPS"

as shown in the screenshot of the transaction.

4) Tell me more about Feeder Class?

Feeder Class for a standard POWL has to implement the interface "IF_POWL_FEEDER ". The interface contains

methods which should be implemented by the Feeder Class to define the field catalog to be displayed in the POWL,

and determine data for the displayed object type.

Details of the methods in the interface can be found in transaction SE24. In the case of Traveler Work Center these

methods are implemented by the Feeder Class "CL_FITV_POWL_FEEDER_TRIPS".

5) How can I hide tabs in Traveler Work Center?

This is a very common requirement. This can be achieved by following SAP Note 1124779 - ESS EHP Deactivate

unused POWL queries in Travel Management.

This Note provides a solution to control the visibility of tabs through Authorization by creating custom roles.
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6) Can I hide the links "Filter" and "Settings" which appear on the top right corner within the tabs?

In order to hide these links launch the Application Configuration "FITV_POWL_TRIPS" and go to the Component

Configuration "FITV_POWL_TRAVELLER". Select "confData" and scroll down to the attribute "hideSettingsLink".

Check the tick box next to this property. This will hide the links from your traveler work center. One should make thesechanges in a copy of the Application and Component Configuration's to avoid changing the standard configurations.

7)Are there any other useful transactions related to POWL I should be aware of?

Other useful transactions to be aware of when working and customizing POWL are"

POWL_COCKPIT: This is the POWL Administrator Cockpit. It can be used to configure parameters for Standard POWL,

Reporting POWL and Easy POWL

POWL_TYPER:This transaction is useful for role assignment of POWL. This is useful when trying to hide tabs.

Covered in SAP Note 1124779.

POWL_TYPEU:Define Visibility of Work-list Type (or tabs) at User Level

POWL_CAT: Assign Queries to Categories. Queries that are assigned to a category appear together in the same block

in portal.

POWL_QUERY: Used to maintain POWL queries and define POWL types and their description.

POWL_QUERYR: Define Query Visibility at Role Level.

POWL_QUERYU: Define Query Visibility at User Level

8) This is all standard, what about the custom development I was promised at the start of the blog?

Scenario:

My requirement was to change the text of the links that appear in "Recommended Actions" column of the "All My Trip"s

tab in the Traveler Work Center.

Solution:

In order to implement this we need to do an Enhancement to the Feeder Class. Following are the steps:

- Identify the Feeder Class which is populating data in the POWL. Here we know the Feeder Class is

"CL_FITV_POWL_FEEDER_TRIPS".

- The method "IF_POWL_FEEDER~GET_OBJECTS" in the class fetches the data and populates it in the ALV tables

within the tabs.

- Create an Enhancement to this Class and create a Post Exit to the GET_OBJECTS method.

- One very important tip is that all the data shown in the Traveler Work Center is fetched by the Function Module

"PTRM_WEB_TRIPS_GET_LIST". This FM contains output table "ET_TRIPS " which holds the data.

- The link value is contained in the field "SUPPOSABLY_STATUS_NAME" of the structure "PTRV_WEB_TRIPS_EXT"

which is in the output of this FM.

- In the Post Exit Method based on your condition you can change the link text or disable the link. For Disabling the link

set the field "SUPPOSABLY_STATUS_ENABLE".

Code in the POST EXIT of GET_OBJECTS method.

01. DATA lt_object TYPE PTRM_POWL_WEB_TRIPS_EXT_T.

02. DATA ls_ref_ob ject TYPE REF TO PTRM_POWL_WEB_TRIPS_EXT.
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In a similar way we can achieve a lot of custom requirements by enhancing the methods of the Feeder Class.

Hope this blog helps many working on Traveler Work Center in Travel Management.


Tags: ess, employee_self_service , powl, travel_management, enterprise_resource_planning, travel_and_expense_management

03. DATA ls_trip_d ata TYPE PTRM_POWL_WEB_TRIPS_EXT.

04. loop at e_results REFERENCE INTO ls_ref_object.

05. CLEAR ls_trip_data.

06. MOVE-CORRESPONDING ls_ref_object->* TO ls_trip_data.

07. **Put your IF block here to check condition and set the link text (SUPPOSABLY_STATUS_NAME) or disable

08. append ls_trip_data to lt_object.

09. ENDLOOP.

10. CLEAR E_RESULTS.

11. E_RESULTS = lt_object.

Hi,

This is how we did our setup to do a gradual roll out of travel applications. We were on EHP4+SAP Portal 7.0 and are

now on EHP5+SAP Portal 7.3 and this setup still works.We use the country specific services in homepage framework to make sure only some users see the links to our travel

applications in area overview pages in portal. An example is shown below - note that we have copied standard

services into own namespace in this case.

