Discovery Staff Editor

Sep 14 2021

How to pick a SAP SuccessFactors implementation partner

If your company has decided to go with SAP SuccessFactors for your human capital management (HCM) solution, you’ve made an excellent choice. As a one-stop shop where you can manage everything from recruitment to succession and everything in between, SAP SuccessFactors has everything you need to find and engage the top talent in your industry.

But now it’s time to choose an SAP SuccessFactors Implementation Partner. Your choice of a partner can make the difference between a successful implementation and abject failure.

Set your eyes on course for success when you follow a few easy tips to help you find an implementation partner whose goals fit your own.

Check for SAP Certifications

SAP certifications form the foundation of trust between a company and an implementation partner. SAP makes your decision easier by rewarding partners with three certified consultants and three satisfactory client references with a ‘Recognised Expertise’ designation.

SAP awards implementation partners at the company level this designation for excellence in any of four modules, which include:

Recruiting and Onboarding Solutions
Talent Solutions
Learning Solutions
Employee Central and Payroll Solutions

Individuals, on the other hand, can earn certifications at either the Associate or Professional level. To qualify for an Associate certification, a person must have taken and passed an SAP SuccessFactors course on a specific module.

To earn certification at the Professional level, the consultant must have completed training in their chosen module at the Associate level and led three SAP SuccessFactors projects during the past three years.

The consultant’s client must verify that the applicant’s projects were successful. Additionally, the applicant must stay current on certification and delta assessments to make sure that their training is up to date, including the latest SAP features, for their chosen module.

Look at Potential Partners’ Depth of Experience

Like the proverbial nail that fell out of a horse’s shoe and gave rise to events that turned the tide of an entire war, single points of failure can increase your risk of overall failure significantly.

Ask your prospective partners whether they have multiple consultants with certifications and a solid record of success in each SuccessFactors module. Additionally, since SAP modules share data and connect with each other, does every member of your potential partner’s team understand how to take the best advantage of that process?

Assess Your Prospective Partner’s Cloud Mindset

As a 2014 SAP blog post pointed out, many SAP SuccessFactors partners have difficulty adjusting to working in the cloud. That fact hasn’t changed, even though cloud-based solutions are becoming more common.

Unfortunately, some providers still think in terms of on-premises solutions. Getting up to speed with the capabilities and deployment of cloud solutions makes a partner a better choice for a company that’s focused on the future.

But that’s not all. Without a cloud mindset that thinks, “How can I expedite the implementation process by moving most of the process into the virtual realm?” your partner won’t be able to bring the full power of the cloud to bear on your implementation.

Make sure that your interviews cover your prospective partner’s cloud experience. If their corporate resume includes mostly on-premises implementations, move on to the next candidate. You need a leading-edge partner to optimise your SuccessFactors solution for the 21^st century.

Ask Yourself, “Will My SAP Implementation Partner Be a Good Cultural Fit?”

Capability is one thing, but can you form a successful working relationship with your prospective partner? A SuccessFactors implementation isn’t a one-off happening.

Your SAP provider may be working with your teams on an ongoing basis – tweaking your solution to your every need, helping you scale when you’re ready, and adding new capabilities. And don’t forget the support you’ll need along the way.

For that reason – like any other ongoing business relationship – your chosen partner should fit in well with your company culture. Bring some of your other employees in on the interview process so that you can get a better sense of whether a potential partner will be a good fit with your company culture.

sap successfactors implementation partner 447350786

Determine If the Prospective Partner Focuses on Educating Its Customer’ Teams

During the interview process, ask each prospective partner how important it is for them to empower your teams with the knowledge and skills to manage the solution going forward. Ask them to provide evidence (and client testimonials) that they focus on knowledge transfer from their teams to yours.

If their conversation revolves around their company, you can bet that they’re probably not focused on your needs. They’ll be likely to work for their own long-term benefit (and bragging rights) rather than your own.

On the other hand, if the partner’s representative focuses on your needs and shows you how they’ve empowered their other clients’ teams to maximise the benefits they get from their solution, put them on your shortlist. They’ll likely look out for your teams’ success, too.

