SAP Development

Nov 01 2021

Moving SAP’s HR/Payroll On-Premise to the Cloud with SAP SuccessFactors

Business is changing, becoming increasingly focused on flexibility, agility and mobility. The workforce is changing too, as staff members begin to expect more from their employers and the systems they work with. This means HR and payroll also need to change, keeping pace with this ongoing evolution. With SAP SuccessFactors, traditional HR models are moving to the cloud, unlocking a wealth of benefits in the process.

The Benefits of Cloud-Based HR/Payroll Solutions

You already have on-premise HR and payroll systems in place, so why do you need to migrate this to the cloud? Take a look at some of the key advantages of cloud migration with SAP SuccessFactors.

A Comprehensive Approach to Remote Workforces

Perhaps the primary advantage of cloud-based HR/payroll solutions is the increased agility they provide. The workforce is becoming more dynamic, with remote teams operating across disparate locations and partners collaborating in real-time across national and continental boundaries. The COVID-19 pandemic has also accelerated the pivot towards home-based work, with a large number of employees now spending significant proportions of their working week outside of the traditional office.

All of this puts strain on HR teams. These teams may find that their resources are spread increasingly thinly as they work to support a dispersed working model. With the cloud-based SuccessFactors solution on their side, HR personnel can manage distributed teams wherever they are found, reducing the time, effort and expense associated with this.

Improved Flexibility for On-Premise Teams

While a dynamic, remote workforce is becoming a common fixture in business, traditional on-premise teams still have a role to play. As we shift towards remote agility, we cannot forget about headquarters- or office-based teams, and HR personnel need to support these team members in the right way.

A cloud-based solution improves flexibility and support for these teams. The SAP solution integrates seamlessly with existing on-premise solutions, ensuring that no legacy capability is lost during migration to the cloud. Meanwhile, HR departments leverage advanced time tracking and attendance features that provide more capability for the in-office environment, supporting more flexible working practices while ensuring staff members are equipped and remunerated according to their contract requirements.

Centralised HR Data Source

The cloud-based HR/Payroll solution represents a central pillar of truth for human resource data. This is crucial as businesses grow and evolve over time, ensuring that all departments and teams are working from a unified dataset that is updated in real-time.

Via the staff member portal and mobile app, teams can ensure that all their information is correct, relevant and up-to-date. From the HR end, human resource teams manage and verify this information, achieving a growing data source that scales alongside the business. The centralised solution can be configured and localised to meet the specific needs of the business.

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Effective C-Suite HR Reports

HR data needs to be more than just data — it needs to be a leverageable source of information with actionable insight at all levels. This means providing the applications and portals that staff members and HR managers can use to access the resource and backing this up with higher-level operations such as C-suite reporting.

This is one area in which SAP’s cloud-based HR solution can make a great deal of difference. At the C-suite level, executives can commission reports that draw upon up-to-the-minute data, gaining a supreme vantage point from which to view and analyse operations. In this light, the SuccessFactors platform is inherently useful for businesses from the top-down, enabling all stakeholders to get more from human resource procedures and data stores.

Cloud HR/Payroll in Action: SAP SuccessFactors Use Cases

How does the solution work in practice? What will migration from on-premise HR solutions to the SAP SuccessFactors cloud platform look like for your business? Let’s examine some use cases to learn more.

Providing and Managing Timesheets for Remote Teams

Employees need to be remunerated for their time. Businesses need to ensure that remuneration is delivered fairly and efficiently, streamlining the operational procedure. This is where mobile timesheets from the SAP SuccessFactors platform come in. Timesheets can be configured, customised and delivered without delay. From the employee side of things, staff members can complete and submit their timesheet via a mobile device, attaching any supporting documentation or resources.

Timesheets can then be approved, managed and audited by HR teams and by managers at other levels. The result is a far more efficient and transparent process for all stakeholders.

hr on premise to sap successfactors 331483441

Employee Mobile Access

Employees need to be able to do more than simply complete and submit timesheets. They will also need to manage and edit their existing HR data and complete other actions such as requesting leave. Traditional on-premise models have made this difficult and inefficient, but secure cloud platforms have revolutionised employee-HR interaction.

