Have you ever wanted to know which integrations exist between Success Factors Employee Central (EC) and SAP ERP HCM and other SAP ERP Systems , how they actually and exactly work and how you can make them work?

Then you should definitely consider going through our latest content offering around this topic in our SAP Learning Maps for consultants or even attend one of our scheduled classroom training workshops in Germany and in the US also targeted for consultants.

Make sure to take part and to learn from the experts directly so you become an expert in the crucial topic of EC/ERP integrations!

Here are the links to the learning maps as well as the links to the classroom training workshops & registrations:

1. Learning Maps (for SAP Employees only for now - stay tuned for external availability on learning hub)

• Employee Central - Integration with SAP ERP

• Employee Central API and Import

2. Classroom Training Workshops:

For customers & partners only:

RECA01: Employee Central (EC) APIs and Integrations with SAP ERP

• Sep. 07-09, 2015: Walldorf (Germany)
  Participants accepted by approval only: Course fee € 750,--
  Enrollment Request

RECA01: Employee Central (EC) APIs and Integrations with SAP ERP

• Sep. 28-30, 2015: New York (MicroTek) (U.S.A.)
  Participants accepted by approval only: Course fee $ 1200,--
  Enrollment Request

For SAP employees:

RECA01: Employee Central (EC) APIs and Integrations with SAP ERP

• Sep. 07-09, 2015: Walldorf (Germany)

RECA01: Employee Central (EC) APIs and Integrations with SAP ERP

• Sep. 28-30, 2015: New York (MicroTek) (U.S.A.)
  Participants accepted by approval only: Course fee $ 1200,--
  Enrollment Request

Help Us Preserve Endangered Elephants and Rhinos – One Tweet At A Time

At SuccessConnect Las Vegas this year, SuccessFactors and SAP are hosting an interactive fundraiser to help save threatened elephants and rhinos in Africa from illegal poaching. We are teaming together with ERP – Elephants, Rhinos, and People, which is part of groupelephant.com, and consists of for-profit, nonprofit, and impact investment organizations dedicated to the preservation of elephants and rhinos and the alleviation of poverty among African communities.  You can learn more about ERP and groupelephant.com here.  Donations will go towards sponsoring and relocating animals to safe game reserves – within and beyond Africa – as well as investing in local regions by building new and powerful economic engines based on ecotourism and agriculture. All you have to do is tweet with both #sconnect15 and #ERP.  For each tweet that contains both hashtags between now and August 14^th, SAP will donate $1 to ERP. 

So, what’s the motivation?

A century ago, there were 10 million elephants in the wild in Africa.  By 2013, that number had fallen to 470,000.  With the current price for one pair of average mail elephant tusks approaching $50,000 (USD), enormous pressure will continue to fall on the remaining population.  The situation with rhinos is even more grim.  With rhino horns currently running at $90,000 per kilo, an average 4 kilogram horn is worth $360,000, rivaling the price of gold – and cocaine. 

Predictably, this has led to a huge decline in the rhino population as well.  At the start of the 20^th century, there were 500,000 rhinos in Africa.  Today there are less than 20,000 White Rhinos and 5,000 Black Rhinos remaining in the wild – an unsustainable decline that will lead to extinction if left unchecked. 

Elephant and rhino poaching are not new.  Elephant ivory has been in demand for centuries, although through a combination of factors, this demand has soared over the past decade.  The surge in rhino horn demand started about 8 years ago, largely attributed to announcements regarding its use as a medical treatment in some Asian countries. 

International trade in both elephant ivory and rhino horn is illegal and yet, despite the ban, the illicit trade is approaching, by some accounts, nearly 20 billion dollars a year, double what it was just a few years ago.  The amount of profit attainable is too alluring and the prevalent corruption is too easy to bypass.  Poverty plays a key factor given the lack of economic viability and sustainability in the affected regions, enticing individuals into poaching for economic survival.  And now a new wave of suppliers has recently entered, including Africa-based terrorist organizations, such as Al Shabaab, Boko Haram, and the Lord's Resistance Army as well as Asian crime syndicates, all looking to capitalize on this high-value venture.  Listen to the America Abroad Radio and their airing of Poaching and Terrorism: The Race to Protect Wildlife and National Security for some of these details (and many more). 

Saving the remaining elephants and rhinos will require a multi-faceted approach, one that combines governmental and non-governmental approaches, together with a focus on both supply and demand.  On the demand side, appealing to potential consumers by highlighting the plight of the animals and the myths associated with the products is crucial. Campaigns to educate and drive awareness that feature global celebrities – like NBA star Yao Ming’s efforts in his native China – can reduce the demand for these products.  And efforts to impact the supply side are equally important and this is where ERP is focusing their initiatives.  Direct sponsorship and relocation of the animals to safe game reserves – within and beyond Africa – are an important component and underway.  For example, under consideration is a proposal to relocate a small population of orphaned rhinos to Texas.  But perhaps most important is to address the economic viability of the regions so as to remove the economic allure of poaching.  Investing in local regions, building new and powerful economic engines based on ecotourism, and creating enterprises that leverage live animals in the wild instead of animal parts, animal trafficking, and the potentially legal but brutal capture and trade in wild animals, are all crucial to ensuring the long-term survival of the magnificent animals in the wild. 

ERP is a great example of an organization taking that multi-faceted approach and they need our help. So between now and August 14, tweet with both #sconnect15 and #ERP and help impact SAP’s total donation.  And more importantly, help spread awareness of this tragic issue.  We are all crucial to ensuring the long-term survival of these amazing animals.  Start tweeting today, spread the word, and help sustain our incredible world!

On my way home from the office yesterday, the fuel light in my German-made car ($5 for anyone who can guess the make and model) flicked on. The fuel light always gives me anxiety and causes me to immediately start looking for the nearest gas station. Even though I know that my car can probably go an extra 30-40 miles, I don’t like to push my luck. 

As a matter of fact, driving your car at low fuel levels can be damaging to your car. Why would you risk incurring additional damage to your car, possibly not make it to your final destination, and cause yourself additional stress - all at the small expense of not filling up?

At SuccessConnect this year, we have a dedicated track Fueling Your Journey: HR Cloud Technology that’s designed to help educate and fuel our customers’ journey to the cloud. You’ll hear from our product teams on the latest innovations in the our technology and our enhanced mobile and user experience. You will hear from our customers and partners on how they integrate between cloud and on-premise systems and securely transitioning to the cloud. You will hear from how our customers extend beyond what's delivered out of the box with SuccessFactors, by using the Metadata Framework (Extension Center) and how our customers are building brand new capabilities on the HANA Cloud Platform. I’m also happy to say that the entire track is designed for both an HR and IT audience at all-levels.

Here is our action-packed agenda below:

Tuesday, August 11

Wednesday, August 12

Don't forget to download the SuccessConnect mobile app here

I look forward to meeting you all at the Venetian in Las Vegas!

Hi,

the EC Time Sheet provides in 1508 new features. Amongst others it is:

Pay type generation for work on specific weekdays like for example Sunday, public holidays, off days and shift premiums

Up to 1505 it was only possible to generate overtime premiums based on a daily or weekly basis. Now it is possible to generate specific pay types for work on a specific weekday like for example Sunday. The rules are so flexible that you even can set up that for Overtime on Sunday the Sunday premium gets generated instead of the Overtime premium, cause the Sunday Premium is higher (for example 60%) than the Overtime Premium (50%).

Moreover you can assign a "shift classification" to the daily time models and period models (elements of the workschedule). With this shift classification you can generate shift premiums for early / late shifts. For each hour an employee records on a day with that shift classification the shift premium gets calculated.

All paytypes that the time sheet generates can be sent to EC Cloud Payroll or SAP onprem Payroll. The Paytypes get mapped to IT2010 wage types and Payroll can process the IT2010.

On Call time recording

In the time sheet employees can record their on call time. On call times are not regarded as productive working time, so they don´t count for overtime calculation for example. During on call times an employee declares himself available to come to work within a short time frame for some emergencies. Of course the time sheet can generate specific pay types for the on call times.

Manual recording of allowances
You can set up in the time type profil if an employee is allowed to record allowances in the time sheet. Allowances are not regarded as productive working time - similar as on call times - , so they are not regarded for the overtime calculation. Manual allowance can be each premium pay that the system cannot generate, for example dirty work allowance when an employee has worked 3 hours under specific dirty conditions or any other allowance that cannot be derived from the recorded working time. You can of course set up which allowances an employee can record and if at all - or if only a time admin can do these on behalf of the employee

Negative time recording

Time Sheet supports besides pure Overtime recording and Positive time recording now also Negative time recording. Negative time recording is when employees are payed based on their planned time and they need only record the deviations from the planned time like overtime, absences or a training within the normal working time. The Time Sheet generates working time based on the work schedule when the employee has not recorded any deviations. If he has done so, the system mixes the recorded times with the generated times. Shift premiums or Premiums based on weekdays like Sunday work gets automatically generated when the planned time is transferred into worked time which is done daily.

The Negative time recording scenario is in November release only as a show case available as the autosubmit and autoapprove function for negative time recorders is not yet available, but this comes in the next release. Time Sheet needs then not to be touched by an employee when no deviations need to be recorded and the time sheet calculates base pay, shift premiums or sunday premiums based on the planned working time automatically and sends it to payroll.

More thrilling features will come for sure in the november release.

Volker Ruof

Do you agree with the following statement?

People are the most valuable asset of every organization. The power of happy and healthy people - their energy, their ingenuity and their engagement, is the fundamental element required to run an organization successfully.

But organizations are missing key insight on their workforce  - how happy, engaged, agile or healthy are their talents?

