HR Customer Connection November Highlights & Perspective from Down Under

For those of you not aware the SAP customer connection program released a couple of HR changes in the last few weeks in the November Sync Support pack. The SAP customer connection has received some mixed reviews and feedback in the HR space from both customers and the wider SAP community, a great cross section of these sentiments was captured by J. Pazahanick in the following blog/ comments, http://scn.sap.com/community/erp/hcm/blog/2013/06/05/truth-about-the-sap-hcm-customer-connection-program.

My personal experience with the customer connection so far has been a positive one. I participated in the recent ideas phase for the eRecruitment customer connection and 3 of our ideas progressed to the development phase. Overall there were 64 submissions for eRecruitment in the idea phase, with 25 making the quota number to make it through to the next stage. I am currently in discussions with the SAP development team around one of our successful requirements for a candidate interview booking system, and recently saw some screen shots of the potential solution. This solution would allow recruiters to set up an interview schedule which candidates can then nominate them for an interview time slot.I am also in the midst of the Learning Solution idea phase collection period and have added 4 ideas with my customers.

One of the key problems I witnessed with the SAP customer connection particularly in the HR community though is that SAP HR customers see this as another requirements gathering avenue from SAP which has long lead times and ultimately provides little change. I will monitor to wait and see if any changes for eRecruitment are developed and implemented by SAP.

With SAP shifting their HR development dollars to SuccessFactors and SAP on-premise, it makes sense to engage customers for the preferred development areas in the on-premise solution, looking after long term customers, as well increasing customer engagement.  Hopefully we get more improvements developed/implemented and if the results are satisfying for customers I am sure the uptake of future programs will improve significantly.

November Changes released;

1. From a HR Personnel Administration viewpoint one exciting update is the ability to delimit the enterprise structure so that personnel areas, subareas, employee groups and subgroups are no longer used can be stopped from appearing in drop down lists in infotype 0000, 0001, 1008 and 1013 so that users cannot select them in error. This addresses a long held frustration in the customer/consultant community as it now allows customers to clean up unused master data and reduce frustration for end users. (SAP Note 1883014).

2. Another item that will definitely benefit Australia New Zealand customers is that the standard quota report RPTQTA10 has been extended so that accruals can be included alongside entitlements. It is now possible to output a report that has entitlement, accrual and the sum of the two. (SAP Note 1850393).

3. The Communication Infotype (0105) has also been added to PPOME as standard (SAP Note 1833102) and there has been a tweak for the unoccupied percentage of a position (SAP Note 1832511).

For those that missed the changes that were released by the program in May, here is a summary:

• New work schedule finder button on infotype 0007 (SAP Note 1795844).
• New infotype for storing quota type selection group at employee level (SAP Note 1816423)
• The ability to configure default dates in the Quota Overview Screen PT50 (SAP Note 1793781)
• Position, org unit and job text added to the Organization Assignment Overview screen ( SAP Note 1784456).
• ‘Other Bank’ details added to the Bank Details Overview Screen ( SAP Note 1785496).