SAP SuccessFactors goes further, providing a dedicated employee app that integrates with the platform via a secure connection. Employees can use this to manage data and complete other business-critical actions without compromising data security.

C-Suite Report on the Move with Enhanced Mobility

We’ve already touched upon the benefit of a cloud-based solution for C-suite level reporting. However, executives and upper management teams also need to leverage the flexibility and agility of modern solutions. Reporting has always been possible with on-premise HR solutions — albeit slowly — but a forward-thinking solution needs to do more.

With SuccessFactors, C-suite level reporting is achievable on demand and on the move. Secure integrations with tablet and mobile apps mean that reports can be configured and commissioned with just a few taps of the touchscreen, putting insight at executives’ fingertips.

Modernise HR with SAP SuccessFactors

Moving your HR solutions from an on-premise model to the cloud becomes a seamless process with SAP SuccessFactors. Integrations with legacy solutions make sure of this, while innovative features unlock a wealth of potential for businesses.

Reach out to our team today to get started with this solution. We are the SuccessFactors experts, supporting you as you implement a more efficient, more effective, future-focused HR model for your business.

Oct 11 2021

What Can Employees Do with the SuccessFactors Mobile App?

SAP’s mobile-first strategy has unlocked a wealth of opportunities for its enterprise users. Rather than relying upon desktop platforms and other static solutions, organisations can improve the experience they provide by leveraging mobile software, such as the SuccessFactors Mobile App. In turn, operations become far easier to manage and the employee experience is greatly enhanced.

The mobile experience has also become critically important, particularly as the workforce in Australia and New Zealand grows younger and becomes increasingly comprised of digital natives. Smartphone penetration in Australia is expected to surpass 80% of the population in the coming years, making an offering like the SuccessFactors mobile app in the modern workplace.

Let’s learn more about the specifics of this mobile app, approaching it from the point of view of your team members as we examine what employees can do with the SuccessFactors application.

Manage HR Data

Within the SuccessFactors mobile app, employees can access the Core HR area. This is a portion of the mobile app that is designed to be employee-facing, giving team members the tools they need to manage their data and ensure it is up to date. They can achieve this via the Employee Self Service — or ESS — a feature that is built into the app. From here, team members can access and update personal information held in their Employee Central People Profile.

Complete and Edit Timesheets

The SuccessFactors app supports the completion, editing and submission of timesheets, ready for approval from management teams. Employees can complete their timesheets digitally, ensuring that all of their working hours are properly recorded and that they are remunerated for their time according to their contract. These timesheets are then viewable in the Manager Self Service — MSS — area of the app and can be approved or queried.

Case Study: Outsourced IT Maintenance

sap successfcators mobile app adobestock 8116129

For organisations that need to outsource specific aspects of their work, the importance of this timesheet feature becomes acutely evident. While some businesses may have a very simple salary structure, plus any required overtime, more dynamically structured firms will need to be able to manage timesheets from both sides, i.e. from the HR/management side as well as from the employee side.

Let’s take outsourced IT maintenance as an example. If an organisation has an ad hoc arrangement with a third party IT maintenance team, they will need to pay for the work carried out. This can become confusing with traditional timesheet solutions, as errors or discrepancies may not be noticed until after your company pays for services. With the SuccessFactors app, maintenance workers can edit and submit timesheets in real-time, gaining swift approval and eliminating errors along the way.

Request Leave

Employees are able to submit leave requests via the SAP SuccessFactors app, inputting the dates and duration of the leave and identifying the type of leave required. This leave may be part of the annual leave provided in their contract, or it may be a different kind of leave, such as paternity or maternity periods, which employees are legally entitled to. The employee can support their leave request with any documentation that may be required — for example, medical documents and doctor’s notes in the event that sick leave is required. Management can provide swift approval for leave requests, or ask the employee to provide further information — interactions that can be picked up in real-time via the app.

