This is the second part in my Analytics for Talent Management series. In this part I will cover what analytics are offered by SAP in their EhP4, EhP5, EhP6, and SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics releases.
In terms of SAP’s Talent Management, it was Nakisa that provided the first real analytics capabilities after the delivery of EhP4. The analytics provided by Nakisa in STVN SuccessionPlanning are excellent for reporting on and analyzing performance and succession planning activities and getting a solid overview of the state of play. However, users of other Talent Management modules didn’t have any real way of measuring or analyzing their talent operations. Measurement of recruiting, compensation, learning, and development activities are also very important to a business, especially since so many of those areas integrate with each other and with succession planning. In terms of succession planning, STVN SuccessionPlanning provided analytics for each Talent Management Specialist that cover:
- Number of Positions and Key Positions
- Number of Key Positions with 1, 2, 3, 4, or no successors
- Breakdown of successors readiness for Key Positions
- Average successor bench strength
- Number of successors who are part of a Talent Group
- Number of successors who are high performers or high potentials
- Number of employees who are in Talent Groups
- Performance breakdown for last 5 years
- Potential breakdown for last 5 years
- Gender breakdown of successors and incumbents
- Nationality breakdown of successors and incumbents
- Competency and proficiency breakdown
A great feature about the STVN SuccessionPlanning dashboards is the alerts, which can immediately show a user the areas that need urgent attention. The analytics can also be broken down by Personnel Area and Subarea, Employee Group and Subgroup, Company Code, Nationality and Gender. One of the only issues I have with the dashboards is the inability to drill-down and get information about which positions or individuals make up these analytics.
In EhP5 SAP introduced embedded analytics through BI content to be used with Xcelsius Dashboards and integration with Crystal Reports. This is where SAP got the ball rolling for analytics, as the Xcelsius solution is highly flexible and easy to work with – ideal for managers and executives. The focus was really on analytics for Enterprise Compensation Management, but there were also analytics for monitoring the succession planning process: utilization, monitoring, skills and competencies, training, risks, and strengths of talents within the organization. I won’t go into too much more detail about this, since frans.smolders did an excellent job of covering this in his blog Embedded analytics provide immediate answers to key HR business questions. However, what I will cover briefly are some of the analytics provided. In addition to those provided in STVN SuccessionPlanning above, the BI content also includes analytic such as:
- Number of Entries, Promotions, Lateral Moves, Organizational Changes, and Leavers
- FTE for Headcount, Entries, Lateral Moves, Promotions, Organizational Changes, and Leavers
- Newly staffed positions and key positions
- Newly staffed positions and key positions staffed with successors, non-successors, and new hires
- Staffed positions and key positions
- Breakdown of bench strength for positions and key positions
- Talent Ratio (employees : employees in Talent Groups)
- FTE for Talents and Talent Ratio
- Average Headcount per Talent Group
- Number of leavers per Talent Group
- Leaving Rate per Talent Group
- Employees recently assigned to Talent Groups (nominated and approved)
- Delimited and expired assignments (nominated and approved)
- Number and ratio of Talent Assessments
- Number and ratio of employees with or without selected qualifications
- Number of employees without qualifications
- Number and ratio of positions with or without selected qualifications
- Number of positions without qualifications
- Number of employees who have not taken a learning course
- Number of employees who have taken at least one learning course
- Number of bookings and unique courses types booked
- Total and average training hours and days
- Total and average cost of training
- Total participation fees, cancellation fees and combined fees
- Total and average total compensation
- Average compensation per Talent Group
- Total compensation per employee
- Average new salary
- First planned amount and first planned amount per year
- First planned compensation percentage
- Guideline amount and percentage
- Maximum guideline amount, number and percentage
- Minimum guideline amount, number and percentage
- Guideline amount versus compensation amount
- Guideline number versus compensation number
- First planned amount versus compensation amount
- First planned number versus compensation number
As you can see, this is a pretty hefty list of analytics and what I like about this BI content is that it is created around scenarios and attempts to answer business questions, rather than simply supply some statistics. Some thought had gone into exactly what a Talent Management Specialist needs to know to fully analyze their organization. For me the only real problem is that the Xcelsius Dashboards and Crystal Reports functionality require an additional license, as well as relying on having BW implemented. The pre-requisites are also fairly heavy.
