The H2 2020 release is here and full of new features and functionality! We have broken down the updates in a series of 10-15 minute On Demand webinars for you to quickly learn what to expect in your updated SuccessFactors environment.

About the Authors

Erik Ebert

For the past 25 years, Erik Ebert has supported organizations across diverse industries and geographies to implement digital transformation strategies, improving business performance within human capital management (HCM). Erik has a track record of building lasting relationships through a consultative approach, resulting in happy clients, successful projects, and effective teams. Erik works as a Business Development Director with HCT at GP Strategies in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The H1 2020 release is here and full of new features and functionality! We have broken down the updates in a series of 10-15 minute On Demand webinars for you to quickly learn what to expect in your updated SuccessFactors environment.

You can also explore our full catalog of on-demand webinars here.

• Successfactors Platform Employee Profile
• Successfactors Recruiting
• Successfactors Employee Central
• Successfactors Compensation Variable Pay
• Successfactors Learning Management
• Successfactors Onboarding
• Successfactors Performance Goal Succession Development H1 Release Webinar

About the Authors

Erik Ebert

For the past 25 years, Erik Ebert has supported organizations across diverse industries and geographies to implement digital transformation strategies, improving business performance within human capital management (HCM). Erik has a track record of building lasting relationships through a consultative approach, resulting in happy clients, successful projects, and effective teams. Erik works as a Business Development Director with HCT at GP Strategies in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The Q4 release is here and full of new features and functionality! We have broken down the updates in a series of 10-15 minute SuccessFactors webinars for you to quickly learn what to expect in your updated environment. You can also explore our full catalog of on-demand webinars here.

• Successfactors Employee Platform Q4 Release Webinar
• Successfactors Recruiting Q4 Release Webinar
• Successfactors Employee Central Q4 Release Webinar
• Successfactors People Analytics Reporting Q4 Release Webinar
• Successfactors Compensation Variable Pay Q4 Release Webinar
• Successfactors Onboarding Q4 Release Webinar
• Successfactors Learning Q4 Release Webinar
• Successfactors Performance Goal Succession Development Q4 Release Webinar

About the Authors

Erik Ebert

For the past 25 years, Erik Ebert has supported organizations across diverse industries and geographies to implement digital transformation strategies, improving business performance within human capital management (HCM). Erik has a track record of building lasting relationships through a consultative approach, resulting in happy clients, successful projects, and effective teams. Erik works as a Business Development Director with HCT at GP Strategies in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The Q2 release is here and full of new features and functionality! We have broken down the updates in a series of 10-15 minute On Demand webinars for you to quickly learn what to expect in your updated SuccessFactors environment.

• Sap Successfactors Recruiting Q2 2019
• Sap Successfactors Perform Align Succession Q2 2019
• Sap Successfactors Onboarding Q2 2019
• Sap Successfactors Learning Management Q2 2019
• Sap Cloud Operations Dell Boomi Q2 2019
• Sap Successfactors Employee Central Q2 2019
• Sap Successfactors Compensation Variable Pay Q2 2019

About the Authors

Erik Ebert

For the past 25 years, Erik Ebert has supported organizations across diverse industries and geographies to implement digital transformation strategies, improving business performance within human capital management (HCM). Erik has a track record of building lasting relationships through a consultative approach, resulting in happy clients, successful projects, and effective teams. Erik works as a Business Development Director with HCT at GP Strategies in Copenhagen, Denmark.

While many people are preparing for the upcoming peak season in business & HR processes or trying to absorb the innovations announced by SAP at TechEd last week and at SuccessConnect just 4 weeks ago, we here at GP Strategies have been taking a first look at the SuccessFactors Q4-2018 release, sometimes referred to as b1811.

The coding for the Q4-2018 release has been completed and implementation partners and clients can now spend time getting acquainted with the functionalities until Q4-2018 hits preview environments in a few weeks. To clients, we would like to stress that this is an important task even though the Q4-2018 and Q1-2019 releases were announced as a “minor release.”

