Category Archives: Variable Pay

SuccessFactors Compensation and Variable Pay – Compensation Profile Overview

Compensation, Compensation Profile, SuccessFactors, Talent Management, Variable Pay, , , ,

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:

  1. Compensation History
  2. Salary Positioning
  3. Promotion Information (hidden in the screenshot above)
  4. 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):

2084775 – Profile – Compensation

2084777 – Profile Compensation History Tab – Compensation

2084776 – Profile – Salary Positioning Section – Compensation

2084767 – Profile not Editable via Executive Review – Compensation

 

SuccessFactors Compensation – Executive Review Export / Import Functionality

Cloud, Compensation, Executive Review, SAP Consulting, SuccessFactors, Talent Management, Variable Pay, , , , , , ,

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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
  3. 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
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:

  1. 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
  2. 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:

  1. Send email notification to original planner/manager of the affected compensation form
  2. 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:

2084851 – Executive Review – Import Button Unavailable – Compensation

2172177 – Executive Review is not populating data after recent import – Compensation

2255189 – Unable to import the excel file in compensation executive review offline editing. – Compensation Management

2084853 – Executive Review – Offline Edit via Executive Review Export to Excel – Compensation

2084863 – Executive Review – Offline Edit Email Notification – Compensation

Any questions or comments, please leave me a comment below.

 

Some other links that you might like:

My ASUG Town Hall presentation on Executive Review (ASUG Webinar with Jeremy Masters)

Executive Review in SuccessFactors Compensation (SAP Blog by Jisha Jithosh)

Top Ten Gotchas when Implementing SAP Enterprise Compensation Management (ECM)

Compensation, ECM, SAP HCM, Self Services, Talent Management, Variable Pay, ,

Thought I would share a few lessons learned around Compensation management using SAP ECM (Enterprise Compensation Management), but these could be used for any compensation system.

  1. ECM supports the annual compensation (“focal review”) process, but not the off-cycle (ad hoc) increases associated to promotions, laterals, downgrades, etc. Don’t force the off-cycle process in the tool or it will turn ugly.
  2. Ensure budgeting requirements are well understood early in the project between the compensation and project teams.  For example, what is the budget/organizational freeze date (or, is there a freeze date?), can budget funds be re-allocated during planning, what  do you do with terminated employees during the cycle, etc.
  3. Don’t rely too much on “macro-eligibility” to drive your compensation eligibility rules. Infotype 0758 (Compensation Program) is where “macro-eligibility” is defined.  Putting too much intelligence in this infotype is a recipe for disaster because you are at the mercy of master data maintenance (PA30/PA40 transactions).  Bake your eligibility requirements into your “micro-eligibility” rules (including the eligibility BAdI) since you have absolute control over the logic.
  4. Listen carefully to the requirements around compensation planning and approvals. For discretionary plans, ensure that the system is configured to handle the appropriate workflow and business logic to handle compensation worksheet level approvals, routing and escalation rules.
  5. Ensure that all your process inputs (market data, performance ratings, potential ratings, etc.) are configured prior to the compensation worksheet being opened to management.
  6. Agree with the compensation team on which master data will be entered by them in Production versus input by IT in Development (and transported to the upper environments).  Time-sensitive information such as Business Unit Results, Black Sholes/Fair Market Value, Bonus modifiers/kickers, etc. should be controlled by the business in the Productive environment.  This data may also be very confidential as well, for “comp’s eyes only”.
  7. Give the compensation team the ability to proof the compensation worksheets before releasing to management.  Seems a given, but worth it’s own line.
  8. Conduct your system testing with a dedicated QA system with unmasked employee/compensation data. (This may not be realistic for all companies due to budgetary and/or environment  constraints, I understand, but shoot for the stars and maybe you will reach the moon.)
  9. Just because functionality is offered, doesn’t mean you should use it. Test the waters within a demo environment with the compensation team to ensure they really do want all the functionality offered. There is nothing wrong with hiding functionality until if (or when) it’s needed. For example, the Compensation Profile is neat but also can backfire on you if you expose too much data that’s difficult to explain (or – even worse – wrong!)
  10. Don’t over-engineer the stock granting process.  At maximum, collect and split the stock recommendations, but all other activities (vesting management, exercising, life events, etc.) should be handled by your stock plan administrator.

Until next time!

Jeremy

@jeremymasters

SAP and SuccessFactors Compensation Management Q&A

Cloud, Compensation, HR2014, PaaS, SAP HCM, SAPInsider, SuccessFactors, Talent Management, Variable Pay, , , , , ,

Yesterday, SAPInsider hosted a Q&A on SAP and SuccessFactors Compensation Management.  You can view the full transcript here. It is always challenging and fun to do these live Q&A blogs because when you are in the “hot seat”, you need to think (and type!) fast.  Because we only had less than two weeks of marketing for this online event, I was skeptical on the amount of attendees who would show up, but the turnout was a lot higher than I thought. I did see a ton of questions flood in but was only able to answer an hour’s worth.

Compensation

Some takeaways from my chat were the following:

  1. Customers are still confused about the longevity of SAP ECM (Enterprise Compensation Management). I had to (again) reinforce that SAP will not be stopping support of this module. In fact, there is a program called “Customer Connection” which SAP exclusively has for listening to the user community for minor enhancements to the product.
  2. SAP is currently building an integration between SAP HCM On premise and the SuccessFactor’s Variable Pay module. One of SAP’s Product Managers for Compensation/Variable Pay, Deeksha Mittal, was nice enough to join me in on the conversation to articulate some high level timelines for this. She mentioned: “we are working towards an integration between Variable Pay and SAP HCM as well and is definitely on the roadmap for 2014. By the end of 2014 (your next planning cycles) you should be able to take advantage of the integration between Variable Pay and SAP HCM.”
  3. Regardless of using on premise or cloud compensation, customers’ pain points are focused in similar areas, such as: data integrity, process efficiencies (workflow/approvals), and integration with payout process (payroll and/or data extract to equity 3rd party administrator). It doesn’t matter where you deliver your compensation – these themes follow us regardless of platform.
  4. As in other modules, customers who have implemented on premise solutions  are trying to understand how extensible SuccessFactors Compensation/Variable Pay is. I briefly mentioned the introduction of the MDF (Meta Data Framework) as well as SAP HANA Cloud Platform as ways that SAP/SuccessFactors are opening up the platform. Will cloud compensation ever be fully customizable? No, but these tools can be evaluated by the customer to see if their processes’ complex and/or unique logic can be incorporated into SuccessFactors’ technology.
  5. Some mention was made with respect to  future modeling capabilities coming in SuccessFactors. Deeksha Mittal mentioned: “At present, the SuccessFactors Compensation & Variable Pay modules provide flexible ways for defining budgets. We are definitely looking at more advanced modeling features that will help HR to develop more effective comp and bonus plans that are in-line with the company’s financial and HR goals.”

I think it would be beneficial to do another compensation session later in the year since there was so much interested. I will talk to SAPInsider about that.

And hope to see some of your this year HR 2014 in Orlando or Nice, France. I will be doing several sessions this year, including one on compensation: “A guided tour of compensation management functionality: On-premise vs. cloud”

Please remember to follow me on Twitter @jeremymasters

 

Until next time!

Jeremy