With the following consequences:

• They are not able to spend their health and learning budget in such a way that it addresses their employee’s need and adds most value. 
• Resulting business effects are not visible and clear.
• And there is no structured approach to help managers to improve organization’s and team’s health.

SAP’s internal Global Health Department has developed a score which provides exactly this kind of insight: The Business Health Culture Index (BHCI)  rates the general cultural conditions in an organization that enables employees to stay healthy and balanced. This index is part of SAP’s Integrated Report and even quantifies the business impact: For each percentage point in change of the BHCI, the impact on SAP’s operating profit was approximately between €65 million and €75 million in 2014.

With the BHCI SAP’s Global Health Department has proven that it is possible to measure Organizational Health. So wouldn’t it be great to have a standard tool, which provides any company automatically insight on the health of the organization considering people’s well-being and work-life balance, employee engagement, trust leadership and people’s innovation power?

Leveraging the experience and though-leadership of SAP’s Global Health Department, we have kicked off a joint project to come up with a design for a standard solution for Organisational Health.

If you are interested in this topic and want to work with us on such a solution, please contact me -  Tanja Baeck from SuccessFactors Employee Central Product Management.

Our third release this year is the release of the “centers”, but there are a lot of other great enhancements across the SuccessFactors® HCM Suite as well.

With these three new centers, we make life easier for HR and system administrators:

• Event center feature: based on predefined rules and settings, HR and system administrators can create suite-wide process events and notifications

Image 1: New event center feature

• The new administration center feature makes control easier by providing visibility into business process status, workflows, health and performance of your SuccessFactors solution instance

Image 2: New administration center

• With our new integration center feature, SuccessFactors solutions can be more easily connected to other solutions (via a simple-to-use, easy experience and prebuilt templates)

We are still increasing the number of our country versions. With this release we delivered two new country versions for Employee Central: Nigeria and Kenya.

Our payroll time sheet functionality now calculates time pay types for premiums and records allowances

Image 3: Payroll time sheet

In Talent Management, employee competencies can be matched with job role competencies by using our recommended successor feature. In addition, you can immediately address successor skills and competency gaps by adding development goals directly from the succession org chart.

Image 4: Redesigned succession org chart        

Image 5: Recommended successor

One more great enhancement it the new QuizBuilder. With the QuizBuilder, you can easily build and administer quizzes and include specific feedback as to why a question is correct or incorrect.

Image 6: Quiz Builder

And finally SAP Jam. With this release we delivered two great enhancements: SAP Jam brings SuccessFactors Learning course information into social learning groups and, in additions, acessibility enhancements add significant usability improvements for the hard of seeing.

Image 7: SAP Jam

These are only some highlights of our latest release. You can find our release video on YouTube.  And, you can learn more about the release in our SuccessFactors customer community (registration required).

Our next release is planned for Q4 2015. We’ll send you a summary of release highlights shortly before the release. However, you can review a detailed release summary, which is published in our customer community, four weeks prior to the release.

For SuccessFactors Professional Edition, some features may not be available or may become available at a later date.

Ah this one is for those of us who deals with user's on endless coffee breaks while updating employee info in the database (actually locking one or more employees).

Were you ever confronted with users locking employees data for just too long that it felt no one is actually modifing entries but rather at something else?

Yes, there is a new functionality that will automatically toggle to view mode if the session idle time is too long. It is classified under "Idee 6378"

SAP released this new functionality under note 2110196 - PA30; PA40; PA61: Automatic toggle to display mode after specified time period late April that came with SP 87 for EHP 4-7 and 15 for EHP 8.

Very little customizing is involved to activate this functionality;

- "The time period in minutes after which the system warns the user about the pending toggle from change mode to display mode.--

- The time period in minutes after which the system toggles from change mode to display mode in transactions PA30, PA40, and PA61. The time period begins with the time at which the user receives the warning about the pending toggle from change mode to display mode. The time period is displayed within that warning message."

Actually it can all be configured with view T77PAD_TIMER on two level: per country (MOLGA) and per company (BUKRS).

So this enables this toggle view mode to deal with cultural differences

So after the first 4 minutes of idle time, system will automatic display the following warning message:

If the user take no action to prevent toggling to view mode, after one more minute system will toggle to view mode and display the following error message:

Ah! there is a BADi if somehow you think this idea is cool but you would like to deactivate it under specifics circumstances... HRPAD_GET_TIMER

Cool toy anywayz

Antoine

SuccessFactors eXpert (SFX) Accreditation launches today! You, our customers, have been asking for in-depth training and a formal qualification program and we are delivering in an X-citing way!  Our SFX program involves several components:

Training:

• Taking SFX training courses is not required to take your accreditation exam.  However, these courses provide a deep understanding of our solutions and will give admins an advantage in passing their accreditation exam.  Following this week’s SuccessConnect, a number of SFX training offerings will be made virtually available as part of your SuccessFactors subscription.

Accreditation:

• By taking the SFX exams, admins can become eXperts in a single product, or our full suite!To maintain eXpert status, admins must complete accreditation exams annually. Currently exams are launched for the following products: Performance Management, Goal Management, 360 Reviews, Calibration, Compensation, Learning, Jam and Workforce Analytics. Exams for the rest of the suite will be launched before the end of 2015.

SFX Status:

• While the main purpose of this program is to help SF eXperts maximize their companies’ return on investment, admins who have earned their “X” (in any product) will also be eligible for additional perks!  We will offer these Xtraordinary admins benefits such as SFX-only events, support queue priority,
  participation in product advisory boards, and Customer Community recognition!

Xceed your limits and get involved THIS WEEK!  Find additional program information on the SuccessFactors Customer Community.

Are you ready to earn your “X”????

SAP SuccessFactors is introducing new capabilities in its HCM suite that transform the entire concept of HR service delivery, moving from series of individual and isolated self-services into end-to-end intelligent-services that can easily cross software modules and integrate processes. Intelligent services is designed to connect – and even predict – the impending transactions resulting from a change and automatically adjust them for the user, helping improve the employee experience and reduce reliance on – and cost of – shared services.

Limitations of Traditional HCM Suites

HR processes are often complex, typically spanning traditional boundaries of HCM applications and organizational departments. What begins as a simple Core HR transaction can have significant impact throughout other HCM suite modules, generating multiple workflows and updates that must be processed.  For example, if a hiring manager goes on leave, not only does the Core HR system need to get updated but potentially others including the applicant tracking system, the performance management systems, learning systems, payroll systems, benefits carriers, and more.  End users are often unable to easily navigate this complexity, and companies are forced to spend large sums of money on HR Shared Services groups and/or Business Process Outsourcing to ensure all the downstream processes are completed correctly based on the initiating event. 

We’ve taken the concept of suite – and the events and workflows within it – to the next level, building a more intelligent, predictive, and expansive suite that provides end users more control over end-to-end events and reduces the involvement – and expense – of HR shared services. 

The Next Generation of HCM Software – From Self-Services to Intelligent-Services

The traditional method of enabling causal end users like employees and managers to complete HR processes has been through self-services.  Yet, these are often confined to a single process and isolated to a specific HCM module, generating frustration for users to get through everything they need to do when something changes.  Costs are incurred to leverage shared services and/or Business Process Outsourcing to help process the events and correct errors. 

With new intelligent services, we’re taking self-services to a new level.  Instead of end users having to predict all the tasks they may need to complete when they start a HR process, intelligent software does it for them.  With intelligent services, managed in the new SAP SuccessFactors event center, individual transactions that make up common workforce events but cross organizational boundaries and software modules, are consolidated into a single experience.  Instead of managers or business partners having to guess all of the relevant tasks when a change takes place, or rely on shared services to fill the gaps, SuccessFactors does it for them, freeing up valuable manager and employee time. For example, workforce changes triggered by SuccessFactors’ core HR system, Employee Central, can be cascaded to other SuccessFactors modules such as Learning and Onboarding, as well as 3rd party systems. The end result is a simpler and more efficient employee experience, a reduction in cost and complexity, and less reliance on HR Shared Services or BPO to process/finish/correct the transaction – all improving HR service delivery. 

Unlike any other HCM suite, SuccessFactors enables an HR transformation from self-services that is:

• Integrated - – An HR transaction no longer begins and ends with a Core HR system, but extends across all impacted modules to create and end-to-end, complete process.  
• Intelligent – Each capability is aware of the smallest changes that happen in another and automatically responds with intelligence. It predicts the next step in the change, guiding users to the right place according to existing rules based on groups, role-based permissions and notifications.
• Efficient - Intuitive software fills the gaps instead of HR, shared services, or business process outsourcers, reducing time and expense spent on tasks that don’t drive value to the business. HR professionals can easily configure workforce changes based on rules and settings, allowing the right steps to be presented at the right time.

A New Suite-wide Event Framework

Creation and management of intelligent services is done in the new SAP SuccessFactors Event Center which underpins the entire SAP SuccessFactors HCM Suite, enabling customers to deploy brand new, end-to-end people events like becoming a manager, changing employee and/or position information, initiating a leave of absence, processing a new hire/termination, and more. 

All rules based on groups, role-based permissions, proxies, and notifications are incorporated.  SuccessFactors intelligent services can even be linked to external systems to enable seamless integration with 3^rd party applications.  HR administrators can also easily manage intelligent services based on rules and notifications settings within the Event Center. 

Benefits for Every User

Intelligent services simplifies the user experience for managers and employees by providing a logical consolidation of everything a casual user might need to do when responding to a HR event – all without regard to application boundaries or department siloes. No longer do they need to try and predict what’s next – or what system to access – when executing a multi-step HR process.  Instead they are taken through a series steps based on what’s happened and what the system predicts will need to be done.  

With every step that end users take on their own, at least one less call for help from HR Shared Services will be required. SuccessFactors is simplifying the HR service delivery model and reduces the workload – and cost – of HR Shared Services by eliminating the need for them to perform manual processes and data corrections. 