Access Pay Statements

It is useful for employees to be able to access digital pay statements and payment records. They can achieve this in the Employee Central area, using the Payroll Information feature to view pay statements. This feature is provided alongside the SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll, and the system will need to be properly configured and integrated before team members can gain access to payroll data via the application. Employees will not have access to Year to Date Gross and Net data via the Employee Central area, although this data will still be viewable by management and HR teams.

Complete Performance Goal Actions

The Mobile Performance and Goals area of the SuccessFactors app is primarily for management teams to create performance goal plans and to conduct and manage performance reviews. However, employees will be able to complete actions when prompted. If the employee is required to view and confirm goal and performance review data, they can use the mobile application to carry this out.

Access Training and Learning Features

The Learning Features area of the mobile application is similarly geared towards the creation and management of training and learning programs. However, employees will also be able to use this area to manage course enrolments and to approve and sign off on actions that have been completed.

Employees will be able to access learning and support content via this area of the app. The Learning Features section of the app integrates with Continuous Performance Management — CPM — to form the Improved Learning and Talent Experience feature, supporting the ongoing development of personnel.

Case Study: Logistics Fuel Benefits

To understand how the app’s training and learning features work in practice, we can examine a case study from the logistics industry. Employees in the logistics field have specific training and learning pathways based on the requirements of their role — a driver, for instance, will have different learning objectives to those of a maintenance worker. Employees can access specific learning modules and content based on their own needs, ensuring that only relevant content is delivered to them.

This is just one example, of course. The training and learning feature is broadly applicable and can be leveraged across a wide variety of different industry sectors.

Support Your Employees with the SAP SuccessFactors Mobile App

Digital technology puts a great deal of power into your hands — and into your employees’ hands too. With the SAP SuccessFactors mobile app, you can provide the very highest levels of support to your team as they go about their work.

Reach out to us today to get started. We are SuccessFactors experts, assisting you as you make life easier for your team members and achieve a better way of doing business.

Jun 24 2021

How to single sign-on, or not

Some background to SSO

Single Sign On has been around for years. The variant that most of us use with web-based tools is known as Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) (often pronounced SAM-el or SAM-al). Specifically, the version 2.0 which has been an OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) standard since 2005. There are other versions of SSO that you will probably have come across, but in the general market today there is an overwhelming support for SAML2.0. There is some movement toward using JSON Web Tokens (JWT) to manage SSO rather than SAML but for this discussion let’s just stick with the areas that are well defined!

SSO (both SAML or JWT based) depends on two different servers – the application (e.g. SAP SuccessFactors) and the identity provider (e.g. Microsoft Azure AD). The application (also known as the service provider or SP) and the identity provider (IdP) share some secrets with each other in the form of public key cryptography*. Each system knows the public key of the other system and uses this along with its own private key to sign messages. Thus, the two servers know when they are sharing messages securely.

There are two ways to initiate SSO – SP initiated (probably most common) and IdP initiated**. As the names suggest these are different in that SP initiated starts with the user accessing the application which then starts the authentication flow. In IdP initiated flows the user starts with a link to the IdP which then will forward the user to the application. What’s important for this discussion is that if the application uses deep links in, for example, emails sent from the system – e.g. a link to complete your performance review that will take you directly to the performance review document – then these will pretty much always trigger SP initiated SSO – because the link is to the application URL, not the IdP.

So how do we set this up when we need to have both SSO and Password users?

With the background out of the way – let’s discuss the particular situation which I’ve found a fair bit recently.

When implementing SAP IAS (Identity Authentication Service) for a few SAP SuccessFactors customer recently, they have needed the ability to be able to log into the system either via SSO (majority of users) or via password (small number of users). Mainly this has been triggered because not all of the users of the solution are in the main corporate IdP. With IAS, the possibility to enable multi factor authentication within the SAP tooling means that paying for an IdP subscription for these people isn’t necessarily worthwhile anymore from a security standpoint, so more customers taking this opportunity to not put all employees in the IdP.

IAS has two methods for enabling this possibility. Both are configured in the conditional authentication area of the application configuration in IAS.

