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Chapter 6
hotel, and car preferences—and integrating this data with the Payroll module (to
administer reimbursements) and with the Financial Accounting and Controlling modules
(to properly record travel expenses). Companies using the SAP ERP Travel Management
system can also make use of a Web-based application that allows employees to submit
expense reports through a Web browser.
Travel management is also getting easier—and mobile—with SAP’s Travel OnDemand
product, which is hosted by SAP and accessed via the Internet. (As noted in Chapter 2,
this software delivery model, called software as a service, or SaaS, is a subset of cloud
174 computing and is discussed in more detail in Chapter 8.) With Travel OnDemand,
employees can use their smartphones to automatically categorize their travel expenses
by simply taking a picture of each receipt. The system then reads the receipt and puts
it in the correct expense category. For instance, a receipt from a restaurant would
be categorized under meals, while a train ticket receipt would be placed under
transportation. When the employee returns to the office after a trip, the expense report is
already almost complete. This is a huge help to employees who spend a large portion of
their time on the road; the hassle of gathering receipts and filling out paperwork is often a
source of significant source of job dissatisfaction for employees who travel frequently. In
addition, employees using Travel OnDemand are able to query the system about travel and
expense policies, such as the company policy on taking clients out to dinner.

ANOTHER LOOK

What’s New in Human Capital Management (HCM)
The goals and aspirations of a company’s employees should be aligned with the strategic
goals of organizations. Surprisingly, research shows that 95 percent of employees are
unaware or do not understand their company’s strategic goals. In addition, newly
recruited employees often do not perform as well as hoped because the employee’s
personal goals are not aligned with those of the organization. Tools now exist that allow
hiring organizations to assess potential candidates not only on their intelligence but also
on other, harder to define characteristics, such as motivation and behavior.
Once an employee is hired, new performance evaluation tools allow companies to
assess employees in a consistent manner across the organization. Traditionally,
individual managers within a company perform evaluations, which might be based on
criteria that is inconsistent between different managers. This variation can cause
problems when employees are evaluated across departments, perhaps for an internal
promotion or a new job. Tools that improve the consistency of evaluations help to
alleviate this problem. Many companies are also working to improve their performance
assessment process through the use of the “360-degree evaluation,” in which employees
perform their own evaluations, and are also evaluated not only by their managers, but
also by their coworkers, and perhaps even their customers.
Although many organizations are still using spreadsheets to analyze their workforce,
those that use the SAP ERP software have the advantage of fast prediction. Using SAP’s
new in-memory computing (HANA) feature, the Human Capital Management module can
now handle large volumes of employee data—such as data related to hiring, promotion,
and termination—to predict the three- and five-year makeup of the workforce. SAP is
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