Looking to the Future

The updated SuccessFactors product road map debuted at SuccessConnect in September reveals that SAP is taking huge leaps forward. We were especially eager to hear if the Q4 release included anything about SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC), which was announced by the President of SAP SuccessFactors, Greg Tomb, at the Las Vegas keynote.

Shortly after Tomb’s presentation, it was confirmed that SAC would indeed be delivered and is a production-ready product that will be rolled out with the Q1-2019 release. Being dedicated students of reporting and analytics, we’ve also looked at the release summary through the lens of how it will appear in SAP Analytics Cloud:

We love SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) and believe it will be a major component all SuccessFactors customers and other SAP technologies will be using inside a year and a half. The ability to build report stories, highlight main focus areas, and review key performance indicators in a user-friendly way provides a massive return on investment.

Release Details

From a high level, there are 190 release items in the Q4-2018 list, a notch lower than what we saw in previous releases. There’s also expanded support for new countries. Although SAP Analytics Cloud hasn’t arrived just yet, improvements in the current reporting capabilities have still been made. Even though they’re not architectural, they provide business opportunities and value. For data privacy, there are some important features that are also likely to complicate matters.

Release Highlights

• Life is more flexible and powerful for system admins. For example, you can now view and manage business rules on the new Business Rule Admin page. This page is designed with the SAP UI5 technology. From here, you can search, filter, sort, and group business rules. You also have the option to create and display rules from the page, but for all other operations such as modifying, copying, and deleting rules, you’ll be taken to the legacy “Configure Business Rules” UI. You can access the Business Rule Admin page the same way you currently access Configure Business Rules. The new UI5 design provides a clear overview of what rules are available in your company and offers more capability and efficiency to business rule management.
• The Fiori-based home page’s custom tile framework has been updated. While we’ve been able to create up to 100 custom tiles and have been able to use RBP roles to assign tiles to users, some use cases haven’t always been supported in the past. Now SAP has made an enhancement to the custom home page tile framework. As an admin, you can associate business rules with a custom tile and create a single tile for different target populations. The Rules Engine determines which content to display for the end user. This helps reduce the total amount of custom tiles that need to be created and helps you avoid reaching the 100 tile limit.
• SAP has put a lot of effort into providing module-specific configuration check tools. While they may not be super valuable for certified consultants, configuration check tools help analyze potential issues post go-live, so we highly recommend you enable and use them. As of the Q4-2018 release, there is a tile in the Admin Center showing a summary of the latest check results from the tool, covering total number of checks, successes, warnings, and errors. The check history pop-up also includes a new feature that shows the selected parameters for that particular check execution run.
• If your SuccessFactors solution is set up to use single sign on, you’re now hopefully using SAML2.0 as the method. Be aware that if you’re using other mechanisms and the GET log in method, you might run into security issues. For organizations that log in via browser URL, it’s recommended that you don’t include the username and password in the URL. For organizations who log in through internal integration, it’s encouraged that you change the log in method from GET to POST–it’s a change that will be enforced in a future release.
• Consultants often use a combination of XML-based data model imports and the Admin Center configuration tools. Previously, the max-length field defined in the employee data model sometimes exceeded the maximum length allowed in the SuccessFactors database even though the data model could still be imported successfully, making the max-length field ineffective. Now, it’s possible to validate the max-length definition of string fields when importing the data model. If it exceeds the maximum length, the import is blocked and error messages are provided to help you better manage the max-length definition. So if the data model has invalid configurations in it, they must be fixed in order to reimport. We recommend you just try to export and reimport to verify.
• For clients working with data imports on a regular basis, there is a much-needed enhancement to the visual experience of the importing of background and trend (this includes performance ratings and potential ratings) data. The process is enhanced so admins can now choose to enable a pop-up to notify users when they choose to overwrite existing data. Today, it’s easy to perform a simple import with one row, select overwrite, and watch as all data for the particular import object is physically deleted/purged from the system. This new warning is needed to hopefully avert purging disasters.
