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Rajendra_Prabhu
Participant
Having started off as an ABAP consultant 20 years ago, and having donned different hats both in technical and managerial arenas as well as in support and implementation projects, I would love to share my professional experiences so that you too may profit from them. I had a recent experience designing and developing a successful SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central - EC Payroll Replication framework in a multi-tenant environment. This shall be a series of blog posts focused on developments in EC Payroll for EC-ECP Employee Data PTP replication which I hope shall help you and your project teams in replicating my success.

I plan to have this post as the central blog post in the series with hyperlinks to subsequent blog posts. With each blog post, I shall elaborate on a specific process step, providing useful technical tips as well as pitfalls to watch out for in your implementations.

To start with, I share the Business Scenario and the Systems Landscape, in line with my project experience. Later on, I provide a high level process flow, listing out the steps that happen during the data replications.

Business Scenario in consideration:

  1. It's a multi-tenant environment. That is, there are multiple companies, utilizing the same SAP HCM Instance. For our future reference in the design discussions, we shall consider:



      • Company Name: ABC LLC, Company Code: 1000,
        Payroll Areas and ECP Go Live Dates:

        • A1 : 6/10/2020

        • A2 : 6/15/2020
          NOTE: EC Go Live for ABC LLC shall be 6/3/2020



      • Company Name: BCD LLC, Company Code: 2000,
        Payroll Areas and Go Live Dates:

        • B1 : 9/10/2020

        • B2 : 9/15/2020
          NOTE: EC Go Live for BDC LLC shall be 9/3/2020



      • Company Name: CDE LLC, Company Code: 3000,
        Payroll Areas and Go Live Dates:

        • C1: 9/11/2020

        • C2: 9/16/2020

        • C3: 9/11/2020
          NOTE: EC Go Live for CDE LLC shall be 9/4/2020



      • In addition, there shall be a separate payroll area XX which is common to all company codes, to categorize mini-master employees who shall not be paid via the EC Payroll system.





  2. There is no concurrent employment. An employee may work for multiple companies in his/her career span, but never at the same time. PERNRs are not shared between the different companies.

  3. We are transitioning from an on-premise SAP HCM Suite (ECC 6.0) to SuccessFactors EC-ECP solution. Existing on-premise HCM configuration should be retained as much as possible, along with historical employee data for all company codes.

  4. Time Module shall be transitioned from CATS in on-premise SAP HCM Suite (ECC 6.0) to cloud-based Work Force Software (WFS), which shall go live alongside EC Payroll pay area go lives.

  5. SuccessFactors EC shall go live alongside ECP for the concerned Company in the multi-tenant landscape, albeit a week in advance, so as to limit dual maintenance between EC and existing on-premise SAP HCM Suite. WFS requires data a week before it's go live to set up the time profiles, and hence, we shall have EC going live by that date, with demographic feed to WFS.

  6. Financial data is on a separate on-premise SAP ERP system which will be the source for Cost Center master, Profit Center master, G/L and Vendor master to the SuccessFactors systems. Payroll postings shall be done to the same on-premise SAP ERP system.


 

Systems Landscape in consideration:

  • 3-tier systems landscape for on-premise SAP HCM System (ECC 6.0), with system ids for Dev, QA and Prod: H01, H02, H03

  • 3-tier systems landscape for on-premise SAP ERP FI System (ECC 6.0), with system ids for Dev, QA and Prod: F01, F02, F03

  • 3-tier systems landscape for the SuccessFactors EC tenants, with company ids for Dev, QA and Prod: E1, E2, E3

  • 3-tier systems landscape for the SuccessFactors EC Payroll tenants, with system ids for Dev, QA and Prod: P01, P02, P03.

  • A HR Data cloning utility (such as, NEXUS Suite by TIK), installed on on-premise SAP HCM Systems as well as SuccessFactors EC Payroll tenants, which shall be leveraged to copy over configurations and data from on-premise HCM systems to EC Payroll systems.

  • Integrations between on-premise SAP FI systems and SuccessFactors tenants shall be via ALE IDOCs. Since the focus of these blog posts shall be around EC-ECP Replications, we shall rarely be discussing this integration.


 

A Step-by-Step EC-ECP PTP Employee Master Data Replication Process Flow 


PTP Process Flow Diagram


Prerequisites:

  • Connectivity between EC and ECP has been established. ECP Transaction code: HRSFEC_PTP_CONFIG (Additional information in this blog post.)

  • Enterprise Business Function HCM_SFEC_MDEC2HR is turned ON in ECP (Transaction code: SFW5)

  • Existing Employee Data from On-Premise HCM System has been copied over at cutover to EC Payroll System. (Required only if business want historical data in EC Payroll, instead of a clean system with YTDs loaded before first payroll run in new environment.)

  • When providing additional details for each step below, we shall go through the configurations that go along with it.


Following are the execution steps of standard SAP ECP Employee Replication Program RP_HRSFEC_PTP_EE_REPLICATION (transaction code: HRSFEC_PTP_EE_REPL):

Step 1: ECP Replication Program makes a call to Compound API in EC for employee data.
Additional information related to this process step in this blog post:


  • Configuration Tables: T77SFEC_PTP_CONF and T77SFEC_PTP_SEGM

  • Last Run Table: HRSFEC_PTP_LMOD

  • Program Selection Screen input


Step 2: EC then responds in XML format, first employee data package as per the query request. ECP Replication Program keeps polling EC for subsequent employee data packages until all are received. (Additional information in this blog post.)

Step 3: For each employee in the data package, ECP Replication Program spawns off a new processing thread so that all replication activities for the concerned employee are contained within that thread, thus reducing data mix-up between employees and limiting impact of any short dumps to the specific employee being processed, while also improving the overall performance. (Additional information in this blog post.)
More information on these aspects in future blog post(s):


  • PERNR Mapping Table: HRSFEC_D_EEKEYMP (see Part V)

  • PERNR-specific Full Transmission Start Date: HRSFEC_PN_FTSD (see Part V)

  • Implicit enhancements for multi-tenancy needs (see Part VI)

  • Standard Replication Mapping Tables, and Custom Enhancements


Step 4: ECP Replication Program as a final step, (without waiting for all the threads to complete processing) sends out a confirmation message to EC. (Additional information in this blog post.)

Step 5: Each processing thread, post processing of the Employee data, sends out a confirmation message with 'Successful' or 'Failed' status to EC.
Additional information related to this process step in future blog post(s):


  • SLG1 Log, and custom enhancements to make it more user-friendly.

  • SRT_UTIL and it's usage.

  • Data replication monitor in EC


 

With this I shall conclude; only for now. I shall be back with more to share in the coming days. Please feel free to add your comments and any specific challenges you faced during your EC-ECP Replication Projects and I shall do my best to respond with whatever I know. Until then, adios!
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