I hope you and your loved ones are staying healthy during this difficult time. SAPPHIRE 2020 was  scheduled for a few weeks from today and I will certainly miss meeting and talking to the lovely people of this ecosystem, but I know health and well-being is of the utmost importance. For information on SAP’s response to COVID-19 please read this blog. For our Payroll customers I would highly recommend reading and following our blog for SAP Payroll & SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll Localizations: COVID-19 Legal Changes monitoring.

If you are interested in learning more about the Core HR Suite for this release see my blog: SAP SuccessFactors Core HR: 1H/2020 Innovation

Many of us are fortunate enough to have our day jobs during this trying time and people must continue to get paid accurately and in a timely manner as businesses continue to run so here are highlights for our first half 2020 release in Payroll.

Suite Integration

The first area of focus is around Suite Integration. While not the flashiest topic, it is an important one we continue to invest in to make the lives of customers easier and strive to be better. All of the functionality in this section is directly from customer feedback.

No-Show

This “No-Show” functionality was delivered in Q4/2019 for SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central (See this terrific blog with explanation) to make it easier to mark employee’s who do not show up to work accordingly and not have any active days in the HR system. When this was requested prior to COVID-19, the intention was based on our customers feedback due to “Ghosting” or when employees accept job offers and then never show up. Given the pandemic, this functionality may be more applicable when someone accepts an offer and is unable to show up.

With this release we extended this to SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll for better collaboration between HR and Payroll without any manual work. For employers where it was common for people to not show up to work they might run into problems if it was not caught and corrected which potentially results in the no-show accidentally being paid. Now, when HR uses the “Report No-Show” button from the People Profile this will automatically make it so the employee gets marked as Inactive in Payroll and will not be paid.

Figure 1: SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central No-Show

For more information on this feature see the following SAP Help Page.

Employee Central Time: Planned Working Time

This request is one we heard loud and clear from customers and one we have been working on over the last year that we are happy to deliver.

This functionality provides the ability to send planned & temporary working time from SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Time to Substitutions in SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll. The ability to leverage substitutions makes it so customers no longer have to maintain and create specific work schedules in Payroll while still being able to provide planned working times to the payroll calculation driver for necessary calculations and logic that require it. For some customers this will significantly reduce their configuration effort while improving their data accuracy by lowering risk of inaccurate time data.

Figure 2: SAP SuccessFactors Planned Working Time

For more information on this feature see the following SAP Help Page

Enhanced Payroll Information Page

A small request from multiple customers who said it would help make their day to day lives easier  was to give them the ability to mark payroll specific data as mandatory and for the system to automatically show if this data has not been entered. This will visually allow them to instantly know if an employee is missing necessary payroll data without having to click into the data.

Figure 3: Payroll Information Page

For more information on this feature see the following SAP Help Page

*Update – Added 05/14/2020*

My colleague Cornelia Storr wrote a great blog about our update to the Improved Payroll Information page in the People Profile that I would highly recommend for additional details

https://blogs.sap.com/2020/05/11/employee-central-payroll-improvement-for-the-payroll-information-page/

Payroll Control Center: Improved Configuration

One area that is very important for us here at SAP SuccessFactors is our Payroll Control Center which is relevant for on premise, cloud, and hybrid customers. Anyone that follows me in this space knows this is an area that I have created a lot of content for and am passionate about it. I have created and recorded many enablement videos to educate people on capabilities. I have written multiple books for further education.

• SAP® SuccessFactors® Employee Central Integration with SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll: Second Edition: Updated & Enhanced
• Introducing SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll

I have written many blogs/articles over the years as well. I created the HRH65 course that teaches how to implement which is available on learning hub and can be consumed in self-paced learning. I have implemented it myself firsthand many times and seen the tremendous value customers can achieve. This is an area we continue to invest heavily in and have a lot of exciting functionality to come and want as many of our customers using as possible.

Over the past few years we made specific improvements such as including our pre-delivered content within our HR Support Packs rather than requiring a separate  add on applied to the system. We made updates to alerts where solution links and more could be defined within configuration of our IMG.