Option A

In the first set-up, you configure IAS to pass all authentication requests to the IdP. To make things easier to follow let’s call this “Option A”. This means that if a user is logged into the IdP they get “true” SSO – no need to enter anything and they are logged into SAP SuccessFactors (as long as they are already logged into the corporate IdP – which for AS. For those users that are not in the IdP there is the possibility to enable an additional “Allow Identity Authentication Users Log On” setting which gives a URL that users can then use to use password login to IAS.

Option B

In the second setting, let’s call it “Option B”, we enable rules in the conditional authentication that directs those users that are part of an SSO group to the corporate IdP for SSO and those users that are part of the password group (i.e. not in SSO group) to use IAS.

Generally, I would define a Password group so that I can set risk-based authentication rules to force all password users to require the use of Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA).

I set up the different groups in IAS based on the existing login method field in SAP SuccessFactors, it’s fairly easy to do***, you can still find some of the details on the SuccessFactors IAS/IPS setup help site about the IPS transformations that may be needed.

Differences in User Experience

In Option A if you do have users that are not in the corporate IdP then deep links will only work for them if they log into SuccessFactors/IAS first via the special link.

In the second setup, Option B, all users must enter their email address/username before they are redirected to SSO via corporate IdP or password login.

To mitigate the second setup not having “one-click” access to SAP SuccessFactors for already signed-in users, it is possible to use IdP initiated SSO as the “link” to use for most users to log into SAPSF.

saml sign on — SAP SuccessFactors SAML Sign On

The entry of email address/username cannot be totally avoided however as, users would still need to do the “enter email address” step if they followed a link sent in an email – as this would do SP initiated login, redirect to IAS not corporate IdP.

This said, IAS does retain the last username/email that you logged on with and save this as a persistent cookie with 90-day lifetime and pre-populate the login details… so other than the first time a user logs in, it’s likely that with Option B users will only need to click/press one extra button to redirect to corporate IdP (and then log in there, if not already) for SSO in to SuccessFactors.

It is worth considering not even using the corporate IdP initiated login for option B just to ensure that the login experience is consistent between following a link in an email and the “portal” or “homepage” link experience. It will depend on how much value is put on ease of login vs. consistency.

Configuration option	User Type	Experience – link from main company portal page	Experience – link from deep link (to specific area of SAP SuccessFactors)	How Good?
Option A default Corporate IdP login	SSO	One click and in (if you’re already logged into corporate IdP)	One click and in (if you’re already logged into corporate IdP)
Option A default Corporate IdP login	Password	Need to have “special” link for these people can’t use same link	Issue as user not in IdP, need to remember to follow special link first to log into SuccessFactors, then click deep link
Option Bdefault IAS login	SSO	Either set up different IdP initiated login link for these people, then one click and in (if logged into Corp IdP), or user prompted to enter email address (which may be defaulted if they entered it in last 90 days and haven’t cleared their cookies)	User prompted to enter email address (which may be defaulted if they entered it in last 90 days and haven’t cleared their cookies) then in (if already logged on to corporate IdP)
Option Bdefault IAS login	Password	user prompted to enter email address (which may be defaulted if they entered it in last 90 days and haven’t cleared their cookies) then prompted to enter password.	user prompted to enter email address (which may be defaulted if they entered it in last 90 days and haven’t cleared their cookies) then prompted to enter password.

What do SAP recommend.

Well, until I gave this doc to my good friends at SAP (Vish G, Paul T and Marko S) to review to see if I’d made some errors, I had to go by the details in the SAP help documentation:

where it says you have two options.

“Option A: Define the Corporate Identity Provider as Default Authentication IDP for the SAP SuccessFactors Application”

But for some reason, in a most Monty Pythonesque way – there is no Option B.

By the time you read this there may well be an option B in the documentation.

There also is one note/KBA 2954556 “How to implement Partial SSO after IAS implementation on SuccessFactors” where SAP are recommending using Corporate IdP and alternative link approach. Strangely enough, just like the current help doco they don’t even mention that there are other possibilities in that KBA. (Again, with a little bit of a luck, hint, or push, it may well be that this also changes by the time you check out that KBA).

