What’s new in EhP6 for SAP HCM Talent Management

Enhancement Package 6 (EhP6) for SAP ECC 6.0 was released on 7th May 2012 after completing a successful ramp-up. I wanted to put a summary out there of the new features for SAP HCM Talent Management.

EhP4 had focused on a revamp to the Talent Management Core (TMC) processes and applications and EhP6 builds on both the TMC and PMP solutions with new functionality to enhance the processes and user experience. EhP6 has a large focus on the ESS and MSS UI and the new Learner Portal is one of the big additions to the Enterprise Learning suite. Analytics are also a focus and most modules see new analytics that do not require Business Warehouse (BW), courtesy of business function HCM_ANALYTICS_2.

First, you can get a recap of what was new in EhP5 for HCM in this blog by Jarret Pazahanick. Here’s what was new in EhP5 Talent Management:

• Talent Management Core
  • Ability to calibrate employees without performance, potential or both in Talent Review Meeting
  • Printing of Calibration Grid and inclusion in PDF handout
  • Printing of Talent Profile
  • Enhanced rendering of side-by-side comparison
  • Transfer of competencies to employee skills profile from Talent Assessment
  • Deletion of Talent Assessment documents
  • Automated delimitation of successor and talent data
  • Data migration tools
  • BI Analytics content
• Performance Management (predefined)
  • Enhancements to process step configuration options
• E-Recruiting
  • Customer-specific candidate profile data can be included in transfer to HR
  • Smooth and non-disruptive handling of the candidate services
  • Data provisioning for a candidate’s qualifications in SAP E-Recruiting
  • Enhanced applicant tracking and work center process
• Enterprise Learning
  • BI Analytics content
• Enterprise Compensation Management
  • New WDA user interface for compensation planning and planning overview
  • Compensation profile
  • Support for bottom-up (employee level) budgeting
  • Performance enhancements
  • Support for global employment

EhP6 contains a number of minor new features for most areas, although the focus for this EhP release is on the Talent Management Core. Here’s a summary of the new features:

• Talent Management Core
  • Overview page for Talent Management Specialists
  • New roles
  • Flexible Performance Management is integrated into Talent Review Meeting process
  • Enhancements to Talent Monitor in Talent Review Meetings
  • Enhancements to Calibration Grid in Talent Review Meetings
  • Employee can print their Talent profile
  • Talent Profile for Employees contains new skills application
  • Display qualifications, learning activities and appraisal documents in Talent Profile for Managers and Talent Management Specialists
  • TMS can monitor status of performance management process in the Talent Profile
  • More enhancements to Talent Search
  • Enhancement of flexible Performance Management data retrieval methods
  • Additional analytics
• Performance Management (predefined)
  • New roles
  • Enhancements to criteria group functionality
• Performance Management (flexible)
  • New roles
  • Integration in the talent review process
  • Layout of columns is configurable
  • Elements of forms can be grouped into blocks
  • Overview of goals, weighting and ratings when collapsing elements and goals
  • Slider for rating
  • Elements, such as notes, can be collapsed and expanded
  • Localization features for China
  • Analytics
• E-Recruiting
  • New roles
  • Analytics
• Enterprise Learning
  • New roles
  • Analytics
• Enterprise Compensation Management
  • Analytics

Now let’s run through these features in a bit more details.

Talent Management Core

Unsurprisingly the Talent Management Core sees the bulk of the new features for Talent Management in EhP6. Several new features are introduced in business function HCM_TMC_CI_3, mainly around the Talent Review Meeting and Talent Profile functionality. Usability and analytics are other focus areas.

The Talent Management Specialist (TMS) role now has an overview page, displaying essential information and services for the TMS. All of the Talent Management Specialist roles have been made obsolete and replaced by 3 new roles:

• SAP_SR_TMC_TMS_6 (Talent Management Specialist)
• SAP_SR_TMC_MANAGER_6 (Manager in Talent Management)
• SAP_SR_TMC_EMPLOYEE_6 (Employee in Talent Management)

In regards to the Talent Review Meeting, a number of functions have been introduced. The Talent Monitor in the Talent Review Meeting is enhanced to allow a TMS to track the number of employees against the number of nominations per manager, group the employees by certain categories and check the performance and potential assessments of each employee.

