The HR function is moving beyond automating processes, reducing costs, and ensuring compliance in order to drive people decisions that grow the business. However, the majority of today’s HRIS solutions serve merely as filing cabinets for record keeping with no real business impact. Siloed from talent management, they prevent companies from making workforce decisions based on a 360-degree view of the employee. They also feature primitive analytics that provide minimal insights into the workforce and no support for workforce planning. Another shift is the employee demographic. More technology-savvy people – those who have grown up using mobile, collaborative, user-friendly, and graphic technology – are now entering the workforce. Yet today’s core HR systems are made for super-users and specialists since these systems require extensive training, resulting in low adoption.

In the past, most HR vendors designed their technologies for HR departments to make their lives easier and get their job done faster – forgetting about the employees in the organization and making it more difficult for employees to use it. The complexity of the solutions and processes resulted in employees not using the tools provided by HR.

Today’s HR software is redesigned with the end-user in mind. It now meets requirements such as: improving HR service delivery quality; user-friendly experience; and mobile apps for anytime, anywhere access in order to make the application more attractive for employees and managers to use. With this next generation HR technology, organizations can help make employees’ lives easier, and keep them engaged, happy, and productive.

As the way people work today undergoes a transformation, it requires organizations to take a more strategic approach to HR by equipping them with the right tools to manage the new workforce. For that reason HR departments are no longer buying HR systems only for the features they offer and how they solve HR professionals’ lives. The major requirements are ease of use for employees and managers to engage them in the HR processes.

One of the biggest pitfalls within HR teams is the tendency to continue to do what has always been done by offering the same solutions and processes year after year. In some instances that may make sense as you view certain aspects of your HR offering as critical to your employee engagement. But it’s a good exercise to question your offerings and processes on a periodic basis, especially how to engage employees and managers better and how to differentiate products and services as a key to business success.

Now it´s your turn to ask yourself:

• One global system of record: Do we have a platform that is effective across geographies, cost centers, legal entities, and employee types?

• Complete workforce data: Do we have combined HR and talent data that deliver richer, more comprehensive employee profiles?

• Powerful analytics: Do we have workforce data with financials, CRM, and other data for actionable insights?

• Social collaboration: Do we provide social collaboration to optimize workforce productivity and accelerate innovation?

• Seamless integration: Do we have a solution that can be easily connected with other solutions like Finance, CRM or ERP applications?

• Ease-of-use: Do we provide an easy-to-use experience to our employees and managers to make their lives easier?

Technology has already changed the way global businesses run, in addition to opening new markets. Now, we need to let technology change the people dynamics of global enterprises. Don’t let distances and differences hold you back. If you can improve the compliance, consistency, and capabilities of your workforce, you can unlock the full potential of your business.

To learn more about how core HR systems can give you a competitive edge and enable success at your company, check out the latest assets from SAP SuccessFactors on the newly launched Employee Central Digital Hub. From leading analyst reports and white papers to customer success stories and on-demand webinars, you’ll find plenty of information to help you navigate the complex world of core HR systems.

Initial Load / Migration of HR Data from SAP ERP HCM to SuccessFactors Employee Central (EC)

Data migration made easy and right at your fingertips.

Existing ERP HCM customers who move to SuccessFactors Employee Central (EC) need to initially load their HR data from the ERP HCM system to Employee Central (EC). The process of moving all required HR data accurately to EC is an effort that should not be underestimated.
In implementation projects, it should be avoided to build custom migration tools since the effort is significantly higher than using our standard tools. In addition, you need to consider that if standard integration interfaces are enhanced, our standard tools are adapted accordingly. This is also important especially in the case of phased go-live implementation projects.

To ease the process of data migration from SAP ERP HCM to Employee Central, we offer standard migration tools for initially loading/migrating employee master and organizational data from ERP HCM into EC.
This initial load serves at the same time as preparation for subsequent regular data integration from EC to ERP downstream systems in which ERP processes are still running, such as e.g. Payroll, Time Mgmt, Financials, Logistics, IDM, GRC, Travel, E&HS.

This leads us to our vision of a holistic migration and integration approach:

With our migration tool we want to help our customers to

• minimize the time for the cut over process from ERP HCM to Employee Central as master system of data records & processes
• eliminate coding effort and keep configuration effort as little as possible
• ensure correctness of data mapping for subsequent regular EC to ERP integration

The migration tool is part of and delivered with the SAP ERP HCM Add-On PA_SE_IN 100 (software component).
This is the add-on software component for our productized EC / ERP integrations.

To get a first impression of the tool see the following facts:

• Migration tool is designed for the initial data load into EC to support a smooth replication process back to ERP HCM

• Both employee master data and organizational data supported

• Sample content (predelivered field & value mapping) available for accelerated configuration allowing you to concentrate on project specialties (deviations from standard)

• Configuration-based

• EC data model and picklist values are imported into ERP for easier field & value mapping

• Data extraction from ERP into a ZIP File to avoid individual file upload and to ensure correct upload order into EC

• Extensibility features to support custom specialties, e.g. custom data not stored in standard infotypes

• Elaborated Migration handbook structured along the migration project phases available

The migration process looks like this:

To get the complete picture along with guided procedures and most recent innovations, make sure to access and read our migration implementation guide, which walks you through the entire initial load / migration process and is always up-to-date with the most current release features.

It includes topics like
 

• System preparation and configuration of SAP ERP HCM and EC
• Data extraction sequence and import steps for different object types
• EC entities supported for migration
• Communication channel for data migration
• Default customizing / sample templates
• Import data model & picklists from EC
• Define field and value mapping
• Data extraction from ERP HCM
• Data import into EC
• BAdI implementations
• Setting up the middleware (for key mapping table update)

This guide called Migrating Data from SAP ERP to Employee Central can be found along with all other Employee Central user & implementation guides on SAP Service Marketplace under
Products -> Installation & Upgrade Guides (http://service.sap.com/instguides) -> Cloud Solutions from SAP -> Success Factors -> Employee Central -> Migrating Data from SAP ERP to Employee Central.

This guide is also available on the SAP Help Portal:

http://help.sap.com/hr_integration/#section5

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This release is the last one in 2015, but nevertheless it includes a lot of great enhancements across the SAP SuccessFactors® HCM Suite.

We have expanded on our Intelligent Services, continuing the transformation of the SAP SuccessFactors® HCM Suite from a series of isolated self-services to a series of integrated, intelligent end-to-end services. Why intelligent? Because not only do the services connect upcoming transactions, the system also predicts what should come next based on customer-defined rules. One of this quarters innovations, for example, is that managers get a notification when they have new direct reports reminding them to review goal plans and set goals with their new team members.

I really like our new "Out of Office" display status. Get the information when needed! The 'Out of Office' status is provided in the common interfaces such as People Profile, Quickcard, Org chart showing the status of employee leave information upfront without drilling into the profile details.

Image 1: Out of Office display status

For Employee Central we delivered great enhancements. As every release we added country specific content and more enhancements:

• Employees and now record their time in payroll time sheet using clock times
• Collisions checks in time off and payroll time sheet
• New integration feature to replicate data from Fieldglass software to the contingent worker profile in EC

Check out the Employee Central Q4 2015 Release Highlights blog by Andreas Fink.

And, in Talent Management as well, we delivered a lot of great enhancements.

With the new job performance builder feature employees, managers, and HR can now quickly and easily access and view a full job profile (not just job title and description) in the Succession & Development solution.

Image 2: Job Performance Builder in Succession & Development

In our Onboarding solution we delivered country specific content as well: For Australia, Canada, India and UK we included 'out of the box' forms. These forms include Tax File number declaration in Australia, Transfer Claim form in India, Personal Tax Credits Return in Canada and, the Starter Checklist in the United Kingdom.

And, in addition, we now have a new look and feel to the workqueue feature in Onboarding. With this HR end users can easily see onboarding status to identify bottlenecks or overdue items in the process and determine when actions need to be taken.

Image 3: New Workqueue Enhancements in Onboarding

In our Recruiting solution we delivered a new mobile apply functionality. With this your candidates can now apply from any Internet-connected device.

Image 4: Mobile Apply Functionality in Recruiting

As every release, we delivered integration add-ons for SAP SuccessFactors® HCM Suite, such as:

• Integration of mass positions from Employee Central to organizational management functionality in SAP ERP HCM, including assigning mass positions to multiple holders
• Filtering information by country while replication employee organizational assignments from Employee Central to SAP ERP HCM for different countries
• Migration and replication features in a side-by-side deployment model of employee dependents data and employment and job entities Employee Central
• Enhancements in third-party integrations with labor levels opened for customer mapping in Kronos workforce Central integration, and support for custom payments information and direct deposits
• Ability to send additional fields in mapping though improved integration between Employee Central and BENEFITSFOCUS® using SAP HANA Cloud integration technology

And, finally SAP Jam®: With the new Customizable Home Page all users will see the homepage, which can be customized by a company administrator.

Image 4: Customizable Company Home Page in SAP Jam®

And, in addition: Group administrators can now easily measure the health of a group by using our new group analytics dashboard. They can measure and monitor group membership and engagement levels to help lower total cost of ownership (TCO)

Image 5: New Group Administrator Dashboard in SAP Jam®

Check out the SAP Jam release 1511 information: custom company home page, Google drive for Work, mobile device management, group dashboard, Microsoft Office in-application collaboration and more! blog by Roger Noia.

There are a lot of more enhancements in this release. Check out our Q4 2015 Release Highlights document and listen to David Ludlow in our release video on YouTube.

For more information on this release, navigate to our product update page in our SuccessFactors customer community (registration required).

Our next release is planned for Q1 2016. 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.

SAP SuccessFactors HCM Suite
In our continued efforts to simplify experiences for the workforce, we’ve updated the employee directory, included additional advanced search and filter options, and improved the presentation and clarity of search results.

