SAP has multiple software releases each year to enhance and innovate on its solutions, and the major ones happen in May and November. Before each major release, I meet with the SAP Fieldglass Product Management and Product Development teams to learn about each release item. What’s new? Why did we develop it? How will our customers benefit? When having these conversations about the May 2022 release, two themes emerged –
flexibility and compliance.
Flexibility
Being able to measure and manage a program is critical, and every program is a little bit different. To accommodate the many ways that customers want to run their program, we have released a few items:
- Typically, a master service agreement drives the content of individual statements of work. But there are scenarios when it is acceptable for details, such as rate values and fee amounts, to deviate from a master service agreement. Customers can now approve deviations from a master service agreement by using exception handling options.
- Additionally, buyers now have flexibility in how they use master statements of work to enforce work dates on an SOW. They may want to enforce both start/end dates, either start or end date, or neither date. Buyers now have rule types that give them flexibility as to when and how they want to enforce the start and end dates of an SOW.
- Several enhancements have been made specifically for the Program Office. One release item relates to worker tenure. There are cases when worker tenure rules are unnecessary, and it would be helpful to be able to establish approval rules to disable it. Now approval rule variables can be used to determine when the tenure feature should be disabled on a worker document.
- Last, but not least, buyers can now reallocate unused budgets. Buyers often use the project module to manage budgets that cross multiple statements of work. When it goes unused, there is now an option to reallocate unused budget from a completed statement of work back to the open project.
Compliance
Compliance is complex and difficult to manage due to ever-changing regulations, guidelines and policies across industries and geographies. While SAP Fieldglass can handle the complexity of managing the external workforce better than any other VMS, we are always looking to make it easier to stay ahead of compliance issues, as we've done in this release:
- Custom fields created by any admin are viewable across all MSPs. However, there are cases (e.g., privacy) when there is a need to restrict visibility of a custom field to one MSP. Now custom fields can be associated to an MSP so only that MSP can view it.
- Similarly, custom fields on a worker are viewable to all buyer users who have access to the worker record. Once again, there are cases (e.g., privacy) when there is a need to restrict visibility to a specific buyer user group. Now custom fields on a worker can be restricted by specifying which user roles can view it.
- Depending on the industry, region or nature of work, customers have differing needs as to when a contract is signed and executed. There are instances when a contract must be executed prior to the worker starting the assignment or before a revision is confirmed. In other scenarios, the worker is allowed to start and/or end the assignment prior to the contracts being completed. Now customers can complete and execute contracts to best fit their requirements with two new contract workflows. In the first new workflow, the customer can require contracts to be completed prior to the activation of a Work Order and/or Work Order Revision. In the second new workflow, the customer can allow the contract to remain open, even after a worker ends the assignment, up to a defined number of days.
This is just a handful of the many items in the May 2022 release, but it gives you a sense of the what, why and how SAP Fieldglass solutions recently have been enhanced so customers get the most value from their external workforce.
To view the SAP Fieldglass product roadmap, visit
SAP Road Map Explorer.
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