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Connect SAP ByDesign to best-of-breed HCM Solutions
The cloud ERP solution SAP Business ByDesign has been designed for small and midsize businesses (SMB) as well as subsidiaries of large corporations with multiple possible HCM setups:
For Small and Midsize Businesses SAP Business ByDesign offers embedded HCM capabilities that are sufficient for most mid-market companies and tightly integrated with all business areas of ByD incl. financials, project management, supply chain management, etc.
Professional service companies or other companies with very sophisticated requirements to manage their workforces beyond ByD HCM capabilities may consider using SAP SuccessFactors’ HCM Suite that includes additional HR services such as Learning and Development, Performance and Compensation, Recruiting and Onboarding, and more.
Large corporations and globally active companies that are typically organized in corporate networks may consider organizing HR processes on a global level using line of business solutions such as SAP SuccessFactors with world-wide visibility of workforce availability and gaps.
For these companies SAP Business ByDesign offers pre-packaged integration scenarios and APIs to connect best-of-breed HCM solutions. This blog post provides you with an overview on SAP Business ByDesign APIs and integration scenarios to connect best-of-breed HCM solutions.
You have the choice!
Using the cloud ERP solution SAP Business ByDesign you can decide which setup fits best your company: You can use SAP Business ByDesign embedded HCM, SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central or some 3rd-party HCM systems as your employee system of records and to run personal administration processes.
SAP Business ByDesign offers a pre-packaged integration scenario to connect SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central, and interfaces/APIs to connect SAP S/4HANA or 3rd-party HCM system.
If you decide to use ByD embedded HCM capabilities, you can use ByD APIs to enhance ByD or to connect complementing use case specific HR solutions.
When create or change employee data, you should take into account some employee data model specific characteristics:
Main parts of employee data is time dependent. An update on one time slice may change/impact neighbor time slices as well. In result the effective employee data at a certain point in time is a combination of multiple time slices of all relevant employee data segments.
Furthermore employees implicitly create further data such as positions, organisational assignments (reporting line units, cost centers) and identities (user and business role assignments).
In order to simplify employee replication interfaces and to ensure consistent employee data in ByD at all time, ByD provides a staging area “Employee Replication Request” for new employees and employee updates from external sources. New Employee Replication Requests are processed automatically if possible. The work center Master Data Replication provides work center views to review the status of employee-, reporting line unit- and cost center replications and detailed UIs to solve conflicts and errors of Employee Replication Requests.
Integration with SAP S/4HANA or 3rd-party HCM solutions
ByD provides the pre-packed communication scenario “Employee Replication from External System” to connect external HCM solutions.
The base-line assumption is that the external HCM solution is the system of records for employee master data and all personal administration processes are done in the external system (for example hire new employees). Hence the communication scenario is available only if ByD personal administration is inactive.
The communication scenario can be activated in the ByD Business Configuration via scoping question “Do you want to replicate employee data from an external application to your cloud solution?“.
Employee data becomes read-only on the ByD UI, if you activate the replication of employee data from external applications.
The communication scenario “Employee Replication from External System” contains 2 web service APIs to read and write Employee Replication Requests:
- Employee Master Data Replication In
- Query Employee Master Data Replication Request In
The web service API EmployeeMasterDataReplicationIn can be used to map external employee records to ByD employees, to ByD service agents and to assign employees to organizational centers (e.g. reporting line units and cost center). The asynchronous Soap service supports bulk processing, forward error and conflict handling and offers an optional ID mapping for remote object IDs using the ByD key mapping service.
You find more information on SAP Help >> Integration Scenarios >> Employee Master Data Integration from external application.
Integration with SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central
ByD provides an out-of-the-box integration with SAP SuccessFactors EmployeeCentral.
Again, the key assumption is, that SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central is the system of records for employee master data and all personal administration processes. This means ByD personal administration has to be inactive and all employee data will be read-only on ByD UIs.
The Employee Central integration can be activated via ByD Scoping option “You can integrate your solution with SuccessFactors Employee Central” and configured using the communication scenario “Master Data Integration to Employee Central“.
As result ByD pulls employee data from Employee Central into ByD Employee Replication Requests, which are subsequently processed to create and update ByD employees. The integration uses ByD ID-mapping and code mapping services to map code lists and employee-, business partner-, reporting line unit- and cost center IDs.
