In working with customers, I think one of the more under utilized features of E-Sourcing / CLM that can really add value and simplify users’ use of the system is bookmarked reports.

For those that don’t know about bookmarking reports in  E-Sourcing / CLM, let me explain the feature. All E-Sourcing / CLM reports can be bookmarked. Check out this screen shot that shows the toolbar that is displayed with a report when it is executed; notice the Bookmark Report option:

Report toolbar with Bookmark option (click to enlarge)

When a report is bookmarked using the button above, the user provides a name that will be saved for their use only. The system will save the name entered by the user and the filter parameters used for that execution of the report and make it available via an area on the Analysis page:

My Bookmarks - Available from Analysis page (click to enlarge)

As you can see, I have already setup five bookmarked reports. For me, the value in this functionality is the ability of the system to save the filter parameters I entered and to enable very easy access to the report from the Analysis page. Lets say, for example, that there is report that has filters for Organization Unit and some dates. Lets also say that I need to run this report once a week for the current quarter and a specific organizational unit. The first time I run the report for the quarter, I would bookmark it and those settings would be saved. Now, each time I need to run the report, I just run it from the bookmarks and those filter parameters will be populated with the report and it will execute using them.

Bookmarked reports can also be deleted. In my previous example, I would probably do that at the beginning of each quarter when I setup a new bookmark for that quarter. In the screen shot above, there is an edit button in the Bookmark heading - using that button provides me with a screen that I can use to delete unused bookmarks.

So, what do you think? Would using this feature help out your users? I suggest giving it a try.

A few weeks back, I posted about cleaning up the workbench page (Could the E-Sourcing / CLM Workbench be more useful?). One of the ideas I put in that post was to extend the capabilities of bookmarks by making a workbench page channel with access to bookmarks. This would really further extend the value of the bookmarked reports so that users have one-click access to their important reports right from their workbench.

That’s it for this week’s post. I hope this was helpful and that you consider using report bookmarking in your implementation.

Recently, I have spoken to a few people about implementing approval logic for CLM Contract Clauses. For those of you that are familiar with CLM, you know that it does not provide an “out of the box” capability to enforce clause approvals.

Not to worry, however, because the flexible E-Sourcing / CLM scripting capabilities make implementing approval logic for clauses pretty straightforward. In this post, I will describe one approach that I put together for a recent sales demonstration.

The components of my clause approval configuration were:

- Created an extension (custom field) on the clause master data object that was a reference to the user group that is required to approve the clause

- Using page customizations, the approver extension field on the clause master data was made read only

- Using script definition, the approver extension field was populated with the name of the user group that is required to approve the clause. In many organizations, this would be some set of people from the procurement legal department.

The above three configurations provided the framework for the approval process by defining the approver on the clause master data.

In addition to the above configurations, one additional script definition was required. That script definition was implemented as a Field Data Edit script on the PHASE field of clauses. The script included two sets of logic:

- The first logic was based on the phase being changed to Approved. If the new phase was set to Approved and the user performing the change was a member of the approver user group, it was allowed; if the user was not a member of the approver user group, an error was generated and the phase change was not permitted. This logic ensured that only members of the approver user group approved the clause.

- The second logic was to send an email to the legal user group when the new phase of the clause was Review. This ensured that the members of the legal approval group received notification when there was a clause to approve.

So, what do you think? I understand that this is not using the E-Sourcing / CLM workflow approval capabilities, but is it good enough? Would this level of approval work for you? Based on what I have seen with customers, this approach would be more than suitable, but I would love to hear your feedback.

Overall, implementation of a solution like the above should not take more than a few days to prepare, configure, code, test, and deploy. For me, that is very exciting because it demonstrates the real power of the E-Sourcing / CLM capabilities such as extensions, page customizations, and scripting.

Thanks for stopping by and reading my latest post.

Rob

Greetings all…

I thought today I would post about E-Sourcing / CLM Security Profiles. I have seen some questions on the SAP SDN about these recently and thought it would be a good topic to cover here.

Security Profiles are used in E-Sourcing to establish user roles and the permissions associated with those roles. Once setup, user accounts are associated with one or more security profiles which will result in the specific permissions the user has in E-Sourcing / CLM.

The permissions that are setup in the security profile include typical sorts of permissions such as Create, Edit, and View; there are also some specialized permissions that are available that are unique to the business object, configuration data, or master data. One of those permissions that resulted in a recent discussion is the permission called setup. This permission indicates whether or not the data can be managed via the E-Sourcing / CLM setup area. There are also permissions such as Create Template that are available on the major business objects (e.g., Projects, Auctions, RFx, and Master Agreements) that restrict access to the template creation functionality.

As with much of E-Sourcing / CLM there is a lot of flexibility built into the security profiles and how they are configured and associated with user accounts. Sometimes, however, this flexibility can lead to inconsistencies in the use and longer term maintenance headaches. When deciding how best to configure the security profiles in E-Sourcing / CLM, I suggest you really examine your organization and the roles in it. Here are some things to understand and establish before performing any configuration in the system:

What are the various roles of the members of my sourcing organization? Do these roles align with job titles or job descriptions?

Are the roles of the members of my organization strictly defined? Should the system be deployed with that strict definition?

How do the roles that the users have align with the functionality that will be used in E-Sourcing? For example, will only certain roles create and manage Projects? Contracts? RFxs? Auctions?

How much and how often will users’ roles change?

Could a matrix be created that lists the roles of the users and the functionality that those users will have access to in E-Sourcing / CLM?