Enabling the transformation of HR with a simpler, smarter suite. 

At SAP SuccessFactors, we believe the future of HR is “no” HR, meaning that the HR function will continue to transform from the traditional administrative focus to a strategic enabler of business success supporting the people across the organization.  Intelligent services is the next-generation approach to self-services and takes us one step closer to this state by leveraging technology to remove complexity from typical HR events.  End users are empowered end users to do more on their own, without the need to rely on HR Shared Services to do it for them.

Available with the Q3 2015 release, SAP and SuccessFactors are enabling 16 pre-defined workforce changes and will add new events in future releases.

Gartner 2015 Magic Quadrant for Talent Management Suites – Our Response

There are hundreds of quotes about the importance of ‘fundamentals’… that is the primary principals or foundation on which something is based.  You can look to any area in society – sports, music, acting, finance/ investment… the list is endless. Here’s one of my favorites:

“The minute you get away from fundamentals – whether its proper technique, work ethic or mental preparation – the bottom can fall out of your game, your schoolwork, your job, whatever you’re doing.” – Michael Jordan

I speak with a numerous customers, partners, and market analysts about talent management and HR issues—mostly around how we can apply the latest technology to improve or solve a specific challenge. What’s interesting is that, more often than not, what most customers need help with is what could be considered to be the “fundamentals” of talent management. We’ve identified five “fundamentals” to talent management. These include the areas of Talent Attraction, Development, and Retention, plus Risk Mitigation and Communication.

• Attraction
• Development – starts with aligning people to the right goals, ensuring continuous focus and feedback, and providing relevant, personalized learning experiences 
• Retention
• Risk Mitigation
• Communication

Now, I’m not suggesting any of these areas are “simple” things to solve. Let’s be honest – people are complex, and organizations can be even more so. The result? … Building better results in your business thru your people can be challenging.

However, we do believe that the technology and talent suite used to help improve business results thru people should be comprehensive, simple to use, and simple to run. In fact, leveraging a talent management suite should help reduce complexity by clarifying, automating, and ensuring improvements of not just the fundamentals – but actual business results. The simple truth is – software solutions should make it easier to perform things that are complex and critical.

A talent management suite should easily help you improve your fundamentals – today, and tomorrow. Meaning, they you should get fast value in solving your talent challenges today, and provide you confidence in the vision and direction for the future of the solution.

We are proud to once again be recognized as a Leader in the 2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Talent Management Suites where provides of talent management software are evaluated across two dimensions, “Ability to Execute”, and “Completeness of Vision”. 

We believe our leadership in Talent Management is a testament to our ability to help HR and business leaders not only improve their talent management fundamentals and business results today, but also provide a confident, crisp, clear direction for tomorrow.

Gartner includes all of the key areas of talent management in their assessment: Recruiting, Onboarding, Learning, Performance & Goals, Compensation, Succession & Development – as well as analytics, social, and mobile capabilities. Further, they review things like services and support, and go-to-market plans.

Gartner defines “Leaders” as vendors who “demonstrate a market-defining vision of how TM technology can help HR leaders achieve business objectives. Leaders have the ability to execute against that vision through products and services, and have demonstrated solid business results in the form of revenue and earnings. In the TM suite market, Leaders show a consistent ability to win broad suite deals. They have significant successful customer deployments in North America, EMEA and the Asia/Pacific region in a wide variety of vertical industries and with multiple proof points. Leaders are often what other providers in the market measure themselves against.”

We are honored, and frankly humbled to receive this recognition. As a leader in Talent Management we feel a tremendous responsibility to continue to provide innovative solutions that reduce complexity and help you more easily improve the fundamentals of talent management so you can achieve even greater results.

Implementing the New Payroll Control Center – a consultant's view

At last there has been modernisation of the way we run payroll in SAP with the release of HR Renewal FP3.  This is exciting news for those of us who work in this space.  Here is a brief summary of the steps to implement it and of my view having built a solution with it.

I have not covered “Test Payrolls” here.  I’m just concentrating on the Payroll Cockpit and Control Center in this post.

Basic Principles

The Payroll Cockpit

Provides a framework to create checks (not the American spelling of cheques, but rather validation of employee’s pay) and exception reporting for use during the payroll run. Note– these checks are not reports you download (there is not export to excel button), but rather each is a means to establish whether there is some exception that needs to be looked into.  Examples of such checks are; Net pay over a certain amount, missing master data, incorrect data, large retros etc.

These exception checks enable the business user to be guided directly to the employee(s) who need to be investigated to establish whether they are incorrect, or whether the exception is valid.  If they are incorrect then they can be corrected and re-run, if the exception is valid the user can mark it as such and it drops off the error list.

The Payroll Cockpit is accessed via URL:

http://<sap ecc server details>:<port>/sap/bc/ui5_ui5/sap/hrpy_cockpit/index.html?sap-client=010&sap-uilanguage=EN&sap-ui-appcache=false

The Payroll Control Center (Feature Pack 3 onwards)

The Payroll Control Center had some limitations in FP1/2, and the version in FP3 is re-vamped and far more viable for a customer to use.  If you are considering implementing a payroll control center, I recommend you jump straight to FP3 as a minimum.

There are 2 business roles catered for in the Payroll Control Center (FP3); The Payroll Manager, and The Payroll Administrator(s)

The Payroll Manager accesses the PCC via URL:

https://<sap ecc server details>:<port>/sap/bc/ui5_ui5/sap/hrpy_pcc_proc_2/index.html?sap-client=010&sap-uilanguage=EN&sap-ui-appcache=false

The Payroll Administrator(s) accesses the PCC via URL:

https://<sap ecc server details>:<port>/sap/bc/ui5_ui5/sap/hrpy_pcc_errm/index.html?sap-client=010&sap-ui-language=EN&sap-ui-appcache=false#/Worklists

Note– there wasn’t any SAP documentation (that I could find) telling us the payroll administrator URL when we were building the control center (unlike the cockpit and payroll manager's control center view), so we had to work it out ourselves.

However, once worked out and a process built, the solution really came together.

The Payroll Manager view

From here the payroll manager can physically run payroll, for example the process can be setup as:

1. Release control record for payroll
2. Run payroll driver (in parallel if required)
3. Run Posting Simulation
4. Run ‘Policies’ – i.e. run the checks described in the Payroll Cockpit section above
5. Run ‘Monitoring’ – i.e. assign out the checks to the various payroll administrators for processing / actioning.  This step also allows the Payroll Manager to track what items have or have not been actioned
6. Exit Payroll control record
7. Run Production Posting

Each step can be re-run as necessary, i.e. once your payroll administrators have actioned their checks, you can, for example, simply select the “Run Payroll” item again and re-run pay.The most exciting part of the toolset (to me at least) isn’t actually that you can physically run RPCALCX0 from a UI5 browser, it’s the check and validation process (i.e. Policies and Monitoring in the above screen).  You can setup the Payroll Control Center to just perform the checking process (i.e. Policies and Monitoring steps) if you wish, and keep the payroll processing in the back end.As a payroll manager, in the monitoring step you see a summary of the issues identified:

and get to assign out the various items to be actioned by the payroll administrators of that area:

Then the (once the payroll manager clicks on “Start” in the monitoring screen) above the payroll administrator (Joe Bloggs in this example) can see those checks on their error management screen of the payroll control center (below):

One of the big, additional aspects available as part of FP3 is the extra detail you get within these checks / validations.  If you click on one of the items above (Net Pay > $4000 in my example) you get some additional information:

The “Solutions” link “Check employee pay details” here is actually a hyper link and will take you into SAP (GUI via your browser) to look at the employee.But even better than that is, if you click on the row you can go to the detail screen where you can set up the check to give you additional information for the employee like a wagetype reporter style output for them, their Payslip, and other important information.  This can all be customised to what you want for your customer:

As far as relevant information presented in one place for a payroll administrator to review and action, this is excellent!

What you need in order to implement

This solution is a significant change / addition to the normal ECC back end only functionality many consultants / customers may be familiar with.  Therefore, I recommend you take a 2 step process to getting it up and running.

Step 1 – Get the payroll cockpit working. This is significantly helped by the RDS solution SAP provide, and is less complex and better documented than the FP3 control center

Step 2 – Get the FP3 Payroll Control Center working

Additionally, the below skillsets are necessary to be able to implement (and change) the toolset effectively to be of value for businesses:

1. ABAP (Object Oriented) programming skills (sorry functional only people, it doesn’t mean you need to be able to code yourself, though it is an advantage, but you need access to someone who can to implement what changes you want, and it’s all ABAP OO code)
2. Gateway (limited knowledge required)
3. SQL (if you’re using declustered payroll results, which you need to really be to be able to run payroll checks in a practical timeframe)
4. Payroll result structures
5. Master data structures
6. Payroll Processes
7. Perseverance – this stuff is not intuitive (to start with at least) and will require your problem solving skills to get it running

Step 1 – Get the payroll cockpit working

Firstly, get the technical base items installed:

1. Get on to the required HRSP / FP level (and associated dependencies like SAP_UI)
2. If you’re installing the control center (i.e. not just the cockpit) then make sure you get as up to date as you can.  There were a lot (approx. 20 or so) notes released in July / August 2015 to fix issues, before I had those notes in the Control Center wasn’t working well for me
3. Install the RDS solution (http://scn.sap.com/community/erp/hcm/blog/2014/11/24/a-best-practice-to-implement-sap-payroll-control-center-add-on)

Then on to activating items:

1. Get familiar with the (200 page L ) document on the payroll cockpit and control center available in OSS note 2053309.  Note– for the control center, this document provides information on the original control center (i.e. pre-FP3).  Though it’s good to read this for background knowledge, the FP3 one is reasonably different so don’t use this as the bible for FP3. The install info is from page 157 of this document
2. Someone (normally basis) who can setup the gateway components in section 7.4 (you don’t need a standalone gateway box, the gateway items can be done on a normal ECC box)
3. The test item in section 7.6 of this document will not do much, it’s just a test to see if you can see the object from the payroll cockpit link.  If you can’t see anything from your URL then it’s likely an auth issue. Basis can run an auth trace to see what objects your ID is failing on, it’s likely it’s those in section 6.6.1. Talk to your security team about getting your role updated to include these objects
4. If you can see the test object then chances are (if you’ve installed the RDS) that you’ll also be able to see those tiles, click on them and you should be able to see the details of the RDS provided checks (provided you’ve run program PYD_EXECUTE_INSTANCES)

Once you’ve got to this point you’re up and running.  Now it’s a question of using the templates SAP provide in the RDS, and playing with them to understand how they work and how to alter them for your business.

