SuccessFactors for SAP Customers – The SAP Mentors Perspective
Since SuccessFactors became an SAP company, hundreds of organizations have adopted SuccessFactors talent solutions for their talent management needs. Many such customers have also adopted SuccessFactors Employee Central for their employee administration needs. SAP has announced an integration strategy and road map to help customers get the best out of both SuccessFactors and SAP applications.
Several SAP HCM Mentors and experienced SuccessFactors experts have been advising customers on the adoption and implementation of SuccessFactors solutions. They face real world problems and provide practical advice to customers on how to make their move to the cloud.
We are planning a session, as part of the SAP Mentor Mondays series, to bring some of these experts together for a valuable conversation.
Session Recording is now available from https://sap.na.pgiconnect.com/p24kkmeyhvd/
Session Date : Monday August 26th from 9.00 a.m. PST to 10.00 a.m. PST. No registration required.
Web Conference Link : https://sap.na.pgiconnect.com/sapmm
Phone Conference Information +1-866-312-7353 Participant Passcode: 170 133 7730
Phone conference information for all countries is at http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-43478
Session Details
In this session a few SAP Mentors and experts will share their experience advising customers on adopting SuccessFactors solutions. They will also bring their implementation insight to table and discuss how they approached the implementation.
1. SuccessFactors Employee Central expert Jyoti Sharma will share her experience implementing Employee Central and connecting it to on-premise systems. Jyoti works for SAP and SuccessFactors partner EPI-USE. EPI-USE has completed over 12 SuccessFactors implementations in the areas of SuccessFactors Recruiting, Succession Planning, Performance Goals and Employee Central.
2. SAP HCM Mentor, Luke Marson will talk about his experience implementing SuccessFactors Employee Central for an SAP customer.
Jyoti Sharma and Luke Marson are the co-authors of the upcoming book, SuccessFactors with SAP ERP HCM.
3. SAP HCM and SuccessFactors expert, Venki Krishnamoorthy will talk about his experience implementing SuccessFactors Learning and connecting it with SAP ERP HCM.
4. SAP HCM and SuccessFactors expert Kellie Fitzpatrick, will share her experience helping customers move their human capital management applications to the cloud. She will share the stories of how some of her customers are making their move to the cloud and the decisions they had to make. Kellie is the CEO of SAP and SuccessFactors partner Symphony Consulting. Symphony Consulting has completed over 20 SuccessFactors implementations in the areas of Performance and Goals, Learning, Compensation, Succession, Recruiting and Employee Central.
5. SAP Mentor Jarret Pazahanick will join the conversation and share his insight.
6. SAP Expert Sharon Newton is kicking off an Employee Central and Employee Central Payroll implementation. She will bring her thoughts on how she approached the implementation to the conversation. Sharon is the CEO of SAP and SuccessFactors partner hyperCision.
7. SAP Mentor Prashanth Padmanabhan will kick of the session with a short update on the deployment options for SuccessFactors customers.
This is going to be a great session and really looking forward to it.
Is the session open to everyone? Do you need to register?
Or will it be available afterwards?
Stephen
P.s. Venki is also on Twitter at https://twitter.com/venki_sap
Hi Stephen
Is the session open to everyone? Yes, SAP Mentor mondays are open to everyone
Do you need to register? No, showing up works
Or will it be available afterwards? Normally yes, it should be recorded but in order to ask questions etc it's better to be present
Link for the SAP Mentor monday's
https://sap.na.pgiconnect.com/sapmm
The session is on Monday August 26th from 9.00 a.m. PST to 10.00 a.m. PST.
Best regards
Tom
Thanks Stephen. I added the web conference link and dial in details to the post. Thanks for sharing Venki's twitter address as well. I appreciate it.
Hi Prashanth,
This is a great opportunity and an excellent confluence of talented minds and personalities.
Looking forward to it.