• There’s finally support for concurrent employment in Onboarding. This means customers will be able to indicate if this is a new hire’s primary employment during onboarding, allowing there to be multiple positions assigned to an employee without having to manually update the concurrent employment relationship afterwards.
• We have historically seen consultants and client admins add custom fields to the development plan template and forget to mark the custom field as reportable in Career Development Planning. Currently, you can add as many fields as you want, but only 20 fields can be reportable and this has to be set by field. With the Q4 2018 release, you can run a configuration check to identify the development plan templates where custom fields have not been specified as reportable. Nice!
• Compensation has seen several innovations in 2018 we hope clients will have adopted for their 2019 campaigns. The all new combined Total Compensation Worksheet is now generally available and although not mandatory to use, we recommend looking at it from 2019 on.
• There’s a lot of movement in the recruiting space. This is largely attributed to the new Candidate Relationship Management function. For example, with the Candidate Relationship Management Email Campaign feature, users can create an email campaign; enter the name, description, locale, and brand and email campaign code; and enter email field details such as from, reply-to, and the subject. Users can also select individual email recipients or select recipients from talent pools, select an email layout and content template, and save the email campaign as a draft. Other functionality includes viewing a list of email campaigns that includes the campaign name, status, date sent, number of recipients, brand, created by, and description and feedback on the email campaign such as number of recipients, clicks, unsubscribes, and undelivered. If you’re struggling to keep your candidate pool engaged and you’re not using CRM, consider it in the future.
• Employee Central is getting a (forced) upgrade from the now legacy XML-based propagation rules to EC Business Rule-based propagation. If you’ve been live with EC for more than 2 to 3 years, it’s possible you’re using the legacy method. As of the Q4-2018 release, XML-based propagation is no longer supported and is instead replaced by business rules-based propagation. Existing XML-based propagation in your systems will be automatically migrated for you. A must for all customers using XML-based propagation is to review the migrated configuration and ensure it still works as originally designed. As always, pay attention with forced upgrades and verify consequences before the upgrade hits your production instance.
• The Employee Central Data Replication Monitor now uses optimistic locking for all content types. SAP implemented optimistic locking for business configuration in Q1 2018. This means when multiple users try to update the same record, optimistic locking prevents data replication records from being corrupted or invalidated.
• In Employee Central Time Off, not a lot of change this time around – mostly focusing on unifying the user experience with SAP Fiori design in more areas.
• For Performance Management and Goal Management we’re seeing a focus on bringing the mobile experience on par with the browser experience, introducing features such as enhanced search for forms and support for collaborative steps—good features to finally have for mobile.
• Continuous Performance Management is improved!  A mobile-first feature for SAP SuccessFactors Mobile iOS users reimagines the talent experience by creating an intuitive user experience integration between Learning and Continuous Performance Management (CPM). Learning users can now create CPM achievements from the history details screen of successfully completed learning items, create CPM activities from the item details screen of learning items added to My Assignments, and receive a prompt to create a CPM activity when assigning a course to themselves via the Learning Catalog. These features are currently available only on the SAP SuccessFactors Mobile app. It’s safe to assume that they’ll revisit the web UI in a future release.
• More mobile improvement. The iOS and Android SAP SuccessFactors mobile apps now support the collaborative route map steps for Performance Management Reviews. This enables multiple users to edit the performance form simultaneously. This has been a long-time request and should significantly improve the adoption of the mobile apps.
• Updating to Report Center is now mandatory. In Report Center, you can now import or export multiple reports (and different report types) in a single action. To export multiple reports, select the reports you want to export, and click the export icon that appears above the reports list, and watch as it generates a zip file of the exported reports. Likewise, to import multiple reports, click import, select the zip file containing various reports, and click import. A status message will tell you the results. This is particularly useful for moving reports from one instance to another.
• There are also data protection improvements. When setting up a full purge of inactive users for data protection and privacy, you can now upload a list of multiple users specified by User ID via a CSV file. Before, this option was only available for partial purges of specific types of data. Now it’s available for the full master data purge.
• We are still eagerly awaiting the Read Audit functionality that was scheduled to be released during Q2 and Q3. It’s now scheduled to be released in Q1–2019  and will make customers with sensitive employee data compliant.