We’ve also added an “Out of Office” display status for individuals in commonly accessed areas, such as people profile, quick cards, and org chart, so you can see employee leave information without drilling into profile details.

And finally, following our widely acclaimed introduction of the intelligent services feature, we’ve added notifications that will alert you to key events and changes. For example, if an employee changes departments, a notification will be sent to review the goal plan for the new department based on the organizational change.

SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central

The document generation feature has been enhanced to use place holders in templates with multiple entries, such as pay components. So you can generate documents with employee master data for both past and future dates. And you can apply auto delegation to all workflow requests, irrespective of the number of users initially addressed.

We continue to provide country-specific content for:

• Germany: Periods of sick leave can be combined if the relevant illnesses are the same in each period or overlap across periods

• Spain: Periods of sick leave can be combined if the relevant illnesses are similar

Time and Attendance Management

With enhancements to make the time and attendance management feature more versatile:

• Employees can now record their time in payroll time sheet using clock times – recording the actual start and end times of their work.

• Collision checks in time off and payroll time sheet prevent certain time records with start times and end times from existing in parallel.

• You can now use negative time recording methods in payroll time sheet to record only deviations from the planned working time. Time sheet entries are generated automatically and merged with the actual recording of deviations to generate the overall records.

Total Workforce Management

For customers using Fieldglass software to manage external workers, we’ve added a new integration feature to replicate data from Fieldglass software to the contingent worker profile in SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central. In addition, we added notification capabilities and simplified provisioning of contingent worker features in the upgrade center.

Global Benefits

Now, you can specify rules to determine the benefit salary, or round the salary, before premium rates are applied. The system supports you in rounding by configuring benefit salary calculation and coverage rules.

Recently, SuccessFactors, an SAP company, was honored to have our intelligent services named among a distinguished list of "Awesome New Technologies for HR” by the HR Technology conference and its 8,500 attendees and hundreds of vendors in Las Vegas. Not only was this a great opportunity for SuccessFactors to show off our latest HR innovation, but we also gave a glimpse into how the future of work is being redefined.

Every year, HR Technology chooses innovative products from startups and established players that understand the needs of HR leaders and practitioners. This is why so many people flock to this event – the organization knows where HR is heading and realizes the potential of technology to drive that change.

Whether you go to this annual event or not, everyone knows that organizational change of any kind can present some interesting challenges. Very rarely does the structure of any business stay stable for a long period of time. Reassignments, promotions, resignations, new hires, retirement, medical leave, and other HR-related scenarios can wreak havoc. Every vacant seat creates a ripple effect across the organization – and sometimes leaves a gaping hole in a process or two.

From simple HR transactions to machine learning of operations and processes

Everything an employee touches in his or her previous role needs to reflect a status change, even if that person is on temporary leave. Ideally, when someone is promoted, for example, a series of updates are automatically triggered across all organizational relationships, including work reassignments, workflow and process adjustments, and even corporate learning and support. This makes sure that employee is as successful as possible.

Often, these updates are made from scratch and manually, leaving room for costly errors, wasteful spending of HR time and budget, and operational disruption.  This is why we created intelligent services.

The technology logically consolidates everything a business user needs to respond to organizational change and simplifies the user experience for managers and employees alike. Not only does it improve the HR experience, but intelligent services also enhances the work experience. Take customer-service teams, for example. This business area is known for churn rates as high as 27%. By capturing agents’ experience, workload, and accounts, the service organization can build on that information to enhance development plans and determine how to best reassign accounts as needed.

I

ntelligent services that go beyond HR transactions and update systems that support finance, operations, marketing, sales, service, and other lines of business help create a culture of empowered employees. Empowered to make better use of their time. Empowered to stay productive. Empowered to service the customer to the best of their abilities while complying with corporate policies.

Expect more updates to intelligent services in each quarterly product release to come. In the meantime, take a look at how intelligent services can transform HR. See the demo given at this year’s HR Technology conference here.

Social advertising is extremely prevalent, but normally very poor performing. When researching statistics about click-through rates on Facebook and Twitter, it appears that it performs better on mobile than desktop, so it prompted me to look into what may be causing this. I opened each site on my desktop, iPad and iPhone and then navigated around - then I found a very likely and straightforward reason:

How often did you accidentally click on something on your phone either by an errant thumb or by placing it in your pocket? Or when you have a list of links on your phone and you try to click on a specific one, you hit the one either above or under the one you meant?

So if the experience is not meant to be on mobile, why do companies try to jam in a poor solution? Because they need to check a box that they have it, regardless of the customer experience. This is very much true for recruiting. Many career sites and apply processes are a poor solution developed to “check the box” on mobile for companies, regardless of how good the candidate experience.

The candidates want it:

• 45% of job seekers say they use their mobile device specifically to search for jobs at least once a day²
• 89% believe a mobile device is an important tool for job searching²

Companies aren’t doing it right:

• 90% of the Fortune 500 company career sites do not support a mobile apply solution²
• 70% of job seekers are willing to apply for a job via smartphone, but more than a quarter of larger companies said that not a single part of their hiring process has been mobile-optimized¹

It is causing companies to miss out on candidates:

• 60% abandon the process if they have technical issues¹
• 55% if they can’t upload their resume¹
• 20% wont even apply if they can’t use their mobile device¹

So what can you do? I wish it was a single pronged answer, but there are many components. So let’s start with a pragmatic approach:

1. Implement a responsive career site and mobile apply process. Not a mobile site separate from your desktop site. You want to improve candidate experience and confidence while reducing your maintenance.
2. Ensure you can handle resume upload via mobile, cloud services (e.g. DropBox) or traditional desktop upload. If you can’t do all three, you need to rethink your entire mobile strategy.
3. Look at multi-staged applications that can improve candidate completion rates of applications, and allows candidates to complete stages regardless of desktop or mobile devices.
4. Use SMS notifications for the application process, especially when dealing with candidates outside of North America. Assume candidates who complete applications on mobile will communicate via mobile. SMS is easy and accessible all over the globe and nearly seen as a requirement in Asia and Europe.

Over the last two years, SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting has been heavily focused on creating the best mobile candidate experience for our customers so you can hire the world’s best talent.

So the question to you is, what are you doing for your mobile strategy in 2016?

For more details on the 1511 release updates to SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting, check out our Q4 2015 Release Highlights document and listen to David Ludlow in our release video on YouTube.

Sources:

1 2014 Kenton Global Recruiting Research

2 2015 Glassdoor

Onboarding has been a hot topic of conversation over the last few years, but still most organizations see it as a compliance-related activity – i.e. form completion – for brand new hires. And the majority of people I talk to still see Onboarding as a function of talent acquisition, but unfortunately, it is not that simple. There are very few aspects of the talent management process that are as pervasive as Onboarding – touching recruiting, learning, development, goal planning, and a host of non-talent related functions.

This means that Onboarding is truly a cross-HR process and one that has to take into consideration a multitude of factors from compliance to employee readiness to cultural acclimatization. Having an Onboarding program that can span across regions, countries, and cultures is very complex. When looking at the importance of Onboarding on a global scale, there are numerous complexities, such as:

• Global compliance
• Language and culture
• Moving employees around the globe
• Customized development

Because of this inherent complexity there is often some level of compromise that takes place to cover the 80% rule (80% of effects come from 20% of causes). However, in 2015, our motto we have been living by is “Onboarding without Compromise” and that is why we have focused on solving the challenges of global onboarding. How? We do this with:

• Global language support – available in 46 languages.
• Global compliance forms – in this release we expanded our support for these forms, meaning we offer SAP-managed, compliant out-of-the-box forms in five countries – with more countries on the way – but we also support any global forms in any country around the world.
• Customized hiring manager processes – this means your local manager can set up their employees for success the best way they know how.
• Crossboarding AKA internal mobility – Onboarding isn’t just for new hires but for existing employees that want to move within the company. Streamlined onboarding processes for internal employees, whether they are moving across the hall or becoming an expat and moving to another continent – set up employees for success and help retain your top talent.

For more details on the 1511 release updates to SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding, check out our Q4 2015 Release Highlights document and listen to David Ludlow in our release video on YouTube.

New Android app

For this release, we’re most excited about the release of our redesigned Android app. Considering that, according to IDC[1], Android runs on more than 80% of smartphones worldwide, it has been long overdue to show Android users some more love. The redesigned app looks and feels exactly the same as our acclaimed iPhone app. This is especially important for customers who provide their employees the choice between an iOS or Android smartphone, and those allowing BYOD (bring-your-own-device). See for yourself:

Self-services for managers and employees

We’ve added more employee self-services and manager self-services to our Mobile app. As an avid SAP SuccessFactors Mobile user myself, I am really excited about this. We’re not trying to squeeze the full breadth and depth of our suite of products into our native mobile app. Instead, we’re delivering those areas and specific tasks to the Mobile app that make the most sense on smart phones or tablets, thereby making the lives of employees and managers a little easier and helping them become more productive at work.

In this release, Mobile approvals for managers have been greatly expanded – we’ve added several new workflows such as position approval and time sheet approval.

Requesting time off is something everyone has to do at some point. It shouldn’t take a lot of time to do so, we’ve continued to develop and round out this area of our Mobile app as well. Employees can now edit the duration of their leave in various ways from hours and minutes to fractions of days.

Mobile Learning enhancements

Here’s something our SAP SuccessFactors Learning customers will enjoy. Instead of spending their time completing paper lists to note who’s actually attending a training course, learning instructors can now use their iPads to check students in electronically. The way it works is super simple: just like an electronic boarding pass on your smart phone to board an airplane, students can now get a unique QR code on their smart phones. The learning instructor then scans that QR code with their iPad to check the student in to the class.