The ByD interface to Employee Central provides you with a number of plug-in points for SAP Cloud Applications Studio Add-ons incl. exits to modify the Employee Central select statement, to filter and package extractions and to map Employee Central persons to ByD employees or service agents. Furthermore the Employee Central query response can be stored in a technical business object that can be accessed by a ByD Add-on using the SAP Cloud Applications Studio.
Special attention require reporting line structure and cost center assignments:
ByD has a master organizational management (MOM) unifying all aspects of an organizational structure, i.e. legal, financial (managerial), reporting and functional. In ByD you can model functional units below a cost center and assign an employee to the functional unit. The employee then gets assigned to the cost center above the functional unit implicitly.
Employee Central derives reporting structures from the relationships between the employees and their managers. Furthermore each employees can be assigned to a cost center independent from the manager relationship.
To bridge those two different setups the interface generates a separate reporting line structure in ByD using the employee-manager relationship imported from Employee Central.
Additionally employees can only be assigned to cost centers directly, but not indirectly via functional units, or in other words a functional unit that you want some employee to be assigned to must either also be a cost center itself (you then assign the employee to this cost center in EC) or be above the cost center in the ByD organizational structure.
You find more information on SAP Help >> Integration Scenarios >> Master Data Integration to Employee Central. In our ByD Wiki you find the Integration Guide – SAP Business ByDesign & SuccessFactors Employee Central.
SAP ByDesign APIs for employee data and personal administration
You can use SAP Business ByDesign embedded HCM capabilities to manage your employees.
Selecting Personal Administration in your ByD scoping, ByD becomes your leading system for employee master data incl. employment information, compensation and payment information, and personal administration processes such as hire, rehire, transfers and terminations.
ByD Web Service APIs are available to read employee data and to trigger personal administration processes, for example by some external recruiting system.
ByD Web Service APIs:
- QueryEmployeeIn: Query and read employee data incl. biographical data, workplace address information, job assignments and employment data.
- QueryEmployeeBankDetailsIn: Query and read employee bank account details.
- QueryBusinessPartnerIn: Query and read business partners incl. employees. The service returns general business partner data, address data and attachments (e.g. the picture of the employee).
- QueryOrganisationalCentreIn: Get organisational center and if employees can be assigned.
- OrganisationalManagementJobQueryIn: Get positions incl. validity.
Communication scenario “Personnel Administration“:
- ManageEmployeeIn: Change employee general data, biographical data and address data. The service cannot be used to create/hire employees, but to change employee data only.
- ManagePersonnelHiringIn: Hire an employee.
- ManagePersonnelRehireIn: Rehire an employee.
- ManagePersonnelTransferIn: Transfer an employee to another organisational center or job.
- ManagePersonnelLeavingIn: Terminate an employee contract.
Beyond Soap APIs most employee data can be accessed using OData Services and custom web service APIs using the SAP Cloud Applications Studio.
If ByD personal administration is active, all employee replication inbound interfaces for SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central, SAP S/4HANA and 3rd-party HCM integration are deactivated.
Phased Implementation of ByD and HR Solutions
Sometimes software implementation projects are executed in phases over multiple months or years. You may for example plan to go live with ByD Personal Administration first, and implement SuccessFactors Employee Central or some 3rd-party HR system at a later point in time. Such phased implementations mean you are changing the employee system of records and integrate the HCM system with ByD after the ByD go live. This activity comes with some challenges to keep your data consistent and compliant with legal requirements.
In the following I describe some aspects to be considered for such a switch of the employee system of records:
Scoping:
The ByD business configuration is designed to protect the consistency of your data and processes in ByD. For that reason ByD Personal Administration cannot be descoped after go live due to a scoping veto check. Before we can remove this veto check we have to do some homework and provide a guideline and test the implications of such a decision. Furthermore all required activities in ByD must be feasible for a key user or SAP partner.
Employee history:
Almost all employee data is time-dependent and hence the decision to switch the employee system of records impacts not just the future, but as well your historical data. You will have to decide how much employee history shall be migrated to the new HR system (“earliest migration date”). At the same time you have to define an earliest date for retroactive changes in the new HR system and the earliest date for future data replication into ByD. Employee data before the earliest replication date must not be changed to keep your system consistent.
ID mapping and code mapping:
ID mapping for business partners, employees, reporting line units and cost centers has to be created to avoid creating duplicates with the first replication run between the HR system and ByD.
Code mappings have to be configured to ensure proper data transfers.
