Expertise

Requirements elicitation involves user engagement, executive management support and a clear statement of requirements.

Before implementing the SAP Concur system, as a business analyst, I worked with other stakeholders, including the head of finance, controller, accounts payable clerk, internal staff and SAP technical expert to elicit the requirements. Furthermore, those requirements were when implementing the system.

To manage stakeholder engagement, a stakeholder list document was made to list the stakeholders as below. For the sake of confidentiality, the stakeholders’ names are replaced with Tom unanimously.

The SAP Concur system was implemented to automate the process of processing claimed expenses from the staff, improve the accuracy of expense claiming, and improve the efficiency of accounts payable work.

Before implementing the SAP Concur, the accounts payable clerk needed to spend a whole day to process and reimburse tens of expense receipts every week, including printing the receipts submitted by the staff, recording the payable information in an Excel spreadsheet, and paying it in the banking system. It costs a lot of time and cannot guarantee accuracy and efficiency. 

The SAP Concur was planned to be rolled out within 4 months, with a goal of processing tens of expense claiming cases within half a day. After the SAP Concur was put into use, the accounts payable spent 50% less time processing the tens of expense claiming cases and the accuracy was also improved, enabling the automated process of expense claiming.

Regarding the stakeholders involved in the expense claiming, they had different needs for the SAP Concur system.

The staff need to submit a copy of the expense receipt in the SAP Concur system.

The department managers need to approve the expense receipts submitted by the staff in their department.

The accounts payable clerk needs to review all the submitted expense receipts and process them.

The executive team needs to monitor the expense-claiming processes.

The controller needs to monitor the expense processing and any gaps from a financial report perspective.

Solution requirements include functional requirements and non-functional requirements.

•  Functional requirements

The SAP Concur system must support the users in submitting different kinds of expense receipts in different ways. For example, the dinner expense receipt must be submitted in the dinner type expense claiming path.

The SAP Concur system must be able to add all the staff members to the system.

The SAP Concur system must be able to grant different users access.

The SAP Concur system must be able to export the expense text file.

The SAP Concur system must support a workflow to enable some types of expense receipts to be submitted to the department manager to review and then transferred to the accounts payable clerk to process. This is designed to guarantee the the big expense conforms to the expense policy in the company. For example, the airfare expense receipt should be submitted by the staff to the department manager to review and then transferred to the accounts payable clerk to process.

The SAP Concur system must support the workflow to enable the staff to submit some other types of expense receipts directly to the accounts payable clerk to process.

To enable SAP Concur to support the 2 workflows of processing different expense types, a flowchart was designed to show how the workflow worked. And then by collaborating with the SAP technical team and UAT testing, the 2 workflows were implemented in the system.

• Non-functional requirements

The SAP Concur system must be scalable to add more users and process more transactions.

The SAP Concur system must save users time in submitting expense receipts.

The SAP Concur system must save accounts payable clerk time in processing expense receipts.

In implementing the SAP Concur system, I created training materials about how to use the Concur desktop and mobile app. Also, Two-factor authentication (2FA) was introduced to protect the security of the user accounts. I also created a user manual to teach users how to set up the 2FA on their mobile phones.

The above requirements were documented along with user stories, use cases and use case diagrams in an Excel document for requirement management. Visual Paradigm was used to draw the use case diagram.

Managing requirements is recognized as a key activity of business analysis.

High-quality requirements life cycle management is the foundation for the successful implementation of the SAP Concur system. To manage the requirements, we need to ask some questions.

·       Do requirements impact critical business processes?

·       Which processes have recurring changes?

·       Are the prioritized requirements aligned with key business processes?

·       Which requirements impact which business process?

·       What is the status of the requirements?

·       What are the dependencies between requirements?

In implementing the SAP Concur system, as a business analyst, after documenting and verifying the requirements, I managed the requirements life cycle until the system was rolled out and put into use by all the staff.

According to the BABOK, a requirements life cycle management works as below.

The requirements for implementing the SAP Concur system involve business requirements, stakeholder requirements, solution requirements and transition requirements.

Taking the business requirement as the goal, I analyzed the stakeholders’ requirements and solution requirements to ensure they could help realize the goal of streamlining the expense claiming process.

For example, to ensure the department managers could review the submitted expense receipts, I collaborated with the head of finance and the SAP expert to design the workflow to enable the staff in a certain department to submit the expense receipt to their department managers. The department managers could review them and then transfer them to the accounts payable clerk to process them.