App security remains top of mind

Passwords come in all different shapes and sizes – and now this applies to SAP SuccessFactors Mobile as well. Depending on your company’s password policy you can either KISS (keep it short and simple) or require a whole variety of more complex permutations such as minimum length, requiring digits / uppercase / lowercase / symbol, expiration in days, and many more.

For more information and details on the Q4 2015 release please check out our Q4 2015 Release Highlightsdocument and listen to David Ludlow in our release video on YouTube. Be sure to go to the SuccessFactors Mobile customer communityfor the latest news.

Follow SuccessFactors on Twitter: @successfactors

[1]http://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp

SAP has enabled their HCM customers to mobilize their HR data securely. But, to mobilize HR, the core functions have to be mobilized as well. This can ensure workers and managers to access different mobile applications and perform actions on the go from office or away.

This is the reason why real companies worldwide invest in SAP HCM mobility to manage and drive the HR processes. Let’s discuss some of the benefits due to mobilization of HCM, which can influence HR approvals, responses and subsequently the enterprise productivity and engagement.

Enhances Employee Retention and Recruitment

Post-recession, a global challenge that has been affecting most companies is employee recruitment and turnover. As HR managers have to align with coworkers to accomplish business goals, instant communication, staying tuned and responding quickly to queries from employees have become a routine. An effective way to make this process seamless is by mobilizing the complete process.

Accessing and responding to employees quickly from anywhere can enhance the business efficiency powerfully.

Expedites HR Workflows and Processes

Delays in HR process can have cascading effects on the growth of the company. Setting up the mobile workflows can streamline and expedite the approval process. With anywhere access to workers data, using SAP HCM Apps, the managers can perform actions on the go and this reduces delays remarkably.

On the other hand, employees can utilize the applications like Leave Request, Timesheet, Expense etc. to update the activities without breaking a sweat and this enables them to be more productive and spend more time with either their family members or on their core activities

Engages Employees Highly

From the recent research by top firms, it is evident that companies with highly engaged workforce is able to withhold employees better, resulting in exceptional customer service, satisfaction.

HCM mobility can not only enable HR executives to respond to employee requests, approvals and keep them engaged but also can improve bonding with congratulatory messages to staff on anniversary, birthdays etc. In fact, there are HCM apps available for this.

Mobilizes HR, Employee and Corporate Data Flexibly, Securely

SAP ERP is widely recommended for HCM activities for the formidable security and flexibility it offers.

SAP Mobile Platform is a robust platform for developing HCM apps and it is secure, extensible. SAP Afaria can assist in managing the mobile devices, especially at times when employees leave the company or lose them. These are few other reasons why most companies prefer SAP over others.

It’s been surveyed by SAP/SuccessFactors that 63% of organizations do not have Succession Planning i.e. their business is running on high risk due to lack of proper Succession plan.

Sometimes I feel the reason behind many customers not using this attractive tool by SuccessFactors, is may be because SI’s fail to provide the very benefits of the product and how it can add value to their business.

Most organizations do Succession Planning on paper by either just word of mouth or just looking at couple of performance traits, without even analyzing or comparing other facts which could be employee’s  potential, 360 reviews, qualification, achievements in past years, consistency in performance and various other parameters. Imagine a system providing all such details and let Succession planners compare and choose one among the best with all supporting facts.

The purpose of this blog is to know more about the benefits of SAP/SuccessFactors beautiful offering: Succession Planning & how it can change the way customers run business today.

A) Why Succession Planning:

Do customers really need a Succession Planning system in place or they can do without it?

To answer this let’s look at below scenarios–

1)     1)An organization with very shallow talent pools defined, spending huge amounts of unbudgeted money on recruiting when a key contributor walks away.

2)   2) A company calling an urgent roundtable meeting to discuss the attrition rate along with resignation and the replacements of a key players.

3)   3)Ever estimated the cost/time spent on working on getting a vacant position filled by an external agency and effort spent in bringing a replacement up to speed.

4)     4)A company with potential employees but lacking the career development planning to encourage them to be future leaders.

Don’t you think an organization would have better business growth and stability if their key people spend their time on profit-generation than filling vacant positions and getting a new hire up to speed.

How about a system that can help solve all above for you along with encouraging individual career development.

Succession Planning is the answer for the same & it can go great things for your business and of course we should not forget –

Best Run Businesses Run SAP

B) How to do Succession Planning?

An effective way of Succession Planning involves below steps:

1)     1) Define a Succession Planning Process.

This involves identifying your goal of Succession Planning and figuring out your process of identifying/nominating key positions/potential employees.

2)     2) Leverage tools of SuccessFactors Succession Planning

SuccessFactors Succession Planning provides lots of tools to make this journey of Succession Planning and execution a smoother process. More details on these tools is in next section.

3)     3) Career Development Planning

Succession planning without carving a Career development plan for your employees keeping in view their career aspirations, is of no use. Ensure that you develop the skill set of potential candidates and in turn retain them.

4)     4) Continuous Review of Succession & Development Planning Process

This is important as a well-defined process can only be successful if it involves regular reviews.

C) SuccessFactors Tools for smooth Succession Planning

SuccessFactors Succession Management provides integration with Employee Data, Personal( Org) data, Background Data, Trend (Ratings) Data, Competency Data,Families Roles & Job codes, Position Data and Learning Activities Data for customers along with below tools that you can use for your customers:

1)      1) Employee Profile/Scorecard: This is the heart & soul of Succession Planning. Make sure you have the maximum information added here. The more you have, the more information you would know about your workforce that would help you in better Succession Planning. Make best use of Talent Flags that helps you decide if the person is a good successor.

2)    2) Succession Org Chart: Main Succession features that would give you visibility of the entire organization in any roundtable discussion along with any Employee profile information about an employee. Also, this is where you would enter your Succession Plans.

3)    3) Lineage Chart: Helps identify the gap and provides an insight with the domino effect.

4)    4) Nomination: Choose among the various nomination methods (Role, Role Person, Legacy Position, MDF Position, and Talent Pools) that SuccessFactors provide and nominate Successors.

5)    5) Formless Approvals:  You can also add approvals to Succession nomination ( with or without Succession form).

6)    6) Role Based Permission: Permission what information you want people to see. This is important as some information is really confidential in Succession Management.

7)    7) Talent Search:  Helps to do company-wide searches (which can also be saved) to find the best-fit candidate.

8)    8) Side by Side Comparison: Compare Successors side-by-side to pick a successor quicker.

9)    9) Performance Potential Matrix: Plots employees in a chart (e.g. 9-Box, 16-box) to easily identify top and under performers. You can also see historical view in some years. Plus Succession provides flexibility of normalized ratings – E.g. converting your 5 point scale to 3 point scale for a 9 box matrix.

1C  10) Calibration: Calibration help perform rational assessment of employee’s performance and potential with the help of very useful drag-and-drop feature.

11   11) Talent Pools: Helps nominate employees to pools and provides a flexible tool for Succession Planning.

12   12)Presentations: You can create Presentations with Real Time Employee Data.

13   13) Development Goal Templates: Career development planning templates can be created for development plans of employees to track their growth.

14   14)Career Worksheet: Career worksheet enables employees to view and save organizational job roles and see where they fit in that and what they are considering for future. It also provides an understanding of what all goals have already been met and the kind of development work is required to move completely into a new considered role.

15   15) Career Path:You can go to employee’s Career Path from Career Worksheet itself and it provides a graphical view of the career paths from Employee’s current role to the new selected role/job role considering.

16   16) Team Insights: It is new feature added with latest Q4 release which enables managers to have access to important details and information about their direct reports through with a pre-packaged presentation available as a tile in Homepage.

D) Some Commonly Asked Questions:

1)    1) Does SucessFactors Succession help in planning the process?

Successfactors Succession Management provides all the tools/features as stated above to help execute Succession Planning with ease. But it’s important for your customers to figure out their process for Succession Planning – how you will conduct, meetings, how many levels you want to go down and this tool would help fit your process in the best possible way. 

2)     2) When should we do Succession Planning?

It’s good to do succession planning on a regular basis, if not all atleast some of the activities are recommended to be done regularly.

3)     3) How transparent our Succession planning should be?

It depends on organizations and you need to control sensitive information many times and sharing all data is not recommended.

4)     4) How much effort does it takes for Managers/HR in running the system?

For Managers, the only input that they generally need to provide is Talent Information about their direct reports and Succession Planning is generally done in roundtable discussion where HR would use the Succession tools to nominate successors in the system & no more effort is needed by anyone after the meeting.

SuccessFactors keeps on improving and innovating so stay tuned for more updates under Succession Planning as I am sure there’s lot more to happen in this space.

Would love to hear back from you with your comments/feedback/suggestions that may help me share my learnings/information in a better way with you.

Happy Learning!!

     I generally like things to be "nice and clean".....code, application execution, documentation, log files, my office....ok, ok...maybe not the last one (haha). This blog will cover a nagging "oddity" of HCM Processes and Forms that has "bugged" me for quite a while. I came across this one a good while back and thought it would be fixed by now, but it seems SAP has other things going on (hey, have you heard about this new thing they got called S4/HANA? haha). Since SAP seems content with it (for now?), I figured I would at least put it down in a blog in case it "bugs" other people who might be wondering what the "heck" is going on.

     In a nutshell, what happens is that if you happen to take a look at the Application Log (transaction SLG1), which I do quite often it developing HCM P&F processes, you are going to see a lot of entries in there as errors with the message text:

    Work item 000000000000 cannot be read

     But fear not!!!! These are really errors themselves...er uh...I mean bad entries.....entries that should not even be there. But why? Why would they get written to the application log at all? Ahhhh.....here is where our detective work begins!

