On my way to SuccessConnect 2023. Here are the questions top of my mind:
Timeline for move to TIH (Talent Intelligence Hub) and how will it link to existing talent components. Specifically, how will existing customers leverage the functionality given their existing footprint in various talent areas.
New features/functionalities within the Talent areas, especially in the Performance and Compensation areas. When/will the new Goal UI be pushed to all customers? When will all gaps be filled between new and old UIs?
How will Onboarding module move to the next level? Some customers looking to know when the module will get a new, more flexible UX. Also, when will some key functionalities for the US like Veterans status and EEO forms be available out of the box?
We will hear a lot about AI but will be interesting to see how SuccessFactors have incorporated (or will incorporate) into the product versus talking buzz.
Any updates on new functionality for Employee Central Services Center (ECSC) The current integration with SAP’s CRM (i.e. Cloud 4 Customer, or C4C) is leaving some customers wanting more.
If you are at the event and want to chat, please DM on Twitter/X at @jeremymasters
Before embarking on implementing career development/planning functionality with your Talent Management system, you should be asking the HR team a few critical questions to baseline the design. Some of these important questions include:
Do you currently have a competency framework? Do you currently have a skills framework? If not, are you planning to introduce either a competency or skills catalog as part of the implementation?
Does your organization have a development plan (for tracking development goals)? If so, do you link your development goals to competencies (if you maintain them)? Do you link goals to learning activities (within your LMS)?
Do you currently manage career paths within your organization? If not, is this something you would like to do? Do you use career ladders and/or career lattices?
Is a mentoring program currently available for your employees? If so, what kind of mentoring programs do you offer (e.g. supervised, unsupervised, administratively setup, etc)
Do your current job catalog and architecture support the needs for your career planning processes (stated above)? If not, during the project you will need to ensure that the job architecture has career and development planning considerations.
Providing answers to these fundamental questions will provide your internal or external consulting partner with the necessary (broad) direction on moving forward with career planning and development functionality.
HR Innovations 2019, hosted by SAPInsider in Las Vegas on March 19-21, 2019
I was fortunate enough to attend and speak at HR Innovations 2019 last week in Las Vegas. I have attended and been a speaker at the SAPInsider shows since 2006 (gulp!). During the 2006 conference, I spoke on “Guidelines and Best Practices for Leveraging Standard SAP Functionality for Career and Succession Planning” and “Structural Authorizations 101: What You Need to Know”. Boy, that definitely seems like a lifetime ago.
One of my first sessions at SAPInsider, back in 2006
At this year’s event, I was able to participate in a panel (“The great debate – on premise vs cloud”), as well as five (5) sessions spread across only two (2) days. I spoke on building a cloud business case, managing change in a cloud environment (versus on premise), as well as Fiori and SAP SuccessFactors Performance Management. Yes, I definitely felt immersed in the event! A few reflections on the event in general:
SAP Insider looked and felt different than previous shows
SAPInsider made some nice updates to the event. I liked the shorter sessions (30-minute delivery with 10-minute Q&A) with more time for participants to go between sessions and network. The sessions were more consumable for the audience and the event just felt less rushed in general. There were also sessions in the exhibitor hall, and – although it was loud and distracting at times – overall, I think it added another nice twist to the sometimes-mundane breakout room. (Of course, this was an added bonus for the sponsors and exhibitors at the event as well due to extra traffic).
Customers are still worried about life in the cloud
HR Customers get it – the industry is pulling them (whether they like it or not) to the cloud. Most customers weren’t (at least) overtly pushing back but remain surprised at some of the harsh realities when entering a cloud environment (whether it be hybrid or full). In particular, the topic of upgrades came up at a few of my sessions. Customers who have SAP Payroll on premise, for example, were horrified to hear they would need to continue with their annual HRSP (HR Support Pack) upgrades, as well as the added quarterly releases from SuccessFactors. SuccessFactors recently (as of Q4 2018) added test scripts to their releases which put some at ease. Still others fretted it meant more work to spread across little to no available resources.
Yet, Customers understand the benefits of moving to the cloud
Customers understand the benefits of cloud software. The enhanced user experience and continuous innovation seem to be the two most obvious ones. Many of the 15,000+ on premise customers are stymied now since innovating on their current SAP HCM ERP offering may not be justified if a move to the cloud is imminent. The effect on the marketplace is a slow pace of change, and the industry has felt this the past few years. Regardless, customers still understand they need to get there- they’re just struggled how to do so.
On premise is on life support until at least 2030 now (until SAP changes it again).