Answering these questions will hopefully lead you down a path to a particular configuration approach. Here are a couple of approaches I have used in the past:

Create Security Profiles that align with job titles / job descriptions: With this approach, each job function in your organization has a related security profile in E-Sourcing / CLM. Each user is then assigned the security profile on the user account maintenance. If a user changes roles or leaves the organization the user account can be updated accordingly. If a user has multiple roles in the organization, they can be assigned multiple security profiles.

Create Security Profiles that define rights from a system standpoint and create user groups that associate the security profiles with roles: With this approach, security profiles might be defined based on use of the various modules (e.g., Projects, RFxs, etc). Instead of assigning the security profiles to individual user accounts, profiles are assigned to user groups and users are associated with one or more groups. In this approach, the group will likely align with the job functions.

Both of the above approaches can work well and your choice really will depend on how you want to maintain user accounts, security profiles, and your use of user groups. Regardless of the approach you select, the system provides a good audit report that shows how the security profiles are used. You can access this report from: Setup > System Administration > Administrative Reports > Security Profile Usage Summary.

I hope this article was interesting and you are inspired to review your use of security profiles and their setup in E-Sourcing / CLM.

From my earlier posts, you know that I really like using the E-Sourcing / CLM reporting tool. It was actually the very first thing that I did with E-Sourcing when I started working with the application over 5 years ago.

A couple years ago, SAP added the ability to export the report results to a pre-formatted Excel spreadsheet. The Excel spreadsheet can include formatting, formulas, and even visual basic macros.

Due to the fact that the E-Sourcing / CLM reporting tool provides only very basic formatting, the Excel template functionality is quite useful for those reports that really benefit from formatting. Recently, for example, I worked on a report for a customer that had multiple queries in it to generate the result sets. We decided to use the Excel template functionality to take the results from the queries and format the data into a easily presentable single Excel worksheet. This was particularly useful because the report users were only casual users of E-Sourcing / CLM and much preferred to review and analyze the data in Excel.

If you are new to this functionality, I suggest starting with something very basic: change the column header and row data formatting in the template. This is done by performing the following steps (assuming you have already developed the query):

1. Create the Excel template. The template can be either an XLT (true Excel template) or XLS (an Excel worksheet). The Excel template should have one worksheet and the name of that worksheet should be the name of the query (not the internal name, but the internationalized display name). In the single sheet, you can apply formatting for the column headings and rows (search in the online help for “workbook templates” to see some shortcuts you can use in the template for the formatting).
2. Create an E-Sourcing / CLM File Attachment Container with the Excel template. In the create screen of the file attachment container, the purpose should be set to workbook template. The path name should be the name of the file and you should upload the Excel template file into the file attachment.
3. In the E-Sourcing / CLM report, set the workbook template to the file attachment container created in the previous step.

These steps will always be followed when you want to use Excel templates for reports. The real work will always be in creating, adjusting, and testing the Excel template.

A more advanced type of Excel template is to manipulate and/or format the raw data from the E-Sourcing / CLM report in a separate worksheet in the Excel template. This type of template is particularly useful where you would like to take data from multiple queries and format it onto a single worksheet.

To create the Excel template that formats raw data from multiple queries, you must do the following:

1. Create worksheets in the template, one for each of the queries in the report and name the sheets the same name as the queries. These should be in the same order as the queries in the report.
2. Create a new worksheet in the Excel template as the last sheet. You can use formulas in this sheet to “pull” data from any of the other sheets. There are different techniques you can use in Excel to accomplish; I typically will type “=” in the cell where I want the value, then click to the source sheet and select the source cell. The resulting value of the cell will be something like =Sheet1!a1.

For the posting, I created a simple query called Project Portfolio. The query pulls data from the E-Sourcing / CLM projects. I created an Excel template for the report to format the results into something more visually appelling and easy to print. First, I created the Excel template with 2 sheets:

Two Excel Worksheets (click to enlarge)

The first sheet (Project Portfolio) is the name of the query that I created. There is nothing special in this sheet. The second sheet (Project Portfolio Report), which has the focus when I save the workbook, includes the desired formatting and “pulls” the data from the Project Portfolio sheet. The first image shows the formatting I wanted:

Formatted Sheet (click to enlarge)

For each project that is part of my results set, I wanted three rows of display data. Each gray bar in the Excel template will be used to show a different project. The way this is done is by pulling the data from the source Project Portfolio worksheet. For example, the formula used in the first gray bar, first column is as follows:

Formula for pulling data (click to enlarge)

Notice that the formula for cell A3 has a formula in it to pull data from the first sheet in the Excel workbook. This technique allows me to take the rows of raw data from the generated sheet and reformat them into the block style on my template sheet. The next two images show the raw data and the formatted sheet.

Raw Data Project Portfolio Sheet (click to enlarge)

Formated Project Portfolio Sheet (click to enlarge)

This example shows how you can use simple Excel formulas to create visually appealing Excel exports for E-Sourcing / CLM report data.

Due to the fact that most capabilities of Excel are supported through the use of templates, complex formatting, logic, and adjustments can also be implemented using Excel Visual Basic macros. In the past, I have used such approach to dynamically create pivot tables in the Excel workbook using the raw data from the query as the source data for the pivot table. You can do some really exciting things if you want to invest the effort in programming Excel. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that once macros are included in the Excel template, Excel’s security comes into play - in certain cases, the users may not have the ability to execute the macros. You should review this topic with your IT staff before pursuing a complex Excel template of this sort.

Please let me know what you think about this posting and whether you would like more details about the use of Excel templates with E-Sourcing / CLM reports. I hope it helped you understand the capabilities and perhaps inspired you to try them out. Good luck and Happy New Year.