     When I first wanted to find how this entry is written, I started with the obvious. I had often used the Application Log functions before (app logging is cool!), so I looked first at the functions:

     BAL_LOG_CREATE

     BAL_LOG_MSG_ADD

     I did a good old "where used" on them and was looking particularly for anything "ASR" related. Two classes caught my eye right off (and are VERY useful for you to remember/note/use!):

• CL_HRASR00_APPLICATION_LOG       (used for writing to the app log from theHCM P&F runtime/process execution)
• CL_HRASR00_DT_APPLICATION_LOG (used for writing to the app log from the HCM P&F Design Time/design/config view)

     I took a look at the class CL_HRASR00_APPLICATION_LOG and placed a breakpoint in the most obvious place....the method ADD_MESSAGE which is what writes to the application log.

     I started up my process and right away before my form even displayed, my breakpoint hit and the debugger popped up. Looking at the call stack, I could see class CL_HRASR00_FPM_UTILITIES method GET_STEP_PROPERTIES_WIID calls function HR_ASR_GET_STEP_PROPERTIES ....and here is our culprit!

     Looking here, you can see it first attempts to read the work item....but we just started our process, so we do not have one!!! (and might not at all if our process does not use workflow)

     So of course, the function call fails and our "sy-subrc" is not zero. This cause it to go into error handling...which includes guess what? Writing to the application log!

     Here, we can see the values it passes to the "write to application log" method (does that work item ID seem odd? haha).

     And if we look at the actual message class WL and message number 803, we can see...

    Look familiar? haha

    So yes....every time we start a process, SAP writes an error to the application log. Why? I have no idea! Sure seems like a "bug" to me, but to look at it from a positive side, we can see every time someone does "attempt" to start a process whether they carried through with it or not, so maybe that can help with auditing if nothing else. I just think there could be a "nicer" way of handling it.

   Well, this was a rather short one, but just wanted to cover this in case anyone else ran into it and was wondering why their application log was so "messy". I hope it helps, and as always, I will keep blogging if you keep reading them! Till next time....

    If you ever get involved with HCM P&F in any way, you most assuredly will at some point have to create your own generic service. I will not go into detail of what a "generic service" is, but let us just think of them as a way for us to do in HCM P&F what the configuration will not directly do.....like a way to mingle in little bits of executed custom code in with our configuration....which come to think of it, sounds absolutely scary! (haha)

    Anyways, time and again, I have either "inherited" code from previous developers, have to review code for people who are learning HCM P&F, or see code examples/tutorials on the web, and one of my biggest "pet peeves" is when they have not defined anything in the GET_FIELD_INFO method (or they do so half-heartedly by not defining all of their fields). When I ask for a reason, the response is often, "Well, if I don't define them, they still get passed over.". Well, yes....that is true...but then you are relying on the framework to guess how you want to use them, and not to mention, you open yourself up for all manner of "bugs". You can often see this happen as follows....let's say you define a form field in config as "MY_FIELD" with data element "CHAR25"....you then map this form field to your generic service operation which does have the field assigned but you have not defined it in GET_FIELD_INFO.....once you do this, you will notice that it will now attempt to "match up" your form field's data element to the operation's field data element....which guess what?.....it is not defined! ....so it will CLEAR out your form field's data type assignment. But what does that hurt? Well....let's see....first off, you will get a warning on checking your form scenario (Utilities-> Check Inconsistencies).....second, if you go to your "rules" configuration, your form field is no longer listed as an option...third (and worse!), when you got to your form layout that your field may be used on or you want to add it too, the field is no longer available and if it was there, you get a nasty error message. So yes...put in the extra time up front to save you LOTS of headaches in the end! But how do we define the "field info" and what all can we do with it? Come on....follow me!......

      If you are familiar with Generic Services for HCM P&F, then these methods should of course look familiar to you (they better!!!! haha), and we are especially interested in the method GET_FIELD_INFO.

    This method is VERY important because it defines what our field is called and how it is used (data type/element). Think of this method like creating a "library" of all of our "public" fields/parameters/attributes to allow us to "interface" with our service (and "operations"...which we can think of as our public "methods" in a sense). When we define our operations, we assign what fields we use with the operation. You might see it in code as something like...

    Here, you can see that we just keep adding fields to the "fieldnames" table and then pass the whole thing when we assign it to the "operation" structure which then gets appended ("added to the pile") to all of our "operations" which is what the method returns. Using our class method analogy, you can now think of this as we just defined a method called "CHECK_TABLE" for our "class"(our generic service) ,and this method takes the signature/parameters COL_INDEX, COL_NAME, COL_DATE, COL_FREEFORM and COL_NO_DELETE. It would be like setting ourselves up to do a method call in code:

CALL METHOD my_class->CHECK_TABLE ( CHANGING col_index = l_index

                                            col_name = l_name

                                            col_date = l_date

                                            col_freeform = abap_true

                                            col_no_delete = abap_false ).

    So over in the HRASR_DT transaction (Design Time) when we are configuring our generic services, we select which operation(s) from our service we want to use. Guess how the Design Time knows which operations to populate the drop-down with? It actually calls the GET_OPERATIONS method of our service! And it does not take a genius (or even me....haha) to figure out when we map our form scenario fields to our operation, how it knows what fields are possible for that operation (*hint...remember in the GET_OPERATIONS method where we defined what fieldnames are used in the operation? Yep!). And to wrap this all up, it then knows the details about our fields (like data element) because it then calls GET_FIELD_INFO to know how our service uses/defines the field!!!! So now, you should understand why it is very important that you take the time and care to fully define all of your fields in the GET_FIELD_INFO method.

    In the GET_FIELD_INFO method, our implementations typically look like....

    You simply start looping through and building up your field definitions. It is easiest just to "loop" and use a case statement to respond to each fieldname. If you want to be real "creative", you can add your own error handling to have a "when others" in your case statement to catch anything not defined, and throw back a error/warning to the user to let them know that a field they are trying to map over has not been defined. That is just a matter of your own preference as it will not affect anything at runtime.

    Now, of course, if you want to be a very "detailed" developer, you should define your field names and data element names as constants (public/private constants as static class attributes) and then reference those in the code in case you ever need to change the names of the field/element used. However, for "readability", I left the above code "as is" (yeh....that's it...that excuse sounds good! haha) Keep in mind that the names we used in our GET_OPERATIONS method as the "fieldnames" should match the names we use in the GET_FIELD_INFO method as our field names (as well as anywhere else in our code like DO_OPERATIONS when looking through the datasets), so using constants helps insure these do match up! (* I may or may not have had to hunt down strange bugs before where I "fat fingered" typing the names directly, and they did not match. haha)

    The "field info" that we define for each of our fields is based on structure HRASR00GS_FIELD_INFO.

    At the very least, you should always defined the FIELDNAME and FIELD_DATA_ELEMENT_NAME. The others have very specific usage which we will further discuss. Not setting/assigning/defining them directly in your code will assume the "default" setting for them (false or empty/blank). You do not necessarily have to define them if you can assume anyone else will understand this too....or you really just want to be a pain for whoever follows you. (haha) You can look at SAP's many "standard" generic services (and many more now with HR Renewal 2.0!), however, be warned....many are incomplete also and some are not consistent in how/why they use some of the fields (like "reference field"). It will give you some ideas, but I think you can figure out how best to define your fields. Let's look at each possible setting in detail....

FIELDNAME

I am going to blow your mind here.....but hold on.....this is the name of your field!!!! WOW!!!...right?!?! haha Yes...this is just "what we want to call our field"...like defining a variable name. However, it is often best to make sure that you name your field on the generic service side exactly what you call it over on your form scenario config's "form fields" side of things. They do not have to match, but it sure makes life a whole lot easier.

FIELD_DATA_ELEMENT_NAME

Again....hold onto your seat.....this is simply the name of the data element that your field should be defined "like". So for example, if you have defined field "address_street" and want it to be like data element PAD_STRAS, then you will set this is: field_data_element_name = 'PAD_STRAS'. It is important that your data elements match up. Whatever you defined on the form scenario's form fields configuration for your field's data element should match what you assign your corresponding generic service field.

SUPPORTS_VALUE_HELP and SUPPORTS_DEFAULT_VALUE

Think of this more as "documentation purposes" now. There used to be a bit stricter checking on these fields as you can see in these comments/notes/patches...which themselves have since been commented out (as of HR Renewal 2).

Basically, if you had marked this field as "supports default value" yet in your configuration it was not set as getting a default value from this service, you would get a warning. The same kind of thing would happen if you had marked the field to "support value help" but had not set it for "input help" in configuration.

DEPENDENT_FIELDS_FOR_DEFAULT and DEPENDENT_FIELDS_FOR_VALUEHELP

    These are some "interesting" ones we can set. These are actually "tables of fields" that we assign (like when we assign "fieldnames" to our operations in the GET_OPERATIONS method). Again, this is more of a "sanity" check to warn us if our configuration does not match what the operation expects.

    For example, suppose we want to populate our own "value help" for Personnel Subarea but of course, the values we show/display are going to depend on the Personnel Area. We might define something like....

CLEAR field_info.

field_info-fieldname = 'emp_persa'.

field_info-field_data_element_name = 'PERSA'.

APPEND field_info TO field_infos.

CLEAR field_info.

field_info-fieldname = 'emp_btrtl'.

field_info-field_data_element_name = 'BTRTL'.

dependent_field = 'emp_persa'.

APPEND dependent_field TO field_info-dependent_fields_for_valuehelp.

APPEND field_info TO field_infos.

....so then, the framework will "look" and say "ok...we have the field for Personnel Subarea mapped to this operation....but is the Personnel Area field ('EMP_PERSA') also mapped to this?".....if we mapped the Personnel Subarea but did not map/pass the Personnel Area, it will actually not "warn" us....it simply "unflags" the "supports value help" field. (you can see this in method GET_GEN_SRV_OPERATIONS_INFO of class CL_HRASR00_DT_FSCN_GS_DATA). Otherwise, these fields are only checked in one other place (class method) which does nothing really other than take whatever value is passed.