Align organizational structures:
ByD has a master organizational management (MOM) unifying all business aspects of an organizational structure, including legal, financial (managerial), reporting, functional, etc. Other HR systems such as Employee Central have different data models and organizational structure capabilities. The perhaps most important task will be to align the organization structure of ByD with the capabilities of the HR system (for example cost center assignments and reporting line units). This may imply that you have to change your organization structure in ByD and forgo some capabilities of the ByD master organizational management. In section “Integration with SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central” I already described some more details. Overall, the goal of preparing the organizational structure in ByD is to make sure that the replication of cost center assignments and manager relations does not disrupt business processes in ByD.
Please note: Changes of your organizational structure may require to update work distribution rules, approval hierarchies, work flow rules, project data, etc.
The initial load of shared data (for example employee data, job catalogs, company codes and business residences) and the setup of the replication of cost centers, employees and reporting line structures are the last step in a phased implementation project.
You find more details about Phased Implementations of ByD and HR Solutions on SAP Help in the SAP Business ByDesign and SuccessFactors Employee Central Integration Guide.
Hi Knut, thank you so much for sharing this blog. Do you know a client that is actually running in this scenario, where EC is the leading system? How robust is the integrated scenario?
Hi Jörg,
we have customers for all 3 scenarios. However, by far the most ByD customers use the embedded ByD HCM capabilities. The integrated setup with EC is mostly used by larger companies or companies with a strong service business.
Regards, Knut
If the customer use the 3rd Payroll solution, any best practice of the integrate embedded HCM of ByD and payroll solution? any API support this integration?
Hi Benny,
please check if the ByD export of HCM data for payroll system fits your needs. You find details in ByD using the Help Center searching for "Payroll Run Quick Guide".
To post the payroll results in ByD accounting you can use the communication scenario "Journal´Entry Voucher Integration".
Best regards,
Knut
If the customer is currently using the embedded HCM capabilities in ByDesign, can they then easily migrate to SuccessFactors EC and then continue with a SF-EC to BYD replication scenario? Any limitations?
Thanks,
Peter
Hi Knut, thanks for the comprehensive summary. I have the same questions like Peter.
It is possible to migrate from a BYD HCM scenario which is live to a SuccessFactors <> ByD or Third Party HCM <> ByD scenario afterwards?
If I understood the preconditions correct: ByD HCM must be deactivated in scoping to be able to activate the corresponding integration scenarios which would mean it isn't possible to migrate to such a hybrid scenario.
As this is a valuable use case for growing ByD customers I would be interested whether this is planned or whether it might be already possible today.
Thanks
Benjamin
Can this employee replication process be used to interface with 3rd party payroll systems such as ADP?
Hi Jen,
Integration with payroll systems is a different topic. You find details in ByD using the ByD Help Center searching for “Payroll Run Quick Guide”. To post the payroll results in ByD accounting you can use the communication scenario “Journal´Entry Voucher Integration”.
Best regards,
Knut
Update:
When I use the link to the integration guide it is listed as version 2.0 (Dec 2016) and does not seem to contain a chapter on "Phased Implementation off ByD and HR Solutions." Can you point me to the updated document please?
Hi Jen,
the guideline about phased implementations of ByD and HR Solutions is not yet available as we have to removed some road blocks first. Please check the ByD roadmap and follow our ByD What's new for any updates.
Thanks and regards,
Knut
Hi Knut Heusermann ,
one more question regarding the scenario overall:
It is technically possible to integrate ByD via Web Services to other solutions as 3rd party solutions as well.
Do you know of any project experience, where such an integration already took place with SAP HCM?
Thanks and BR
Thomas
Hi Thomas,
yes, you can integrate ByD with any 3rd-party solution as well as SAP HCM using the communication scenario “Employee Replication from External System”.
If ByD is the employee system of record you integrate with 3rd-party solutions, Successfactors BizX or SAP HCM using the ByD employee APIs for query and read access, personnel administration APIs or ByD OData APIs.
Best regards,
Knut
Is there any Documentation on the following
Communication scenario “Personnel Administration“:
These do not appear in the standard List of services in either the Repository Explorer or Service Explorer and the Wiki has no info on this .
Hi William,
The communication scenario “Personnel Administration“ is just a collection of web services for the purpose to manage employees. You find a documentation of each web service in the communication arrangement “Personnel Administration“ in work center view “Application and User Management – Communication Arrangements”.
Best regards,
Knut
There is no documentation there. Where can i find documentation about these services? (Service Explorer has no information, SAP API Hub has no information, Internet has no information)
Hi Juan,
you find the documentation in the communication arrangement itself: Open the communication arrangement "Personnel Administration“, mark the web service and open the documentation:
Best regards,
Knut
That "display documentation" button always gave me error, and i wrote an incident for actionCode of mantain biographical data (it works with 06, that it is assumed to be noaction-check in all webservices).
