Streamlining Letters of Appointment (LOAs) at a well-known South African consumer goods company

Simplifying the creation of LOAs and Change Letters

The consumer goods company needed to establish a centralised, flexible and secure repository for simplifying the creation of Letters of Appointment (LOA) and Change Letters throughout all their business units. This repository was required to serve as a singular, unified platform where these essential documents could be efficiently generated and managed.

Leveraging EPI-USE Labs’ Query Manager and Document Builder tools, as well as SAP Fiori, for documentation simplification

Due to the seasonal nature of the company’s workforce, LOA templates within Document Builder were crafted for optimal efficiency and versatility, leveraging data fields sourced from the SAP system. One of the key features of these templates is seamless auto-flow functionality, which ensures that there are no disruptive or awkward page breaks during document generation.

The LOA generation process was further streamlined by the seamless integration of a dedicated SAP Fiori App, assigning SAP roles to job profiles and managing the dispersion of access rights to respective business units; as well as creating a template of fields for the LOAs which users would complete with the employee’s details, and then generate the LOA into a PDF document.

LOA Creation

The implementation and integration of SAP role assignment, in combination with the capabilities of Document Builder and SAP Fiori, ensures a robust system for managing LOAs. It not only guarantees data security and confidentiality but also empowers users with efficient tools for LOA creation and retrieval.

SAP Fiori App (input)

LOA PDF Document (output)

• 83 LOA templates
• Improved user experience
• Over 8,500 runs between September 2019 and July 2023
• 16 Employee Change Letter templates

How EPI-USE Labs further enhanced readability, professionalism, adaptability and accessibility of the LOAs

• Extracted the textual content from existing contracts and the strategic insertion of SAP data fields. To maintain uniformity and consistency in the spacing and layout of these LOAs, a standardized format was adopted by encapsulating the content within database tables.

• Developed a dynamic page management system that tailors the LOA to specific requirements. This system enables the generation of separate pages for each Annexure as needed.

• Templates are customizable to accommodate variations in the content, allowing users to include or exclude sections based on whether certain information has been input into the SAP Fiori App.

• Implemented functions that prevent the inclusion of empty fields in the generated text.

• Created clauses with dynamic formulas that can be selectively applied to specific Business Units. This customization ensures that LOAs can cater to the unique requirements of different departments or roles within the organization

• Allowed central storage in a customizable folder structure for easy access and management.

• When modifications are made to the main template, a simple import of the updated version into the main folder ensures that all LOAs across the organization reflect the latest changes.

About our client, a leading South African consumer goods company

A well-known consumer goods company, home to many of South Africa’s leading and best-loved brands, has a shared services structure in place, spanning IT, finance, logistics, field marketing and procurement. This allows them to take advantage of their scale of operations and presence in multiple value chains to grow local brands.

Over 9,000 people are employed by this company, with seasonal work opportunities making up a large component of their workforce. This structure, alongside their presence in multiple industries, is the driver behind their impressive growth over time, and testament to their turnover in excess of R10 billion in the last financial year.