Performance management documents are now integrated into the Calibration Grid process in the Talent Review Meeting process. Employees can be calibrated mid-process in the Talent Review Meeting. The Performance Management process starts as usual and any ratings by the manager are in the “proposed” status until they are calibrated in the Talent Review Meeting. Ratings can then be updated or confirmed in the appraisal document later in the Performance Management process.

The Calibration Grid allows the TMS to group employees by coloring each square of the Grid, thus providing greater visibility of employees in each segment. Also, employees within certain squares of the Grid can be automatically assigned to certain Talent Groups.

One of the stronger features introduced for the Talent Review Meeting is the Follow-Up tab. This contains a list of the results of the activities performed in the Talent Review Meeting, including Talent Group nominations and Performance and Potential assessments. This follow-up list can then be used by the TMS to perform other actions:

• Update the final performance and potential ratings in the appraisal documents
• Edit Talent Group assignments
• Perform automatic and mass assignments to Talent Groups based on calibration
• Extract comments for each employee into Microsoft Excel
• Set the overall status to “approved by next-level-manager”

The TMS can also Group and filter the result list and display an error log for failed updates per employee.

For the Talent Profile, enhancements are introduced both for the Talent Profile for Employees and the Talent Profile for Managers and Talent Management Specialists. Qualifications and Learning activities of an employee are now displayed in both the Talent Profiles for Employees and the Talent Profile for Managers and Talent Management Specialists. In addition, an employee’s Qualifications can be edited in the Talent Profile for Employees. In the Talent Profile for Managers and Talent Management Specialists it is possible to view the appraisal documents for the flexible Performance Management process. The employee is now able to export a PDF of their Talent Profile which they can print.

As with EhP5, the Talent Search is further enhanced to provide the ability to search for a combination of multiple attributes of employees and to provide more features once a search has been performed. Once a search has been performed the TMS can get an immediate overview of the employees, compare employees and create a PDF Talent Profile “album” of employees in the results list.

The further integration of the flexible Performance Management process allows a TMS to retrieve and display data in new ways. These include displaying single values from an appraisal document in Talent Profile short profile or Business Card or displaying all values of a category from an appraisal document. Also delivered are new BW extractors are delivered, search indexing and reporting in the Talent Assessment status monitor.

SAP’s focus on analytics without BW means there are additional analytics available, which are available in the Reports iView available in the Talent Management Specialist 1.6 portal role. New analytics includes:

• Status Monitor for Talent Assessments
• Status Monitor for Employee Assessments

Performance Management (predefined)

EhP6 sees 4 new roles for predefined Performance Management:

• SAP_HR_HAP_PMP_ADMIN_SR – Administrator
• SAP_HR_HAP_PMP_MANAGER_SR – Manager
• SAP_HR_HAP_PMP_EMPLOYEE_SR – Employee
• SAP_HR_HAP_PMP_GOALS_SR – Specialist for Corporate Goals

These new roles are intended to replace the existing roles:

• SAP_HR_HAP_ADMINISTRATOR – Administrator
• SAP_HR_HAP_MANAGER – Manager Flexible
• SAP_HR_HAP_EMPLOYEE – Employee Flexible

The only other new features for the predefined Performance Management process in EhP6 are the enhancement of the criteria group functionality. The new functionality adds some flexibility to the predefined process by allowing criteria groups to be adapted to customer needs. These new enhancements allow users to:

• Define or add criteria groups
• Rename any of the standard criteria groups
• Deactivate any of the standard criteria groups
• Define or change the sequence of criteria groups

These changes are introduced in business function HCM_OSA_CI_3.

Performance Management (flexible)

EhP6 introduces a number of new features for the flexible Performance Management process. Most of the new features are usability and UI features, but, as described in the Talent Management Core section above, further integration with the talent process is introduced. The new features are introduced in business function HCM_HAP_CI_1.

