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Author's profile photo Karen Perez

Setting up SF Competency Connector integration in Integration Center

In this blog post, you can learn how to send the competency data/libraries from HMX to LMS using the Integration Center tool.

INTRODUCTION

We are all aware that the new guidelines from the SAP Learning Product team are to use Integration Center for HXM suite integration with the Learning platform.

Recently SAP published a new IDP (Implementation Design Principle) with all the details on how to set up SF User, Job, and Organization connectors using Integration Center (for a full read, please access the SAP SuccessFactors Learning: Impact of implementing SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central IDP) and now the idea is to show you that you can also switch the Competency Connector from provisioning to Integration Center, which will empower all customers, making them owners of their jobs and having the possibility to maintain it without any need of external help/support.

In the below chapter you can find all the details on how to achieve this.

DETAILED SOLUTION

Step 1. Create a new Integration template by clicking in the ‘+ Create’ icon and selecting ‘Scheduled Simple File Output Integration’

Image%20from%20Demo%3A%20Integration%20Center

Image from Demo: Integration Center

Step 2. Search for the entity that will be used as our database, in this case, ‘CompetencyEntity’. Also select as many fields as possible that will be used in our template, for example, GUID, Category, Library, Competency Name, and Description.

Image%20from%20Demo%3A%20Selecting%20the%20main%20entity

Image from Demo: Selecting the main entity

Step 3. In the ‘Options’ tab, provide a name and description to your integration template and set the Output File Type as CSV. Do not forget to save.

Image%20from%20Demo%3A

Image from Demo: Name, description, and type page

Step 4. In the ‘Configure Fields’ tab, you will be able to see all the already selected fields and now you need to include one fixed field is the ‘Competency’. This is required because LMS needs to understand what is the entity that you are trying to import. To add the new fixed field, click in the ‘+ Add’ button, and then ‘Add Fixed Value Field’.

Image%20from%20Demo%3A

Image from Demo: Adding a fixed value field

Step 5. Fill the Label of the new field and also the default value, that in our case is ‘COMPETENCY’.

Image%20from%20Demo%3A%20Defining%20the%20new%20field%20label%20and%20default%20value

Image from Demo: Defining the new field label and a default value

Step 6. Now there is only one more field to be added, that is the locale. Follow the same steps to add a new field and you get the below result:

Image%20from%20Demo%3A%20Adding%20the%20locale%20field

Image from Demo: Adding the locale field

Now our template is created and the next steps would be to fill the destination settings and schedule the job to run based on the connector schedule and the customer requirements.

If there is a need to send all libraries but only one or specific ones, you can use the filter under the ‘Filter and Sort’ tab, by selecting the field ‘Library’ as the criteria and filling in the Value column the exact name of the library, as shown in the image below:

Image%20from%20Demo%3A%20Create%20a%20filter%20based%20on%20Library

Image from Demo: Create a filter based on Library

In the following link, you can download the sample Integration Center template that was described above and import it in your instance to use as a starting point.

CONCLUSION

This blog post described how we can set up the integration for Competency data from HXM Suite to SAP SuccessFactors Learning Management using the Integration Center Tool.

With the proposed solution we bring to our customer more agility and ownership of their integration and also avoid the creation of multiples jobs in provisioning when the requirement is to send more than one Library since the provisioning job only allow us to create one job per library.

Looking forward to your comments and questions.

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      8 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Vinay Potdar
      Vinay Potdar

      Very good article. Really a nice thought to use IC instead of competency connector.

      Author's profile photo Karen Perez
      Karen Perez
      Blog Post Author

      Thank you, Vinay. Glad to hear that you find it useful.

      Best Regards,

      Karen Perez

      Author's profile photo Anika Stender
      Anika Stender

      Hello Karen,

      many thanks for the explanations regarding the competency export in integration center. As the library export from BizX is a zip file containing size library file and the integration center export is a csv file. Do I just need to change the connector properties accordingly?

      Thanks and regards,

      Anika Stender

      Author's profile photo Karen Perez
      Karen Perez
      Blog Post Author

      Dear Anika,

      Thanks for asking this, it is an important question that was not clarified in the blog.

      We don't need to change anything in LMS. The system will still consume the CSV file generated by Integration Center without any problem. So, just create the IC file and schedule it to send to the SFTP server, schedule the LMS Competency connector and it will work!

      I hope this helps!

      Thank you.

      Best Regards,

      Karen Perez

      Author's profile photo Anika Stender
      Anika Stender

      Dear Karen,

      Thank you for your feedback. I actually had to change the in System Configuration CONNECTORS the following to make it work: competency.connector.input.file.name5=sf_competency_data.csv

      Another question: Can I use one single integration to bring different locales for one competency ID into LMS?

      Thank you.

      Best regards,

      Anika Stender

      Author's profile photo Karen Perez
      Karen Perez
      Blog Post Author

      Dear Anika,

       

      This LMS setting is required if you create a csv file, not for a txt file.

      About the different languages, you can have only one file in Integration Center with all languages, so there is no need to create multiple files. Please find here a sample file/template for this multiple languages case.

       

      Thank you.

      Best Regards,

      Karen Perez

      Author's profile photo Oluwaseun Ayanyemi
      Oluwaseun Ayanyemi

      Thank you so much. This article was so helpful.

      Author's profile photo Jacob Binu
      Jacob Binu

      Thanks Karen!!