So yeh...for the most part, they are not strictly enforced....but nice to make sure you have everything "noted".

FIELD_REFFIELD_NAME,IS_CURRENCY_FIELD and IS_QUANTITY_FIELD

Now THIS is where things get interesting! These are the probably the most useful fields we can assign. For most all cases, you will use the FIELD_REFFIELD_NAME and then either use IS_CURRENCY_FIELD or IS_QUANTITY_FIELD. A field can not (should not!) be both a currency field and a quantity field. In a nutshell, this allows us to "reference" one field to another so that the actual value of the field will automatically be converted for display (external) and storage in the database (internal) without us having to call additional functions to do this for us.

FIELD_REFFIELD_NAME is our "reference field". Think of it as saying "for our field, we need to refer to this other field in order to determine our value" (ie. to look for a conversion). However, even SAP does not always use this "correctly". Here is example code for a standard SAP generic service....

    However, if you look at method GET_TECHNICAL_FIELD_INFO from class CL_HRASR00_GENSERV_MAPPER (which is the only place this field gets checked), you see at line 66-76, it explicitly checks to see if either the IS_CURRENCY_FIELD or IS_QUANTITY_FIELD is true, otherwise it will CLEAR out the reference field name (ie. ignore it).....soooo.....not sure how SAP's own folks think it gets used. (haha)

      (*there are MORE problems/BUGS with this code however, that I will cover later below)

  SAP does the same kind of "reference field for currency/quantity" handling in the SAP_PA service. You can see this in class CL_HRASR00_PAITF_MAPPER method GET_TECHNICAL_FIELD_INFO. Around line 80, it loops though the fields mapped to SAP_PA (form_scenario_fields). Oddly enough, the "PA mapper" handles "reference field a little differently. For instance, say we mapped infotype 0008 annual salary and currency as follows:

    In the GET_TECHNICAL_FIELD_INFO method as it loops through and finds our "annual salary" field, it does the following:

1. Looks at the "mapping buffer table", T5ASRFSCNPAMAP, to find how we mapped our "form field" to the PA structure field.
2. From the "mapping", it can "see" what the SAP_PA field is that we mapped to....in our case, "ANSAL".
3. It then can "lookup" the dictionary details (data element, type, etc) ...you can see structure DFIES and see the definition. It very easily tells us our reference fields! (much easier than how we have to do this in our generic service).
4. This definition describes the fields "reference field" and "reference field type".
5. It checks to see if a "reference field" is defined (and ours is) so then it goes back to the same "mapping buffer table" as in step #1 and finds that field.
6. It gets the "PA fieldname" of our reference field (in our case, "ANCUR") and again looks up the field's dictionary definition (in DFIES again) to find the "data type".
7. If the reference field is data type "CUKY" (currency), then it sets our reference type as "C". Otherwise, it is set as "Q" (quantity).

    Here, you can see how the "PA mapper" builds the definition of our field.

  In the Dispatcher (class CL_HRASR00_DISPATCHER method GET_FIELD_INFO), you can see where it calls either the PA Mapper or Generic Services Mapper to "get technical field info".

It then takes a look at all of our collected (both SAP_PA and generic services) "technical field info" (around line 119) which eventually gets passed back to class CL_HRASR_PROCESS_UI_EVENTS and method ADD_REFFIELDS_TO_EXTERNAL_DATA. This one is a bit odd to me because it takes the actual currency value and makes that the reference field name (not to mention assuming it is always a "currency").

    Ok ok...back to our generic service and "GET_FIELD_INFO". In my own generic service code, I have used it as follows as an example for using the infotype 0014 (Recurring Pay) "amount of payment"(BETRG) value and related "currency"(WAERS). Based on how the method GET_TECHNICAL_FIELD_INFO from class CL_HRASR00_GENSERV_MAPPER looks are out field definition, this is how it should be written:

    You can see how I set my "amount" as the "reference field" on my "currency field"(WAERS) field and also marked my "currency field" as "is currency field" is true. However, this is COMPLETELY BACKWARDS from how SAP handled it in the "SAP PA MAPPER" as shown previously. If the generic service mapper actually followed how the SAP_PA Mapper does it, our code should look something like:

    In other words, our "amount" field should  have the corresponding "currency" field listed/defined as it's "reference field", and then on the "currency" field, it should have "is_currency_field" marked as true ("X"). This way, it would match with what SAP_PA returns to the Dispatcher when it's "get technical field info" method is called. I have no idea why SAP does not do this!

    Finally, to make matters even worse, the actual code in method GET_TECHNICAL_FIELD_INFO from class CL_HRASR00_GENSERV_MAPPER has a nasty little "bug". If we do set up our field as having a "reference field" and "is currency field"...even doing it the "wrong" way....the code does set our "reference field type as "C".....but will then set EVERY FIELD AFTER as "C" also....

    This is because the code does not clear out the "structure" used:

    You can see that badi_technical_field_info_wa is never reset/cleared. Line 64 just moves over the "corresponding fields" which "field_reffield_type" is not one of them. So once we set "field_reffield_type" as on line 68, if no other fields have a "reference field" as checked on line 66, then they just get the same value ("C") set to them every time. This is why we can't have nice things!!!! ARGGGGGGG!!!!

    When you set this up, it "should" handle the input/output (external/internal) conversion for us auto-magic-ly. For example:

"The ANNUAL_SALARY field is associated with SALARY_CURRENCY field that you also have on the form. You defaulted the SALARY_CURRENCY field with currency JPY. If the amount is 15,00 JPY in the backend, it is actually shown as 1500 JPY. Similarly if you enter 900 JPY in the form, it should store as 9.00 JPY in the HR system."

    As awesome as all this appears, I know it is shocking, but this has not always worked so well (even in the SAP_PA service). There have been notes along the way. Honestly, because of the "bugs", I often had to do my own "solution" for this much as SAP does say in screens like "Base Pay" where there are actually TWO fields for each currency value....one for display (a converted value) and the one that is actually stored (background/hidden one).

    For the Adobe Interactive Forms & ISR days, there were some issues with this working correctly at first. However, SAP corrected it and provided this note:

1351143 - Conversion of Amounts based on Currency

    FPM forms have had a "bug" with this not working correctly for some time now (hence I had to "workaround" it a lot!) , but thankfully it was corrected. I actually found out because when we did an upgrade, it actually started to work which then caused problems because I had been doing the conversion (in/out) myself! (haha) However, if you have not upgraded in a while, SAP put out this note for FPM forms back in April 2015:

2152011 - FPM Forms: Conversion of amounts based on currency not occurring

    So now you should have a better understanding of what to define in GET_FIELD_INFO and why you should (other than not making me very angry if your code is ever handed over to me! haha). Like I said, this is one of the more often overlooked pieces of HCM P&F, so I thought it would be good to blog about (...and I may have just seen another developer's code who left about half of his generic service fields undefined and "motivated" me to publish this one out! haha). As always, I hope you enjoyed it and even better if you found it useful. I will keep blogging if you keep reading. Till next time...

(*EDIT: added more detail around how SAP does not handle the currency/quantity conversion correctly in generic services and show the "bug".)

At SuccessConnect 2015, WorkForce Software announced that it was signing a global reseller agreement with SAP that “adds a robust, cloud-based workforce management solution to SAP’s portfolio, complementing the company’s market-leading core human resources (HR) and global payroll solutions.”

Since this has happened, many customers and partners have reached out to me to understand what this agreement offers, what it means for customers, and what this means for the developing Time Management capabilities in SuccessFactors Employee Central. Current SAP customers who are using SAP Time Management and also evaluating a move to Employee Central have shown a particular interest in understanding the differences in the offerings and what the use case is for each one. In this blog I will investigate the agreement, what it means for customers, how customers can figure out which solution to choose, and how to build the roadmap for moving time management to the cloud.

What’s the crux of the agreement?

SAP’s agreement with WorkForce Software means that SAP will now be reselling and supporting three applications from WorkForce Software’s EmpCenter® suite under the brand SAP Time and Attendance Management by WorkForce Software. WorkForce Software’s EmpCenter suite is a robust cloud-based workforce management solution that can handle simple, complex and/or industry-specific scenarios. The three applications are:

• Time & Attendance: time and attendance application
• Advanced Scheduler: workforce scheduling optimization
• Absence Compliance Tracker: complete leave management solution (for U.S. and Canadian Employees)

You can learn more about the agreement and the functionality available by reading SAP Time and Attendance Management by WorkForce Software.

Who is WorkForce Software?

WorkForce Software is a best-of-breed provider of cloud-based workforce management solutions for organizations with complex policies and compliance concerns. They were formed in 1999 and are based in the US with offices in the UK and Australia. Through its EmpCenter® workforce management suite, WorkForce Software enables organizations to fully automate time and attendance processes, effectively manage employee absence and leave, optimize staff scheduling, and gain real-time visibility into labor costs and productivity. They have 1.8 million users at nearly 600 clients across more than 90 countries worldwide which all rely on WorkForce Software solutions to streamline compliance, reduce labor costs, provide more intuitive tools to their employees, and achieve strategic HR on a global basis.

What does the agreement mean for customers?

By adding these solutions to the SAP pricelist, it means customers have a one-stop-shop to purchase total workforce management solutions along with other solutions from SAP. Apart from simplifying procurement and billing, it also means that they leverage application support through the SAP Support Portal and benefit from investment in data and user interface (UI) integration between Employee Central and WorkForce Software. While both data and UI integration already exists (customers can see what is currently available by heading to SAP Service Marketplace via http://service.sap.com/ec-ondemand), additional, deeper integrations will continue to be developed to enhance the user experience.

For customers currently using older time and attendance systems, this opens up an entirely new option: the opportunity to transition to a best-of-breed solution in conjunction with SuccessFactors’ Employee Central and Employee Central Payroll. In addition, as more partners are trained to implement SAP Time and Attendance Management by WorkForce Software, customers will be able to use their preferred implementation partners. To meet the growing demand, WorkForce Software has already begun to ramp up its Partner Certification Program to supplement its existing roster of joint WorkForce Software and SuccessFactors implementation partners as well.