With the EhP6 release SAP introduced the Object and Data Provisioning (ODP) tool that allows organizations to get BW-standard analytical capabilities without needing BW. While the power and benefits of BW shouldn’t be underestimated, some organizations simply cannot justify the expense of licensing, implementing and running a BW system. Sure, you could say that these organizations aren’t taking their business seriously, but for BW there has to be more of a business case than just Talent Management analytics.
As part of the ODP delivery 18 data models were provided that cover E-Recruiting, Performance Management, Succession Planning, and Enterprise Compensation Management. The ODP solution can also be expanded to display customer-specific requirements. Along with the ODP is a workbench to create queries, which can be viewed with existing queries in dashboards. The “out of the box” analytics provided with the ODP tool include:
- Ratio, Number and Status of Appraisals
- Ratio, Number and Status of Talent Assessments
- Ratio, Number and Status of Employee Assessments
- Number of Learners
- Number of Completed Course Appraisal Documents
- Number of Learners Who Did Not Complete an Appraisal Document
- Number of Partially Compliant Employees
- Employees Whose Qualifications Expire in x Days
- Number of Non-Compliant Employees with Booking or No Booking
- Number of Fully Compliant Employees
- Number of Unique Course Types Booked
- Number of Bookings
- Total Participation Fee
- Total Cancellation Fee
- Total Fee
- Average Total Fee
- Average of All Learning Group Criteria Values
- Average of All Learning Criteria Values
- Average of the Best Value rating and the worst value rating for the Criteria / Criteria Group
- Best and Worst Values for the Criteria / Criteria Group
- Total Number of Learners Who Have Booked for the Course
- Total Number of Learners Who Have Appraised the Course
- Percentage and Number of Employees With a Completed Compensation Process (with or without Budget)
- Percentage and Number of Organizational Units With a Completed Compensation Process (with or without Budget)
- Budgeted, Distributed and Remaining Amounts
- Budgeted, Distributed and Remaining Awards
The ODP analytics can also be broken down by various variables. An example list for the Status Monitor for Talent Assessments is:
- Company Code
- Assessment Template
- Assessment Process
- Employee Group
- Employee Subgroup
- Personnel Subarea
- Current Calendar Day
- Pay Scale Group
- Pay Scale Level
- Status
- Personnel Area
- Organizational Unit
While I like the concept of ODP, the focus was more around supplying analytics in MSS – although there is a still a decent number of Talent Management analytics. SAP doesn’t have any plans to provide further ODP models in the future, since they are focusing more in BW and some new HANA technologies. Customers should be conservative about investing too much in this particular technology as this might not be a future proof investment.
More details on the ODP options and other analytics provided in HR Renewal 1.0 can be found in another blog by frans.smolders, What happened to HR Reporting and Analytics in EHP6 and HR Renewal 1.0?.
For those that do have BW and EhP6, SAP have introduced the Executive HR Reporting RDS that provides attractive and customizable analytics dashboards that include a variety of workforce and talent management orientated analytic capabilities. Some of these analytics include:
- Vacant positions
- Time to fill
- Quality of hire (No. of leavers v performance of new hires in 1st year)
- Internal fill rate
- Offer acceptance rate
- Open requisitions
- Performance and Potential
- Promotions and demotions
- Lateral moves for talents and non-talents
- Job rotation and movement
- Average training hours
- Key positions
- Bench Strength
- Readiness of succession
- Talents in key positions
- Quality of succession (what % of successors are selected to fill key positions)
- Personnel cost per cost type
- Average talent compensation
- Talent training cost analysis
- Education costs
- Number of training days
- Training methods
In regards to SuccessFactors, the SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics and Workforce Planning offerings are built from more than 30 years of analytics experience (the solutions are based on SuccessFactors’ acquisition of Inforhm in 2010). They deliver a plethora of analytic capabilities – they ship with over 2000 analytics – in very easily digestible and visualized formats. The functionality provides analytics in tables, charts and graphs – depending on what data is being reported. It also provides benchmarks based on the aggregated data that Workforce Analytics has from its customer base. SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics will also run on HANA in the near future so there will be an even higher level of performance for all customers, not just those that invest in HANA technology. Like the EhP5 analytics, the Workforce Analytics provided by SuccessFactors have been defined to answer key business questions and help organizations understand their organization.