They said that these are restricted services without documentation, but i have tried another browser and you are right, documentation is there! (perhaps browser cache issue).
Anyway, i managed to make it work before the incident answer and before reading documentation.
Other services and operations were easy to implement.
Thank you and sorry for my mistake!
Update:
With release 1905 ByD supports to switch from using embedded ByD Personnel Administration capabilities to SuccessFactors Employee Central.
You find more details about Phased Implementations of ByD and HR Solutions on SAP Help in the SAP Business ByDesign and SuccessFactors Employee Central Integration Guide.
Hello Knut Heusermann ,
I am currently in the process of using the EmployeeMasterDataReplication API to enhance the Employee hire process with some time information.
It seems the field EmployeeTimeRecordingProfileCode is not currently present in the WSDL of this service.
Is it only me or is it the normal data model from what you know?
I might need to do a PSM request in order to have it released in the API.
Thank you for your attention
Best
Jacques-Antoine
Hello Jacques-Antoine Ollier
Yes, this attribute is not part of the EmployeeMasterDataReplication interface.
Could you please explain the scenario as to why the attribute is important ?
The Employee Time Recording Profile is a "time administration" entity - and would be used by customers when they would use the overtime valuation features for their employees in ByD. Here, we'd imagine that the time administrator works wholly out of ByD - maintaining and monitoring the time accounts (at the very least) that are involved with the overtime capture.
Given this, would it not be better for all the employee time administrative activities during hiring, transfer, termination etc happen via the regular ByD user interface, rather than via integration ?
Regards,
Sandy
Hello Sandeep Dinesh Janardan ,
Thank you for your follow-up.
Indeed we understand that this should be maintained manually, however the issue is actually that for the customer. Customer has around 1000 employees and they do not want to maintain the default values when we hire an employee. At least the field should not be blank and should be defaulted to some value we could choose in Business Configuration for example. This way they could only manage exceptions when hiring an employee. However, currently, all fields in the Time Admin not coming from SF EC are blanks and need to be manually maintained in the BYD UI, which is actually what we try to prevent.
Thank you very much for your help!
Best
Jacques-Antoine
Hello Jacques-Antoine Ollier
Understood. Alternatively, would it suffice if we provide an enhancement spot in the replication process, where you can add the defaults depending on the customer's needs ? One could use it to cover other attributes as well.
Could you please raise an incident for the requirement ? We can use it as reference and put it in our product backlog.
Thanks a lot,
Sandy
Hello Sandeep Dinesh Janardan ,
Actually this is exactly what I am trying to do as a workaround by using the Replication API and fill the default values from it.
If you could give us the possibility to maintain default values on the replication fields, it would be perfect. Currently the only thing we can do for default values in ABSL is to add some extension fields to the PersonalDetails node and manipulate them. Everything else needs to be done through the API unfortunately.
I will raise an incident regarding this in the customer's tenant.
We might also need a call together to show you what we are trying to achieve.
Thank you for your attention
Best
Jacques-Antoine
Hello Knut, Sandeep,
The Personnel Administration communication arrangement and its related web services are not available any more since the latest release. Can you confirm if these have been deprecated or removed?
Hello Asif Raj
Nice to hear from you after all this while !
The Personnel administration web services and its corresponding communication scenario are supported, you should still find this under the communication scenarios list.
I don't think we pre-deliver the communication arrangement itself - you would have to create it out of the communication scenario. However, if you find that the communication arrangement has got deleted across systems after upgrade - could you please raise an incident so our support team can investigate ?
Thanks,
Sandy
Hello Sandeep,
Great to hear from you as well & thanks for the response.
I will raise an incident to investigate.
Thanks
Asif
Hello,
can someone help me on this "documentation" please? Initially I just wanted to know, how I could enhance already migrated employee data, then I got to this KBA: https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/3234367 and finally I stranded in this blog post.
I tried both of the buttons with different output but same result - nothing.
BR
Andreas
Hi Andreas,
this is a bug, which has already been addressed. We plan a correction with the next hotfix collection.
Sorry for any inconvenience,
Knut
Hi folks
we use the out of the box integration with SuccessFactors and it works very well. I'm only wondering if it is any documentation or hints how to phase out and finally delete employees in ByDesign using this replication?
HCM is read-only if using replication, so needs to be done externally?
Best
Dimitrij