What this deal is not

While this deal is many things, there are definitely some things it is not. This reseller agreement is not about selecting one timesheet application over another. It’s not SAP Time and Attendance Management by WorkForce Software versus Employee Central Time Management. WorkForce Software offers a set of total workforce management solutions covering time and attendance, absence tracking, leave management, and schedule optimization. Employee Central’s time management capabilities offer a different use case, and we’ll cover this later in the blog.

The deal is also not meant to suggest that SAP are not investing in time management or that it does not have time management functionality currently; both are not true. The deal does mean that SAP is offering customers the chance to manage complex time and attendance scenarios, track absences, and more with one of the leading workforce management solutions in the market, in the event that their needs cannot be met by Employee Central Time Management. In addition, the solutions are not mutually exclusive. Customers who want to use time management in Employee Central, but want to perform absence tracking with WorkForce Software, for example, can do so.

Why Partner?

The best way to answer this question is to quote Thomas Otter from this blog comment:

Partners play a vital part in our strategy. We don't think we can build everything. We have excellent relationships with WorkForce [Software] and Kronos. These will strengthen rather than diminish

I believe that the approach is an excellent way of bridging the gap while SAP builds out functionality as well as a long-term solution for items that they do not plan to build. While some industry commentators may see this as SAP admitting they don’t have strong functionality, it’s worth pointing out that SAP – and any other vendor – simply cannot build out a fully functioning feature overnight. It takes time – and customer feedback – to build out functionality. In this candid interview with Jon Reed of Diginomica Thomas also points out that:

WorkForce [Software] are doing things with time at a much deeper industry level than we are currently capable of, or plan to do. Let’s say you’re a manufacturing org with 100,000 people. 60,000 work in a plant, and are unionized. 40,000 are salespeople and office staff. We’ll let WorkForce [Software] handle the manufacturing staff; we’ll handle the office staff.

What is offered in Employee Central Time Management?

Before we dive deeper into what all of this means, it’s worth quickly looking at the two offerings that make up Time Management in Employee Central.

Time Off

The Time Off module offers employees the ability to book vacation, PTO, sick leave, and other types of leave. It can handle accruals (both standard and seniority based), holiday calendars, period-end processing, workflows, and offers both employees and managers a team calendar to view pending and approved time off. The Manage Time Off feature enables managers and/or HR administrators to view and modify time types and balances and create time off requests on behalf of employees. The solution has been available for around 2 years and has well over 100 customers using it.

A simple demonstration of the Time Off module can be seen in the blog Time Off in SuccessFactors Employee Central: demonstration. SAP customers can read the Time Off implementation handbook on SAP Service Marketplace at http://service.sap.com/ec-ondemand.

Time Sheet

Formally known as Payroll Time Sheet, the recently released Time Sheet module enables overtime, positive, and negative time entry along with time valuation for each type of time entry that can then be sent to payroll to pay an employee. Additionally it can also handle entry of non-paid time such as on-call time and allowances. The Time Workbench is also provided to display all work schedules assigned to employees, show and highlight work schedule changes in a calendar view, and assign a new temporary work schedule to employees.

In the future, there is a likelihood that we should see the introduction of functionality like begin and end times for time recording (clock-in/clock-out), more complex valuation rules, and clock integration, etc.

A simple demonstration of the Time Sheet module can be seen in the blog Time Sheet in SuccessFactors Employee Central: demonstration, while the blog SuccessFactors Employee Central Time Sheet and Time Valuation gives a reasonable overview of the first release of the functionality. SAP customers can read the Time Sheet implementation handbook on SAP Service Marketplace at http://service.sap.com/ec-ondemand.

So what does this mean for SuccessFactors Time Management?

Well the simple answer is timing. SAP has it covered today and in the future. It just depends on what is needed when it is needed.  SAP is still investing in building out a more generic time management solution, just as they did with SAP Time Management. However, Employee Central Time Management is aimed to offer more simplicity than SAP Time Management, which has seen the over-complex time schemas created by many SAP Time Management customers. Clients can leverage the SAP Time and Attendance Management by WorkForce Software for anything that is not native within Employee Central, and they can leverage Employee Central’s Time Off module, which is already handling complex scenarios.

Which Time Management solution is the best for me now or in the future?

As Thomas Otter said to Jon Reed in his candid interview for Diginomica:

We felt that in terms of immediate fit, WorkForce [Software] made sense. But this does not mean we are scaling back our own effort to build time and attendance. We believe that we will need elements of time and attendance in EC [Employee Central] going forward. We have clear customer demand for time and attendance native to EC.

This clearly points to a specific use case for SAP Time and Attendance Management by WorkForce Software and it makes a lot of sense to me. As a best-of-breed solution, WorkForce Software has a long history of handling complex requirements and meeting industry-specific needs, making SAP Time and Attendance Management by WorkForce Software an appealing option for those looking for an integrated cloud-based solution that targets complex needs and compliance concerns. At the same time, customers should remember that Time Management in Employee Central will continue to be available, providing a basic time management functionality aimed at meeting the requirements of a large selection of customers.

With all of this in mind, customers are still going to be interested in understanding which option works best for them. There are several factors that influence which solution to go for, but the issue essentially comes down to this: how complex are the requirements? For customers with more simple time management needs Employee Central Time Management is most likely the best fit. However, when you start to get into scenarios that are more complex, where the employer is working with multiple employee groups, pay codes, clock systems, valuation rules, unions, and locations, SAP Time and Attendance Management by WorkForce Software is purpose-built to address those needs – while keeping the customer on one SAP contract.

So what do the experts think?

For a deeper understanding, I wanted to get a couple of quotes from industry executives and experts on what they thought of the agreement. First, I turned to Kevin Haus, Global Alliances Manager at WorkForce Software to get his reaction:

SAP Time and Attendance Management by WorkForce Software brings two strong solutions together for a complete HCM suite. With the convenience of single sign on and key performance indicators that appear right on the SuccessFactors dashboard, users can readily spot trends and make informed decisions about time and labor.

I asked Joachim Förderer what he thought about the deal:

It’s all about choice and specific requirements. There is no one-size-fits-all Time and Attendance product out there, and we feel with our own offering natively in EC, plus the WorkForce Software product as a solution extension, our customers have that choice. Plus, there are other partners who will remain in the game. We will make sure that we advise our customers to pick the right option for themselves.

Sven Ringling – a long time expert in SAP Time Management and now growing his Employee Central skillset – said:

It’s great to see SAP and WorkForce Software establishing a closer partnership with the WorkForce Software solutions available on the SAP pricelist. Traditional SAP customers like the idea of getting everything from one vendor and this makes it easier for them. The real proof will be in the pudding, i.e. support. If that works a seamlessly as the sales process, when interface issues occur, it will be a great deal for customers.

Summary

The reseller arrangement between SAP and WorkForce Software certainly gives customers a trusted choice for time and attendance, absence tracking, leave management, and schedule optimization and enables them to purchase these solutions directly from SAP. It also gives Employee Central customers an option if their time and attendance needs cannot be handled in Employee Central’s Time Management features, or if they want to add scheduling and absence management tools to their solution. For customers looking for their Time Management capabilities to be handled by Employee Central, either now or in the future, this deal should not impact SAP’s roadmap or investment. Given the flexibility that this agreement offers, all-in-all it is a good deal for customers.

Further Reading and Upcoming Free Webinar

There are a few pieces that I recommend you check out in order to get a wide-range of perspectives on the topic, including:

• Free Webinar: December 10th: Cut Costs & Improve Efficiencies with SAP Time and Attendance Management by WorkForce Software
• News Analysis - WorkForce Software Announces Global Reseller Agreement with SAP (Constellation Research)
• SuccessFactors’ Thomas Otter on the WorkForce agreement, cloudy development, and HR futures (Diginomica)
• The comments on (RP)TIME to Say Good Bye? (SCN)

Also, don’t forget that you can keep up with the latest and greatest on SuccessFactors in the SAP HCM and SuccessFactors LinkedIn group. You can also keep up on Employee Central specific topics in the SuccessFactors Employee Central LinkedIn group, or follow WorkForce Software’s LinkedIn page.

(Part 1 of a 3-Part Blog Series)

At SuccessConnect 2015, SAP SuccessFactors launched a radical new innovation that expands across the entire SAP SuccessFactors HCM Suite - Intelligent Services. Many of you may have seen the keynotes, webinars, whitepapers, interviews and the awards we've received for Intelligent Services.

However, the skeptics still ask me - "What's the big deal?", and "How is this relevant to my customer?"

In this blog, I'm going to keep the answer simple.

I will provide ONE concrete example of how Intelligent Services improves HR service delivery, while reducing the cost of HR.

Global Mobility - The Problem

Companies today spend more than $150 billion annually on global mobility. According to PwC and Deloitte, companies will increase their spending on global mobility by 50% by 2020. However, only 2% of the companies surveyed rate their global mobility practices as being world-class.

Workforce mobility programs today have not kept up with recent trends - they're complex, costly and inefficient. HR is required to manually update multiple systems, manage each employee's tax liability and work with multiple relocation vendors just to help a single employee relocate to a new country. There's no question that e frequent business travelers and employees who accept global assignments need a reliable and self-service technology that can support their global mobility needs. Intelligent Services was built to help our customers solve this strategic issue.

Take SAP for example, a global leader in enterprise software that employs ~ 70,000 employees. Say 10% of our workforce (7,000 employees) must travel frequently for their jobs or take on short/long-term global assignments. There's a HUGE cost in managing the processes for 7,000 employees! Typically, a much smaller HR organization (SAP's global mobility team consists  of 40 employees) is required to manage all of the processes end-to-end. From when an an employee submits their request to go on an international business trip or global assignment, HR is responsible for hand-holding the employee all the way until they show up for work in their new country - all while keeping costs low.

