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This article will appear in the Jan n Feb n Mar 2013 issue of SAPinsider (http://sapinsider.wispubs.com) and appears here with permission from the publisher, WIS Publishing.

Today’s business world is nothing like it was a

decade ago — or even just two years ago. Busi-

nesses are more complex and marketplaces are

moving faster than ever before. With the pace of

change showing no signs of slowing down, it seems

that enabling organizational agility, once the hall-

mark of only the top organizations, is now a must

have for all. To remain competitive, businesses

need to be able to scope, analyze, and execute orga-

nizational transformations with increased speed

and precision. As an HR professional, you need to

be able to easily model and remodel the organiza-

tional structure to keep pace with these changes.

However, you might face a barrier preventing

you from being able to make agile organization

changes and model updates: your data. It is only

possible to make sound organizational trans-

formation decisions if your HR data is accurate

and up to date. Often, though, there is simply too

much information. And the absence of solid data

can have costly side effects. A recent study by The

Data Warehousing Institute estimates that “data

quality problems cost US businesses $600 billion

each year.”1 To avoid such costly business mis-

takes, HR professionals are seeking to be able to:

■ Gain an accurate picture of the impact of orga-

nizational changes

■ Obtain relevant data to ensure that they can

make the right decisions quickly

■ Make decisions today that will become imme-

diately visible and align with the strategic

goals of tomorrow

■ Effectively collaborate with key business deci-

sion makers

1 The Data Warehousing Institute, “Data Quality and the Bottom Line: Achieving Business Success through a Com-mitment to High Quality Data” (http://download.101com.com/pub/tdwi/Files/DQReport.pdf).

HR’s Next Top ModelTake Charge of Change with SAP® Organizational Visualization by Nakisa

by Sylvia Strangfeld, SAP and Romeo De Leon, Nakisa

■ Clearly communicate organizational changes

to gain workforce commitment

The good news is that the SAP® Organizational

Visualization application by Nakisa comprehen-

sively supports an organizational transformation

strategy and makes these goals achievable.

SAP Organizational Visualization enables you

to manage and improve the accuracy of the data

in your SAP ERP Human Capital Management

(SAP ERP HCM) core, and model and prepare for

organizational change. With confidence in your

data and a visual model, you can drive informed

decision making with solid business evidence,

and communicate organizational changes effec-

tively to increase employee buy-in.

Take Control of Your HR DataWith an increasing amount of complex and dis-

parate data silos, it is becoming more and more

difficult to obtain the right information you need

to make fact-based decisions. SAP Organizational

Visualization offers a built-in data quality man-

agement tool that enables you to create a rolling

data auditing program proven to reduce manual

effort and increase effective decision making. The

tool combines the visualization of key data, for on-

the-spot data validation, with automated diagnos-

tic audits. Managers can establish data-checking

rules to enable fast auditing of vast amounts of

SAP ERP HCM data, and a “gamified” data quality

scoring system can help motivate your teams to

manage their own data, expanding the responsi-

bility of data quality management beyond HR.

Leverage Advanced Organizational Modeling CapabilitiesBuilding on this solid foundation of core

data, SAP Organizational Visualization also

Sylvia Strangfeld (sylvia.strangfeld@sap.com) is Solution Owner for Orga-nizational Management and the SAP Organizational Visualization application by Nakisa. As such, Sylvia is responsible for driving road-map integration between SAP and Nakisa.

Romeo De Leon (romeo.deleon@nakisa.com) is Vice President of Product Strategy at Nakisa. In this role, Romeo is responsible for defining Nakisa’s overall solution roadmap and driving product innovation.

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offers a system to mitigate the operational risks

associated with organizational transformations.

Whether you are working on a departmental

reorganization, a major merger, or an acquisition,

delivering data in an intuitive format is vital to

its usability. A recent Aberdeen study found that

“tools to help with visualization, quality, and data

enrichment will bring additional trust to the data

and make HR insights an integral part of business

review, just like financial and operational data.”2

And with so many changes happening simul-

taneously, “modeling while you operate,” that is

modeling and re-modeling the organization to

keep up with change while still managing the

business day to day, is really the only option to

stay ahead. To help, SAP Organizational Visual-

ization uniquely provides a wide gamut of organ- uniquely provides a wide gamut of organ-

izational change management capabilities to

SAP ERP HCM users. These features enable you

to assess risk and make accurate organizational

changes while staying agile.

Using SAP Organizational Visualization, you

can dynamically model what-if scenarios based

on current organizational data and analyze the

effect of changes immediately by using real-time

analytics to benchmark against key performance

indicators (KPIs) such as budgets, salary totals,

and headcounts (see Figure 1). �ou can also syn-�ou can also syn-

chronize and merge changes from the live struc-

ture into the model, share annotated scenarios

with colleagues for review and approval, and

automatically write-back approved changes to the

SAP ERP HCM system. This controlled write-back

process ensures minimal disruption to business

2 Aberdeen Group, “Human Capital Management Trends 2012: Managing Talent to Lead Organizational Growth” (January 2012; http://deliberatepractice.com.au/wp- content/uploads/2012/01/Abderdeen-HCM-Trends-2012.pdf).

operations and enforces a disciplined process while

ensuring optimal transparency and alignment.

Spreading the WordWith a more fluid organizational structure and

changes happening so rapidly, it is more important

than ever before for corporate HR departments to

share a clear picture of the organization and to

enable role-based employee access to relevant HR

information. SAP Organizational Visualization’s

easy-to-navigate and automated organizational

chart not only brings HR data to life, but fosters

workforce communication and engagement across

the enterprise. Offering this level of transparency

gives your employees a sense of organizational

unity and a way to stay connected wherever and

whenever, which can mean the difference between

employee commitment or demotivation caused by

shifts in the organizational structure.

Staying on TopNo matter how good your organization is at keep-

ing up with the pace of change, if your business

decisions are not firmly rooted in a solid founda-

tion of data, carefully modeled and assessed for

operational risk, and clearly communicated to

the organization, you run the risk of failure. By

extending the value of your existing investments,

you can stay truly agile. SAP Organizational Visu-

alization offers a comprehensive organizational

modeling solution that can support your orga-

nizational transformation strategy with cutting-

edge simulation, analytical, management, and

collaboration tools to help you stay on top.

To learn more about how SAP Organizational

Visualization by Nakisa can help your organiza-

tion, visit www.sap.com/lines-of-business/hr/

organization-visualization/index.epx. n

FIGURE 1 u SAP Organizational

Visualization’s drag and drop

functionality lets you view metric

updates as you model in real

time so you can save and share

the models, analyze potential

consequences to KPIs, and write

back approved changes to SAP

ERP HCM