Ralf Wagner (VP, Product Management) from SAP did a nice job explaining the new offering in 2023 for SAP customers not able to migrate to SAP SuccessFactors in the next few years. The offering is called “SAP Human Capital Management for SAP S/4 HANA on premise addition” (take a breath!). This offering basically means the customer has to “carve out” their existing SAP HR module and deploy on SAP HANA database. It will be based on an EhP8 and supplemented by some HANA-based capabilities. The will then be integrated with the S/4 HANA suite. SAP will develop migration tools to do this. Still TBD on what effort this would really look like.
One of my industry colleagues, Danielle Larocca, Senior Vice-President of HCM Solutions at EPI-USE Labs, created a post on this with additional details.
SAP’s latest approach on migration options for on premise customers
New podcast
Check out the podcast from Steve Bogner’s Insight Consulting Partners. I was a special guest and I had a fun time recording it with Steve and friends. Steve hasn’t posted yet, but I’ll update this post when he does.
Taking in some beauty at the Bellagio
Until next time…. I expect SAPInsider to continue having an HR show in 2020, and go back to simply calling it HR 2020. Here’s to hoping it will grow on the productive changes done this year.
The Compensation Profile within the SuccessFactors Compensation and Variable Pay modules is not new but has seen limited usage since its availability in Q3 2013. This short post explains the major areas/functions of this functionality.
To access the compensation profile, you have two options: either selecting the employee’s highlighted name (above) or by selecting the additional details “Open Profile” link (below):
Doing so will open a dialog (modal) box, that looks like this:
There can be up to four sections included in the Compensation Profile:
Compensation History
Salary Positioning
Promotion Information (hidden in the screenshot above)
Recommendations
The header (top) section of the profile contains fields that cannot be customized by the compensation administrator (e.g. status, location, etc.). These are fields included in the Employee Profile (User Data File, UDF), or within Employee Central. The top also includes access to the Quick Card.
Compensation History can be hidden. The history itself is configured by form under the Compensation Home under the respective Compensation or Variable Pay template, under [Template Name] > Plan Setup > Design Worksheet > Define Compensation Period Data
Salary Positioning is another area that can be displayed but can also be hidden. If you want to hide the section, check out the SAP Knowledge Base Article 2084776 (S-User ID required)
Promotion information can be included in the display. The screenshot below contains the platform (non-EC) fields available. Promotions within Employee Central (EC) are an entirely different subject for another blog.
The Recommendations section of the Compensation Profile contains the exact same fields as the worksheet columns. In fact, it reads from the same configuration, so whatever is visible/editable on the compensation or variable pay worksheet will be the same in this view. Same permissions, business logic, etc.
A few training points for your change management team as you roll out and support this functionality:
Managers lose the visibility to the budget when they are using the Compensation Profile. Even if you use the latest “floating” budgets options, the budget information does not update when the user is planning in this mode
Ensure that you tell your users to save after every individual planning (i.e. each screen), before scrolling to the next. The system will prompt as well, but it’s a good reminder to save and save often so there’s no unnecessary loss of data.
‘Previous’ and ‘Next’ buttons will follow the order of how the employees are listed on the worksheet
For your compensation administrators, here are a few SAP Knowledge Base Articles that are of interest in this area (S-User ID is needed to access all of them):
Today marked the end of an era of SAPInsider events. For the past 11 years, these events have been a great venue to reconnect with colleagues and customers. All in the spirit of knowledge sharing, knowledge harvesting, growing the eco-system – without the sales pitch. Customers really appreciated these conferences for this reason. Maybe there will be more opportunities in the future with conferences like this.
The European conferences always offer huge opportunities for speakers, especially from the US. Imagine the irony with a Yankee like myself talking to an EU audience about GDPR and the EU-US Privacy Shield. My joke that the “NSA is listening in now on this very session” draw laughs from the audience, but the room quickly sobers up when we realize what’s at stake when we talk about data privacy and our care with personal data.
Coming to the EU is also a wakeup call to understand struggles with new technology adoption, in particular, HR cloud. It’s easy to make a case to migrate HR to the cloud in a sales presentation, but harder to do so in a context where organizations are not ready (for a multitude of reasons, some of which are more valid than others). These are the conversations that are needed more often together – to understand a context for technology growth and to plan a realistic roadmap.
Reflecting back on over 10 years presenting in Europe at SAPInsider, it’s been a heck of a ride, and looking forward to the next 10 years+ in whatever form that shapes to be. It’s essential to do for all the reasons above. The coffee and croissants are a plus too 🙂 .