Look at Your Resourcing Requirements for the Project

What benefits do you want to get out of your SuccessFactors implementation? Whether it’s global experience and capabilities, experience in serving clients from your industry, or extensive support, you need to learn whether a potential SAP partner can meet those resourcing needs.

Choosing a partner with niche experience can bring a rich range of benefits to your partnership. If they have specific industry experience that can help you get the most out of SuccessFactors, they might be a better option than a partner without any knowledge of the day-to-day challenges you face.

Even more importantly, you need to meet their consultants personally. Are they on the same wavelength as you in terms of their willingness to work with your teams and deliver the resources you need?

Look at a Potential Provider’s Ability to Customise Your Solution

Even though you selected SAP SuccessFactors, there isn’t only one way to implement the solution. SAP Activate is the gold standard methodology for SAP SuccessFactors implementations. However, how it is used can significantly differ from partner to partner, project to project. Some important questions you should ask your potential partner are

Do they have a best practice template solution?
Do they use accelerators? These can include a template solution, test scripts, integration frameworks and more.
What does the partner expect your team to do? For example, their standard could require a customer to have their own test manager. Do you have one? If not, how does that impact the price and timing?
Can the partner be flexible on the delivery model to align with your business? Yes, they can implement the module in ten weeks, but do you have the resource availability to keep up? What about your endorsement cycles internally? Does it allow you enough time?

Make sure that the implementation partner you choose understands your needs and will deploy only what you need. However, your needs could change – so choose a provider that can fortify your solution in the future.

Ensure That Your Partner Can Provide Proper Governance

Don’t make the mistake that so many companies make – looking only at the solution. In addition to focusing on the solution itself and how your partner can optimise it for your needs, look at a potential partner’s governance capabilities.

During your interviews, ask what your partner can do to mitigate risk, manager, and user issues. Do they have the capability or desire to work with you on escalations? Will one of their representatives be willing to sit on your steering committee to advise you on proper governance?

With all the sensitive data human resources and payroll departments handle, robust security is a must. Additionally, when you combine that risk with that of remote workers and bring-your-own-device policies, you need a partner with the experience to provide robust governance and teach your teams proper security protocols.

Put an SAP Expert in Your Corner

The Discovery Consulting team has helped companies in a broad range of industries find, hire, and inspire world-class teams with customised SAP SuccessFactors solutions. Get in touch with us today to learn how we can help you steer your company into the future.

Jan 07 2021

Retain and Empower Employees with SuccessFactors Compensation Management

The success of any corporate organisation ultimately depends on its employees. The more productive they are, the more innovative they are, the better your company’s chances at taking the lead in your industry. All things being equal, more innovation and more production drive revenue.

If your company culture doesn’t compensate innovative, productive employees for their efforts, costs rise – because employees won’t stay around in such an environment. Without a system to reward highly engaged employees, such as SuccessFactors’ compensation management module, your organisation runs the risk of losing them.

As employee engagement expert Michael Brenner points out, hiring new employees to replace disgruntled ones can increase costs anywhere from 30 to 400 per cent of each employee’s salary. SAP SuccessFactors’ Compensation module, along with its companion module, Succession & Development, can help align these employees with your business strategy through a pay-for-performance culture. Here’s how this module can benefit your organisation:

Take the Guesswork out of Employee Engagement

SAP SuccessFactors Compensation uses leading-edge forecasting and modelling capabilities to find the ‘sweet spot’ that keeps employee pay within your budget while tying employee compensation to bottom-line results. With this module, you can plug in your company objectives, the going rate for each role, and your yearly budget to arrive at bonus pay and long-term incentives (LTIPs) for those employees who help meet your objectives.

As your business goals and challenges shift with the changing times, you can adapt your compensation plan to ensure that you remain on budget. With all the factors that impact compensation already tied into the software’s algorithm, you can stay competitive with other possible offers yet never go over budget on performance-based pay.