Step 2 – Get the Payroll Control Center working

1. Read the document provided in OSS note 1995698
2. Create 2 users, one being the payroll administrator, one the payroll manager
3. Ensure both are setup in table T526 as administrators for your payroll (the large 200 page document talks about this)
4. Run program PYC_ADM_TRANSACTION to get the various background jobs required to support the payroll control center going
5. Get a basic payroll process up and running (i.e. use process template PYP_V2_PRODUCTIVE_PAYROLL as a start).  Don’t worry about your checks (i.e. policies and monitoring step) for now.  Again, you may hit auth issues here, so use a trace to find out the objects you’re hitting and failing on
6. Once you have the payroll process working, get a FP3 check up and running, use data source type PYD_CHK_FP4_SAMPLE, data source class PAYROLL_POLICY_EXAMPLE_3 as your base. Note– the class and methods for the FP3 checks are reasonably different from the ones the payroll cockpit uses, so don’t worry about using any payroll cockpit ones for now, just use the SAP provided FP3 one.  Note – this SAP provided FP3 check reads declustered payroll results, so if you don’t have declustered results you’ll need to copy this class to something else and change the check to return information from master data just for the purpose of ensuring you get a result from the check
7. Once you have one working, you can now start to copy across the payroll cockpit checks you have from the RDS solution into the FP3 version of the data source classes to give yourself a suite of checks
8. Then you can really get to grips with the additional items you get in FP3 with the various subscreens of the swim lanes in the payroll administrator’s UI5 view (i.e. the solution suggestions, Key Values, Generic overview etc) that enable the payroll administrator to be given more information about the employee that has come up in the check

Areas for improvement

     1. No RDS available for the FP3 Control Center yet

If you want to get the Control Center in FP3 going, it will require effort to do so, but effort that I believe is certainly worthwhile

     2. Automatic assignment of items to be investigated / resolved

Most clients I have (particularly large ones) distribute their payroll by personnel area, employee group (or something similar).  The payroll control center does not yet have functionality that will automatically assign all errors associated with personnel area 1234 to payroll administrator A, etc.  The payroll manager has to do this manually

     3. Position based access

Currently a user has to be assigned to the administrator group directly in table T526 in order to appear in the UI5 screen as a user to assign checks to in the control center (as well as have the relevant auth objects assigned). Given people move in and out of positions, it would be best (in my opinion) if this access to the control center was provided based on an attribute against a position.  Having T526 drive it makes things very manual

     4. Auditing who did what

The payroll administrators can flag employees who have come up in a check as being ‘correct’ and their exception ‘resolved’.  However, there isn’t a report (or screen) at this stage that a payroll manager can use to establish who has set an employee to being OK. This kind of functionality would be of additional benefit should there be an overpayment (or worse still underpayment) to an employee which an administrator had looked at and decided was OK to pass.

     5. Scheduled processing

Currently the payroll control center requires someone to trigger it, i.e. you can't set it to run overnight.  This may impair some customers from taking it up as they like (for obvious reasons) to get the payroll processing and locking down of employees done out of business hours

Key mindset changes

The payroll control center (and to a lesser but similar extent the payroll cockpit) is about running the pay, establishing exceptions, and correcting those exceptions in order to complete the payroll efficiently and correctly.  It doesn’t cover ‘reporting’ or reconciling the pay in the way we are used to via WT reporter, etc (currently at least).

In Summary

FP3 brings SAP payroll processing into the modern age.  It gives the payroll manager and administrator the ability to interact directly in their processing, leveraging payroll and master data validation checks, parallel processing performance, and declustered payroll results to give a faster, more efficient and more effective process.

Recently, a had some friends ask me if it was possible to enable a sync to auto populate Employee Central Job Information directly to Employee Profile’s Work Experience Within Company or Job History Portlet. The answer is “YES” and I’m pretty sure SuccessFactors have documented it somewhere. The big question or challenge most of us face is “Where can I find it?”

In this blog, I’ll go through the configuration steps required to enable this function.

Corporate Data Model

In Provisioning, download the Corporate Data Model and look for the <hris-element id="eventReason"> section.

Make sure the visibility of the “include-in-work-experience” ID is set to “both”.  If the HRIS field is not available, just add it in before the closing of the </hris-element>.

Now update the Corporate Data Model back in Provisioning.

Foundation Object

Go to Admin Tools > Employee Files > Manage Organization, Pay and Job Structures.

Look for Event Reason “Transfer” (or any Event Reason driven Job Info record which you would want to include in Employee Profile)

Do Take Action > Make Correction and change the Include in Work Experience Flag to “Yes” and Save.

Repeat the steps for other event reasons.  This controls what type of history will default into the new job history portlet. I would recommend the following event reasons to include such as “New Hire”, “Rehire”, “Job Reclassification” and “Promotion”.

Configure Business Rules

Next we need a business rule which we will attach on the Employee Profile portlet.

Go to Admin Tools > Company Settings > Configure Business Rules and Create A New Rule

Make sure the Base Object is “Job Information” and the “if” statement Event Reason.Include In Work Experience = Yes

Enabling Employee Profile Portlet

Now go to Admin Tools > Employee Files > Configure Employee Files

Select the view you would like to add the new portlet to. In my example below, I would be adding it to the Profile.

Select “Insert Portlet” where you would like the portlet to show up and “Create and Add” the Internal Job History portlet.  You may also want to delete the existing “Work Experience Within Company” section since this is now a duplicate.

Proceed to configure the Internal Job History Portlet

In my example, I renamed the portlet to reflect Work Experience Within Company replacing the former.

Please also ensure to define the business rule created previously as the Rule name and include the fields you would like to display and save.

Do remember to Save Dashboard when you’re completed

Role Based Permission

The final step now is to give access to this newly created portlet. Do note that there is no need to give “edit” access since this is displaying information from Employee Central.

And now to test. Select any employee and go to their Profile record. Scroll to the newly created portlet and Job Information record would be populated here.

Thank you,

Leon Lee

www.veritasprime.com | www.helpmycloud.com

All of the documentation and cases I could find refer to the benefits of Declustering when on a HANA box. However, many customers are not at the stage of being on HANA yet, so the question I had was; What benefits can Declustering bring on a standard (i.e. Oracle DB) ECC system?

Setup

The initial setup required for declustering on a non-HANA system is the same as on HANA.  It consists of activating the framework, flagging which tables to decluster, doing the initial conversion of existing results, and then activating the declustering to occur ongoing.  These are simple steps detailed in note 1774918.

Also, it’s important you bring in the latest declustering updates.  Specifically note  1826671 is important as it brings in reference tables required to pick up the correct entries in WPBP and also enable quicker access to retro results.

Skillset required

The below skillsets are necessary to be able to implement (and use) declustering effectively to be of value for businesses:

1. Payroll functional knowledge of cluster structure (off-cycles, retros, splits etc)
2. ABAP programming skills
3. SQL skills

Database storage

In a non-HANA system declustering the major payroll tables (WPBP, RT, BT, a couple of country specific tables) consumed roughly the same amount of space as PCL2, i.e.

Declustered results + PCL2 results ≈ 2 * PCL2 results

Performance

The comparisons I have here are timings on purely how long it takes to get to the dollar figure result. These results are from ABAP programs.

The non-HANA system is from a customer with approximately twice the employee volume of the HANA system. Both are large employee volumes.

Non-HANA system:

HANA system:

Items 1, 2 and 3 are the same query / code for both systems (though slightly different selection criteria given the nature of each customer) with the exception of item 1.  This item reads the BT table for the non-HANA system and the RT table for the HANA system as the HANA customer doesn’t have their BT table declustered.  Therefore comparing item 1 between the 2 customers is not appropriate here, it is useful for explaining behaviour on the non-HANA system though.

Reasons for differences in performance

The reason for the difference in performance within the non-HANA system for the above 3 tests is that declustering speed there seems to be proportional to how many items you are selecting (the WHERE statement in your SQL) and how many tables you are reading to get those items.

For example, request item 1 above (Net Pay for Payroll Area 01) for the non-HANA system is a very simple request as the report only needs to look at 2 tables to get the information and we don’t have to worry about retros (BT table is the A result only), hence the very fast results.  However, items 2 and 3 above needs to look at 4 tables and restrict within those (as well as take into account retros) to get the desired result, this takes a lot longer to run.

The HANA system doesn’t hit these same constraints, and the speed in that system is more proportional to the amount of data being read, i.e. the more data the longer it takes to run. The HANA system performance does not seem to be dependent on the complexity of the SQL statement like the non-HANA system is.

This dynamic should be taken into consideration when scoping the benefits of declustering for your customer(s).

The gaps / limitations or declustering – things to be aware of before embarking on an implementation

First and foremost, declustering is just a method of storing information.  It’s not a toolset.  Implementing declustering doesn’t make anything you have now run any faster.  Declustering stores information in a way where it can be accessed quicker and (from a technical point of view at least) easier.