Then we created 2 portal roles as shown below. One (ESS) that every portal user has and one (ESS TEM) for travel

users only. As a result it only contains the travel workset and iviews:

We merged the 2 ESS roles (you might have to read up about role merging but it is pretty simple. Just give both

roles/worksets same merge IDs etc.) and if assigned this "add-on " role you get an extra tab in portal as shown belo w:

The one problem we had with the above setup was to hide the homepage framework area service link to Travel and

Expenses in the ESS overview page for non-travel users. This is the link:

For that we had to create an enhancement to function module HRXSS_SER_GETMENUDATA to dynamically hide this

part of overview page based on assigned backend role (the TEM merge role as described at the top is linked to this

backend role). This can be done by creating an enhancement like this at the bottom of this function module:

Gradual / Country Specific Rollout of Travel ExpenseManagement (TEM)

Posted by Jan Thomas NygaardMar 1, 2013
http://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/tags#/?tags=enterprise_resource_planninghttp://scn.sap.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/2-13885984-191008/Capture.JPGhttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/tags#/?tags=powlhttp://scn.sap.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/2-13885984-190999/Capture.JPGhttp://scn.sap.com/people/jan.thomasnygaardhttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/tags#/?tags=esshttp://scn.sap.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/2-13885984-191006/Capture.JPGhttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/2013/07/01/demystifying-powl-and-feeder-class-in-travel-management#commentshttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/2013/03/01/gradual-country-specific-rollout-of-travel-expense-management-temhttp://scn.sap.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/2-13885984-190997/Capture.JPGhttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/tags#/?tags=travel_and_expense_managementhttp://scn.sap.com/people/jan.thomasnygaardhttp://scn.sap.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/2-13885984-191012/Capture.JPGhttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/tags#/?tags=travel_managementhttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/tags#/?tags=employee_self_service


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This provides us with a nice and flexible setup for gradual rollout of the travel and expense application. If anyone has

suggestions of how to avoid the enhancement above please let me know

I hope this will help someone.

Br Jan


Tags: enterprise_portal_(ep), portal, sap_portal, ess, employee_self_service , netweaver_portal, portal_development, tem,

travel_management, enterprise_resource_planning, travel_and_expense_management, homepage_framework, role_merging,

sap_erp_human_capital_management

Objective

This document is intended to SAP HCM Travel Management consultants to help them

during the configuration of travel management. With the help of this document,

restriction of travel expense for different travel schema, statutory trip type, enterprise

specific trip type can be made more dynamic and flexible.

Available Travel Expense Types

Travel management module provides provision to create different travel expense types as per the client's business

needs. Commonly used travel expenses can be air fare, food bill, local conveyance, laundry expense, parking

expense etc.

Different expense types can be maintained in view V_T706B1 against Trip Provision Variant.

Below is the path for configuration in IMG:

Financial Accounting->Travel Management->Travel Expenses->Travel Expense Types->Create Travel Expense Types

for Individual Receipts

Restricting Expense types at Employee level

Availabil ity of Expe nses can be restricted at employee levels via u se of Travel privi lege infotype 00 17.

ExpTy.Permissibil ity field in view V_T706B1, one can control the available travel expense for different grades of

employee.

HCM Travel Management Restricting TravelExpenses

Posted by Mihir NagarFeb 25, 2013
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Employee group can be maintained in Travel Privilege infotype 0017 against EE Grp Expense Type field.

SAP's Limitation of Restricting Expense Types

SAP standard provides IMG configuration for restricting the expense types at trip schema level.

However, there is no provision where one can maintain the expense type at trip type levels.

SAP provides two types of trip types:

Statutory trip type

Enterprise specific trip type

SAP provides view V_T706S_RECEIPT for restricting the expense type at schema level, this view can be called from

below IMG Node:

This IMG node does not provide provision to maintain the expense types at travel trip type level.

Restricting Expenses for Different Trip Types
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POWL_QUERY.

The Personal Object Worklist (POWL) provides the following query refresh options:

On First Page Visit: The query refreshes only when the POWL is initially loaded.

On Every Page Visit: The query refreshes each time the POWL is loaded.

On First Query Run: The query only refreshes when the query is initially switched on.

On Every Query Run: The query refreshes each time the query is switched on.

If no refresh type is set, then the query is refreshed according to the default behavior.

Note:Manual refreshing works in all cases . The setting needs to be maintain seperately for each Query ID.

More information can be found the KBA Article 1806905.

1123 Views 1 Comments Tags: refresh, travel, powl, enterprise_resource_planning

In the earlier versions of Travel management, before the existence of Employee Self Service (ESS), trip number is

displayed for any Travel Request/Expense created in the system.

You can check the Trip column in the PR05or TRIPtransaction.