Keep Up with Local Compensation Regulations

With SuccessFactors Compensation, corporate organisations can tailor their employee payment arrangements to country- or state-specific statutes. If your company, like so many these days, employs freelance or contract workers, the module can help you reward them for superb performance as well, regardless of where they reside.

Ensure Stability and Growth with SuccessFactors Succession & Career Development

Even with optimum employee engagement driven by rewarding outstanding performance, your organisation will lose a valued employee from time to time. Whether from illness, injury, retirement, or moving away, some employees will leave your company.

Like in sport, a winning business team needs a deep bench. When you take a proactive approach and provide for a ready backup workforce, you can ensure continuity and improvement among your teams.

SuccessFactors Succession & Career Development module can enable you to fill these essential spots quickly while providing your employees with the chance to advance their careers. This tool helps you create development plans with mentoring programs that train current employees to move into other roles seamlessly.

Not only does this module ease the succession process, but it can also provide automated recommendations for employees who have the potential to fill possible openings. Hiring from your in-house teams also helps you trim costs since you won’t need to go through the recruiting, hiring, and onboarding processes.

When your entry-level employees see the potential for advancement your organisation offers, they’ll be less likely to look for greener pastures with one of your competitors. Additionally, these opportunities will likely motivate them to boost their performance in their current role, making them more valuable even now.

Leverage the Power of SuccessFactors, the Single Platform Solution

Compensating superb performance and developing promising employees into better-paying, more challenging roles are two sides of the same coin. SuccessFactors’ developers created all its human capital management modules on a single platform to simplify human resources workflows, engage and provide career advancement for current employees, and have a seamless succession plan for employees who leave the organisation.

SuccessFactors modules share common data to best meet your organisation’s needs, giving your organisation a comprehensive approach to everything from recruitment to retirement. Before you get started with your SuccessFactors suite, though, make sure that you have all the documentation ready. Once you’ve inputted all the data, SuccessFactors will automate many of the tasks you once needed to perform manually.

Create rules that define the performance levels that qualify an employee for raises, bonuses, promotions, or other perks. If you include the Succession & Career Development module in your suite, define the criteria that identify promising employees in each department or field of interest.

Larger organisations might want to assign responsibility for promotions and other rewards to departmental heads rather than HR leadership. Since they are the ones who see their direct reports’ work every day, they are usually a better judge of what criteria constitute an outstanding performance.

Allowing specialists to be the final arbiter is even more essential for highly technical or creative teams since they have expertise in those areas. With SuccessFactors, you can grant them permission to access the files within their respective departments.

Finally, document your organisation’s compensation and succession workflows to ensure that everything works as it should within the tool’s automation feature. Once the system in place, it can save your HR team’s time while empowering your employees to perform at their best.

With a culture that rewards those employees who help meet your corporate goals, your organisation will rise to its potential and surpass its competitors. To get started with SuccessFactors Compensation and its companion module, Succession & Career Development, get in touch with the Discovery Consulting team today.

Nov 28 2020

Create a Culture of Learning with SAP SuccessFactors Learning Management System

Business success ultimately depends on the skills and knowledge employees possess. Employee training is also essential for compliance reasons. Yet, facilitating a culture of learning isn’t easy without the right tools. The SAP SuccessFactors Learning Management System (LMS) module offers a next-generation solution for corporations that are ready to redefine the learning experience.

Why fostering a modern learning environment is a business priority

According to Deloitte’s 2019 Global Human Capital Trends report, 86 per cent of survey respondents believe that reinventing the way people learn is one of their organisation’s more pressing issues right now. The reality is, learning is becoming more integrated with work as companies tackle two long-standing challenges: the skills gap and compliance regulations. However, employers are struggling to cultivate an effective learning experience and to foster an authentic culture of learning.

In Australia, 78 per cent of CEOs believe not enough availability of key skills is a major threat to growth. When asked about the implications of the skills gap, 55 per cent of business leaders said it’s stopping their company from innovating efficiently and 44 per cent said it’s making it harder to meet growth targets.