To realize this workflow, I tested many expense claiming cases (mainly alpha test) to detect the malfunctions in the whole expense claiming process and make the designed solution work well.

To ensure the accuracy of the requirements and the solutions, I conducted more than 100 user acceptance tests to detect any malfunction in the expense claiming process.

As the SAP Concur system has about 50 expense types we needed to use to claim the expense, I tested every expense type with testing cases to ensure the accurate claiming amount, category and processes. After completing every test for one expense type, I recorded it in the document.

For the workflows which were used to process expense receipts, which were reviewed first by the department managers or directly submitted to accounts payable, I also tested each of them to ensure the expense receipt could be submitted to the right person.

To ensure every staff member could submit their expense receipt, I created more than 70 user accounts and gave them corresponding access to the system functionalities.

The leadership members could have the highest access right to monitor the expense claiming process.

The controller could monitor the expense claiming process and any gaps from a financial reporting perspective.

The accounts payable clerk could review all the expense receipts submitted directly by all the staff or transferred by the department managers.

Department managers could review the submitted expense receipts by the employees in their departments and then transfer them to the accounts payable clerk.

For all the staff, they could create an expense claiming report and submit it under the correct department in the system. To realize this functionality, I added a function and department code in the system to ensure the staff could choose the correct function and department they belong to.

All of the above stakeholders’ requirements were realized by the solutions designed in the SAP Concur system and testing.

The business requirement is the ultimate goal of implementing the SAP Concur system. However, for the stakeholder requirements and solution requirements, their priorities were different. In implementing the SAP Concur system, streamlining the expense claiming process of creating and submitting the expense claim was the most prioritized. Without a streamlined process of creating and submitting the expense claim, we cannot optimize the workflows of enabling the department managers to review and transfer the expense claims, to say nothing of enabling the accounts payable clerk to process the expense claims.

To realize the prioritized requirement, I conducted many tests and collaborated with the SAP technical experts to resolve issues. The collaboration with SAP technical experts happened in every stage of the requirements life cycle management.

After streamlining the expense creation and submission process, I started to streamline the workflows to enable the department managers to review and transfer the expense claims for 22 expense types.

 All of the sales reps in my company need to go to the customers' sites almost every day, so the expense claiming for personal car mileage expense claiming was a very important requirement for the sales reps.

Initially, we wanted to let the sales reps manually input the mileage information, such as the starting point and ending point of the sales trip. However, to avoid some errors in manually inputting the information, we wanted to use the Concur Drive, which is an integrated functionality in the mobile Concur app. I tested the Drive functionality, but it did not work well. For example, sometimes, the Concur Drive cannot record the mileage correctly, and sometimes it cannot work if the mobile phone cannot connect to the network, and then the Concur Drive functionality would be down.

Meanwhile, I found another independent mobile app called TripLog, which could integrate with the SAP Concur mobile app to track the mileage. However, after conducting a cost-effectiveness analysis, we decided to drop that alternative.

And at last, we let the sales reps manually input the mileage information after every sales trip. In the follow-up training about using SAP Concur, the sales reps were taught to record the mileage accurately.

The changes of the requirements were assessed from feasibility, cost and accuracy of the solutions, and then we found a solution that was the most cost-effective.

Thank you again for your dedication and creativity throughout this process. I'm so proud of what you’ve accomplished and excited to see your portfolios showcased.

After documenting the business requirements, stakeholder requirements, solutions requirements and transition requirements, I worked with the head of finance, SAP expert, accounts payable, controller and other stakeholders to ensure the requirements were clear and accurate. And then, all the requirements were approved by the head of finance, who was the leader of the system implementation project.

Additionally, once the requirement was changed and approved, the requirement was also approved by the head of finance.

In general, the business analysis of the requirement hierarchy, including business requirements, stakeholder requirements, solution requirements and transition requirements, drives the implementation of the SAP Concur system and every other business analysis project.

The requirements elicitation involves the stakeholder engagement, which could be managed by a stakeholder register and stakeholder matrix, which is used to analyze their impact and the impact o the stakeholders. In this article, I did not mention the stakeholder matrix to analyze the impact, but I will use it in other stakeholder engagement analyses.

The requirements life cycle management, from tracing requirements to approving requirements, comes along with the entire process of the SAP Concur system implementation and ends with the successful rollout of the system.