A Note on Role-Based Permissions (RBP)

With the Q4-2018 release, there is now a role-based permissions migration tool to perform RBP migrations. For small organizations, this tool allows you to create the most commonly used roles and assign permissions in RBP based on legacy permissions. Previously, RBP migration did not have a step-by-step tool to support it. Now, you can use the migration tool to start creating the roles you’ll need in your new security model. If you’re not using RBP, it’s time to start. If you’re not sure how to get started, reach out to SAP Cloud Support, your partners, or ask an expert. It’s a simple and largely self-maintaining feature.

Reporting Overview for SuccessFactors

Finally, let’s talk a little about reporting. While we’re waiting for SAP Analytics Cloud to emerge as a reporting framework inside Report Center, it’s important to make sure you’re taking advantage of the analytics capabilities already available in SuccessFactors.

Today, an enterprise company will likely have:

• List Reports (based on Ad Hoc Report Builder)
• Tiles (based on admin center built youcalc tiles and standard tiles)
• Dashboards (based on admin center built youcalc tiles as well as standard tiles and standard dashboards)
• Advanced Reports (based on Online Report Designer EC Advanced Reporting)
• Spreadsheet Reports (for Login history and details)
• Embedded Insights (allows display of tiles in a panel on each main module)
• Home Page Tiles (display selected tiles on the home page)

Access to all reporting tools is governed via role-based permissions, so it can become quite granular. We recommend you check that your end users have access to the right analytics at least quarterly.

We also recommend you enable the login spreadsheet report so you can better understand general system usage and answer questions like: “How many of our mangers have logged in during the past 30 days?” and “Which managers have never logged in?” If you haven’t enabled Report Center yet, we recommend that you do and that you validate your existing reports on a regular basis, including making some basic spot checks on data validation and reconciliation. With this in place, you’ll be in a fine position to start using SAP Analytics Cloud once it becomes available in the first half of 2019.

Wrap-Up

Our friends at SAP have certainly been busy the past few months. We expect this innovative pace to continue its acceleration as the SuccessFactors solution matures and integrates more and more with the SAP Cloud Platform, SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Digital Boardroom, S4/HANA, CRM, Procurement, and countless other SAP systems to complete the SAP vision of the fully digital enterprise.

We look forward to getting our hands on all the new features and seeing them in action, and we’d love to hear what you think about the new features as well! The preview instances are set to update the weekend of November 3rd and the production instance is set to drop four weeks later on December 1st.

If you want to learn more about the release, consult the SuccessFactors Customer Community or contact us.

About the Authors

Erik Ebert

For the past 25 years, Erik Ebert has supported organizations across diverse industries and geographies to implement digital transformation strategies, improving business performance within human capital management (HCM). Erik has a track record of building lasting relationships through a consultative approach, resulting in happy clients, successful projects, and effective teams. Erik works as a Business Development Director with HCT at GP Strategies in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Many articles have been written about People Analytics and the value of converting people and HR data into actionable insights to gain competitive advantages. This year seems to be one of digital transformation everywhere—and analytics is an important part of the business case. Having worked for leading companies in various industries and geographies over the past few decades, I have experienced the trend towards streamlined business processes across those geographies and industries. This is especially true for the HR space where standards are moving in fast and where the war for talent is never ending.

Anyway, I can admit that I am part-time data nerd and have a strong feeling for analytics. For the past 18 months, I have been fortunate to work extensively with analytics related to Human Capital Management. In this blog, I will share some more in-depth experiences with the newest addition to the SuccessFactors software suite: Workforce Analytics on HANA (WFA on HANA). This innovation allows companies to analyze data over time, understanding the trends shaping your workforce and providing you with actionable insights. And since it is based on the in-memory architecture of HANA, most of the insights are provided in just a few seconds.

Hoping you will still read on, I will give you the conclusion first:

WFA on HANA is the most important feature that has been added for a long time to the SuccessFactors suite.

And knowing intimately what innovations have been provided in the last 30+ releases, this is a big thing to say. Read on, and I hope you understand why I am making this bold claim!

First things first: define what you want to know.

Before embarking on an analytical journey, it is important to define what key performance indicators or metrics are important to your organization. What is it that is most important to you? What makes your company different? What trends in the demographics do you need to be aware of? What hypothesis do you want to test? The definitions can rely on your own historical experiences, but you can also take advantage of the experiences from GP Strategies and SAP who define a framework of standards for Human Capital Measures. These ensure that you follow good industry practice and allow you to compare your own organization to market data provided by SAP.