In PR05 transaction,

In the ESS travel management solution, travel related POWL queries are displayed as shown. I had removed Travel

Planning related tabs from the POWL queries.

In the new version of travel management (ESS), trip related informations are displayed to the user using the POWL

queries but the trip number is not availabl e/displayed. Below steps will help in make the trip number visible in ESS

travel management as well.

Display Trip number in the POWL queries of Travelmanagement

Posted by Rajkumar ShanmuganathanAug 29, 2012
http://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/tags#/?tags=powlhttp://scn.sap.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-79272-180541/FITV_POWL_TRIPS.pnghttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/tags#/?tags=enterprise_resource_planninghttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/2013/01/31/refresh-functionality-in-the-powl-query-starting-release-enhancement-package-5#commentshttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/tags#/?tags=travelhttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/2012/08/29/display-trip-number-in-the-powl-queries-of-travel-managementhttp://scn.sap.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-71044-133019/2.pnghttps://bosap-support.wdf.sap.corp/sap(bD1lbiZjPTAwMQ==)/bc/bsp/sno/ui_entry/entry.htm?param=69765F6D6F64653D3030312669765F7361706E6F7465735F6B65793D30313230303631353332303030303030323838323230313326http://scn.sap.com/people/rajkumar.shanmuganathan3http://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/tags#/?tags=refreshhttp://scn.sap.com/people/rajkumar.shanmuganathan3http://scn.sap.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-71044-133000/1.png


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POWLquery uses the feeder class to display the information.

You can find the feeder class and query related information in the transaction POWL_TYPE.

For each type there will be a feeder class assigned. For example, for My trips, by standard the available feeder class is

CL_FITV_POWL_FEEDER_TRIPS .

In order to display the Trip number in the POWL query, have copied the feeder class from

CL_FITV_POWL_FEEDER_TRIPS to ZCL_FITV_POWL_FEEDER_TRIPS.

In the feeder class CL_FITV_POWL_FEEDER_TRIPS, inmethod GET_FIELD_CATALOG you have the hidden column

name Trip number as below,

In the modified class ZCL_FITV_POWL_FEEDER_TRIPS, I have modified the code as below.

There will be syntax error in the customized class, you need to change the class name in the below method as well.
http://scn.sap.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-71044-133020/3.pnghttp://scn.sap.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-71044-133023/6.pnghttp://scn.sap.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-71044-133021/4.pnghttp://scn.sap.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-71044-133022/5.png


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As a result of all the abo ve chan ges, you can see the trip numbers i n the ESS POWL que ries as well.

Thanks,

S.Rajkumar.

1415 Views 2 Comments Tags: travel_management, enterprise_resource_planning

SAP Travel Management (TM) is a very powerful solution to manage the travel process and eventually reduce the

travel related expenses. But what is TM? Travel management or corporate travel management (CTM) is the function of

managing a companys strategic approach to travel (travel policy), the negotiations with all vendors, day-to-day

operation of the corporate travel program, traveler safety & security, credit-card management and T&E data

management (wikipedia)

There are many reasons why TM is important:

According to JPMorgan Travel and Entertainment (T&E) is the second -largest busi ness exp ense i n most

organizations.

Travel costs are rising and still there is more and more travelling in the corporate world.

Sustainability and risk management are high on the executives agenda and travelling has a huge impact on

them.

The expectations of the travelers are growing, e-ticketing, self-service booking, mobile access to information

have become the norm.

SAP TM offers some crucial benefits:

Cost reduction. Both direct cost (negotiation power with preferred travel suppliers) and indirect cost (shorter

processing times and administrative savings.

Enforcement of travel policies

Integration with SAP ERP

Reliable bookings (synchronization with 3rd party booking systems, insight and analysis of travel information)

User-friendly software

Self-service available 24x7

Generic solution with country-specific versions

Legal compliance and support of the local language in 30 different countries

SAP TM supports the travel process end-to-end:the corporate travel policy can be maintained in the back-end, the

travelers can maintain their own preferences, make travel plans (flight, rental, hotel, etc.), the managers can approve

them, the traveler can submit expense reports, which again can be approved, credit card data can be processed, etc.Reports can be created in ECC and BW, but the nicest is of course in BusinessObjects.

Recipe for cutting travel costs

Posted by Tamas SzirtesMar 19, 2010
http://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/2010/03/19/recipe-for-cutting-travel-costshttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/2012/08/29/display-trip-number-in-the-powl-queries-of-travel-management#commentshttp://scn.sap.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-71044-133024/7.pnghttp://scn.sap.com/people/tamas.szirteshttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/tags#/?tags=enterprise_resource_planninghttp://scn.sap.com/people/tamas.szirteshttp://scn.sap.com/community/erp/travel-management/blog/tags#/?tags=travel_managementhttp://scn.sap.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-71044-133034/8.png


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