In traditional annual compensation (focal) processes, performing work offline is typically frowned upon by compensation and HR professionals. Whether it be for merit, bonus, or equity recommendations, discretionary increases and awards should be carefully considered by planning managers based on (typically) performance and market factors (e.g. compa-ratio). However, there are circumstances where an export and import of recommendations could come into handy during an annual (or periodic) compensation process:
A group of employees (e.g. customer service reps, manufacturing workers, etc) who – either unionized or non-unionized – need a common increase. This may or may not be driven off a bargaining agreement.
A legal requirement for a country. For example, in France or Spain, where a general or mandatory increase may have been decided by the government
A COLA (cost of living adjustment) that needs to be applied to a particular group of employees by geozone or location.
In the cases above, SuccessFactors Compensation does provide functionality for planners to export and then subsequently import recommendations.
Below are the technical details on how to turn it on and how to use it in a Production scenario.
Assuming you have the permissions to do so, you can turn on the import functionality in the Executive Review by going to Admin Center > Compensation Home > Actions for All Plans > Compensation Settings
Company Settings within Compensation Home
Select the option “Enable Compensation Excel Offline Edit”. As the help states, when this setting is checked, compensation planners may download worksheet values to excel, enter recommendations, and then import them back into the system.
Compensation worksheet with Import and Export buttons
When clicking on the Export button (with the Import functionality enabled), the following pop-up is available. You should select the checkbox to indicate that the recommendations will be imported back into the tool. You can download in either Excel or CSV format.
Worksheet Download in Excel – Ready for Input
The important thing to note here is that:
the planner should NOT insert or change ANY columns on this Excel , except to update the recommendations (input) in Yellow. These are the only fields that the system will use when it gets uploaded
the downloaded document does not contain any formulas
The import process is straight-forward. When the planner has completed their update of the recommendations/awards in yellow, use the Import button to upload the updated records.
Importing Compensation Recommendations
Please note the two options at the bottom of the pop-up box:
Send email notification to original planner/manager of the affected compensation form
Send email notification to current reviewer of the affected compensation form
The first email (as of b1705 release) has the first option automatically checked. Be careful to uncheck that if you don’t want emails to be sent.
A current limitation with the functionality is that this functionality only works within the Compensation module and not within the Variable Pay module. Still TBD on whether or not this will be added to the roadmap. Those familiar with SuccessFactors Variable Pay know that it is a very different animal.
The other big limitation is that currently (as of b1705 release), there is no way to provide this Import functionality via Role-Based Permissions (RBPs). It’s an all-or-nothing switch, meaning whoever has edit access to the Executive Review (whether it be planner manager, Executive, HR, etc.) will have the exact same privileges to export and import. This could likely influence your decision to use this functionality or not in Production.
Some helpful SAP notes on the functionality include:
This is what happens when you fly on a brand new Delta jet. So new that they haven’t even registered Wi-Fi. At least this blog has come out of it – hope you find it useful! I have jotted down a few of my top tips (so far) when integrating and implementing SuccessFactors Compensation and/or SuccessFactors Variable Pay.
Data, data, data! OK, do we need to go through this again? Regardless of the systems being integrated, we are always attacking the same gremlins, aren’t we? As Compensation professions (or those IT Professionals supporting Compensation), there’s nothing like going through a compensation process to see how painfully obvious it is that the integrity of your core HR data is vital in your talent management processes – especially compensation. Take, for example, an employee’s FTE % (sometimes referred to as employee percentage). If incorrect, this one data element can wreak havoc on your merit, merit budget, and incentive calculations.
If SAP HCM core is your system of record, be sure you are using the existing SAP provided integrations. With Integration Add-Ons 1.0 and 3.0 for SAP ERP HCM and SuccessFactors HCM Suite, both the SuccessFactors compensation and variable pay modules have pre-delivered content. You will need to time this integration with your current Foundation UDF “User Data File” file that you are using.
Be kind to your PI (Process Integration) middleware resources. Take them out to lunch and buy them a pizza since you will need their help. The integrations provided by SAP are SAP PI based and will need to be activated in your middleware environment. This is often a project plan task forgotten in the plan and will end up biting you if you don’t plan for it.
If you are migrating from ECM (Enterprise Compensation Management), don’t try to do too much with this. The new integration uses staging tables and is entirely decoupled from ECM. You may end of leveraging IT0759 or IT0761 so LTI handling, if you still intend to interface to your stock plan provider. Also, you may need to do some incentive number-crunching for segments (e.g. “legs”, “assignments”, “rows”, etc.) in a custom infotype. You should consider keeping your existing bonus engine if your incentive plans have not been able to simplify / conform to the SuccessFactors variable pay model.