Compliance training is a struggle for both employers and employees. Authors Hui Chen and Eugene Soltes sum up the problem well in a Harvard Business Review article – they explain that the costs of compliance don’t always justify the ends. The average multinational spends millions a year on compliance training, and this doesn’t account for the thousands of valuable employee hours consumed every year engaging in training and other compliance activities. Still, businesses don’t see clear benefits, while employees don’t appreciate having to complete “mindless training exercises.”

The key to successful employee training is to create a modern learning environment that engages employees, inspires curiosity, and makes managing compliance simple.

SAP SuccessFactors LMS delivers on all of these objectives, whilst at the same time redefining what’s possible when it comes to upskilling, reskilling, and maintaining compliance.

SuccessFactors LMS enables employees to succeed – and drives business growth

Turn employees into proactive learners with a learning management system purpose-built for engagement. SuccessFactors LMS takes training to a whole new level with machine learning-powered personalisation, accessibility, and clear paths to career development.

Curated training content can align with business goals. Offer courses and curricula to support organisational development, performance goals, as well as compliance needs.
Personalisation makes learning more effective. Employees receive personalised recommendations based on their goals, past training, and the learning of their peers.
Mobility lets employees learn from anywhere. Learners can access course content on any device or download for off-line use.
Give learners control over their development. With the ability to search and filter training content, employees can create learning paths tied to their career and skill development goals.

With SAP’s LMS, employees – as well as partners that sell or support your products – develop new skills and gain knowledge that’s necessary for growth. This can lead to a range of benefits, including faster innovation, greater resilience, and the ability to source talent from your in-house team for new roles and promotions.

It also boosts engagement. With quality career training that’s easily accessed, employees can pick up new skills to help them move ahead in their career. With the SuccessFactors LMS, employers also get a 360-degree view of employee training with complete learning histories, surveys, certificates of completion, and assigned goals. You’ll have more clarity over who’s ready to take on new challenges and what skill gaps persist at your organisation.

SuccessFactors takes the complexity out of compliance

There’s no one way to tackle compliance training. Legal mandates change regularly, and keeping employees up-to-date is a never-ending task. With SAP’s system, administrators can configure workflows and easily stay on top of compliance needs, even in highly-regulated industries. SAP Success Factors automates, simplifies, and ensures total peace of mind.

Customise training by group. Send specific learning assignments to different audiences, such as new employees or those who handle data directly and require updated training.
Reduce legal risk with faster training. Push mandatory recurring and one-time training assignment to learners quickly, ensuring employees are informed, and your obligations are met.
Save time and reduce administrative costs. All of this can be automated, which can dramatically cut down time spent on compliance management.
Gain important insights. SuccessFactors learning analytics offers detailed information on compliance training status and activities. Managers can use this information to stay on top of which employees need training and when.

Managing compliance training doesn’t need to be a headache for everyone. SAP has created a learning management system that makes it easier for employees, managers, and HR teams to tackle compliance efficiently.

A learning management system designed to empower modern corporations

In a compliance-heavy, high-tech world, corporations can’t move forward without a strong culture of learning. Give your stakeholders the tools that will enable them to thrive, and in the process, unleash your organisation’s potential.

Employee training doesn’t have to be challenging – contact us to get started with SuccessFactors LMS.

Oct 27 2020

How SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll Brings Simplicity to Global Payroll Management

Paying a global workforce is becoming increasingly complex. Payroll administrators have to balance compliance requirements for multiple locations and shifting workforce trends, all whilst ensuring fast, accurate, and safe payments. Without an efficient and flexible solution, your corporation faces rising payroll processing costs and lower engagement. Your HR department also misses out on the opportunity to build trust with employees through this vital touchpoint.

SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll enables global organisations to take payroll administration to the next level. An innovative cloud-based solution, SAP’s payroll system brings together all payroll processes on a single platform with embedded localisation for over 40 countries. It’s a next-generation solution that offers consistency, reduced costs, and a better user experience.

What Employee Central Payroll does

Employee Central Payroll (ECP) is the payroll module of SAP SuccessFactors Core HR. It’s an innovative payroll platform used by corporations located in Australia and all over the world.