If you want to use declustering (which I believe you really should), the question then becomes how? There are no out of the box (that I’m aware of) back end ABAP programs that will read it.  You have to build tools to use it.

If you want to use it for reporting, then there is ancillary information a business user will want outside of what you can get from the payroll results.  Employee name or the text for the personnel area for example.  Therefore you have to not just get the figures from the declustered tables, you’ll need to lookup the other required information to make it fit for purpose for a business user.

Your basic options are:

1. Build something to read from it in ECC (Wagetype reporter does not read from it)
2. Use the toolsets SAP provides and create your code and SQL statements to read from it. The key toolsets SAP provide are; the Payroll Cockpit, Payroll Control Center and BI

Declustering does not alter your posting results.  So if you report from PPOIX, PPOPX etc for reconciling payroll to your GL then your performance under a declustered system will not change for that.

There are some other blogs around that have excellent information on the technical aspects of declustering.  This one by Gabriel is particularly useful:

http://scn.sap.com/community/erp/hcm/blog/2014/07/04/new-analytic-capability-of-payroll-results-via-declustering

Summary

As can be seen from the test results, significant performance advantages can be achieved by moving to a HANA system, but should that not be on the radar for your organisation in the immediate future you can still leverage the declustered toolset to significantly improve performance within your current system constraints. There additional database requirements to use it, however this is not an insurmountable impost given the performance improvement.

This is a topic I have felt very passionate about over the years and was glad that Bill Kutik gave Luke Marson and I an opportunity to share our thoughts.

Would love to hear your thoughts as a customer, vendor or consulting firm on your experiences.

Hi Community,

On May, 14^th the fourth feature pack (FP4) and few days ago, on August, 13^th the fifth feature pack (FP5) for HR renewal 2.0 has been released.

But, what’s in for you here? Let me introduce to you the new functionalities we enabled for HR renewal 2.0.

With FP4 we concentrated on smaller, but important enhancements for many of our productive customers.

Extended Search Help for Positions and Organizational Units

With these enhancements the Search Helps for Position and Organizational unit input fields now offer a combination of text-based search, organizational hierarchy search and Favorite Organizational Units.

Picture 1: Extended F4-Search Help with HR renewal 2.0 FP4

The extended search help is per default activated for the following instances when Business Function HCM_PAO_CI_8 (HCM, Personnel & Organization 08) is activated:

• Roadmap Forms: initial step „General Process Data“, field „Position“
• Various PA-Infotypes with fields OrgUnit or Position
• OrgManagement: Managed OrgUnits (IT 1001/012)

Automatically active (after installing FP4) will be the usage of the new extended search help for the following standard FPM Forms:

• Move Position (HPAO_MOVE_POSITION) 4field “OrgUnit” within section “Destination Organizational Unit”
• Move Org Unit (HRPAO_MOVE_ORGUNIT) 4field “OrgUnit” within section “Destination Organizational Unit”
• Create Position (HRPAO_CREATE_POSITION) 4field “Managed Org. Unit”

The new extended Search help can also be used in customer specific FPM forms or customer specific infotypes!

With FP4 we additionally enabled the global info types0017 “Travel Privileges”, 0128 “Notifications” and 0712 “Main Personnel Assignment” for the usage with HR
renewal.

And - last but not least – we delivered the country versions with localized info type configurations for: Romania, Kazakhstan, Thailand and Ukraine.

HR Renewal 2.0 FP5 focuses on TCO enhancements to speed up the implementation of solutions for HR Professionals, as well as usability enhancements.

All enhancements were specific requests by productive customers and cover feedback from HR end users as well as system administrators. For FP5 you have to activate business function HCM_PAO_CI_9 (HCM, Personnel & Organization 09).

First enhancement of FP5 is that

General Process Data screen always editable in roadmap formswithin the initial scenario step.

To give you some more insight in the reason of this enhancement I would like to describe one business case in more detail:

The General Process Data screen includes especially the “effective date” information. As end users confirmed in our discussions this date is often entered incorrectly or have to be changed during the process, so that it is necessary to correct the date after leaving the initial screen of a roadmap process.

But - so far - the initial screen could not be changed after the user has moved to the next step in the roadmap. This was a deliberate design decision since the parameters entered on General Process Data (e.g. organizational assignment information) often determine screen structures, default values, field attributes etc. of the subsequent infotype screens.

Productive users gave feedback that this handling is too rigid and not user friendly. Therefore we decided to change the behavior of the system here.

Second enhancement of FP5 is the

     Step-dependent infotype content / attributes in roadmap forms.

Also some more details on this enhancement:

Until FP5 it was not possible to provide different infotype content for different steps in roadmap forms. All users had the same set of infotypes available.
There was only the possibility to set the entire roadmap form to „read-only“, for approvers. But often it is not required to give all users all information,
sometimes users will not even be allowed to see all information entered in a process.

Therefore now infotypes can be configured differently per scenario step within a roadmap form. These roadmap forms can also be used to kick-off change requests by a manager (who sees a limited set of infotypes) and have an HR expert complete further, more complex employee data.

Picture 2: Define step-dependent roadmap form with HR renewal 2.0 FP5

Picture 3: Define the attributes of the step-dependent infotypes – HR renewal 2.0 FP5

Picture 4: Result -step-dependent Roadmap form with HR renewal 2.0 FP5

The third enhancement of FP5 is

Generate HCM P&F Roadmap Forms based on Personnel Actions.

Because HR Renewal for HR Professionals is largely used by existing ERP HCM customers it was not a surprise, that these customer requested a tool to take over the configuration they already have in place to handle multi-infotype scenarios/employee contractual changes. For these scenarios like hiring, internal transfers, terminations etc. the customers are using „Personnel Actions“.

To lower TCO and reduce the manual effort to make these settings available as HCM Processes & Forms content – which is required for HR renewal – a new report helps customers to automate the creation of HCM P&F content for PA by generating processes and form scenarios of type „Roadmap Form“.

Picture 5: New IMG node for Generate Processes and Forms based on Personnel Actions with HR renewal 2.0 FP5

Excludedfrom this enhancement are settings for personnel actions via feature IGMOD - I know, I know!!

Additionally only „Roadmap Forms“ are generated, so no other form type (like FPM forms, mass forms) is supported in this approach and it does not apply to PD infotypes.

The forth enhancement of FP5 I would like to point your attention to is

Context-dependent UI field control for infotypes.

Customers usually want to change the UI attributes of fields per infotype.

So farthey could achieve this with different tools, but none of these tools seem to be as fast/efficient as classic options customers are used to from the SAPGUI world.

If customers e.g. change the setting field attributes for the user interfaces - which reside on the new infotype framework - via table T588MFPROPC there are some disadvantages:

These settings e.g. apply to all user interfaces that run on the decoupled infotype framework (so also to ESS), and only fields of P-structures
are included. Additionally there is not F4 help available for input fields etc..

If customers decided to create an own FPM configuration they faced other disadvantages:

That they had to have someone with know-how of FPM, they had more effort to copy standard configuration, adapt it and then add the own configuration ID to the configuration of the master data application.

The new IMG activity allows customers to define field attributes per application context, e.g. specifically for HR Professional / Master Data Application + roadmap forms as well as for fields of UI structures.
All input fields are supported by F4 value helps to make only correct entries.

Picture 6: IMG node to define context-specific UI field properties with HR renwal 2.0 FP5

And the fifth enhancement of FP5 is

Navigation from infotype to related configuration settings.

There are certain customizing activities that can be called from the infotype UIs, e.g. current settings. Therefore, the user has to be able to navigate to these
IMG activities quickly via ‘Further option’ link in the master data application. In addition, some values have to be defaulted when navigating to the IMG activities. Such kind of navigations can now be realized by configuration in LPD_CUST.

Picture 7: Configuration of quick navigation from infotype to configuration settings with HR renewal 2.0 FP5

For more information about the enhancements in HR renewal FP4 and FP5, or our deliveries with previous feature packs please visit our resources space (implementation information) on service market place.

Saying this I hope I could give you a good overview of our recent investments and - as always - we are very interested in your feedback!

Best regards,

Sylvia Strangfeld

sylvia.strangfeld@sap.com 

or How to end the Labours of Sisyphus

Note: This article is discussing elements of the European Working Time Directive, but nothing in the article shall be considered legal advice. Before making any decisions possible affecting regulations, do get your own legal advice first

I spent some of the more frustrating hours of my life as an HR systems consultant imple

menting the European Working Time Directive in SAP Time Management in some shape or from. It was

frustrating so often not because the system couldn't do it. No, the frustrating element comes from organisations, who want to implement the regulation through a system only. And you simply can't.

Time administrators often experience the same frustration as the clean up hundreds of

warning and error messages every day only to find the same number again the very next morning. So, they could be excused to feel like ancient King Sisyphus, who was tasked by the gods (they didn't have the European Commission yet back in those days) to roll a heavy boulder up a hill only to see it escaping and rolling back rolled back down every time he was about to reach the top.

But let's take one step back and look at the most significant elements of the regulation.

1) Maximum daily working time is 10 hours: the possibly most important rule

Easy: cutting off working time after 10 hours even comes with the out-of-the-box configuration in the time schema TM00 and who doesn't know constant TGMAX in table T511K? It usually also comes with a warning for the time administrator to see.

Hold on a minute. Of course, there are exceptions. On individual cases like emergencies (you don't want your surgeon to leave you lying there cut open, because the operation took longer than planned and he reached his 10 hours for the day, right?). That's usually dealt with using a custom subtype for infotype 2007 and a custom rule. And then there are planned exceptions, e.g., when it does make sense and is safe to compress the monthly working time into fewer days. Then you'll manage these exception using work schedule parameters or groupings. Fine.

