Mapping employee id for Employee master replication from SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central to SAP HCM/S4/ECP

****This article has been written assuming that reader is aware of employee ids available in SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central & SAP HCM and understands basics of Employee Replication****

My intention is not to go in detail of replication but would like to share the observations and experiences after working with customers to support the Employee master replication and new options recently given by SAP. I would like to know about your experiences as well in this area through your comments.

In a SAP SuccessFactors Cloud hybrid model the mapping of employee id fields from SuccessFactors Central to SAP HCM/S4 is very important and discussion around this topic should be done at the beginning of the project.

Recommended approach is to map Pernr ~ userid and Central Person (CP) ~ Person id external

It becomes tricky when a customer plans to go-live with SuccessFactors Central globally but has different cloud models for different regions. Example – Full cloud for Europe and Hybrid cloud for APAC. In such scenarios you may choose to have a different number range for employee ids in SuccessFactors Central.

For new hires SuccessFactors Central gives a standard feature “Next Person ID Assigned” in “Company system and Logo Settings”.

During import of new hires you need to give the Person id manually in the import files. Once the employee import is complete you can enter a number in the ‘Next Person id assigned” from where you want to start the new hires. You can also create a rule to generate next person id. Refer this to know more about Hire/Rehire Configuration to generate the next id.

The Person Id and User ID do not have to match, but generally both will be same when the first employment is created via the UI. User id will be different for host record in case of Global Assignment. Note: It is not possible to generate a User ID via Business Rule for Global Assignments or Concurrent Employment. Userid will be derived from next number in the number range (either rule or ‘Next Person ID Assigned’ in Company settings) if ‘Make user ID same as usern name‘ is set as No. (This setting is available in the GA Cinfig as shown below. The new username is generated by taking the username of the home employment and adding “-” and the next available number, if you update the setting to ‘No’ then username will be <home user-name>-N but user id will be generated by either rule or next number available)

If this parameter is set as Yes then userid and username will be in the format person_id_external-n (where “n” is an incremented number representative of how many employments the person has). The user id will also be <home user-name>-N.

Some customers have a third party system to generate the username for employees which is used for SSO but userid is generated in Central and can’t be changed.

For already existing employees in SAP HCM (before SuccessFactors Employee Central go-live) you will have the employee key map table in SAP HCM where you will map employee id from SuccessFactors Central to SAP HCM.

Scenario 1 – When value of this parameter is ‘Yes’

For new hires post SuccessFactors Employee Central go-live you can map the userid from SuccessFactors Employee Central to pernr in SAP HCM for employees with home record since userid = personid. For host record in case of global assignment the userid will have a hyphen which you cannot map to pernr in SAP HCM since it allows only numeric value.

In this case you may define a saparate number range in SAP HCM to support global assignment host employment. Further you have to implement an enhancement to assign PERNR from this new number range in case host assignment is replicated.

Scenario 2 – When value of this parameter is ‘No’

In this case you may have either internal number range or external number range for pernr in SAP HCM. In case of external, you can implement an enhancement in SAP HCM to map the userid from SuccessFactors Employee Central to pernr in SAP HCM because the userid for host record in SuccessFactors Employee Central will be next number from the number range defined for person id.

After successful replication the employee key map table in SAP HCM gets updated.

You must have got to know by now that replicating global assignments and concurrent employments is little complicated. Further when you have multiple systems like Employee Central, ECP, SAP HCM (on premise) , S/4 integrated it is better to have a unique identifier to identify employees across all these systems. Reporting from all the integrated systems also becomes easy with a unique identifier rather than system specific employee ids.

From b1908 Employee Central Release SAP has introduced a new id called assignment-id-external.

Previously, when you wanted to change user IDs in some cases a support ticket was needed. Refer this for more information. The user ID conversion process was costly as well as time consuming. Now instead of userid you can use assignment ID to identify users in your system and change it  yourself if required. It has one-to-one mapping with userid. You can create a business rule to generate assignment ids but make sure the format matches the systems like SAP HCM/ECP/S4 where you have to replicate employee data. The receiver system should have external number range.

When you activate the assignment-id-external field in SuccessFactors Employee Central for every new employment a new assignment id will be generated which will be mapped to PERNR in SAP HCM (there’s an option in BIB to activate assignmen id in SAP HCM)