Workforce Analytics on HANA lets you look at your data like you have never been able to before so you can understand more about the trends that are shaping your workforce over time, and so you can make better People Decisions to secure your future. WFA on HANA has a set of predefined metrics following good industry practices and is flexible enough to allow companies add their own dimensions and filtering capabilities. For example, you can run headcount reports over different time periods, split by different dimensions, drill down, filter, and even combine metrics (e.g., “managerial headcount split by gender”). So, in that sense, Workforce Analytics is a flexible tool that allows you to report on the items that give you a competitive edge while on the other hand following good industry principles. End users are intended to be not only business analysts and reporting specialists, but also HR professionals and senior managers.

Case: Headcount Reporting

Let’s say that you just want to know the headcount for the past 4 years. WFA on HANA allows you to get this with the measure “EOP Headcount” (End-Of-Period Headcount). If you were to do this in other reporting tools, such as Online Report Designer, this report would take minutes to load and would not be suitable for online analytics.

This shows you, hopefully not surprising, that there has been significant growth in your company headcount (or that there have been acquisitions or other major events). More analysis will reveal where the growth has been, what employment types are the most significant, and more.

Case: Headcount Reporting and Diversity

Then you may want to know what the gender distribution looks like over time for your headcount. Easy, just specify that you want to analyze data by gender (multiple other analytical dimensions exist).

Now this report shows you that there were some data quality issues in previous years (gender “Unallocated”), but also that the gender split is fairly linear across the years. It is possible to drill down to, for example, Country level to look at differences in geographical areas. So, this is what we want to document to our CHRO who asked the question.

Case: Headcount Reporting and the Five-Generation Workforce

Next you may want to look at headcount and age distribution over time. Simple—just add Age as an analytical dimension and the numbers are displayed.

Instead of Age, you could also use the dimension Generation, which converts age to a descriptive text in case this is more meaningful to you. You can also click out any of the dimensions as to emphasize the changes in the others, if you, for example, would be interested in knowing the “over 40” and “below 40” groups.

Case: Managerial Positions Split by Age Ranges

But these three, you may say, are just simple data, not really insights. OK, then let’s try to answer a little more complex question about managerial positions—how are we staffing them? To answer this, let’s first look at how many managerial colleagues we employ.

As expected, as we have grown, the number of managerial positions has also grown. We can also see that the growth has been significantly larger in the older segment than in the younger. Again, this is not a surprise but important to know. The data tells you something about what promotion principles you have had the past years, and this can be used going forward.

Case: Managerial Positions Split by Gender

Like the regular headcount dimension, you could also look at the gender dimension instead of age ranges. Just add Gender to the Dimension and the report generates. This allows us to understand if we are applying any gender-based biases towards our hiring policies and where in the organization this bias is most profound. We also see which areas can serve as role models so that we better understand what practices we should learn from and apply in other areas.

Like all other measures, you can drill down to understand if there are geographical differences, business unit differences, or which managerial lines have the best mix. If, for example, you have a large presence in Southeast Asia, you can look at that region only to see how the numbers are stacking up. I didn’t include these details in the images—I hope you get the point.

Employee Central Is the Core

All data you source in WFA on HANA is delivered directly from effective dated transactions in Employee Central. Data refreshes happen daily and take only a few minutes to complete. With the latest Q1-2018 release, WFA also respects GDPR requirements such as ability to perform read level logging of personal or sensitive information such as Gender. Events and Event Reasons are mapped from Employee Central to relevant Dimensions in WFA, allowing you to compare your own trends to market benchmarks for measures such as Voluntary Termination Rate.

Concluding Remarks

OK, this blog covered almost 2% of the capabilities in WFA on HANA. I did not mention anything relating to termination trends (voluntary vs. involuntary terminations per business area), combining different data sources such as performance ratings and termination trends, or looking at average salary and salary ranges split by gender or generations.

