The SAP ecosystem enables seamless integration between different SAP modules and third-party applications, allowing businesses to streamline their operations, improve efficiency, and make data-driven decisions across the entire enterprise. It provides a unified platform for managing nearly all end-to-end business processes, including resource planning, finance, sales, procurement, manufacturing, spend management, and human resources, among others. Indeed, should an organization’s processes require the use of an external workforce, SAP Fieldglass can play an important role.
Take the case of WorkingNet, a leading manufacturer of data networking equipment. Historically, WorkingNet followed a fairly standard order fulfillment process, from customer order placement to inventory management to warehousing to shipping. However, with the explosive growth of blockchain technologies, cryptocurrency mining and, of course, artificial intelligence, WorkingNet has experienced a rapid increase in equipment orders, including orders for customizations of some existing product lines. Thus, it needed to ramp up not only production, but design, engineering, and order fulfillment. This necessitated a swift change to it’s entire-end-to-end process—a change it could only make by leveraging an external workforce.
Let’s take a look at WorkingNet’s end-to-end process, and how SAP Fieldglass became a key component in its rapid evolution:
| 1 | Product Design and Engineering | WorkingNet doesn’t want to move its engineers away from the development of new products, so it uses SAP Fieldglass to procure product designers and engineers to work on a temporary basis to reengineer its existing products to satisfy the changed market need. Once the products are market ready, WorkingNet can offboard the temporary workforce. |
| 2 | Manufacturing | Increased demand means a necessary increase in manufacturing output. WorkingNet uses SAP Fieldglass to hire external workers to supplement its existing manufacturing workforce to handle the increased demand. Using the integration of Fieldglass with SAP SuccessFactors and SAP S/4HANA, WorkingNet gets a real-time snapshot of the total workforce, allowing it to easily reallocate workers where needed. It also uses the data generated over time to analyze the market conditions to determine if, when, and where it may want to hire some of the temporary workers into full time roles. |
| 3 | Customer Order Placement, Receipt, and Validation | WorkingNet’s order placement processes and systems require upgrades to accommodate product customization and the increase in order volume. SAP Fieldglass handles the statements of work required to procure and manage the vendors necessary to perform the upgrades. |
| 4 | Inventory Management and Warehouse Processing | The rapid increase in manufacturing means an increase in warehouse inventory. As with the manufacturing step in the process, WorkingNet would use SAP Fieldglass to procure temporary workers to help with all aspects of warehousing, from inventory management to order fulfillment. |
| 5 | Shipping | Shipping and delivery are outsourced to third-party shipping companies. WorkingNet could use SAP Fieldglass to manage the statements of work for these third-party companies, but their shipping in managed on an order-by-order basis, depending on the location of the customer, so it doesn’t need Fieldglass in this instance. |
| 6 | Payment and Accounting | WorkingNet does use and external third-party vendor to process orders and payments. It uses SAP Fieldglass to create the statement of work that manages the vendor. SAP Fieldglass also plays a less direct role in accounting: invoices and payments for the workers and services it was used to procure are processed through WorkingNet’s payroll system. |
| 7 | Customer Support | WorkingNet relies on external call centers in or near its offices throughout the world to provide customer support. It uses SAP Fieldglass to create the statements of work that manage those vendors. |
| 8 | Feedback and Continuous Improvement | Though SAP Fieldglass plays no role in the evaluation and improvement of products, WorkingNet could use it to hire consultants to evaluate customer data and provide product feedback. However, SAP Fieldglass CAN integrate its powerful analytics functions with the SAP Analytics Cloud to provide a real-time view of not only the costs of the external workforce, but also gain a view of its entire workforce. |
Of course, this is just one example. SAP Fieldglass can connect to any end-to-end business process that requires the use of an external workforce. With features like requisition creation, synchronization of contractor information, time and expense tracking, integration with SAP Ariba, SAP SuccessFactors, and SAP S/4HAHA, and robust analytics, organizations can efficiently manage their external workforce and make data-driven decisions.