This is a topic I recently had a spirited conversation with Jarret Pazahanick and Steve Bogner on, and ultimately an area we continue to strive for improvement to make it easier for all. With this release we are releasing centralized workbench/dashboard for PCC configuration for processes (Pre-Payroll, Production Payroll, Post-Payroll) and alerts. We made a conscience effort in the workbench to use native language rather than technical speak. For example. rather than a label saying like run-time class we would instead have it as rule logic.

With that background, lets take a look at some specifics.

Centralized Configuration Dashboard

When creating PCC processes the information is now available in a singular workbench (PYC_CONFIG_WORKBENCH) which will make it easier to configure. Previously, this consisted of multiple activities in the IMG and going to different places and having to put together the relationships. The user can now define the step template, step specifics, define auto start/confirm, specify amount of employees for parallel execution, & define variants all within the “Steps” tab with additional tabs for other PCC process specifics.

Figure 4: PCC Process Configuration

When defining and creating new PCC alerts the user can define the specifics from the dashboard. After selecting “Validation Rule” the system will show all the existing alerts. When the user clicks one or creates a new one they will have all the details centralized. This includes things such as

• Basic Information for the Alert (Name, Description)
• Parameters (Wage Types, Amounts, & More)
• Alert Details shown when it is triggered (Audit Summary, Master Data Details, Payroll Amount Compare, Wage Type Report)
• Solutions prompted including the ability to define the link (PA30, EC Portlet, ABAP WDA)

Figure 5: PCC Alert Configuration

Alert Dependencies

We have had the ability to “filter” alerts, however the feedback we received is that this was not straightforward and needed to be improved. With this release we have added the ability to create alert dependencies. An example would be if we had two alerts:

1. Gross Pay Over $
2. Pay Variance over %

There would be cases where someone gets a large bonus that would trigger both alerts. This would artificially inflate the total alerts since the same data caused both to be triggered. Now, we can put a dependency in place so if one exists, the other will not be triggered. Ultimately this will give a more accurate reflection to the end user and reduce effort.

Figure 6: PCC Alert Dependency

We continue to look at enhancements to make this easier going forward including additional enhancements planned for the H2/2020 release which I look forward to writing further about and I am always open to hearing from the ecosystem.

For more information on this feature see the following SAP Help Page

Where can I find more Information?

• For information on release highlights across the SuccessFactors suite, see this great blog from my colleague Beate.
• For the full list of deliverables for 1H have a look at our “What’s New Viewer”
• You can find helpful material on how to implement our latest functionality in the implementation guide on the SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll Help page.
• The changes mentioned in this release are delivered in HR Support Pack 80. For the full support pack release schedule see the following

Here are additional resources for those interested in learning more about SAP Payroll solutions

• SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll Main Website
• SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll SAP Help (Requires ID)
• SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll Q4 2018 Release Highlights/
• SAP Note 2550639 – Payroll Control Center – Working with Teams
• Employee Central Payroll 101
• SAP Payroll Deployment Options
• Payroll Control Center – A Fresh and Modern Approach of A Fully Automated End-To-End Payroll Process
• Payroll Control Center – One-Click Monitoring Walkthrough
• Payroll Control Center – Three-Click Production Payroll Walkthrough
• SAP/SuccessFactors Payroll Control Center Event Listener Functionality
• SAP SuccessFactors Payroll Integration & Off Cycle Payroll Demo
• An Introduction to SAP Payroll Processing, Control Center Add-On
• Employee Central Payroll – A Process Introduction
• Fiori Integration & Enablement with the Payroll Control Center
• SAP Help Library Payroll Control Center
• The Payroll Control Center for SAP ERP HCM and SAP SuccessFactors
• Employee Central Payroll – What is the Payroll Unified Configuration?
• Employee Central Payroll – New Payroll End-to-End Hire
• SAP Best Practices for SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll for United States– Content Overview & Deployment
• What’s new with SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll for United States rapid-deployment solution V2

Thank you for taking the time to read and I hope you and your loved ones remain safe.