Don’t forgot that all of your compensation and variable pay templates need to have the <comp-group id=”xxxx”/> tag in the XML if you are sending your data from SAP HCM, where xxxx is a string with no capitalization. As the time of this writing, this can only added via the XML configuration. This tag is important since it tells the SuccessFactors system which forms (that use that template) to update during a refresh from SAP HCM. Like any tags of an XML template for compensation in SuccessFactors, the placement of this tag is very particular near the end of the XML. Read the SuccessFactors documentation carefully and be careful when you are downloading/uploading or editing the template in Provisioning.
Remember the power of the pay matrix (e.g. salary ranges) which drives everything from the compa-ratio and range penetration, as well as guidelines (if included as a dimension). Don’t try to interface this over ( not worth it) – this would just be an upload every year. If a range range/midpoint changes, the onus would be on your SuccessFactors compensation administrator to manually update that. This shouldn’t happen once the process has started unless there was an error or your compensation manager is trying to make your life more interesting…
Think carefully how you will leverage the Executive Review. Unlike the name implies, this functionality isn’t necessarily just for executives, but rather for calibration purposes in general. Based on Role-Based permissioning, you can define a group with display access and a group with edit access. I will be talking about this topic during the ASUG Compensation SIG (login required) later this month. If you are a SuccessFactors customer, please plan on joining me for this learning event!
That’s it for now. Please send along any questions and comments in the area below.
Oh, and Worklogix is a Silver Sponsor at the upcoming SAP SuccessFactors conference, SuccessConnect. If you are in Vegas, please visit us in booth #35.
Several years ago, SAP found themselves in a situation which happens to many large software companies. Two separate parts of the organization developed new HR functionality to solve for a common gap: usability. On one side, HR Renewal came to fruition – a new landing page built off SAPUI5 with a new navigation and user experience. The other – SAP Fiori – was a cross-function solution (inspired with a Google design team) with a separate entry point (SAP Fiori Launchpad) and its own user interface using SAPUI5.
Many customers are now perplexed on how to move forward given both are viable solutions to solve SAP’s long-plagued usability problems, especially in the areas of Employee and Manager Self-Service.
It’s apparent that the bulk of innovation will go into SAP Fiori apps, since SAP Fiori is being leveraged across all platforms (On premise, SuccessFactors, Fieldglass, Ariba, etc.) It is SAP’s answer to a common UX, despite the disparate systems behind it. Vishal Sikka (ex-CTO of SAP, now CEO and MD at Infosys) layed out his vision at the 2013 SAPPHIRE show.
His “Fiori UX Paradigm” – drawn by hand and reminiscent of the days when the best solutions in software began on the back of a napkin – showed his vision, which SAP is trying to execute on.
So, with all this talk on SAP Fiori, does this mean that HR Renewal is dead? No. The functionalities are still more plentiful in HR Renewal (by a long shot), and are highly relevant for HR Professionals. It is unlikely that SAP will endeavor to re-write these apps in SAP Fiori. Although SAP Fiori is the better choice from a mobile perspective (since it’s responsive and device-agnostic), HR Renewal is still a good choice for companies who want to roll out services to their HR teams (admins, reporting) who don’t want to deal with the SAP GUI. The hard-core services performed in HR Renewal (i.e., Personnel Administration and Organizational Management updates such as employee movement scenarios and organizational updates) would almost certainly be done on desktop and not on device (e.g. I can’t see an HR admin performing a complex promotion/inter-company transfer on their Smartphone). This should relieve some of the frustration from customers when they realize a majority of the transactions that are new with HR Renewal are using the Web Dynpro ABAP technology which is not mobile-optimized (as opposed to SAPUI5).
I will tackle more sound-bytes in future blogs. In particular, the question may not be HR Renewal versus SAP Fiori, but perhaps how could they work together for your organization.
Until then, please leave some questions or comments below…
I wanted to share a useful piece of information about the use of the “Lock Objects” functionality in the program RHECM_PROCESS_SUPPORT_FOR_PLNG (transaction code PECM_PROCESS_SUPPORT) since it seems to come up in every ECM deployment that Worklogix is involved in.
