Some of the critical IT Tools for the CE group are highlighted below, with informal tips and guidelines linked/included.
WP1 Tips and Guidelines document - live Slides doc to help with commonly encountered needs for CE activities. This is a crowd-sourced document - please add to it if you learn something new & interesting.
Formal SAP support is via OneDigital SBS. Informal support can usually be found on most sites. Users will require a Username that is used regularly to keep it 'active'.
Replicon is Solvay's chosen time-recording system for R&I and other technical staff including CE. Reports from Replicon are used for high-level overviews of to which tasks/projects our workforce is allocated. The hours collected within Replicon are also converted to cash costs and allocated to active projects in SAP, to monitor their spend against budgets as well as other accounting purposes.
As a general rule of thumb, there are three categories of project/task in Replicon:
| Category | Purpose/Value |
|---|---|
| CAPEX/Development-Capitalized | Resource costs are allocated and amortised over project-defined timelines. This significantly reduces cash-flow demands in the short-term and is a powerful tool for the business to control our finances. Wherever possible and legitimate, staff should aim to allocate their hours to this category of project. |
| Expense Projects | Resource costs are allocated and visible against the named project. This allows the business to monitor the spend for basic control purposes - though the costs are still allocated to the Cost Center in the short-term (i.e. no amortization). This category is considered appropriate and useful when there are no CAPEX/DevCap style projects that could be employed instead. |
| Generic Tasks | These are generally of less value to the wider business - though local functional/manager preferences may attach value, or employees may wish to keep records for their own purposes. |
It is suggested that CE staff should target regular logging of hours for the first two categories. Logging of generic tasks can be discretionary, based on local demand.
Remember to add a trusted user (your manager is recommended) as a 'Substitute User' within Replicon Settings. This will allow that user to complete your timesheet in the rare occurrence that you are unable to make entries at month-end (usually 25th of the month)
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Our regular Replicon administrator is Rechelle Swing.
Salesforce is a key tool for recording customer intelligence - including sales, opportunities, contact-persons, meeting records, etc. The system is 'business-secure' - though is NOT considered an appropriate repository for ITAR or other export-sensitive data. Links to other repositories should be used in these instances - for example, if there is sensitive data within a Customer Visit Report, then that data should be within an approved system (e.g. Sharepoint) and connected by a hyperlink within Salesforce.