Either way, at the moment, it’s not really a recommendation, more an explanation of different possibilities. Recommendations, it seems are left for opinionated people like me to deliver!

So, what do I recommend?

If you only have a handful of non-SSO users, potentially consultants supporting your system or other people who understand that they are “special” and need to behave in a special way to use the system, then use the corporate IdP as the default identity provider (Option A). Otherwise, use the IAS with conditional authentication (Option B). I’d recommend that you don’t use an IdP initiated login link, as it won’t work for password users and will likely cause confusion when deep links behave differently. I’d only suggest using the IdP initiated login link if there is an expectation from the senior executive sponsors of the solution that it should be “one click and in” and they don’t seem receptive to the various details I’ve mentioned – they just hear “Techno babble, blah, blah blah, excuse why you can’t make it do what I was told by the sales people that it could do… blah blah blah.” I’ve seen some of those situations, logic can’t help you, just give them the IdP initiated login link.

That’s all folks

Hopefully, that was useful! It seems this was a slightly shorter post that I was fearing it was going to be before I started writing! If there’s anything you’d like to follow up on or ask – please do post a question in the SuccessFactors community, there are no doubt many people who have been through the fun of IAS implementations who can offer advice, including myself.

If you looking for more info – start at the SuccessFactors community post about IAS – https://community.successfactors.com/t5/Platform-Resources-Blog/Migration-to-SAP-Cloud-Identity-Authentication-With-IAS-IPS-from/bc-p/272831 and check out all the links there. Read all the comments and questions that others have asked, and others have answered.

Then if you have more questions, please come to one of the weekly Office Hours, where you can ask questions and hopefully have them answered. The team from SAP are super knowledgeable and super friendly and are just waiting to help you be successful. (And I might be there too being opinionated if you join the APJ time-zone friendly session!)

This article was originally published on the SAP SuccessFactors community website.

*Explaining how public key cryptography works is way beyond the scope of this post, and there are hundreds of people who’ve done great work doing this. If you don’t understand public key cryptography, do yourself a favour and go and research it. It is the tooling which underpins most of the internet. It’s not that hard a concept! I wrote a simple RSA encryption algorithm for a game my friends and I were playing where we had to pass a floppy disk between us to take turns back when I was 13 so that we could send each other messages secure in knowledge that the others couldn’t read the messages. Given that I wrote the code in GW-BASIC which only handled 16bit integers, I’m pretty sure one of my friends could have brute-forced the codes… but this is pointless reminiscing, the point is, just go and learn how it works!

**There is a case that can be made that IdP initiated SSO is less secure than SP initiated SSO because it can more easily be used in man-in-the-middle attacks. However, given that all applications and IdPs would be using HTTPS (TLS) to encrypt their communications, if a MITM attack can intercept the authentication assertion, you’ve got bigger problems than your SSO being compromised.

*** Okay, it’s easy for me because I’ve done it lots of times! If this is the first time that you’re trying this, yes it isn’t easy. Sorry! I’m not going to go into the details of what you need to modify in your IPS setup to enable the split between password and SSO groups and even sending different email notifications (or not) to the two different groups, that’s probably a decent sized post just by itself. Stay tuned though as I’m planning to put something together for my next presentation at SAP Australia User Group Summit on this.

Jun 04 2021

SafetyFactors Updates

Over the last couple of months, SafetyFactors has been further enhanced to ensure you and your organisation could make the most out of the best in the game, ‘SafetyFactors’.

“Organisations don’t get better by chance; they get better by change.”

We have delivered updates on how your workplace incidents are taken care of, from inception to completion, continuing to ensure that, within the SafetyFactors app, employees get to see exactly what they are supposed to, under a secure and controlled environment.

Going forward, as a part of our delivered roadmap for May 2021, SafetyFactors will help you and your Safety Team to:

Analyse better with stories in People Analytics

With the new release being rolled out for SafetyFactors, you can now use your SAP SuccessFactors’ Stories in People Analytics to report all the data from SafetyFactors to assist organisational decision-makers to be able to make future-sighted decisions, efficiently as ever.