Warm Regards,
Jyoti
not trying to be negative here but are some of the folks here really successfactors experts? 😕 where are the folks from consultancies that worked on successsfactors prior to the SAP acquisition. allt these folks are legacy sap folks. with sap you had to have many years of experience and/or projects to be considered an "expert"
Hi Howard,
Good to have you back to keep everyone grounded. It depends on what you define as a "successfactors expert", since there are few people that are experts across the suite. Also, it depends whether you define an expert as being someone that understands the technology inside out, or whether it's someone that understands how to expertly design and map business processes to leverage the technology.
From my perspective, I define an "expert" as someone that has a broad understanding of markets, business processes, and technology as well as the experience to leverage all of those facets to implement solutions that solve business problems, provide business value, and engage in thought leadership.
So in this case, just understanding and implementing SuccessFactors two or three times doesn't necessarily make someone an expert. There has to be a deeper understanding than just deploying technology. And I've seen people implement a technology 3 or 4 times who I definitely would not consider an expert, especially if they implement it the same way every time no matter what the business challenges are.
However, everyone has different interpretations of what an "expert" is and by your definition maybe some of the folks here aren't experts.
Best regards,
Luke
Howard Marshall Thank you for highlighting the need for SuccessFactors implementation experience. EPI-USE and Symphony Consulting have completed over 30 SuccessFactors projects for customers covering a variety of topics. I added the details to the above post. Jyoti Sharma and Kellie Fitzpatrick will be able to bring that real world experience to the conversation.
thanks. had one more question and one original question. where are all the vendors that did sfsf implementations prior to the sap acquisition? how many of these branded consultancies like symphony, how many of these projects did they actually do versus the projects they have due to having bough companies and/or brought in sfsf consultants as employees?
There are not so many vendors that did SuccessFactors before, although there are 1 or 2 in each major territory (and more in bigger territories like the US). However, they are all quite small and I've not seen any signs that they have the breadth of business process expertise that many SAP HCM consultants do - but that does not mean that they don't have it! Certainly not many of them have SAP HCM expertise...
i used to have great admiration for you untilt his post. you are very biased against sfsf only consulting companies. if you see below, allen's company is not what you call "small". it seems to me you and prasanth and everyone else is biased towards sap hcm consulting companies. why not tell the truth?
Hi Howard,
I wasn't referring to Aasonn and I know Allen and his company. His claims are entirely valid and true. However, it wasn't one of the many SuccessFactors partners that I was referring to.
Knowing a lot about many of the markets in North America, LATAM and MENA I can assure you that there are many small SuccessFactors shops that don't quite have the business experience of some SAP HCM consultancies. But on the other hand, there are SAP HCM consultancies that simply do not get the Cloud and do not make good partners for SuccessFactors (despite chasing the business). I have no particular bias to SAP HCM shops, but you were implying that SAP HCM shops were not as valid as the SuccessFactors-only shops and I was simply making a point that it is not always the case. In a way I was indeed defending SAP HCM consultancies, but by no means do I have a bias.
I definitely would ask anyone to perform due diligence on any consultancy - whether from a SAP HCM or SuccessFactors origin - that claims SuccessFactors competency to ensure that they can do what they say they can. In some cases the SAP HCM firms will be better, in other cases the SuccessFactors firms will be better. The bottom line is that different partners meet different customer needs and I merely wanted to provide balance that there is relevance for SAP HCM consultancies.
I hope that clarifies my comments and well done for raising important points on this blog.
Best regards,
Luke
Thanks Luke.
Howard, thanks for making the point about this and pointing out this discrepancy. In large part there is an ongoing discovery of the talent in this newly expanded ecosystem by everyone involved.
Luke is a great community resource when it comes to his research on SAP/SuccessFactors HCM and he is coming up to speed on who else exists in the legacy SuccessFactors partner ecosystem. I consider Luke a personal friend so I'm sure there was no harm intended. From his post here, I'm sure it was probably mostly an oversight/ommission by accident.
In his response, Luke makes a good point, Customers need to be certain that they validate any partner that claims "Expertise" in SuccessFactors.