So, it"s quite simple: If someone clocks more than 10 hours without special permission, they don't get paid for the extra time. Or is it? Sounds to me like there is an assumption that working time you don't get paid for is actually not making you tired. It counts as regeneration time. Well, if you believe that, could you please come to London and work for us? We promise not to pay you, so it will be very relaxing ;-)

And this is where the whole idea of "implementing the European Working Time Directive" in SAP HR Time Management, Employee Central Timesheet or any other system falls down. The system can only make sure your employees don't get paid for more than 10 hours, but it's got no control over actual working time (unless it's linked to access control). I get the idea that it does discourage employees from working too long, if you tell them, they won't be paid for it and payment is also a strong incentive to obtain approvals for exceptions, so you know about them. But it can't be reduced to a Time&Attendance problem. It's a People Management problem and therefore line managers need to be involved. So, the very least you need to add is that line managers get the right analytics tools to recognise excesses in working time AND someone to make sure they actually act. Whether or not employees are actually paid for the excess time becomes a side issue (though not paying them sets the right incentives and, let's be honest, is convenient for the employer).

Another question you should ask: are we making sure employees not capturing clock times are also compliant? This group of people is often conveniently excluded from the strict regime, as there is no easy proof for them working excess hours. Well, that doesn't make it more legal. Clearly: this is a supervisor's task to monitor.

2) max 48h working time per week over long term average

in a 6 day week, employees can clock 60 hours without going above 10h per day. The regulator believes this is too much (probably right for most people and jobs imo), but acknowledges you might have to work a bit more during peak periods. That's why the weekly limit of 48 hours (actually the limit is 8h per day based on a 6 day work week - and using holidays or sickness to get the average down doesn't count) can be exceeded, but should be compensated for with shorter days during a 6 months period.

There are some customers, who want their time evaluation to throw error messages at their time admins or even cut pay. Most customers, however, don't do anything about this rule or have a report to monitor the numbers.

The last way is by far the best imo, assuming this report is provided to and acted upon by line managers. These warning messages fired at time admins are usually ignored as a time consuming nuisance and cutting pay - well: dto.

3) Taking the right breaks

This is arguably turned into the most complicated bit in the system. The rules are (almost) clear:

- if you work more than 6h on a day you need to take 30min break

- If you work more than 9h it's 45min all together

- you are not meant to take the break in the first or last hour or in pieces smaller than 15 minutes. Plus a few more details

The standard time evaluation schema is set up to deal with the 30 and 45 minutes break. An even easier way is possible through work schedule rule configuration. The schema solution doesn't really care, when the break is placed. In fact, technically, it does often place it at the end of the work day. This is against the rule, but the argument goes that it's only about cutting 30 or 45 minutes off no matter when the employee really took her break. As overtime often goes into time, where night shift is paid, this doesn't always work and you need to mess around a bit with the schema at that point. A discussion is: if someone clocks 6 hours and 1 minute:

- should we deduct just one minute, because than we don't exceed the 6 hours any more.

- or 30 minutes, because that's the break the employee should have taken already by that time, had he planned to stay for more than 6 hours

- or 15 minutes, because the first point applies, but breaks need to be taken in 15 minutes chunks?

This example illustrates how futile the exercise is: If an employee hasn't done a break yet, when reaching 6 hours, but realises she needs a few more minutes, surely she wouldn't have a break first before working another 5 minutes?

Well, he same as above applies: cutting breaks out of paid working time doesn't guarantee a break, but if employees are responsible for taking their breaks and line managers do some monitoring, this may just be fine.

Where you really see a lot of futile effort is, when employees do actually clock out and in for their breaks. The standard rules (to some extend) and custom rules (often quite complex) are designed to consider breaks clocked by the employees and then adding break time as and when required. E.g.: an employee works from 8am to 18am (10 hours), clocks out 13:00 and back in 13:30 for lunch break. The schema now calculates that there are still 15 minutes of break missing. And pretends there was another break, say, 13:30-13:45. Now, tell me if I'm wrong here: I can understand that breaks are not clocked and standard breaks therefore assumed by the system unless told otherwise. However, if employees do clock breaks, then adding to the recorded break time looks suspiciously like cheating to me. And all that at the cost of considerable, unnecessary complexity added to your system. Yes, it's not rocket science, but as it usually multiplies with a lot of other complexities, weeding these rules out would often be a real gain in simplicity (yes, consciously using the buzz word here).

4) and on and on and on

There are quite a few more rules in the regulation concerning, amongst other things:

• a minimum of 11 hours off in each 24h period (often neglected, but an important safety issue)
• a minimum of 4 weeks annual leave
• special rules for employees under 18 years old

You may want to argue about the rules themselves. They do make sense, but as they are pretty indiscriminate often may take it too far and feel a bit patronising. But that"s not, what I want to discuss here.

So, can the system do this for me?

There's one big problem in time management in many organisations and the working time directive is symptomatic for this problem:

The management of what's often called the organisation's most important resource is delegated to a machine, when it should be line managers' job. In many cases, it would be possible to disentangle from several automated rules and use the energy freed up to provide line managers the right information to manage their team members.

And that's where SuccessFactors Employee Central Time Sheet comes in, in case you have wondered about the headline. Yes: if you have extremely complex rules (be it to calculate fake breaks to comply with the working time regulation or to do more sensible things to actually support your core business), that require highly complex rules or programming of custom operations in transaction PE04, then you probably won't be able to use Employee Central Time Sheet. In that case you need to turn to 3rd party products, when you move to the cloud.

However, if you manage to streamline your calculation (and a lot of customers I have seen could do that) to have the time and attendance system doing its own job and line managers doing theirs - supported with the right reporting, then you'll often realise that EC Time Sheet is the better solution for you. SuccessFactors Employee Central is perfectly designed to empower employees and line managers to do their job, so you'll be more likely to engage line managers with an easy to use system.

If you go to the very basics, Employee Central Time Sheet in release 15_08 may already be all you need. In that case: congratulations for a great job in simplifying your HR process! However, it's quite possible you still want to use actual times rather than just durations in hours. Otherwise you won't be able to record breaks at all. In that case you'll have to look further down the roadmap (possibly not very far ) and pick the right time to switch depending on the speed of evolution in EC Timesheet and your exact requirements.

Employee Central Time Sheet Screen from 15_05 release

And while you are waiting, some simplification may already be possible to prepare for the great day. Most notably: fix Sisyphus' boulder on the top of that hill. Stop generating these hundreds of warning and error messages for time administrators, when, at the end of the day, they don't really have the power to do anything about them. Why have them spend an hour per day ticking off and approving messages, if there is no real decision to be made. You'll be better off monitoring it with a report and you can use the freed up time of your time admins to plan for the Employee Central migration - or for the 3rd party integration.

Comply with a single tick box

Well, it's not all gloom and doom. There is actually one very simple way in SAP HR to comply with the working time directive. And that's having employees opting out of it and recoding that decision in infotype 0016:

Opt-out field for UK in infoytpe 0016 in SAP HCM

Cool story. I actually got hired after replying to a tweet. No lie. I met Will Staney in exploring technology jobs in Austin, and I stayed in touch with him on Twitter. And when he was looking for a new person on his team, in true Will fashion, he reached out to his impressive social network to source his hire. I replied to his tweet. “Stop looking for a video editor. You have found one.”

It’s a cool story. I’m proud of it. I know Will is too.

That was 2012. And in the 3 years since, things have changed drastically.

As with many aspects of recruiting and social media, procedures have become popular. Buzzwords created. Best practices created. Then copied. Then become old news. Cliché. Then laughed at… All within a year.

We try to see who can be the first to race into new technology, Periscope. Google glass. Apple Watch. (Which honestly, I love mine. It makes me feel like James Bond.)

As creatures of habit, it’s hard to admit that things are changing so quickly that by the time you figure something out, it’s already time to change it.

A lot of industry professionals I know don’t like the term “social recruiting.” As my friend, Matt Charney said recently, “All recruiting is social recruiting.”

It is a vague term with multiple meanings… and it happens to be in my job title.

So when I use the term social recruiting, I’m speaking specifically of Employment Branded social media channels and how they support recruiting efforts. Not how recruiters use social media to recruit.

The reality is, this is all new territory: the merging of recruitment, social media, and brand. And the fact is, that the details change daily.

With the recent announcement that Google+ has (essentially) failed as a social network, instead of shying away from missteps, I think it could be beneficial to talk about some of our missteps. 

Misstep 1: Can I haz all the channels?

In the early days (circa 2008-2010) of implementing Employment Brand on social media, there was a land rush to get on every social channel that could be even potentially viable.

Facebook & Twitter? of course.

1. YouTube. Check.

Google+? Sure.

Pinterest & Instagram? Seems easy enough. Share photos.

What’s next?

Tumblr? Snapchat? WeChat?

Global channels?

Webio? Ren Ren? Vkontakte?

And there are new channels coming onto the market everyday. Medium?Ello? Potentially, very cool.

The more we added, the more confused we got on what we were supposed to do.

Why? Because every channel is different, and the way users communicate on each channel is different. Motives are different.

Each new channel is an opportunity to post content in a unique way. Not just to repost our Facebook posts, which is a poor strategy.

Course correction: You don’t have to be on every channel.

Pick the channels that make sense for your brand. Let go of the rest.

Since our launch of Life at SAP branded channels in 2014 we have actually shrunk from 8 down to 5.  Our current channels are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, & Life at SAP Blog.

Misstep 2: Social Content Doesn’t Drive Hires.

I gave a presentation to our head of TA with our social recruitment strategy for Life at SAP. Our social recruitment strategy went something like this.

Step 1. Use employee stories to create dynamic, engaging content.