While we do provide a set of standard templates, organisations also have the ability to create their own templates for their organisational reporting needs. Having company-wide safety and incident data that can be easily integrated into other People dashboards further shows how tight integration of SafetyFactors and SAP SuccessFactors is. We are bringing the eXperience part of HXM to your solutions.

mac laptop screen mockup analysis 416297744 — Our standard SafetyFactors incident reporting template

Talking about our standard templates, here is a glimpse of how SafetyFactors’ Incident Reporting looks like in SAP SuccessFactors Stories in People Analytics.

Moreover, this latest out of the box reporting tool from SAP SuccessFactors not only lets you export the data it reports on as an xlsx or csv file, but you can also export the entire dashboard as shown in the image as a PPT, PDF or even as a google slides file. Should you be stating your concerns as an OHS team member in your next board meeting, you have much more than just a spreadsheet to prove your PowerPoint! pun intended.

Escalate if a reported incident has not been actioned on time

Everyone in an organization gets busy at times. But that does not make the job of actioning crucial incidents any less important. If a reported incident/injury has not been attended by anyone, SafetyFactors can automatically ensure that the right person is informed and can follow up to ensure right things are actioned at the right time.

Be Proactive and prevent incidents in the first place

Being able to report incidents and resolving them is something SafetyFactors is good at. But our design ethos is that prevention is far better than cure. Proactivity is something SafetyFactors is built for.

It is self-evident that we do not want people at our workplaces getting injured! (Likely one of the reasons you came across this post.) However, SafetyFactors helps you ensure incidents do not happen at your workplace in the first place. But how does it do it? Simple, to use a metaphor, maintaining your brand-new car is more effective and efficient than repairing it.

SafetyFactors helps you design checklists and assign safety tasks to people to ensure your workplace is being inspected and reporting any hazards when needed to maintain a safe and sound working environment for your people at work. The process demonstrated below gives an overview of how you can prevent incidents using SafetyFactors.

incident prevention 2 — Incident prevention using SafetyFactors

point 3 tablet ipad spacegrey landscape 1 — A sample checklist you can create in SafetyFactors

Record additional data that suits the organisation’s requirements for an incident or injury

SafetyFactors “out of the box” collects all the data to help you meet your Workplace Safety Compliance, but we know that sometimes there are “special” bits of data that are relevant to your organisation or industry. Sometimes you do need to record the data that not only helps you with your compliance but helping your teams work efficiently.

SafetyFactors assists by allowing you to add additional fields, also known as custom fields alongside the default fields to record any further details related to an incident or injury reported in your organisation.

Furthermore, this is something you can totally configure!

Share information with the people in your organisation only where relevant

Our design for SafetyFactors has always been to ensure that data is secured so only those that have permissions to see data can see it. SafetyFactors allows for complex permission management by leveraging SAP SuccessFactors’ Role-Based Permissions framework to ensure one only gets to see what they should see.

Notify people related to an incident with more flexibility

To resolve a reported incident or hazard, it is crucial to get things done at the right time. Notifying the right people plays an important role in assuring the people concerned that the incident would be resolved and would be resolved right!

Thus, SafetyFactors helps you set up a notification system for all the scenarios you can think of, be it when someone reports an incident, or when someone is assigned a corrective action to fix a hazard, or even when an incident has been resolved. If you can think of it, SafetyFactors can help you configure it. And yes, your notification emails can be configured to include images, logos and bring a better experience to your people. #experienceWins #HXM

Feb 03 2021

Future-Proof Your Organisation with SuccessFactors Succession and Development

People are the heart of every organisation. The employees who commit to a shared vision push a company to better serve its clients and succeed. But life happens, and time progresses. People move and retire. They seek a sea change or career change. They pack-up, say their goodbyes, and leave.