An out-of-the-box solution with leading-edge capabilities, organisations can count on accurate, timely payroll no matter how diverse or complex the workforce. This is because ECP offers important advantages for global companies.

Sap Successfactors Employee Central Payroll

Flexibility and scalability

The reality is, there’s no one-size-fits-all payment model today. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic shook up global business operations, demand for alternative payment options was on the rise. A 2019 report on the Evolution of Pay found that over three-fourths of employers believe offering customised payment options can make them more competitive when trying to attract talent, and 62 per cent of employees cite off-cycle pay options as a worthwhile consideration when comparing job offers.

With SAP’s payroll solutions, you can standardise payroll processes across your entire organisation and adjust processes to meet changing needs and expectations. Actions that are challenging to implement with other platforms are simple with Employee Central Payroll. Retroactive and off-cycle payments are built into the system, and it’s possible to create custom or temporary paycheck processes as needed.

As a cloud-based system, ECP is fully scalable and can grow with you. Also, your organisation can enjoy disruption-free innovation as SAP updates the software periodically. These updates are automatic and don’t require any downtime.

Minimal errors with real-time monitoring

Payroll errors are traditionally time-consuming and expensive. They can also erode employee trust. Employee Central Payroll’s forward-thinking design practically eliminates mistakes with real-time payroll monitoring.

Unlike software that relies on batch-style processing where large amounts of data are processed in batches, the SAP SuccessFactors payroll module uses continuous payroll processing. As a result, payroll administrators can use real-time analytics and alerts to identify when they need to address a potential error.

This proactive response model can reduce occurrences of double data and other inaccuracies, ensuring employees are paid on time and for the correct amount. This gives the payroll department greater confidence that the correct payments are being sent out. It also saves time. Instead of digging through error logs every time there is a discrepancy, payroll staff can quickly resolve errors in the queue before they become a problem. As SAP includes clear and accessible event records, they can also easily view past actions instead of having to create Microsoft Excel lookups to find payroll-related errors.

Streamlined global payments

In the digital era, HR departments have to develop effective processes for managing data privacy laws. For HR and payroll teams of global corporations, this can be an overwhelming task as different locations have their own laws and regulations.

SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll eliminates a lot of the complexity and manual work with built-in localisation. It automatically complies with local regulations and data privacy laws. Localised tax calculations ensure you’re compliant no matter what region employees live in. The software currently supports payroll processing in dozens of countries, offering useful features including local currencies, languages, time zones, and a calendar with national holidays.

Full integration

Enjoy full integration with SAP’s SuccessFactors Core HR, which includes time management, recruitment, time and attendance, and workforce management. Align payroll processes with HR and create customised workflows to save time and increase efficiencies. ECP also integrates with third-party apps that are maintained by SAP partners such as SpinifexIT Easy Reporter and PCC Accelerator.

A payroll system designed to increase agility

With Employee Central Payroll, your HR and payroll administrators can build out processes that align seamlessly with your organisation’s unique needs.

Cutting-edge features, including organisational charts, inline comments, audit histories, and flexible workflows help to reduce error and increase transparency, while real-time processing capabilities ensure consistent, accurate paycheck processing. With global payroll out-of-the-box, your organisation can have total peace of mind that payroll is effective, no matter how large or dynamic your workforce. And supported integration enables customisation, empowering HR to create efficient solutions to problems and respond to evolving expectations with ease.

To unlock the incredible efficiency and benefits Employee Central Payroll offers, get in touch with our team today.

Oct 02 2020

Key Resources for the SAP SuccessFactors 2H 2020 Release

The SuccessFactors second half (2H) 2020 release is scheduled for deployment in Preview data centres on 16th October and Production on 20th November. Finding the relevant information can be challenging at times, these are the key resources SAP provides, so make sure you have access to the SAP SuccessFactors Customer Community for all the information hot off the press.

This year SAP changed from a quarterly release schedule to a half yearly deployment schedule, which means a longer wait to receive goodies (i.e. enhancements, new features) but also more time for businesses to bed down each release before being managing another one.