Intelligent Services - The Answer

Rather than having HR spend hours/days/weeks on manually updating systems, Intelligent Services can automate and simplify the processes for them. HR Admins log into the SAP SuccessFactors Event Center to enable predefined events (such as when an employee changes their location). HR is able to set rules for what happens once the employee's location changes - ie: show a Recommended Community or trigger a ToDo for the employee to complete a particular task. Employees no longer have to guess what they need to do before taking on their global assignments.

Example of ToDo's delivered via Intelligent Services

Example of Recommended Community for Global Relocation

Intelligent Services - The Future

I have shared ONE example of how Intelligent Services can help our customers address their issues with employee mobility.

Intelligent Services may not solve all of our customers global mobility problems 'out of the box'. However, I anticipate that as more customers and partners  leverage this new technology we will find more creative solutions in addressing the issues in global mobility. I have listed some questions that we ask ourselves as we continue to build out Intelligent Services and our global mobility use case:

• How can we help our customers simplify the process of obtaining employees' work visas and permits?
• How can we help our customers communicate better and protect the safety of their employees in the wake of a natural disaster, terrorist incident, or business outage?
• How can we help frequent business travelers simplify their travel and expense reports?

SAP SuccessFactors continues to work closely with our customers and partners to build new events for future releases that will expand beyond the SuccessFactors HCM suite. For more information on Intelligent Services, I encourage you to take a look at the Intelligent Services digital hub.

My next blog will focus on how Intelligent Services addresses the Leave of Absence.

*Many thanks to Tanya Thouw, Head of Global Mobility at SAP for contributing to this blog.

The 15th Annual SAP HR2016 Conferencewill be held in Las Vegas from February 23 - 26 at the Las Vegas Wynn hotel. It is regularly considered, along withSuccessConnect, one of premier events for SAP and SuccessFactors professionals, consultants and customers. There are more than 130 sessions, 50 exhibitors, 20 case studies, 32 hours of educational sessions and 115 speakers. I will be attending this year and be available during the Ask-the-Experts sessions if you would like to meet or customers can ping me in advance and we can schedule some one on one time. I am also very happy to announce that the HR Insider team has given me a special one of a kind promotion code, which will provide a $450 discountfor my customers, readers, Linkedin group members and followers up until the show starts.

If you are still on the fence I thought I would outline my top three reasons to go to the HR2016 conference.

HR Technology – It is very obvious that we are in the early innings of the multi year shift from client server OnPremise software (i.e. SAP HCM, Oracle EBS, PeopleSoft) to the next generation cloud based offerings (i.e. SuccessFactors, Workday, Oracle Fusion) which is fully supported by all of excellent customer researchStacey Harrisdoes in her annualHR System Survey.  At the end of the day, smart customers make smart decisions, buy the right software, hire the right consulting firms, put the right internal people on the team and have successful projects. There is no doubt in my mind that going to HR2016 will make you and your team smarter. It is one of the topics I talk about in this video I recorded withBill Kutik and Luke Marsonearlier in the year calledDirty Consulting Secrets and Tips to be a smart customer.

Speakers– Amy Thistle,Gargi Chakrabarty, and the entire HR Insider team does a great job of selecting speakers for the conference and they include SAP HCM and SuccessFactors Industry Experts, SAP Mentors, SAP Press Authors, HR Expert authors and thought leaders.  Each year when I pull together The Future of SAP HCM and SuccessFactors Consulting I chose people I have a lot of respect for professionally such as Steve Bogner,Luke Marson, Jeremy Masters, Amy Grubb, Brandon Toombs, Jyoti Sharma and Sharon Newtonand this year I was not surprised they have a combined 25 sessions at HR2016. Folks such as Mike Timm, Danielle Larocca, Donna Leong-Cohen, Justin Morgalis, David Ludlow, Steven Hunt, Joachim Foerderer, AJ Whalen, Ralf Wagner, Paul Rose, Mark Brandau, Rebbeca Murray, Brandon Webb, Greg Robinette, Mick Collins and Parvathy Sankar always do a great job on the “conference circuit” and would highly recommend their sessions as well. Here is thebrochurethat outlines all the sessions and there is something for everyone.

Networking– One of the underrated parts of any technology conference and something I outlined in my Valuable Lessons to Make the Most of your SAP Careeris networking. The HR2016 event is a great opportunity to network with peers, meet new people and for customers to share learning’s and experiences with fellow customers. The who’s who of the SAP HCM and SuccessFactors industry will be at this event, looking to swap war stories and business cards, connect on LinkedIn and Twitter and share information. I would highly recommend the Ask the Experts Sessions and Speed Networking, as both are great ways to meet new people. Please stop me to say hi if you see me walking around and if you can’t attend make sure to join twitter and follow hashtag #HR2016 and of course SAP_Jarret :-). I would also highly recommend joining the over 25,000 members in mySuccessFactors and SAPand SAP and SuccessFactorsLinkedIn Groups.

Hopefully I have outlined why you should attend the HR2016 conference and if you are an SAP HCM or SuccessFactors professional this is one event that you won’t want to miss and don’t forget to sign up via thisone of a kind promotion code, which will provide a $450 discountup until the show as it is the best deal that will be made available.

Hi everyone,

you've landed on this page because you are looking for Roadmap details for Document Generation and don't really know where else to look.  Maybe you've done a search on "Roadmap" and this page came up as part of the search results.  Maybe you are bored and are looking through all SCN or Jam Groups where you have access and you saw the word "Roadmap" as part of the content?  Or maybe you were just hoping that finally someone could tell you where you can find Roadmap details?

Well, I may not have all the answers to your Roadmap questions but I can give you a couple of things:

1. Where are Roadmaps normally kept?

2. Where can I find information about Document Generation Roadmaps?

So, for 1., we publize Roadmaps to the wider world via service.sap.com/roadmaps. 

SAP SF puts out the Roadmap information here: https://service.sap.com/~form/handler?_APP=00200682500000002672&_EVENT=DISPLAY&_SCENARIO=01100035870000000122&_HIER_KEY=501100035870000019823&_HIER_KEY=601100035870000248628&_HIER_KEY=601100035870000250121& --> Scroll down to find the entry "SuccessFactors HCM Suite Product Road Maps". 

SuccessFactors have Product and not Solution Roadmaps.

As of this blog, the latest HCM Suite Roadmap is available here: https://service.sap.com/~sapidb/012002523100003818132015E.pdf

So, to answer 2. now, lets look at the roadmap. 

Page 99 of of the current roadmap shows that document generation was introduced with the Q3 release 2015.  Innovations planned include ESS, MSS,mass generation and scenarios for Benefits.  Longer term items include Digital Signature. Now you know where you can keep up to date on Document Management.  And using the roadmaps, you can keep up to date on the entire HCM Suite.

Happy reading.

Phil

When I joined a year back as HR Business partner, I understood that one of the major challenges faced by business leaders is to effectively engage with the talents. Most of the time, the review meetings witnessed discussion around targets/goals and hardly anything around individual development. With ageing workforce and global competition for talent, the need of the hour is to engage and retain our talents. The talents need personalized development plan to close the skill gaps and get more engaged workforce. We need the right talent at the right time with the right skill set to give our business the competitive advantage.

Hence along with business leaders my task was to sensitize the talents on 3 parameters of development plan/goals – What, why and how.

3.  Define the learning activities that will help you achieve each development goal. Learn about choosing the right activities by reviewing "My Development Playbook."

4. Document your learning activity results to recognize your accomplishments.

Development Plan in Successmap:

The Development plan in Success map starts with the following 3 questions:

• Who am I?– talks about one’s relevant experience, industry domain
• Where do I want to go?– talks about whether to grow in the current role or future role based on potential and performance assessment
• How do I get there?- talks about the means to get to one’s aspiration

The most striking feature in the Development plan is “My development playbook”

The development playbook helps one to navigate through 3 critical questions and thereby helps to achieve the most fulfilling career in SAP. Each critical question also has a resource section with ample tools for self-evaluation and assessment.

.

• Who am I?– The path to self- discovery enables one to assess skills, aspirations, growth opportunity, value and personal brand. This section is quite enlightening since it sets one in the mode of introspection.The resources available for exploration are potential assessment and development direction, gap analysis, personal brand building.

• Where do I want to grow? -  Once the self-discovery phase is over, reflect on the personal and career goals and identify how this can be applied at SAP. This section really outlines the career path for navigation starting with understanding SAP’s strategy, passion, industry trends (Know your SAP). Once you understand what SAP has in store you need to start thinking on your preference and career path opportunities (Career Navigator). The Career Pathfinder is a great tool for understanding SAP’s global job architecture. Once you identify the aspiration role, the required skills, competencies, responsibilities can be viewed through Global Job profiles. Also the open positions can be viewed through Job openings.

• How do I get there?– According to me once you are done with Step 1 and 2, half of the task is completed. Now it’s all about realizing your dreams and taking some solid actions around it.

The first thing that comes to someone’s mind when we talk about development plan is training. The tool urges you to think outside the box and apply 70-20-10 learning principle here. You need to choose the goals (can divide into short –term and long term goals) and decide on the tasks to achieve those. The development goals can then be recorded in success map for regular update.

Most of the time, one of the bottlenecks for accomplishing a development plan is the lack of managerial support. The beauty of the tool is that it enables manager to view the goals given by directs and mark their commitment. This provides sufficient window for manager to understand the aspirations and extend the required support for accomplishment.

Overall, I find the tool very intuitive, easy to navigate, quite resourceful and this serves as a career guidance for managers and employees. Diligent use of the tool will enable one to chalk out a successful career path @ SAP

We have recently gone live with Employee Central along with Time Off and Time Sheet functionalities, so thought to share my experience with the community.