EhP6 sees 4 new roles for flexible Performance Management:

• SAP_HR_HAP_PMG_ADMIN_SR – Administrator
• SAP_HR_HAP_PMG_MANAGER_SR – Manager
• SAP_HR_HAP_PMG_EMPLOYEE_SR – Employee
• SAP_HR_HAP_PMG_GOALS_SR – Specialist for Corporate Goals

These new roles are intended to replace the existing roles:

• SAP_HR_HAP_ADMINISTRATOR – Administrator
• SAP_HR_HAP_MANAGER – Manager Flexible
• SAP_HR_HAP_EMPLOYEE – Employee Flexible

The usability and UI enhancements include dynamic rendering of the performance document at runtime, allowing the document layout to be much more flexible than before. Previously it was only possible to have elements one after another, but now elements can also be rendered side-by-side in columns. Other features focus around collapsible elements and blocks in the documents. Blocks of elements can be created that display different sets of columns. When collapsed the user is still able to get an overview of information from the blocks in the same row of the elements, such as the rating and weighting. Other elements are now collapsible, such as notes, descriptions and additional appraiser information. New color sliders have been introduced, similar to those used in the Talent Assessment processes.

For China, SAP has introduced a number of Performance Management localizations in business function HCM_LOC_CI_30. These are:

• Users can batch-evaluate performance and batch-update appraisal documents
• The maximum number of part appraisers, previously 18, has been removed
• Employees can now inherit OrgUnit performance with different weights, rather than user’s checking individual OrgUnit performance document

HCM_ANALYTICS_2 delivers the Performance Monitor to provide managers and HR with an overview of the current status and progress of performance management documents and processes.

E-Recruiting

In E-Recruiting, new roles have been introduced to replace and consolidate the existing roles in the system. These are:

EhP6 sees the delivery of analytics content for E-Recruiting that doesn’t require BW, through business function HCM_ERC_ANALYTICS_1. These new analytics are available via a new Web Dynpro application using the Operational Data Provider (ODP) and in SAP Business Objects Explorer, available in the Recruiter launchpad. The new analytics include:

• Efficiency of Posting Channels
• Planned Job Interviews
• Efficiency of Application Sources
• Activity Monitor
• Time to Fill
• Requisition Monitor
• Diversity Report

Learning Solution

Like E-Recruiting, Learning Solutions also has new roles to replace and consolidate the existing roles in the system. These new roles are:

• SAP_INST_TUT_LSO_SR_CI_3 (Instructor/Tutor)
• SAP_COURSEADMIN_LSO_SR_CI_4 (Course Administrator)

These replace the following roles, which are now obsolete:

• SAP_INST_TUT_LSO_CI_1 (LSO: Composite Role for Instructor and Tutor)
• SAP_INST_TUT_LSO_SR_CI_1 (LSO: Single Role for Instructor and Tutor)
• SAP_COURSEADMIN_LSO_CI_2 (LSO: Composite Role for Course Administrator)
• SAP_COURSEADMIN_LSO_SR_CI_2 (LSO: Single Role for Course Administrator)

Business function HCM_ANALYTICS_2 delivers analytics for LSO, including:

• Forecast compliance of the certificates and licenses of the workforce on a regular basis (with or without employee proficiencies)
• Training activities of the organization
• Training cost overview
• Results of the course appraisal documents
• Status of the course appraisal documents

Enterprise Compensation Management

Like with other Talent Management modules, ECM also has analytics introduced in business function HCM_ANALYTICS_2. The Enterprise Compensation Monitor provides an overview of current compensation planning process for managers and HR. In addition managers also have analytics for:

• Overview of Compensation reviews
• Overview of budget distribution
• Status of the budget distributions
• Percentage of the available budget is distributed
• Overview of the current budget distribution of the compensation reviews
• Remaining budget
• Budget already planned for previously selected organizational units

Like with other analytics information, this is available in the Reports iView in the Talent Management Specialist 1.6 portal role.

Summary

There are some nice new enhancements for SAP HCM Talent Management, with the focus clearly on analytics. There is some consolidation of security roles and some new features for Talent Review Meetings, among other niceties across the suite. However, there are no major innovations and EhP6 was the last EhP release prior to the announcement by SAP that they will only deliver “selected innovations” for on-premise Talent Management.