Employee Integration between SAP ERP & Concur (Travel, Expenses and Invoices – Automated and in Control)

[Former Member]

 



 

Before jumping on to Concur-SAP ERP integration, I would like to brief you about the Concur solution and what it has to offer to the business.

Well, with the paradigm shift from “on premise” SAP HCM solution to Success Factors, the cloud solution has become the new age technology and we have one more name in the list specific to Travel Solution, i.e., Concur

Concur aims at providing a cloud-based solution for Business travel, Expenses & Invoice management for businesses of all kind and size. With the increasing percentage of business travel over the period, it’s become inevitable for the organization & its employees to manage their travel and expenses data in a way which is quicker, more comfortable and hassle-free. This is exactly what Concur does. Below are some of best features of Concur solution

• Being a cloud solution, concur enables the business and employees to manage travel and expenses data through mobile/laptop and access from anywhere.


• Concur provides with an easy to use and understand dashboard to manage the cash flow more efficiently and visibly.


• Concur provides a hassle-free sync of employees (SAP)


• Automation of the financial system to concur without any 3^rd party integration system, i.e., PI/ Dell Boomi.


• Automation of expenses with the support of multi-currency.


• Concur supports list item sync, i.e., cost center, profit center expenses linked to the project.


• Concur supports automatic creation of G/L (General Ledger) entries.


• Concur can be integrated with SAP ERP, Microsoft Dynamics, Access Dimension, Oracle EBS.

 

 



 

 

 

Concur Employee Integration

Coming to employee integration, we have the option to use FTP or use the standard web service provided by SAP.

Once the SSL certificates are installed in the SAP system by basis team, you can start working on setting up the integration.

T Code used for integration set up is CTE_SETUP.

 



 

There are several tabs, i.e., system, Employee, Cost Centre, etc. Under employee, there are options like

• Change Export


• Specify Field Mapping


• Define Default Locales


• Manual Export


• Delete Export

Change export:

It allows defining the options for exporting data.

• Personnel No/ Person Id- Here you can define whether you want to go with personnel no or person id to be the unique identifying factor for replicating employees into the Concur system.


• Phased Rollout (Export with restricts)/Export without restriction: You can either choose phased rollout option otherwise known as restricted export wherein you can restrict your employee export based on certain personnel area & company code as per business requirement. Or you can choose export without restriction option which allows you to export all the employee records available in your system irrespective of any parameter like co code, PA, PSA or employee group/subgroup.


• Automatic Export: This enables the system to automatically push the delta changes to post the initial upload to concur system if any. You can set up automatic export job to be run at any time interval your business agrees to.


• For Ex: Change of manager, change of country, language, email id, etc.

 

Specify Field Mapping:

 Field mapping allows to map the corresponding SAP field to the already given concur field in the mapping form.



This is an employee form provided as a part of the standard SAP-Concur solution. This gets activated when the global employee form is set in concur system. Hence, you can't add or delete any fields in this form from SAP side. You can only maintain the corresponding SAP table & info type/ subtypes against the fields which are going to be used for your integration. If at all you want to modify the form in terms of adding more fields you have to check with the concur support since it’s to be done from their side.

There are few fields which are mandatory for the integration, i.e., Emp id, Active (EE Status), First Name, Last Name, Orgunit1 (Cost Centre), Currency Key, Ledger Key, etc. Other than these fields there are 21 custom fields which you may use as per your requirement.

In case, the standard field mapping does not serve your requirement; you can write BAdi for the same. For Ex: In most of the business, employees maintain company email id as their primary mail id. But there are cases, where some of the employees would maintain their private mail id as primary id. As you can see in this mapping form, we have the option to select only one subtype for each mentioned Infotype. Hence, you have to write a BADI to achieve this scenario.

Define Default Locales:

Concur system supports several locales. As a part of the standard solution, en_US is set as the default locale for all the countries. However, you may specify additional locales per country in the table below.



 

If you want to use a locale for several countries, leave the ISO Code field empty and under Locale, enter your preferred locale. As a consequence, all relevant countries which you did not list specifically in the table will be assigned this locale.

If the locale you have mentioned in the table is not supported by the Concur, employee export will fail.

BAdi Implementation:

This is already mentioned under field mapping. Whenever there is a deviation to the business process which can’t be accommodated by the standard mapping, BAdi is written.

Manual Export

This allows setting the parameters (i.e., Personnel no, Employee status, Co Code, PA, EG, ESG) as per the requirement. Manual upload does the full load of the employees for the parameters set each time it is executed.



 

Employee Export under Phased Rollout:

• Phased rollout method does not send all the employees existing in the system. It rather gives the option to restrict data flow based on parameters like company code, personnel area, and date as per the business requirement.

 

This is how the phased rollout screen looks like. There are two options, i.e., Generic Definition and a single employee

• With the generic definition, you have to give the combination of the company code and the personnel area and the start date for which and when export should start. Save the entries and click on start. Automatically export will start in the background. Upon completion of the export, you can see your entries with revoke option. If you click on revoke, it'll delete the employee records from concur system which was exported earlier. We need to be cautious while using revoke option in your prod.


• Single employee allows adding individual employees to be exported to concur. Here also revoke option does the same functionality, i.e., deletion of employee records.


• When the phased rollout is done for the first time, it does the full load of the employees. For the initial upload, it'll look for the active employees in the system. Later If an employee gets terminated once it's already exported to concur, integration would push the change and mark them inactive in concur system.


• Once your export is successful, the record will be created in concurring.


• To check the statistics of success and failure records, go to the communication monitor.

 



Replicated object column would be the total of successful objects, deleted objects & not updated object. You can click on each option to check which employee id failed under which category of error. These lists can also be exported if required.

To be processed column contains the future dated actions and it’ll be automatically get replicated when the actual date comes.

Below given is the screenshot of how an employee record looks like in the concur system.

 



 

 

P.S : This is the first part of my SAP to Concur system integration article where I have explained only about Employee data integration from SAP HCM to Concur. In the subsequent parts I’ll explain about FI to Concur integration which would include travel requisition processing in the concur system along with G/L posting back in the FI system.