Personal Insights
Stories in People Analytics Learning Resources
Introduction
SAP SuccessFactors Stories in People Analytics leverages SAP Analytics Cloud story creation tools to enable you to create dynamic interactive visualizations with your SuccessFactors data. What can you do to master this next generation of SuccessFactors reporting?
The purpose of this article is to share with you the numerous Stories in People Analytics learning resources, including Introducing HR Reporting with SAP SuccessFactors People Analytics, my eBook from SAP Press.
Related: Why Stories in People Analytics should be a priority for you in 2021
Related: SuccessFactors People Analytics First Impressions by Erik Ebert
SuccessFactors Help Documentation
A great place to start is the official help documentation (S-ID required) published by SAP SuccessFactors. This guide includes the following
- Up-to-date limitations and known gaps
- Prerequisites (including IAS)
- Permissions required
- Query creation
These help docs are especially strong with query creation details, including schema and table joins, filters, and calculated columns.
However, for Story Creation including charts, graphs, and other visualizations, you are directed to the Stories section (S-ID required) of SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) help. That documentation is accurate for the standalone SAC toolset, but it is important to realize that not all SAC features are available in Stories in People Analytics.

Install Story Templates
SAP has created over 30 Employee Central story templates (S-ID required) that you can load into your instance at no cost. This is a nice way to see examples of completed Stories for relevant HR scenarios. Note that these templates are dependent on a specific system configuration, so these may not work as designed in your instance.
SAP Analytics Cloud documentation
SAP Analytics Cloud’s excellent story creation and data visualization tools are the basis for Stories in People Analytics. In addition to the SAC Help docs mentioned above, SAP Hana Journey includes blogs, videos, and other content to help you learn the SAC Story tools. As a reminder when you use these resources: not all SAC features are available in Stories in People Analytics.
SAP Support KBAs
There are already a number of useful Stories in People Analytics KBAs at support.sap.com (S-ID required). Expect these to grow in number as customers continue to create Stories.
SuccessFactors Community
The People Analytics SuccessFactors Community pages (S-ID required) include upcoming release details, SAP blogs, and forums that you can use to interact with and ask questions of SAP professionals and other customers. Check out the excellent newsletter series updated monthly with feature demos, tips, and other helpful content.
eBook: Introducing HR Reporting with SAP SuccessFactors People Analytics
As you can see, there are many resources across various SAP sites to learn about Stories in People Analytics. But when you’re first learning something new, jumping from site to site and searching for specific answers can be time consuming and inefficient.
If you would like a concise guide to Stories in People Analytics I’ve written Introducing HR Reporting with SAP SuccessFactors People Analytics in conjunction with SAP Press. This eBook can help you become more productive with Stories in People Analytics in a timely manner.
Key topics covered in the book:
- Why People Analytics and visualizing data is important
- How to build queries
- How to create stories
- Three sample dashboards for inspiration to help get you started
Additional Articles
There have been some really helpful Stories in People Analytics blog posts and articles published, and I’ve included some of those here. If you know of any other relevant articles to include, let me know!
- SAP SuccessFactors People Analytics – the true approach for operational reporting–Nice article that explains the benefits of Stories being directly connected to your transactional SuccessFactors modules.
- SAP SuccessFactors People Analytics Stories Data Visualization Series: Selecting the right chart Part 1|Part 2|Part 3–Great series of articles that explain in detail use cases and benefits of each chart type.
- Using report stories for people analytics for creating dazzling dashboards and reports from LMS data–Get a preview of how you can visualize learning data.
- Onboarding 2.0 Reporting through People Analytics–Onboarding 2.0 reporting is exclusively in Stories; here’s how to do it.
- Content Store now Available for People Analytics Stories–See how to use the Content Store to easily implement Story templates.
- Manager Dashboard Update–An update to this Story template that includes data from Employee Central, Time Management, Compensation and Recruiting Management.
- Learning in Stories in People Analytics Adoption Readiness Program–An excellent collection of resources to help you understand the capabilities of Stories and how it can fit into your Learning and People Analytics program.
Wrap-up
I hope you found this article useful! If you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact me or leave a comment below.
Mike Hoekstra Really informative thank you. Do you know of any plans for creating SF cloud content for Data Warehouse Cloud? From what I have read the entry point is the ODATA API rather than any pre-packaged content.
Hi Chris Hodgetts: At this time I am not aware of any, at least from SuccessFactors.
Update: I've added this blog post regarding on the Manager Dashboard story template to the article. https://blogs.sap.com/2021/02/26/manager-dashboard-update-for-sap-best-practices-for-sap-successfactors-people-analytics/