Transaction PECM_PROCESS_SUPPORT for process support during ECM cycles
First, there is a common misunderstanding that it’s about locking employee records. However, the “Lock Object” flag is only about locking Budgets (i.e., budget units)
Imagine you have an organizational structure having the depth of 4 hierarchical levels and the top node is A, subordinate from A is B, subordinate from B is C, and subordinate from C is D. Since Enhancement Pack 5 (EhP5), SAP ECM supports the employee-level budgeting approach (bottom-up). This means we have 1) the budget structure as a mirrored org structure (BU-BU and BU-O) and 2) the employee budgets (BU-P).
Whenever a manager is logged into Manager Self-Service doing compensation planning, certain objects get locked. The system locks the employee itself (i.e. P and IT0759), the budget unit (BU) connected to the employee is locked (BU-P) and finally the budget unit (BU) connected to the org. units where the manager is the chief of is also locked. This leads to the dilemma that two functions of the Process Preparation Report (transaction PECM_PROCESS_SUPPORT) mitigate:
1) Option Update Planning and Budgets: Whenever an employee is turning eligible / ineligible, the employee budget is getting created or deleted. Therefore also the roll-ups are getting refreshed. This refresh doesn’t work when any manager is logged-into the Compensation Planning / Approval iView within the portal locking a budget connected to the org unit.
2) Option Recalculate Budget: Functionality doesn’t recalculate budget whenever any manager is logged into the Compensation Planning / Approval iView within the portal locking a budget connected to the org unit.
Dependent on how the compensation cycle is setup (is it a global or country compensation review; global organization or just within a region/country) the likelihood is high that there is at least one manager logged into Manager Self-Service during an ongoing compensation cycle. To bypass this dilemma, SAP has recently implemented the “Lock Object” flag. Whenever the flag is unchecked, the system is not checking any longer if a budget unit connected to an org unit is locked by a user or not. It always pushes changes into the database. Again, the “Lock Object” flag has nothing to do with locking an employee. It’s only about locking the budget structure by managers.
Here are the pros and cons of this functionality.
Pros:
As usually at least one manager is logged into MSS all the time, this facilitates the update of budgets significantly. Simply uncheck the flag and budget structures can be updated all the time. Additional programs which may kick out (or prevent) managers to perform budget updates are not needed any longer.
Cons:
The manager experience can be a bit tricky with these budgets, and proper communication should be made available to managers involved in the process. Let’s take an example where a manager who is logged into MSS and initially sees a budget of 100,000 USD. While the manager is logged in, you execute PECM_PROCESS_SUPPORT to perform a recalculate budget which reduces the budget in a lower org unit for example by 10,000 USD. This update is not immediately visible to the manager, but rather only when he/she opens another iView and then returns to Compensation Planning / Approval iView to get a refresh. This means that a manager who plans to keep his org unit budget at 100,000, but in reality he only has 90,000, because someone executed PECM_PROCESS_SUPPORT in the meantime.
I would recommend to always use PECM_DISPLAY_BUDGETS to monitor any potential inconsistencies in the budget structures which can always be repaired using the button “Update Spent Amounts” in the budget audit report in case they exist.
I was fortunate to attend SAPInsider’s 2015 conference in Nice where the weather was beautiful, the cuisine delicious, and the conference content bountiful. One of the more interesting topics that I learned about was SAP’s support for S/4 HANA and SAP HCM platforms. Based on customer feedback since the original plans were unveiled at SAPPHIRENOW, changes to the support of SAP’s productized integration was necessary. Here’s the skinny:
There are 5 basic scenarios. (I am sure there are others based on customers’ own deployments, but let’s stick with these for now):
If using SAP ERP HCM:
1) Keep SAP ERP HCM in its own instance on premise, and deploy S/4 HANA on premise
2) Deploy S/4 HANA and SAP ERP HCM in the same instance on premise
3) Keep SAP ERP HCM on premise, and deploy S/4 HANA in the cloud
If using Employee Central:
4) Deploy S/4 HANA on premise, and integrate with SuccessFactors Employee Central
5) Deploy S/4 HANA in the cloud, and integrate with SuccessFactors Employee Central
In all scenarios above, SAP has or will have productized integrations to support these scenarios to the year 20xx, where xx is something we need to hear from SAP on. I was able to grab some time with David Ludlow, Group Vice President at SAP, who really understands the customer landscape out there. He presented this slide which captures the options pretty well.
So what does this all mean? Well, the answer is still to be determined, but for SAP HCM customers who are looking to use Simple Finance and other aspects of S/4 HANA, it simply means more options. This has always been a bit of a double sword for SAP, but in my opinion, it’s something that SAP had to do in order to accommodate its vast customer base.