Succession is inevitable, and it’s how an organisation copes with the movement of talent that defines its future. Success doesn’t happen by chance; conscious effort, planning, and preparation are crucial to ensuring the next generation of workers thrives. That’s where SuccessFactors Succession and Development comes into play.

What Is Succession Planning?

Before you investigate SuccessFactors’ career development planning capabilities in greater detail, here’s a staggering statistic to give you some perspective: 58 per cent of managers have never undergone management training.

Remarkably, many management employees find themselves in leadership positions by chance. It’s a case of being in the right place at the right time as their organisation scrambles to reshuffle after a staffing surprise.

But in today’s competitive business landscape, thoughtful job design, dynamic internal development opportunities, and intelligent organisational structure are fundamental to fostering an agile workplace that engages employees and promotes retention. These best practices lend themselves to the principle of succession planning: the activity of identifying potential successors for key positions and nurturing their skill set in preparation for increased responsibility.

Systematic employee development – which encompasses challenging job assignments, professional development sessions, and other enriching activities – overlaps with what’s known as leadership development. The goal is to mitigate the risk irreplaceable employees pose by equipping future leaders with the first-hand experience, nuanced understanding, and self-confidence they need to excel.

Nurture Next-Gen Leaders with SuccessFactors Succession Management

Intention is one thing. Achievement is another. Executive and HR managers dedicate the majority of their resources to day-to-day operations and strategic growth mapping. Succession planning is often left off the agenda.

SAP Succession Planning takes the hard work out of future-proofing an organisation. The comprehensive system minimises risk by accurately pinpointing top performers and providing a framework for employee development. The results are two-fold: nurture the talent needed to achieve today’s goals while gaining the insight and planning capabilities required to sustain tomorrow’s growth.

With the right succession planning tools, you can develop the right people and fit them into the right roles.

Here are three of the chief benefits of SuccessFactors Career Development Planning:

1. Cultivate an Engaged Talent Pipeline for Future Growth

SuccessFactors Succession Planning gives you the visibility needed to precisely evaluate employee competency and identify unsuspecting talent via firm-wide searches. With your best (and worst) performers firmly recognised, you can analyse the risk and potential impact of staff loss. From there, you can formulate an evidence-backed succession planning roadmap that mitigates this risk, boosts engagement, and feeds into future growth.

2. Empower Employees to Develop Their Skill Set

A continuous improvement mindset helps high-performing team members stand out and advance their career. Give your staff the tools they need to take charge of their professional development and progress on their journey toward professional fulfilment.

SuccessFactors Succession and Development empowers executives and employees by achieving the following:

Open dialogue that provides staff with feedback on a regular basis for improved awareness and self-reflection
Accelerated high-impact development and learning programs that combine best-in-class mentoring and leadership plans
Access to resources that encourage proactive exploration of career trajectories, required skills, and organisational gaps

Employers can leverage employee activity to explore automated ‘good fit’ recommendations to uncover individuals whose skills and interests align with role opportunities. This leads to a more efficient, more productive organisational structure.

3. Achieve Superior Business Outcomes

Ultimately, a business’s success relies on the competence of its employees. By preparing your organisation to adapt seamlessly to talent movements, you safeguard operations against disruption and mismanagement.

SAP Succession Planning goes one step further. You can connect employee development initiatives with strategic business goals, funnelling your efforts toward the organisation’s North Star. You can identify and close talent gaps, create informed recruiting plans, and recognise optimisation opportunities.

Crucially, SuccessFactors Succession Management allows you to measure the results of your succession strategy. From there, you can tweak your approach to enrich employee experiences further and better deliver on key performance metrics.

Safeguard Your Corporate Organisation’s Future

It’s a cliché that bears repeating: fail to prepare and prepare to fail. Just as your organisation’s current success depends on your staff today, future growth relies on future employees.

Succession planning gives your company the flexibility it needs to adapt and transition in the face of surprise or scheduled talent movements. Moreover, engaging and developing your employees enhances retention and workplace satisfaction, further propelling your organisation toward industry leadership.

Get started with SuccessFactors Succession and Development and lock-in your future success. Contact the Discovery Consulting team today for personalised advice.