Technical Articles
Understanding the Executive Review Import feature
The Executive Review import feature is a very useful feature of the compensation module of SuccessFactors for system administrators.
Being able to mass adjust recommendations for a selected group of employees (by filtering on them using the enhanced executive review filters) can be a huge time saver for Admins during a review cycle.
In this recording I cover the following aspects of this feature :
- How it works (demo).
- What to pay attention to when using it :
- Covered in recording below : hard custom validation (“error”) need to be changed to “warning” in Design Worksheet before the import (covered in the recording below).
- Not covered in recording below : standard column compRating must be removed from the import file before import because its presence will prevent the import (the file won’t upload and a generic error message “Unable to import file” will show).
- How to turn it on if you don’t have it on already :
- Only partly covered in recording below : Make sure that the 4 following checkboxes are checked in Actions for all plans :
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- Then permission it through Role Based Permission :
Additional notes:
- The maximum number of records that can be imported in one file is 65,535. Please note below for limitations on export and import to and from Excel in SuccessFactors : https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/2432283
- Time to process 35,000 records in a production environment = 5 hours.
- The speed of the Excel upload into executive review is affected by not only the number of employees in the upload but also by the number of actual worksheets they are on. In other words, 5000 employees that are spread out on 1000 worksheets will load faster than 5000 employees spread out over 3000 worksheets. We recommend that when creating batches, they are built in a way that minimises the number of worksheets (e.g. it would be better to group by organisational area rather than level).
- In case we have issues importing date editable fields through Executive Review Import, please see here for demo that shows it is working. It only works with manual entries if we apply custom format mm/dd/yyyy to the editable (yellow) date column in excel AND if we select encoding UTF8 when importing the XLS (and not Western ISO which is selected by default).
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All the best,
Xavier
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Hi Xavier, very useful! Additional questions here: the yellow columns in the export file are hard coded as I understand, but what defines if a column is importable or not? Thanks, Laura
Hi laura gyselbrecht
a column becomes yellow on that first export if it is editable on the worksheet (read-only = No in Design Worksheet).'
I came across this case the other day : a customer had willingly hidden the amount recommendation box for the standard merit field and only kept the % editable for planners. Yet they wanted to use exec review import which only works on the amount (we can't import % and have it update the amount, we must use amounts). All we had to do was temporarily switch back the setting "Percent or Amount" for that column to be equal to "Show both percent and amount", then quickly export-reimport, then set the setting back to its original value of "Show percent only". It worked fine on live worksheets.
All the best,
Xavier
Hi Xavier,
Nice tip, thanks a lot for sharing!
Best, Laura
Hi Xavier,
Do you know if the same applies to Hard Stop on guidelines, as in the case of hard custom validation?
I have hard limit on the guideline and if I try to import in the executive review values that are outside of the guidelines I get the same error.
Isn't it possible just to get the correct values uploaded and those that don't follow the rule to be skipped?
Thank you.
Hi Tatiana Caraiman
I wasn't able to replicate the issue you are having in my environment, please see the recording below where I made 2 edits, one for someone with value outside hard guideline max (50% in this template) and another one within the guideline. Only the one outside guideline max was skipped, the other one was correctly updated.
https://youtu.be/g_itPkaxePA
All the best,
Xavier
Thank you, Xavier. I guess I will check it with the Support.
Regards,
Tatiana
Hi Xavier,
I have an update:
Yes, it is expected when you exceed guideline in the import file even for one employee, the whole import will fail for those who belong to the same worksheet. It is an expected behavior.
If I exceed the guideline for an employee from one worksheet but I am within the guideline for an employee from another worksheet, then only the one who isn't within the guideline will fail.
Example, I have exceeded the guideline for Employee X but the import failed for Employee Y as well, because both employees belong to the same worksheet.