From my discussions with other SAP HCM consultancies, it appears what's happening in the marketplace now is that many SAP partners within the HCM space are trying any way they can to get SuccessFactors project business and in many cases are saying all sorts of outlandish things, which for the most part is not just "stretching-the-truth" but in many cases are "out-and-out lies". Misleading marketing is an interesting moral condundrum - is it fair play in the rough and tumble business environment or is it just wrong. I'll leave it for the reader to decide.
The facts seem to be simple, because of the SuccessFactors HCM solution, On-Premise SAP HCM business with regards to new implementation projects and upgrades has begun to lag and the number of consultants SAP consultancies have on the bench has increased to the point of putting some of these consultancies in the position of being a bit desperate. When that happens, companies begin to start putting Press Releases in to the public domain that makes it sound like they have SuccessFactors experience. When in fact, all they have are a few trained consultants, without any real life experience, or at the best, minimal experience.
Minimally experienced consultants that don't have a deep bench of highly experienced, senior consultants won't succeed in any engagement. So being trained or having X number of trained consultants cannot replace 1,000's of projects. It takes time and unfortunately a consultancy needs to spend the time building up that experience starting with smaller engagements with smaller customers before they can tackle a large customer implementation.
We've been at this for a long time and 6 years ago, we were in a similar situation of having to build our expertise. So the best advice to a customer looking for a partner to implement their project is "Buyer Beware".
Its great that this discussion got started. A lot of people who follow this space have seen rediculous press releases recently and claims by other SI's who claim expertise but literally have no experience or next to none. We all know better - customers end up paying the price in the end when they select an SI based on their SAP On-Premise experience without looking closely at their SuccessFactors experience.
Thank you Howard for accelerating this discussion and thank you to Luke for bring this discussion to SCN.
Prashanth/Howard,
In case you weren't aware and just to add clarity to this discussion about experience, Aasonn has been implementing SuccessFactors for almost 7 years and have over 1,500 customers that we've implemented SuccessFactors for across 30 countries, and have completed over 4,000+ projects. Currently we have over 400 active implementation projects underway and over 300 additional customers that subscribe to our MyConsultant support plan with active work plans in progress.
BTW: We are the only partner that is allowed to put on SuccessFactors own website, "The most experienced partner in the world".
We not only have implementation services but our Focus methodology provides both technical, integration, PMO, and HR Talent Strategy transformation services as part of our full featured consulting offering.
At last count, we have over 35 of the Fortune 500 as customers and 4 of the Fortune 100 as customers. These two market segments are our highest growth areas.
Hope this helps clarify our positon in the SuccessFactors SI category with regards to experience.
Thanks Prashanth.
Look forward to hear experts 🙂 and SAP mentors to share their insight on Implementation and solution strategy. Hopefully we can have some sort of followup blog/Q&A to summarize some of key pointers to take to customers.
Regards,
Sudhir
Sudhir Gupta That is a good idea.I will make that recommendation to the participants.
The session will be recorded. Unfortunately the session time is not convenient for you and your colleagues in Australia. I apologize for that.
Despite the somewhat ridiculous time for Australian participants, I will be dialling in too. Looking forward to hearing about this, and asking a few questions too 🙂
Chris Paine I apologize for the inconvenience. Had to move the time to accommodate everyone's schedule.
Session Recording is now available from https://sap.na.pgiconnect.com/p24kkmeyhvd/
Hi Prashanth,
Thanks for putting this panel together. I was struggling with the updated connect software, experiencing cloud solution [dis-]advantages live;-) Struggling with a head cold at the same time and originally wanted to take the day off, that's why I wasn't shaved either.
Glad I didn't take the day off and made sure that this session flowed and was recorded.
As @h_omprakash tweets:
Great job.. Excellent overview.. We should continue webinars like this in regular interval.
@SAPMentors https://twitter.com/h_omprakash/status/372044517752324097Thanks to everyone who made it special, Mark.