Fast and Furious: SAP Payroll on SAP HANA
I know it’s late…
I know you’re weary…
I know your plans don’t include Payroll…
*Apologies to Bob Seger
It’s time to process a payroll run. Usually this starts as a job which kicks off overnight to ensure the completion when the payroll team arrives in the morning. After a morning spent checking the payroll results and making any necessary adjustments, the correction run is performed. Hopefully there will be just one of those and today won’t extend into the night. So here we are…
As robust and powerful as SAP Payroll functionality is, completing a regular run generally requires many hours over a few days. In the past the rub has been to either spend for additional hardware resources to improve run time or endure a lengthy process.
Consider too that the payroll process is always under the pressure of the payday deadline. Few application areas endure the scrutiny of your company and your employees more than payroll. It must be both completely accurate and on time.
But what if the hours spent on the payroll run were turned into minutes or seconds? What if the follow up simulation runs went just as fast?
And, what if the data from the entire payroll process was available for real time reporting and analytics? Such is the promise of SAP Payroll on HANA.
In his blog, SAP HCM on HANA Overview and Roadmap , Jarret Pazahancik shares the SAP roadmap for HCM specific HANA solutions which either
have already been released or are under consideration to be delivered over the next 18 months.
It is important to note the prominence of Payroll and Time processing. The Insight Roadmap states that SAP anticipates for each to have high performance execution throughout the entire end to end process.
Also, if you consider that the cost of high speed in-memory computing has become more affordable just about as quickly as the data can be processed,
the time is right for HCM applications to get on board.
Due to its in-memory capability, the HANA database is not limited by having to continuously read and store data during a process. We are quite accustomed to using an application server to process data which has been retrieved from a database. But what if the calculations were actually performed there? Imagine computations in superfast RAM instead of on a comparatively superslow drive.
Then imagine what it means for those late nights spent waiting for payroll to process.
Get some sleep, fast and furious SAP HANA Payroll appears to be just ahead.
Thanks for the mention and looking forward to this new payroll functionality being released.
I can imagine how glad payroll administrators will be with this development I believe it's a right step in the right direction. Velocity in business and in the right direction rules in this dynamic and evolving age has its a right step for success in any Line-of-business.
Guess the payroll processes and being performed at the speed of thought.
Regards
Absolutely, hit the nail on the head. Reporting on payroll and time data can involve processing of huge datasets. From a corporate wide perspective questions like "how much is absence due to sickness costing us?" and "how much overtime are we paying out - where and why - and can we optimize our processes to minimize the need for overtime?" have always been important. In the economic climate of today, such questions are of greater importance than ever as even very large businesses have to work harder and harder to remain both competitive and profitable. However, answering such questions accurately depends not only on the accuracy of the data but on its availability to the business in reporting. Accuracy of the reporting depends on the frequency with which the data is kept up to date. We traditionally expect time evaluation data to be updated nominally once per day per employee while we acknowledge that payroll results are updated less frequently. As others have commented, the effort, time and stress involved in ensuring accurate and timely payroll can be very large. Rather than simply focussing on post-evaluation reporting, we ought to consider how much business benefit would be gained if the live processing of payroll and time evaluation were transformed from hours to seconds/minutes making payday deadlines easier to meet without sacrificing quality. How much additional benefit could be realized if simulation runs could operate fast enough that the impact of changes in time and payroll data could be visualized (right to currency value impact in payroll) in near real-time? Rather than reporting (fast) on the existing data - how about reporting in real-time on the calculated results from processing of that data?
I look forwards to HANA and hope that payroll and time will not be viewed as an afterthought.