Up to date for 180,000 payment cases

The IPEMA Service Center (ISC) at the State Office of Finance (LfF) in Koblenz takes care of maintenance and further development. Because adapting table contents, billing schemas and rules, and documenting versions in an audit-proof manner was a very complex process, they looked around for a service provider for individual SAP solutions. As a result, ISC introduced the FIS/hrd Schema and Rules Analyzer (SRA) in early 2013 and FIS/hrd Copy Compare Convert (CCC) a year later. The components significantly simplify the process of maintaining payroll and make it audit-proof.

Major challenges

SAP HCM - internally called "Integrated Personnel Management System", or IPEMA for short - was introduced in 2011 after the Council of Ministers decided in 2007 to replace the existing personnel management processes in the Rhineland-Palatinate state administration.

The new integrated system for personnel management and payroll accounting was to be based on standard software, so SAP was used. Today, 180,000 payrolls are created with it every month. The Koblenz State Finance Office has 600 employees. 280 employees alone are responsible for payroll accounting. Another 1,200 employees throughout the state handle personnel processing in the SAP-HCM-supported payroll system IPEMA. Around 40 people support the SAP system from Koblenz. The IPEMA Service Center (ISC), an independent staff unit located at the State Finance Office, has since developed many customer areas and state procedures; IPEMA thus encompasses a large professional scope.

Working with SAP presented the administration with major challenges. This is because the billing schemes and rules are constantly changing due to new collective bargaining and legal regulations, and in some cases the ISC has to develop rules itself. A task that can only be accomplished with the help of external consultants for non-trained IT specialists. The FIS/hrd Schema and Rule Analyzer was finally the optimal solution that met the requirements regarding analysis, processing and documentation of schemas, rules as well as tables.

FIS/hrd was implemented in two places within the ISC organization: In the application operation, where the customizing of schemas, rules and wage types takes place, and in the payroll control. In application operation, the software replaces the SAP standard transactions PE01 and PE02 with its own transactions or supplements them with additional functions. After a very short training period, users have felt a reduction in workload because tasks could be completed much more easily and quickly. One example of this is the regression tests that take place once a month and are carried out by the ISC for quality assurance purposes. All developments are tested once again before they are actually implemented in the production system.

Test, copy, compare

With the FIS/hrd Scheme and Rules Analyzer, all edits made in the system also become audit-proof. Every change made in the control of billing runs is stored by the software in an audit-proof manner. In the event of audits, the ISC can retrieve the data at any time, point out differences and thus has the greatest possible control in the area of billing runs. Thanks to its note function, the tool enables complete and traceable documentation; the objects are automatically versioned upon transport release. The versions are generated before each settlement for revision and later analysis. Before SAP service packs are imported, they are used for reconciliation.

After working with the SRA component at the state office for about a year, they then put the second FIS/hrd component - CCC - into operation in the spring of 2014, which is primarily used to anonymize employee data for analyses, training purposes or for system updates. "Especially when we develop new solutions for payroll cases, they have to be built first. Instead of starting from scratch, we can use FIS/hrd CCC to clone cases and then anonymize them completely for data protection; and not only for individual cases, but also for a very large number," says Andreas Biringer, ISC Application Operations, explaining the advantages of the solution. 

In addition to copying, the comparison of billing results plays a very important role at the IPEMA Service Center. Since the function for comparisons and result checks did not fully meet the needs of the ISC in the beginning, the solution was further developed by FIS-ASP precisely according to customer requirements.

With the comprehensive FIS/hrd CCC analysis and comparison functions, data can be analyzed from the perspective of individual employees, but also across departments, for example. Most importantly, the templates are based on applicable data protection guidelines. FIS/hrd CCC shows which data worthy of protection exists in the SAP system and determines personal entries at different levels of analysis. The data can then be handled in an EU-DSGVO-compliant manner. In addition to these tasks, new areas of application are constantly being added in which administrators benefit from the versatile functions of the FIS tool.

The ISC and FIS have been working together successfully for almost ten years. The users no longer want to do without the FIS/hrd tool in their daily work.