Step 2: Post content on social media… every channel possible.

Step 3: Include link to related, available jobs using Recruitment Marketing tool by SuccessFactors

Step 4: Wait for the candidates to come pouring in, because the content is awesome, social media is free, and we can track hires from every specific piece of content and channel.

To be fair, this wasn’t a terrible strategy. As a small team who was trying to figure out a number of challenging items, it was good enough to have content going out to every channel… until it wasn’t.

I can tell you one thing for certain. No matter how good the video, how cool of an infographic, how many retweets, social content is not going to drive large numbers of candidates into your pipeline.

This isn’t to say that social content isn’t useful. Every piece of content; photo, blog, article, tweet, company review all add to your Employment Brand, and your employment branded social channels are an important way for you to contribute to that conversation.

Course Correction: Equip Employees and Recruiters.

Part One:Train your employees to be active on social media. Manage your expectations and realize that not all your employees will want to participate. Create referral programs that are easy to utilize by sharing on social media.

Part Two: Work with social savvy recruiters to come up with new ideas for content that can help them sell to candidates.

Misstep 3: I Don’t Like Data.

Fairly recently, we ran a promoted post on Facebook targeting a specific job to employees of competitors that fit the profile of the candidate as best we knew.

We spent $1000 to advertise a program in a Middle Eastern country.

The results?

823,212 impressions

5,602 clicks on the ad (an irrelevant number)

89 clicks into the job description

6 apply completes

5 qualified applies

0 hires

I bring this up, not because sponsored posts on social media never work, but because it’s easy to let the outcome take a backseat to the cool new technology. 

But there is a fix; data.

This is a good thing for those in social recruiting, because, for some time the connection between social engagements and how that tied into hiring was similar to reading tealeaves. With the Recruitment Marketing Tool, we are able to pull the curtain back, and let the number speak for themselves.

The numbers?

Social media accounts for less than 1% of hires. #truthtalk

Does it matter if we have great engagement? Sure. Does it matter how many fans you have? Yes. But these metrics should not be your primary indicator of success.

Course Correction: Follow the Data and adapt

It’s hard to admit that something you worked so hard for and believed in doesn’t work. But if the data shows otherwise, you need to be agile enough to pivot.

Candidates are coming into our system from Recruiters, Career site, and job boards… So what do we do with that?

Confession 4: I’m not James Bond

So I have to ask myself, how are we helping hiring?

If content doesn’t drive candidates, if social media doesn’t make hires, if channels are becoming too much to juggle… what does that mean?

Even with my smart watch, I’m not James Bond… I’m Q. The guy who gave James Bond all of his gadgets. The guy who helps arm the secret agent. The guy who puts extra bullet in the gun.

So, who is 007? My recruiting team.

If I do my job right, I provide them with useful items to help sell a candidate on choosing SAP as an employer.

I give them one more shot. One extra bullet.

Aaron Rector- Director of Social Media – SAP

Follow Aaron on Twitter

Connect on LinkedIn

Listen to Aaron’s SuccessFactors webinar on “the do’s and don’ts of social recruiting”, and check out many other great presentations.

Recently we have successfully implemented the SuccessFactors Recruiting solution as a hybrid model. Some more talent solutions are in the pipeline as well but before I must share our view and experiences with this.

Basically we need a candidate tracking solution which will be used to develop new requisitions and to view all candidate information, as well as able to manage them and their results.  SF Recruiting provide the exact solution what we are looking for or more precisely what HR team was expecting.

Managers are now able to create requisitions, view candidates, and invite other managers to participate in the interview process, rate the candidates and post a job.

With Success Factors, candidate management become easier for the candidates to view career opportunities across the system and to use the same profile that they create to form the basis for their applications for all positions for which they apply. It also gives provision for applying with LinkedIn.

Provision for Candidate Pool/Search, Talent Pipeline, Job management for candidates, managing Email templates are definitely very useful and needed features in any Recruiting solutions.

Let’s me tell you why it has been decided to choose the SF Recruiting solution for us.

Actually there are number of challenges for Recruitment with the past uncompleted HRM solution. Some of the real showstoppers are:

• HR was spending lot of its time on candidate’s data management
• Recruiting process consist of lot of paper job applications and manual data entry
• There was no automate job posting process and lacking in job requisition option
• No proper way to track and manage applicants throughout the recruiting process.
• Lacking social media integrated functionality.

And SuccessFactors helps to provide the solutions for these open challenges and provide us a platform to integrate with the Core HR. Let’s check some of the useful options and a short overview.

There are three main components of configurable templates within Recruiting: the Job Requisition Data Model, the Candidate Data Model template, and the Candidate Profile Template.

Job Requisition

A requisition defines the requirements of the position being filled. Requisitions are created from a template that is configured during implementation.

A hiring manager asks for a job requisition via email. The recruiter xyz creates a job requisition for the hiring manager.

Provided with 3 Creation options:

 Copy an existing requisition with all fields, which were already filled

 Browse families and roles to pick a job description

 Create a complete new requisition from scratch

Each job requisition template can be associated with one approval workflow, called a route map. The approval route map of a Job Requisition is shown on top of the Job Requisition (JR) template.

To approve a JR you need to open the Recruiting menu. All your JRs are listed here and can be viewed and approved. By selecting the “Send Options” picklist you can send the JR to the next approvers or back to the previous one. You can add users to get feedback or add additional approvers like global managers etc.

When the job requisition is approved, the recruiter posts the job requisition on internal and external sites.

Candidate Management

For candidates the career sites could provide relevant results based on the search criteria like Location, Functions, and Business Line etc. So each candidate can sign up and create their own account and upload all relevant documents for their profile.

Right after confirming profile candidate will be forwarded to the application template and can easily apply for particular positions. This is now a very common framework for most of the career sites.

The Candidate Profile and Candidate Data Model are two big elements of the candidate’s job search experience as they work together to provide recruiters and hiring managers a complete picture of the candidate.

But interesting one is applying with LinkedIn. By clicking on the “Apply with LinkedIn” candidate allow Success Factors access to their account and the relevant data will be pre-populated in their profile.

The “Job Management “gives the candidate an overview of the jobs applied on. Similarly “Candidate Workbench “gives Recruiters access to the applications and profiles of candidates who have applied to each position and shows how candidates rate against the requirements established in the requisition.

Through Talent Pipeline a Recruiter can easily manage all the candidates applied for a particular position. The Talent Pipeline contains all of the statuses in the hiring process as well as some system default statuses.

Setting up interviews is a functionality that can be configured against one or more in-progress statuses in the Talent Pipeline. Recruiters can define the interview team and set dates and times for each interviewer to evaluate the candidate. There are also provisions to emailing this information to the interview team with candidate’s profile and resume. Interview Central is where candidates may be evaluated by the interview team.

Candidate Search tool is also provided to find a list with defined profile information.

The offer approval and offer letter function is available in the “Offer” status in the talent pipeline. The offer approval template should be filled in. You can add as many approvers as needed; the process will be conducted in the order of the added approvers. After the offer has been approved an offer letter can be selected and send to the candidate.

Changes to the Recruiting Email Templates could be done in the Administration Interface of the system.

An email template has to be set up in all configured system languages. When the templates are set up it needs to be enabled. Similarly one can
maintain Headers and footers that can contain content and formatting parameters for the recruit.

Evaluating candidates is also become easy as selecting the “Rate Now” link to see all candidates evaluated for that job. As ratings are given, an
overall score is generated based on the rating scale defined for the requisition.  Interviewers can provide comments on each competency and overall comments on their rating. Finally, interviewers provide an overall rating on each candidate.

Some other features are also available which we have opted out as of now but sounds always interesting and useful, Hiring and Onboarding, Employee
Referral can’t be ignored.

For integration Add-On package for SAP ERP Human Capital Management and SuccessFactors Business EX has been use as integration option for us to transfer the Recruiting data (for positions corresponding job requisitions to SuccessFactors and applications to SAP to hire candidates as employees) and Employee data. There are also provisions to transfer Compensation and Evaluation data. Downloading files with flat file format has been decided as we have a different Middleware option other than SAP NetWeaver PI. But we are interested for SAP HCI option next time, let’s see

There are also possibilities for integrating with Employee Central and Luke Marson's Blog on SuccessFactors Employee Central & Recruiting: configuring the New Hire process integrationprovide wonderful information on it.

Some more integration tips also shared in the document SF Recruitment Management- Tips related to Vacancy interface

We are also aware of RDS, SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions are pre-configured applications that allow companies to deploy software in weeks or
months for a set price. The applications are designed to address one area of functionality of SAP's larger enterprise applications, and address a specific
function or need.  SAP Rapid Deployment solutions build on SAP Best Practices is also available for Recruitment.

SAP Best Practices for SuccessFactors Recruiting in SAP ERP HCM:SAP Service Marketplace - SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting

SuccessFactors Recruiting definitely transforms the hiring process into a more strategic for the Talent Management by offering the end-to-end recruiting solution. We are hoping for some real positive results and feedback after using it for some time.

Abstract

HCM Processes & forms scenario have progressed from ISR world of PCR to much better HCM P&F based on Adobe forms to the latest version HCM Processes & Form based on FPM + Adobe both.

These web based requests are routed to the responsible person for approval and processing using sap business workflows. In an ideal scenario, every web-based request (Transfer, Promotion, Org reassignment, separation etc.) has a separate workflow for each process following its approval hierarchy and processing.

