With 1611 release of SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer now there is a new way of replicating Employees from SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central to SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer (C4C). Until the 1608 release only point-to-point (P2P) based replication was supported in SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer for replication employees from SuccessFactors Employee Central (EC). But with 1611 release we offer a mediated employee replication via SAP HANA Cloud Integration (HCI). The main drivers behind moving from P2P to mediated approach are as follows
1. Supporting extensions in a more flexible manner. Prior to this to create extensions customer need to get in touch with SAP service center team and also there was no process defined on who to approach , how to approach for creation of these extensions.
2. Another major reason was performance, Point to Point integration was a synchronous process, which has it owns limitations especially when we talk about volume of data. In mediated version the replication from HCI to C4C is now asynchronous and hence does not suffer from issues typical to large synchronous XML messages around memory and timeouts.
3. Another pain point with P2P process was even if any one employee record had code list mapping issue or some other data related issue whole Initial load/delta load used to fail
Before we proceed further I would like to highlight,the core business logic of Employee replication stays same but the way we used to fetch records from Employee Central system changes. A job in HCI is scheduled to pull data from Employee central at a specified time interval instead of the pull being triggered from C4C.
Also with the new approach we will no longer will be creating reporting line unit (RLU) for managers coming in from EC, which was the case with P2P solution. Again here the driving factors are more leaner employee replication, performance issues involving RLU creation which was based on complex internal calculations/logic which contributed to memory issues and Customer feedback, where many customers who complained about automatic creation saying we already have Org units in C4C, why force us to have more, which essentially means going forward, customers need to manually maintain org assignment’s once employees are replicated in case they want to assign org.
Our goal was to have a learner replication process along with asynchronous processing and providing flexibility supporting extensions. With all the above points in mind now let's look at how to configure the new solution for replicating Employees from SuccessFactors Employee Central to SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer.
For existing Customers who are already using the existing P2P solution, we will not overwrite existing Org assignment, so customer can plan to switch to new approach going forward. Old point to point approach is deprecated which essentially means only existing customer have option to either stick to P2P approach or start making use of new approach. New customers (customers who are going live with 1611) can only use the HCI mediated solution.
In the HCI Public catalog we have delivered a new package SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer Integration with SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central. This consists of 2 integration flow artifacts.
- Replicate Employee from SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central
- Replicate Employee manually from SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central
To keep this blog short in the
next part, I will explain the purpose and configuration of the above mentioned integration flows.