As mentioned in the introduction, I think it is fair to say this is a major improvement in the SuccessFactors suite. Best of all, WFA on HANA can be implemented now if you have Employee Central in place—or are planning to. WFA sources data from relevant SuccessFactors modules and optimizes your data views from the transactional database into cubes that run in the background, automated via impressively speedy daily (or hourly) processing.

Working with people analytics is both a project where you define a set of KPIs, implement a tool, and build processes and education around it. It is also a journey where you will be able to—if not forced to—adapt new KPIs as your business surroundings change and as your business matures regarding analytical thinking. It is important to understand that WFA on HANA is not the end result; it is the beginning of a continuous journey where you will improve your understanding over time, and your capabilities to make better people decisions will improve over time.

If you have any comments or questions, please do reach out to us. At GP Strategies, we have always been leading the path, and we are happy to be part of the first partners able to implement WFA on HANA for real. And hey—please do leave a comment here—it is always a great inspiration to get feedback.

About the Authors

Erik Ebert

For the past 25 years, Erik Ebert has supported organizations across diverse industries and geographies to implement digital transformation strategies, improving business performance within human capital management (HCM). Erik has a track record of building lasting relationships through a consultative approach, resulting in happy clients, successful projects, and effective teams. Erik works as a Business Development Director with HCT at GP Strategies in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Erik Ebert is an SAP SuccessFactors Solutions Director for GP Strategies in Copenhagen, Denmark.

For several years Workforce Analytics has been in the SAP SuccessFactors family but has not been fully adopted as an integrated and working solution. This has changed. Now the time is here—your company can improve decision-making, find answers to key questions about workforce challenges, and receive guidance to help solve them with workplace analytics.

Driving impactful decisions with solid business evidence.

Workforce Analytics on HANA (WFA on HANA) provides actionable insights on workforce data to drive your business strategy today and help you plan for the future. Our workplace analytics solution increases the effectiveness of HR with a comprehensive library of standard metrics, industry benchmarks, and HR best practices that help measure the things that matter. GP Strategies helps you to quickly and easily implement a powerful Workforce Analytics solution for any HR metrics area, starting with Employee Central (core workforce and mobility). For example, you can analyse and understand termination rates (voluntary and involuntary) and analyse your organisation to determine the areas in which you are losing more talent than others.

WFA on HANA is designed for business execution and fully integrated with SuccessFactors. It is easy to use and provides the insights and tools you need to take action. With more than 30 years of expertise in HR metrics built into the tools, technology, processes, and services, SuccessFactors sets the standard for workforce metrics and benchmarks, and it provides the tools that make everyone successful. Selected metrics available with WFA on HANA Core Workforce and Metrics Pack include:

• Average Headcount
• End of Period Headcount
• Start of Period Headcount
• Organisational Tenure
• Age & Generation Distribution
• New Hires
• Rehires
• Promotions
• Demotions
• Job Changes
• Involuntary Terminations
• Voluntary Terminations
• Gender Distribution
• Male to Female Staffing Rate
• Male to Female Staffing Rate – Managerial
• Average Annual Salary per Employee

Each metric pack includes a defined set of source data fields that are extracted from EC to generate Base Input Measures and Dimension Hierarchies. These two components form the basic building blocks. Filtering Base Input Measures by Dimension Hierarchies generates a rich set of Derived Input Measures. Derived Input Measures are combined in formulas to generate Result Measures (in percentages, ratios, etc.) that are commonly used in analysis and reporting, as well as in benchmark comparisons.

Getting started.

GP Strategies consultants offer proven excellence in HR analytics, planning, and metrics, and are available to share best practices and accelerate your business execution. Let the certified and experienced HCM consultants at GP Strategies deliver a successful implementation for you. Contact us to learn more about this offering and how you can get started with SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics on HANA.

About the Authors

Erik Ebert

For the past 25 years, Erik Ebert has supported organizations across diverse industries and geographies to implement digital transformation strategies, improving business performance within human capital management (HCM). Erik has a track record of building lasting relationships through a consultative approach, resulting in happy clients, successful projects, and effective teams. Erik works as a Business Development Director with HCT at GP Strategies in Copenhagen, Denmark.