Creation of an HR portal in SAPUI5 by the French Ministry of the Armed Forces with Neptune DXP
With 4 HRIS on SAP for the Land Army, the Air Force, the Navy and the Army Health Service and 1 satellite HRIS called NCI (Noyau Commun Interministériel, Common Interministerial Core), the SMSIF-RH was tasked to modernize the existing HR portal for the Land Army, and also create 2 new portals for the other armies.
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Challenges
-Transfer from one HR portal to a new portal
-New portal had to require no upgrades to existing SAP system
-Short implementation timelines
-Wanted to use existing in-house ABAP developers
Solutions
-7 new applications for the Land Army
-4 applications for the Space Army
-2 new applications for the Navy
Results
-3 application portals live and running
-2 portals created with timelines of 6 months or less
-High user adoption quickly
-Apps that cover personal information, requests for permission, leave and mobility
Challenge: Create a new and improved HR portal that seamlessly integrated into existing SAP systems
Based on Tours, the SMSIF-RH’s role is to ensure the development and maintenance of the operational condition of the Information Systems (IS) of the HR domain of the French Ministry of the Armed Forces.
The project’s objective for the SMSIF-RH was to transpose the existing applications within the former Army HR portal to a new portal and to move all or part of these applications to the newly created portals of the Air & Space Army and the French Navy.
These applications were intended to allow the various members of the armed forces to access their information and update their information if necessary.
The potential number of users to connect to the HRIS is 250,000, spread over the 4 HRIS: 160,000 for the Army, and 90,000 spread over the 3 others.
The selected development tool needed to require no upgrades to the SAP systems and no investment in hardware, while keeping implementation times short.
The Neptune DXP solution was chosen to meet these technical requirements. A determining factor in the choice of the tool was the fact that the platform is installed directly on the ABAP stack.
“One of the big advantages of the solution is the use of ABAP business classes. There was hardly any upgrading of skills for ABAP developers and that was the case for us, because we had a really big development structure with 17 ABAPers, so that was one of the big advantages of the product,” says Fabrice Jean, head of digital transformation section, HRIS Portals project manager at the French Ministry of the Armed Forces.
He continues, “One of the other major benefits was the API Designer. In a simple way, with a little training and work, we were able to expose APIs with all the business classes in ABAP to other systems.”
The existing Neptune DXP user community within the public sector, including the French Gendarmerie Nationale and the French Ministry of Justice who has also chosen Neptune DXP to deploy their HR portals, further reassured SMSIF-RH.
“We were seduced by the product, because of its ease of implementation since the tool is installed with only one transport order for the main tool and several transport orders for the complementary tools for the SAPUI5 library part, and great ease of development,” states Fabrice. “We had a large team of ABAP developers and the aim was that they could use the chosen tool easily. Neptune is essentially based on ABAP development for the business part and for the UI part, it is a very user-friendly development interface, which allows ABAPers to switch from an ABAP world to a Fiori-like world quickly.”
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Solution: Recreate 7 applications in a production site then roll out the portal to additional branches of defense
There were several stages to the project. The first step was for SMSIF-RH to modernize the existing portal for the Army. Specifications started in November 2018 and developments in early 2019. The application portfolio, which consisted of 7 applications, was installed in the pre-production environments for acceptance from March to July 2019, and the portal went into production in September 2019.
Once the Army portal was in production, the second step of the project was to adapt this first portal for the Space Army. For this stage, the specifications and development times were therefore much shorter, running from April to July 2019, as the SMSIF-RH development teams based themselves on the newly modernized Army portal. The 4 portal applications went live in early December 2019.
For the Navy, which was left with a fairly small application portfolio of only two applications, the specifications and the start of development was carried out at the same time, with a production start-up in early 2020.
The Neptune solution addressed the SMSIF-RH issue through the following 4 criteria:
- Easy to install and update: “Today, Neptune is one TO to install, plus as many TOs as there are SAPUI5 library versions you want to install.”
- Responsive and Efficient support: “Every time I submit a ticket for a problem, I get a response within 24 hours and within a week I get a hotfix.”
- Great ease of administration: “There is a whole administration cockpit that comes with the tool, which is very easy to use.”
- The mutual support community: “Not only on the SAPUI5 portal part but also internally in the public ministries, with the Gendarmerie Nationale and the Ministry of Justice, with whom we were able to share experiences and technical solutions. We also have a wealth of documentation, with tutorials available on the publisher’s portal, which makes it very easy to get to grips with the tool and to come up with solutions for making applications available fairly quickly.”
Results: 3 separate portals for Land Army, Space Army, and Navy created to cover HR needs and requests
Overall, the project to modernize the Land Army portal and create the Air & Space Army and the Navy portals ran from November 2018 to January 2020, with the deployment of 3 application portals as of today.
Developed applications cover personal information, requests for permission, leave and mobility.
“We have deployed three portals to this day. The first one that was implemented was for the Land Army. We had an aging portal that needed to be renovated at all costs. The aim of the migration to Neptune was to be able to move the existing applications from the old portal to this new portal and, if possible, enrich it with new applications,” states Fabrice.
“At the same time, we created portals for the other armies: the Air Force in the first instance and the Navy in the second, with very short implementation times, since for the Air Force and Space Force, we had a timetable of about 6 months between the start of the specifications and the start of production and a very quick timetable for the French Navy with a fairly small application portfolio of 2 applications. We started the specifications in November 2019 and we put the Navy portal into production in January 2020. It was very fast because we were able to capitalize on everything we had initially developed for the Land Army and reuse everything we had developed for the other armies.”
For the Land Army, the portal is increasingly popular: of the 100,000 individuals who have the possibility of logging on (60,000 without access to computers), half log on regularly to make their requests.
Fabrice’s final thoughts, “One word to describe Neptune, I would say easiness: easy to implement, whether in terms of system administration and easy to administer to have an operational system.”
Company Snapshot
The role of the Ministry of Defense is to ensure the protection of French territory, population and interests. It also responds to other missions within the framework of international (NATO) or regional (Defence Europe) agreements and treaties. Beyond these missions, the Ministry of Defense is also involved in public service missions. Its human and material resources support or supplement the actions of other ministries, on a daily basis or in an emergency, on national territory and abroad.
Industry Focus: Government and Defense
Number of Users: 160,000 Users
System Version: SAP HR
Devices: Desktop
“One word to describe Neptune, I would say easiness: easy to implement, whether in terms of system administration and easy to administer to have an operational system.”
-Fabrice Jean, Head of Digital Transformation Section, HRIS Portals Project Manager at the French Ministry of the Armed Forces
About Invarture
Invarture is a French company specializing in providing solutions and software dedicated to the optimization and transformation of SAP ERP. With more than 15 years of experience, they focus all their energy on finding the best technologies to help large European accounts get the most out of their management information systems and their ERP. Invarture represents Neptune Software and leads the community of integrator partners in France. More info at: www.invarture.com
About Neptune Software
Neptune Software is a rapid application development platform vendor with more than 660 enterprise customers and over 3.5 million licensed end users globally that empowers IT departments to deliver tangible business outcomes. Neptune Software offers with its Neptune DXP, a leading low-code, SAP-centric, enterprise app development platform to digitize and optimize business processes and user interfaces – at scale and with ease. Neptune DXP provides a fast and cost-effective way to industrialize the development of custom applications – saving companies time and money on development, integration, and operations
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