Core HR SuccessFactors Q4 2017 Release Highlights

Hi all,

Before all the yearly wrap-ups start to publish, I want to update you on the many innovations we have delivered in our Core HR Q4 SAP SuccessFactors release. I will provide some context and visuals around all of the major innovations which become available in November.

Let’s start with visualizing and maintaining the organizational structures.

Org. Visualization

So far the feedback on our visualizations for organizational (or cost center, or legal entities, or others) structures has been great. However, customers also indicated that they would like to create and maintain entities directly in the charts. Therefore, we have added this functionality in the 1711 release. See the following screenshot for how this looks like:

Users can now create a new object directly via the side panel. Very useful when defining the structures!

Workflow

For Workflow we now released functionality that many customers have been waiting for, and personally I find this very exciting. It is now possible to send out a tailored and meaningful workflow e-mail for every workflow. And only when needed.

For each specific workflow you can now leverage the built-in document generation capabilities to define your workflow text. See the following screenshot:

You can bind in all specific Employee Central fields to personalize the text based on the context of the workflow. And you can also make the workflow specific to the role the workflow actor has. this means that managers can receive different information, then e.g. employees or HR.

Localization

Our local product managers have updated the application so that you can benefit from predefined fields, business rules and reports to be compliant when running operations in those countries. Beyond a whole range of country specific updates to already supported countries, in this release we continued our expansion with 5 new country versions for Iceland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Luxembourg – increasing the total number to 89.

And to run payroll in line with country regulations our local product managers now released EC Payroll functionality to support eSocial in Brazil, Civil ID and Passport Information for Oman, Emirates ID for UAE, Sponsor ID for Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, Dependents Data for Venezuela and Spain as well as Contract Elements for Argentina and Italy.

Benefits

In the area of benefits, you can benefit from new functionality to add workflows to benefit carts.

We have also made it possible to configure the enrollment effective from-date in a variety of ways: as of next month, as of next pay period, from the event date, or click date. You can use these configurations to use the correct starting date for benefits.

Time and Attendance Management

In this release we have three major enhancements for Time and Attendance management.

Firstly, we improved our time sheet approval sequence. Amended time sheets that have been rejected now remain in the system with a status designated as declined so that employees can change and resubmit rejected time sheets or opt to delete the time sheets. And the full approval cycle is now visible for employees, managers and HR:

Secondly, we improved our Time Collectors functionality which we initially released in Q3. The Time Collector functionality massively improves the complexity we can handle in our real-time time-evaluation because we can now do calculations on e.g. weekly, monthly and yearly basis. In this Q4 release we have made the framework more robust and we now provide Time Administrators insight in those counters when they need it. This will help the time administrators to get a detailed understanding of time-evaluation details per employee and they are now able to use this information when needed. So they can now figure out who worked how many night shifts in a given month, or how many overtime hours have been recorded in a certain period.

And thirdly, we have added a Time Configuration Search. This allows time administrators and consultants to search for dedicated time configuration objects like work schedules, time types, time accounts, or time profiles and to easily find all related employees. Here is a screenshot:

This greatly improves the usability and speeds to up the implementation timelines.

Payroll

In our efforts to create a seamless user experience across Employee Central and Employee Central Payroll we now released alerting functionality for payroll administrators to ensure correct payroll processing in case of events like address change or termination.

The payroll administrator gets new tasks assigned directly on the landing page:

And from there jumps into the underlying process:

The nice thing is that customers now have the flexibility to configure their own process to support the payroll administrators. Per process the set of mashups (infotypes) can be defined. See the following screenshot:

This shows the new user-friendly UI for configuring Payroll Tasks related to Hiring, Address Change and Termination of employees, which as you see can be setup per country.

Another major release in the Employee Central Payroll space is the ability to run ad-hoc off-cycle payroll for on-demand payments (e.g. bonus) through a new user interface available via the payroll menu in SuccessFactors. See the following screenshot:

As you can see all needed follow-ups steps are completely available via the Payroll Control Center.

In Q4 we have also released our communication of cost centers between S/4HANA Cloud and Employee Central Payroll, and the payroll results are directly posted to the finance part of SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

Total Workforce Management

Integrating collaboration activities directly in HR processes is highly beneficial in many use cases so we now allow contingent workers (stored in the contingent worker profile) to utilize the collaboration groups which are setup specifically for their role in the organization directly in SAP JAM. This allows them to collaborate immediately with all people in the organization, directly when they get on board.
Secondly, based on customer feedback around country regulations, we have released functionality to make the contingent worker profile country dependent.

Employee Central Service Center

This release includes the ability to bring the term ‘Ask HR’ in line with any term used in your organization to improve the usability of the application. In addition, we provide enhancements to the tickets overview page, which allows your users to find tickets quicker and to keep up to date with the ticket status more easily.

We have also increased the number of translations for EC Service Center by adding Chinese (Simplified), Romanian, Japanese, Finnish, Arabic, French (Canadian) and Portuguese (Brazil).

Employee Central / SAP HCM and ERP integration

We have improved our Business Integration Builder capabilities to secure smooth migration of SAP HCM data to Employee Central, and afterwards potentially a simple integration from Employee Central to SAP ERP for e.g. payroll purposes.

You can now perform the organizational objects migration/integration in parallel jobs using the job scheduler. This means that the performance for these OM object migrations can be increased massively. Up to now, this way of performance improvement was only available for the employee data migration/integration. In addition, progress monitoring is available. And we have released sample content for Organizational Management.

SAP SuccessFactors People Central Hub

Another ground-breaking innovation is the SAP SuccessFactors People Central Hub. This is relevant for all customers who do not run Employee Central yet. It enables customers to connect SAP solutions such as SAP S/4HANA, S/4HANA Cloud, or SAP Fieldglass.

And to help all our customers to drive a digital HR strategy this enables visualization of all the data via the SuccessFactors online and mobile employee directory and organization chart:

It allows the consolidation of HR master data from various sources and it can immediately visualize who works where in the organization, and it allows all users to easily look up people’s contact details.

Best-Practices Packages

And I want to close with something really compelling! To accelerate implementation, you can now deploy SAP Best-Practices directly via the Upgrade Center. The Employee Central Best-Practice contains preconfigured HR processes, position management, total workforce management, integration and localized content for time off and time. You can e.g. benefit from prefilled holiday calendars, work schedules, time account types, absence types and accrual rules. The best-practice is currently available for Australia, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and the USA. Check out more information and some screenshots here: https://blogs.sap.com/2017/09/11/deploy-country-specific-successfactors-configuration-with-a-few-mouse-clicks-free-of-charge/.

Check out other new features across our HCM suite

Learn about other new features and enhancements across the full SAP SuccessFactors HCM Suite by reading our Q4 2017 Release Highlights document, checking the Q4 blog, or by viewing our Q4 2017 release video on YouTube.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out.

Best regards,

Frans
Frans.smolders@sap.com