A couple of month’s back I wrote a blog on Time Sheet and Time Valuation ( SuccessFactors Employee Central Time Sheet and Time Valuation) which gives more of technical details to configure Time Sheet,  rather than actual scenarios we encounter in project or pain points/challenges anyone  face during the implementation.

In this blog, I would like to emphasize on few key things which are commonly required to use Time Sheet feature efficiently in any implementation. Let’s get started with my findings.

Additional Fields:  

In any organization, it is quite common to track the employee time spent on each project. In standard solution, we have the option to charge time to cost centre, and sometimes this may not be sufficient to capture enough details like for which project employee is charging time.

To cover this, we can add additional fields easily as Time Sheet objects are built on MDF framework. It is also possible to upload attachments if required.  Below is the screen shot with additional fields to capture employee time.

Reports:

Reports play vital role in any product, we have below 2 standard reports for Time Sheet, but they may not be so useful especially if customer specific fields are defined in Time Sheet to track additional information. However, the alternative is you can define your own report which is quite easy.

1) Employee Times Overview

2) Time Pay Type Overview

We have created few reports (example below) to track employee time on the daily basis and weekly basis.

Note: In below report, Hours field is a calculated field with the formatting option set to 2 decimal points.  For some reason, Analytics system is showing around 10 decimals (for example 7.6 in EC is being shown as 7.5999999) in reports, therefore, use calculated field with formatting to get the desired result.

Workflow Notifications and Approval:  When it comes to notifications, in particular Time Off and Time Sheet, notification template is very generic, therefore enough details are not provided in the notification as of now.  However, SuccessFactors is working on building template-based notification to address this issue which is very similar to template based document generation. Once this feature is released it may be so handy to build the notification relevant to the object.

Another challenge we have with Time Sheet approval is, no statistics (such as a total number of hours in the week etc.)   are provided in approval page for the approver to get a quick view before approving the time sheet.  Apparently this is also in roadmap so soon we can have better approval version.   As a workaround solution custom report such as below can be created to meet the purpose. In the below report, Weekly Recorded Hours is an aggregate calculated field.

Current Time Sheet Approval Page

Custom fields for Reporting:By default, custom fields are not available for reporting, therefore   ticket must be created to get them enabled for reporting.

Important :  Enabling advanced reporting may take longer time as there are a couple of activities involved in this process.  As an implementation partner we need to raise a support ticket, then “customer support” team has to raise an internal ticket, then batch jobs have to be run etc...

In a nutshell, make sure that you are giving enough time to CS team to get advanced reporting enabled.

Summary

In summary, based on my experience with the product, Time Sheet is perfectly meeting the customer requirements to capture employee time, and the customer satisfaction is superior so far.

I hope this blog may help the community to understand a bit more about EC Time Sheet functionality.

I am more than happy to receive comments if anyone has faced any challenges with Time Sheet and how they addressed the challenge.

previous blogs.

SuccessFactors Employee Central Time Sheet and Time Valuation

SuccessFactors Employee Central and Compensation Integration

SuccessFactors Employee Central Global Benefits

SuccessFactors People Profile

     Hey you guys and girls, have any of you heard of this thing called Facebook?!?!?!? What about Twitter? LinkedIn? Google +?....I hear they are gonna be a BIG deal! (hahaha)....by this time, these "social" platforms are so common that many have found their way into Webster's Dictionary and even your parents and grandparents likely have Facebook accounts. But what does this have to do with HCM Processes and Forms (HCM P&F)? This is an old blog I had started and meant to finish up, but never had the time. It was just a little "proof of concept" (POC) that I put together for a client....it gave me a chance to "play around" a bit with something a bit outside the usually HCM P&F workload.

     In this scenario, we are referring to Adobe Interactive Forms (AIF), but you can just as easily do this with your FPM-based forms (well, not quite as easy because FPM forms do not lend themselves well to "web links" and Javascript....but you could make your own embedded component as I did with my Google Maps example *hint hint* HCM Processes & Forms: Google Maps and how to step up your FPM forms game! ).

     This idea was born out of an "employee rewards" process that I helped develop. It was around awarding a bonus to employees based on performance and after a series of approvals and so forth, the employee is notified and receives a "certificate". Since the "certificate" follows a strict format and we wanted to include specific branding, images, etc (ie. "make it pretty"), it lent itself much better to a PDF format than to using FPM layouts.

     For this example, let us consider an "employee of the month" process. It will follow typical HCM P&F configuration and development. We have a manager that picks an employee they wish to recognize as "employee of the month". They fill out their form and submit it. For the next step, we may possibly have the next higher manager that receives all of the "nominations" from each lower manager. They will then either approve or reject these (or maybe we make this an "edit" step even where they can put in a suggested "award"....maybe pick from a drop down of "gift card", $100 bonus, vacation time, etc). The approvals get routed to an HR Administrator who can then submit the "award" for the employee. In our case, let us say that the HR Admin enters a $100 one-time payment (infotype 0015) for the employee and submits the form. The backend makes the actual infotype 0015 update via workflow. After the update is a success, we now (FINALLY!!!!) route to the actual employee. Now this is where our "social media-ize" portion finally comes into play!

     Consider that the employee receives the Adobe form "Certificate" which they can print for themselves to adorn their "spacious" cubicle (as we all know is common), but on the form, we have also included a "link"/button for them to share this great honor with all of their "friends" on Facebook (which our very progressive, forward-thinking, Millennial-coddling company allows us access too):

     The user/employee clicks the "share" button, and they will then see a "pop-up" much like...

     Which then will appear on their own page once posted with "share link" as ...

     To "share" on Facebook is quite easy. You simply sign up for an "app ID" (think of this as your "public key" that identifies you to Facebook) .

App Registration and Config - App Development - Dokumente - Facebook für Entwickler

     Next, it is simply as easy as embedding your needed Javascript (or link) into your "web page" (or in this case, our Adobe Interactive Form). There are many ways to do  this but here is a simple code example in which I am writing a "string" that gets passed back from a function to provide some "inner HTML" to where we display our button:

     Now, in your own "script" in your AIF, you can imagine that you would likely be reading several displayed/hidden fields to pull values (like employee name, position, etc) in order to dynamically construct your information that you pass the Facebook share parameters (like "title" or "description").

     You can set just about every portion of the window that shows as well as set how it should display (pop-up or new window/page) and where to redirect to once complete. There are MANY more examples you can find simply by Google-ing "Facebook share dialog". Here is Facebook's own information (thought I find other sites have better explanations):

Share Dialog - Sharing - Dokumente - Facebook für Entwickler

     Now that you understand the basics (and that no real "magic" is involved...just good ol' fashioned "web development"), you can also do the same for Twitter and just about any other social media site. Just check out their APIs, look for examples, and build your own! Has this sparked SEVERAL ideas of your own? (haha) I hope you have enjoyed this short blog and the somewhat diversion from the norm for me. As always, I will keep posting them up if you keep reading them. Till next time...

In this blog, I would like to share my experience with the handling of country specific infotypes in global HCM Process & Forms. The customer has got a global SAP HCM instance and the HCM Process & Forms were used for handling all MSS related transactions across the globe.

One of the most widely used forms was for new hire and it was designed for managers to seamlessly complete the new hire process of their employees. This was form used globally and on completion of this form it automatically updates infotype 0, 1, 2, 7, 8, 14, 41 etc.

The biggest challenge we faced with this form was the handling of Personal Data - Infotype 2 (which is a country specific infotype) globally. Each country has it’s own set of fields in infotype 2 which makes it difficult to use a generic screen structure in design time for that infotype. Original plan was to automate infotype 2 only for US (which is the largest market) and for rest of the world, form will be routed to HR admins to manually update the infotype 2 data for that country. Form was built based on this design and the screen structure used for infotype 2 in the design time was HCMT_BSP_PA_US_R0002. This enables auto-updation of US, wherein rest of the world was handled manually by the HR admins.

This has worked fine for few months but as the number of transactions increased over time, admins outside the US started complaining about their work load. As a result a new strategy had to be devised in order to automate the creation of infotype 2 for rest of the world.

Two options were mainly considered:

1. Create individual forms for each country and have the manager hire employee to a particular country using the form designed for that country.

2. Use the international screen structure HCMT_BSP_PA_XX_R0002 to update the generic fields of infotype 2 and then use some custom methodology to update the country specific fields during runtime.

There were some problems with the first option, the most significant being:

1. Multiple forms to be developed and maintained. Huge development and on-going maintenance cost.

2. Sometimes manager will dynamically change the hiring country of the employee inside the form by changing the personnel area. When that happens, current form needs to be closed and a new form needs to be launched for the new country. It’s technically challenging to handle that kind of navigation without breaking the current functionality.

After carefully studying the pros and cons, it was decided to go with option 2. The approach we followed is as explained below:

1. The international screen structure HCMT_BSP_PA_XX_R0002 was used to map all the generic fields (fields which are common and shared by all countries) of infotype 2.

2. Five extension fields were added to the form scenario. These 5 fields act as dummy place holders for every country.

3. Based on the country, the labels of these 5 fields are changed dynamically in the form to make these fields appear as county specific fields to the manager.

4. The dummy fields are mapped to the actual database fields for every country in a custom table.

5. A custom task is created and is called as the last step of the workflow (after the save_data step).

6. Import the 5 extension fields from the workflow container into the custom task.

7. Inside the method (linked to the custom task), read the mapping table and do a mapping of the extension fields with the actual database fields.

8. Finally modify the existing infotype 2 record of the employee with the values in country specific fields.

Once this new approach was deployed, managers across globe were able to use one single form for new hire but could still update the entire infotype 2 data of the employee (including country-specific fields) in one shot. This has also significantly reduced the workload on HR admins globally.