The Road to Release Document – 2nd October 2020

This document is usually a high-level explanation of the release process more than actually giving away much of what’s coming out. It’s aimed at system administrators and includes the following key points:

Understanding the update process, e.g. the release and scheduled patches
Steps for administrators to prepare for the release, including using the What’s New Viewer tool, subscribing to useful newsletters, internal planning with key business resources, and activating and testing the release features.
A timeline of when the information and release is scheduled for delivery
Explanation of Universal versus Opt-In features

If you’ve been through releases before, there’s no real surprises here. This is mostly useful to understand the timelines of when certain information is available.

What’s New Viewer – 9th October 2020 at noon PDT

The What’s New Viewer is the one we all eagerly await, as this will explain every feature/update/fix that’s included in the release. It replaced the old Excel spreadsheet that used to be provided with a searchable, mobile-responsive view which can be filtered as well as exported.

You can use one or more of the following filters to narrow the list:

Filter Name	Description
Module (changed from Solution in 2H)	Use this filter to limit the release items to specific products or modules.
Feature (changed from Feature Group in 2H)	Use this filter to find release items related to a set of features within or across solutions.
Type	Use this filter if you want to look at release items based on whether they are a change or something new.
Availability	Use this filter to limit the release items based on their availability status.Release items with Full Availability are available to all customers, subject to their configuration type. Most release items are fully available.Release items with Limited Availability are only available to a subset of customers, usually because they require an additional agreement.
Major or Minor (new in 2H)	Use this filter to limit release items by their impact to your business.
Configuration Type	Use this filter to limit release items to those with a specific configuration type.
Software Version (new in 2H)	Use this filter to limit the release items to those in the release you’re adopting. By default, the viewer is pre-filtered to the current release. We keep older versions in the viewer so that you can go back and see all changes to a feature or module over time

The What’s New Viewer also includes:

Links to more information and resources
Indicates whether the feature is Universal or not
Which module/s it relates to
Short demo videos for some topics.

Recent updates to terminology help make the filters clearer as well as including a filter to differentiate between releases. For more detail and screenshots read this blog post i n the SuccessFactors Customer Community.

There’s a LOT of information to digest in the What’s New Viewer, so one of the services we offer our AMS support clients is to provide analysis of relevant features based on our knowledge of their system, to help highlight the most critical feature that may be of interest or resolve known issues.

Release Highlights Video & Document – 16th October 2020

This information includes high-level module summaries of what to expect, not a lot of detail, more a 1-pager executive summary per module.

Similarly there’s a short overview video and additional videos for some modules giving a taste of key changes.

Release Q&A Series Held – 1st-13th November 2020

This is the real gold right here! Make sure you pre-submit any questions you have about specific updates, Q&A Release Series Question Pre-Submission opens 12th October in the SuccessFactors Customer Community.

Customers can already register for the Q&A sessions and there’s APJ friendly times as well. There’s a different registration process for partners to follow via the SuccessFactors Partner Delivery Community.

What Can You Do Now?

Don’t have access to the SuccessFactors Customer Community? Get set up now!

To access the Community, an SAP-ID (S-user ID) OR a Universal ID linked to an S-user ID is required.
Your company’s user administrators manage S-user IDs and authorizations.
If you do not have an S-user ID, contact your company’s administrator to request an account without additional privileges.
If you do not know who your administrator is, please contact the SAP Customer Interaction Centre.

Then you can register for the Release Q&A Series webinars relevant to your modules.

What Can You Do Later?

Review the What’s New Viewer for your modules when it’s released to the customer community on 9th October 2020 to see what might benefit your organisation.
Run some regression tests in your Preview system before AND after the release is applied on 16th October, this gives you time to identify and raise any questions or issues that come up!
Activate any new upgrades or features you’d like to test further, in some cases you’ll need partner support if Provisioning changes are required.

Need Help?

If your business would like assistance to manage the on-going release cycle and ensure you’re getting the most out of your investment in your SuccessFactors system, get in touch to talk about our support and Health Check options.