Implementation of Workforce Analytics and Workforce Planning can take as little as 5 months, although this depends on the customer needs, their other systems and what other SuccessFactors solutions they are running. Analytics are supplied via “Metric Packs”, such as Performance Management, Career and Development Planning, Succession Management, and TalentFlow. These are deployed “on top” of Workforce Analytics and Workforce Planning to provide the specific analytics functionality required. Also contained within the solution is functionality such as a query design workspace, dashboard designer, and report scheduler.
From a Talent Management perspective there is a good array of analytics, with over 200 well defined analytics - SuccessFactors told me that a list of all the available analytics “could fill a 500 page book”. The range and focus of analytics differs from SAP’s “traditional” analytics solutions and therefore provides a different level of analysis than was available before. Just browsing through the list shows some interesting analytics that seem more innovative and wide-ranging than is typical in an SAP offering. As a result, for some of the analytics in the selection below I have also included the description used by SuccessFactors. The following selection of analytics are taken from various metrics packs that cover Talent Management:
- External Hire Rate
- Internal Hire Rate
- Internal Placement Rate (Internal Hires as a percentage of total internal & external hires)
- Net Hire Ratio (number of external hires for every one terminated employee)
- Net Hire Ratio - Silents & Boomers/Generation XY (ratio of mature net hires to generation XY net hires)
- Recruitment Source Ratio (number of internal hires for every one external hire)
- Rehire Rate
- Career Path Ratio – In (number of employees internally promoted for every one employee internally transferred)
- Career Path Ratio – Out (number of promotions out for every one transfer out)
- Promotion Rate – In (percentage of promotions in per employee)
- Promotion Rate – Out (percentage of promotions out per employee)
- Promotion Speed Ratio (the average position tenure in years prior to promotion)
- Performance Appraisal Participation Rate (percentage of eligible employees who participated in performance appraisal during the period)
- Total Performance Appraisal Occurrences (total number of performance appraisals received by eligible employees during the period)
- Number of Employees Reviewed (number of employees who received a performance review during the period)
- Employees Eligible for Review (number of employees due for a review during the period)
- Average Performance Appraisal Rating
- Current High Performers (employees with a current Rating of High)
- Previous High Performers: (employees with a previous Rating of High)
- High Performer Growth Rate
- Employee Turnaround Rate (percentage of previously rated poor performers whose rating increased to average or above this period)
- Employee Downgrade Rate (percentage of participants whose rating decreased relative to the previous rating)
- Employee Upgrade Rate (percentage of participants whose rating increased relative to the previous rating)
- Performance Appraisal Rating Static (participants whose most recent rating was the same as their previous rating)
- Performance Based Pay Differentials (average base compensation paid to top performers for every dollar paid to mid or low performers)
- Average Salary per employee
- Total Average Annual Salary
- Total Average Annual Salary per FTE
- Total Compensation Expense
- Average Salary - High Performers
- Average Salary - Non High Performers
The External Hire, Career Path Ratio and Promotion rate analytics are also provided for exempts, non-exempts and minorities. The Promotion rate analytic is, interestingly, offered for female employee too.
In fact, all of the analytics in Workforce Analytics can be broken down against various variables, including biographical information like gender, etc:
- Time (calendar, Fiscal)
- Structure (org unit, location)
- Biographical / Diversity (age, disability, indigenous)
- Employment (type, status, classification, job family, occupational group)
- Tenure (org tenure, position tenure)
- Payment (salary range)
- Recruitment (recruitment source)
- Separation (separation reason)
- Workforce Availability (absence type, paid/unpaid)
More recently SuccessFactors announced the release of Headlines, a new type of analytics capability that picks out key trends and highlights these to business managers in common business language. This type of capability goes beyond anything that is offered now by SAP and offers a different angle on reporting and analytical capabilities. By pushing important trends to managers, Headlines is taking the hard work out of analytics for managers in the trenches. You can read about Headlines and watch a short video clip here.
Workforce Analytics is vendor agnostic and can connect to multiple on-premise and SaaS systems, so it can provide cross-application analytical capabilities. Integration should become tighter for SAP customers once SAP announce further details of their SAP NetWeaver Cloud Integration technology for SuccessFactors.
If an organization is already using SAP ERP HCM then it seems like an investment in BW could be as worthwhile, although each organization should evaluate all of the options available to them. Within the near future SAP should provide the capability for SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics to integrate tightly with SAP ERP HCM to provide a greater array of real-time analytics in SuccessFactors’ constantly evolving Workforce Analytics solution.
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