SuccessFactors and Employee Central – Whats New

SuccessFactors follows a quarterly release cycle and their most recent update was released on July 27th. One of the things that struck me at SuccessConnect in San Francisco was the fact that although SuccessFactors is providing information on the updates in several channels there still seemed to be many customers that were unaware of what had been delivered in earlier releases.  In this article I will focus on some of the new functionality and fixes that SuccessFactors has made available in this and in the past release for Employee Central. 

Employee Central 2.0 July 27, 2012

• Beta Release of Integration with SAP Payroll for USA, Canada, Mexico, UK, Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, Australia, Brazil, and India
• Ability to make mass changes for a group of employees (i.e. organizational transfers)
• Global Assignments where you can assign employees to global positions and manage home and host countries
• Collaborative Workflow enhanced to include participants who are not approvers, but who can still make comments and notification  to non-participants once a workflow is complete
• APIs to enable imports of 38 unique Employee Central objects
• Ability to record a “Show Me Video” with audio and screen capture embedded within any page of the application
• Workflow routing for employment detail changes (i.e. employee becomes eligible for benefits) and create an approval chain
• New Home Page with list of workflows not acted upon in 3 days for one point of tracking by administrators (Requires the new homepage functionality)
• Incremental import of non-effective dated objects such as email, phone and emergency contact
• Rehire matching will now use first name and date of birth to include people who have changed their last name (i.e. Maiden Name/Married name)
• Import multiple levels of propagation data
• Option to include inactive employees in Ad Hoc Reporting
• Users can hide the inset photo when using the Expressive Public Profile
• Gender is no longer a required field
• Support for Polish, Thai, and Turkish languages
• Start dates can now be added from January 1, 1900

Employee Central 2.0 April 20, 2012

Just to recap what was released in the last release in case you missed.

• Ad Hoc Report scheduling and reporting on foundational objects associated to Job Information, Compensation Information and Recurring/Non- Recurring Pay Components
• Ability to import an incremental job relationship file with only updated information
• Error Reporting when records don’t load into Employee Central
• Standard hours
• Frequency can now be set to hourly, monthly (previous only annual)
• Can now display effective pay dates and custom fields
• Different icon for mobile phone other home or work phone in Quickcards
• Can add department or division fields to Employee profile

In speaking with the team at SuccessConnect their future roadmap will focus on continuing to build out position management, absence management, mass changes, global expat assignment, real time analytics and global payroll while adding functionality for mergers/acquisitions and external workers. There are also future plans to enhance the architecture to support a MetaData Framework (Naomi Bloom will be happy) and an ongoing investment in the integration platform as well workflow and rules engine.

Employee Central has been bought by 110 customers with about 60 live and some solid momentum as SuccessFactors has signed several large new global customers with 50K+ employees already this year. It is extremely obvious that SAP and SuccessFactors are committed to building out their cloud HRMS offering as per Bill Kutik they re-assigned about 500 experienced product managers and engineers to the development effort as well asSuccessFactors VP Engineering Adam Kovalevsky is moving to Germany to manage the team. My initial view is Employee Central is somewhat light in functionality when compared to what is currently offered in SAP HRMS but given the competitive pressures and large development team I will be watching the future releases very closely as I have high expectations.