The very purpose of this blog is to not tell about HCM P&F (there is lot of information already on this by our SCN experts/mentors), but to introduce you to our design of “Dynamic” workflow. We have used only one single “dynamic” workflow for all types of HCM P&F requests. I call it “Dynamic” as it changes itself as per the number of approval levels. This design greatly reduces development and testing effort close to 70% compared to the original way of doing workflow development for web-based request. For example: 20 or more different Manager Self Service based web-based request (Processes & Form) can be implemented with 1 dynamic workflow design. So It can be imagined how much cost and effort would be saved in implementing HCM P&F scenarios for a client which otherwise involves huge cost and effort.

I am sure some of you may already be using this approach but since I didn’t find any blog on this so thought of circulating this to maximum people so that this can help their projects/customers as well.

Below are some key features and how they have changed:

PCR/ HCM P&F (Adobe) / HCM P&F (FPM)

SAP Dynamic Workflow

Let’s talk about the feature that we always kept constant.

In every organization, there are many business processes like transfer, promotion, organization reassignment, separation, etc. involving the employees and their managers. As all the process can have different number of approvers and the approval hierarchy with different notifications to be sent with different body and content, a separate business workflow is required which can handle all these above. In order to save the development and testing effort of all these separate workflows, a single dynamic workflow can be created which can handle all the above things.

Once a manager/employee/HR Admin requests for one of the business processes, the approval workflow gets triggered. We are able to known the type of process by the name of the form scenario coming from the event data container. Using the name of this scenario, we can fetch the number of approvers & approver’s rules from one of the custom tables based on the process type. To determine the number of approvers of a particular process, it needs to be maintained in one of the custom tables which will hold data for different types of processes.

The dynamic workflow will now have loop inside which will be executed the same number of times as the total approvers or until the process is rejected by any of the approvers. Inside the loop, we will have task to find out the current rule as per the loop index. This rule along with other required information can now be sent to the standard task which sends the work item for approval to the dynamic manager. Once it is approved, the loop continues and the rule for next level of approver is fetched and the process goes on until the request is rejected or all approvers have approved the request.

Now that all the approvers have approved the request of business process, it goes to the final HR Admin. Once it is approved by it, the notification of completion can be sent. This notification will have the text and subject line based on the type of process. A separate custom table is used to store the subject, the standard text and the number and name of recipients that can be used for a process. Different standard texts will be created for every process and these will have markers for dynamic text. Based on the data fetched from the form, these dynamic texts in the standard text can be replaced with the exact value.

In this way, one single workflow can handle different approvers with different levels of approvals and different notifications having different text for a business process.

Benefits of Dynamic Workflow

1. Can be used for any number of business processes like Transfer, Promotion, Separation, etc.
2. Saves around 70% of the development and testing effort of workflow consultant and of the project as a whole as only one workflow needs to be created.
3. Can handle different number of approvals for each type of business process Example: 5 approvers for Transfer, 3 for Promotion, etc.
4. The logic to find the approver at different approval level for a particular process can be different based on the type of process.
5. The approval or rejection notification can be sent to different recipients based on the type of process.
6. The subject, body and the content of the notification can vary depending upon the type of process.
7. One of the biggest advantages of dynamic workflow is that the number of approvers or the recipients or the logic to get the approver, etc. can be changed by just changing the data entries in few custom tables. This leads to easy maintenance.
8. Any comments provided by approver on approval/rejection are also captured through workflow and can be passed to email notifications.

Sample Design

Below is a flowchart depicting the design, very simple as “Simple is Beautiful”.

Sample Table Structures used to fetch approvers and subject/content of email as below:

Conclusion

The design of workflow can be changed as per your business needs but the idea is to use just one workflow. Hope this helps your customers and provides effective resource management within your project.

Looking forward to your experiences/inputs around the same.

Happy Learning !!

I was lucky enough to recently feature in a Firing Line with Bill Kutik® episode, where fellow HR implementation expert Jarret Pazahanick and I discussed the differences between cloud and on-premise HR implementations and some of the different things customers should be looking for. Although our discussions were about HR cloud implementations in general, I wanted to write about how some of these musings could be applied in a SuccessFactors context. In addition, I will also cover some other key topics that customers should consider that we didn’t cover in the interview. You can watch the video below.

Overpromising and under delivering

Jarret kicked off the conversation with some revelations about the “dirty secrets” in response to Bill asking us what the important problems are that lead to unhappiness with cloud implementations:

One of the dirty little secrets in the consulting world is that some software integrators are still overpromising, they’re over estimating their expertise and experience to try to win new project work.

This is definitely something that we’re seeing in the SuccessFactors world. If you ever visit an industry conference, you’ll probably be surprised to see that every consulting firm are “the experts” in SuccessFactors. SAP Mentor Chris Solomon discussed this in his blog SuccessFactors and SAP HCM consulting: How the West was Won! back in 2014 and yet little has changed. Customers need to make sure they do their due diligence on any potential partner and we’ll touch on this a little later. Jarret made another comment about the current situation:

The great news for customers is that there’s a new breed of consulting firms that really understand how to deploy cloud-based technology. They’re doing so with smaller teams of more experienced consultants, and doing so with a combination of remote and on-site consulting.

There is definitely a new breed of consulting partners with fresh perspectives and cloud DNA. Firms like Aasonn, Cloud Consulting Partners, and – I’m not ashamed to say it – Hula Partners have been implementing cloud since their inception and know how it all comes together for maximum customer value. It’s not just a deployment model, but a mindset that moves beyond technical implementations to value-adding business solutions that solve real customer challenges and pain points. It also involves fewer people with more rounded techno-functional skillsets and understanding of business process and organizational culture.

Unrealistic expectations

Next I was given the opportunity to give my viewpoints on the important problems and what customers can do to solve them:

Customers are still approaching cloud implementations like on-premise implementations, even though they have a different make-up. Some systems integrators and to some extend some sales executives are setting unrealistic expectations about the time it takes to implement a cloud system.

I always think it is important for a customer to think about whether they want to rush a huge, business-changing enterprise software implementation or whether they want to be more patient and thorough with such a large impact on the organization. Just because you can slam in a system in 3 months do you really want your implementation team spending 100% of their time on this initiative with no room to discuss and make the many important decisions – including unexpected decisions – that need to be made? And who is going to do their job while they’re working on this project? How can you even guarantee having the right team available during such a short period? Although it sounds good to be able to get a system implemented rapidly, the real fact is that there are many unwanted side effects that should be avoided.

Research, due diligence, and more research

Bill asked me to continue the conversation by giving my insights on how customers can get the best value out of SIs. Among my responses, I thought this piece was especially worth highlighting:

[Customers] should also be looking at doing the due diligence on their system integrator. Recently a pharmaceutical company that we were working with in the sales cycle had asked us to speak to some of our customers, they had asked us how many implementations we’d done, how many certified consultants we had, they event went as far as asking for the names and resumes of all of the people that were going to be on the project.

This is probably the most important part of any implementation – selecting the right partner. The above example is the perfect example of what a customer should do. They had worked closely and negotiated with a number of partners on the proposal and performed substantial due diligence on the partners. Customer references, a strong team of Certified Professionals in each area, and reviewing the details and track record of the partner implementations ensured that they chose the right partner to deliver their project.

Any good partner will be able to provide solid references – not just on whether the partner is nice to work with, but what the goals of the project was, how the project was delivered, and what the outcomes were – and will have Certified Professionals in most or all of the modules being delivered. There is no substitute for the experience gained by Certified Professionals and choosing consultants who don’t have Certified Professional status means that there is a risk they won’t have enough experience to lead a project. It doesn’t matter how many implementation projects a consultant has worked on, if they don’t have Certified Professional status then they won’t have delivered at least two projects across the entire project lifecycle and this experience is critical to achieve a smooth and effective implementation.

Smart customers choose the right partners

Bill asked Jarret how he felt about being grilled by a prospect and among many of the essential pieces of advice he gave was:

A large pharmaceutical customer of mine is going down this journey right now … they’re reviewing all of their business processes. They realized we deployed on-premise technology 17 years ago. HR has changed, IT has changed, our business has changed, and they’re really looking to find some lessons that when they do their implementation they’re going to be that much further ahead.

This statement is true for so many customers who are using on-premise technology, even if they’re still getting lots of value out of the software. So much has changed in the world since many of the current on-premise systems were released and although they have innovated over the years, their core foundation is built for doing business in a world that most organizations have moved on from. Having a modern mindset and having a partner that understands cloud technology, modern business processes, and how to provide real value in a cloud world is imperative to taking advantage of cloud technology and the constant innovation it will bring. Approaching a cloud implementation as an on-premise implementation will mean teaching an old dog old tricks. It is up to you to ensure that embrace the new world and make the right decisions in your project.

And finally… Key topics we didn’t cover

There are many topics we simply couldn’t cover in this short interview. The consultant skillset has changed with the cloud and consultants have struggled with the transition from single-skilled roles to multi-faceted skillsets and there are many pitfalls they need to overcome to make the jump into SuccessFactors. Be aware of consulting leaders, sales executives, and marketing professionals who are writing or speaking at conferences – their motive may be more around positioning their consultancies than providing useful information. Ask yourself, “Is this individual really implementing software? Do they really have hands-on experience?” A deeper dive will often provide the answer.

It’s worth watching Mike Ettling’s SuccessConnect 2015 Keynote if you haven’t yet seen it as he touches on a few topics that are relevant for customers and cloud implementations.

Summary

Bill gave both Jarret and I a great opportunity to discuss how cloud implementations have changed and I hope that we didn’t disappoint. There are so many aspects of HR software and HR software implementations that have changed over the last decade and cloud is providing an ideal path for customers to get new value from HR technology. However, with these changes come new areas of consideration for customers and new approaches to ensuring business value across the lifecycle of the implementation, from software selection and choosing the right partner to how projects are run and how ultimately they will derive business value.

Keep up-to-date on the latest SuccessFactors news, views, and practical articles and blogs in the SAP HCM and SuccessFactors LinkedIn group.