Product Information
How does SAP SuccessFactors Time Management compare to SAP HCM Time Management?
Around 2 years ago we started to heavily invest in SAP Successfactors Time Management. In the last 3 to 4 releases, we closed most of the major feature gaps, such as flextime, clock in clock out, parallel absences, and cross midnight.
At the moment this is resulting in a Time Management application that is taken seriously by all our SAP SuccessFactors and SAP HCM Time Management customers. However, now that major gaps are closed it also becomes harder for customers to self-judge when the time is right to convert.
Therefore, in nearly all my conversations with customers who run SAP HCM Time Management the same questions come up:
- When is it feature par?
- Why should I convert from SAP HCM Time to SAP SuccessFactors Time Management?
Of course all customers want a feeling of confidence about the right time to transition.
Therefore, in this blog post I will try to answer both questions and provide a perspective about when it becomes relevant to transition.
1. When is it Feature Par?
We have set an internal goal to build a true successor for SAP HCM Time Management, which allows our customers to fully transition into the cloud.
This means that it is our aim to cover similar use cases as we offered with on-premise SAP HCM Time Management. To fulfill on our aim our development focus for SAP SuccessFactors Time Management is on global time management processes across industry, worker type, and regardless of region or customer size.
Where is SuccessFactors Time Management today?
We do not start from scratch. Right now we are running more than 3.000 customers on our Time Management capability, of which 1.000+ use our Time Sheet. This means that we already run at scale. However, initially our user base was mainly covering the less complex ‘desk based staff’.
Since we launched SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking (incl. support for night shifts, clock terminal integration and flextime) we see more and more customers who start to go-live for the deskless workforces.
What do customers really need?
As discussed, many customers want to hear when it is feature par. However, the question is not an easy one to answer….because: which customer actually used every part of SAP HCM Time Management? In all my years, I met close to 0.
All customers implemented what they needed to implement to satisfy their business requirements. And for some customers this was using 30% of its capabilities, and for others maybe 70%. No one to my experience used 100%.
So the question should not be about feature parity, but about the required capabilities for the unique customer requirements. If customers assess when their requirements can be covered they need to understand what capabilities are offered today.
What can get implemented today?
If you look at what is offered today, SuccessFactors Time Management has a lot of capabilities to satisfy requirements. On a high level it offers:
- Global Time Configuration
- Localization features incl. accrual rules, public holiday calendars, business rules, advanced collision framework to satisfy e.g. country specific parallel absence scenarios
- Work schedule management, incl. (dynamic) break handling
- Real-time time evaluation to calculate things like overtime, shift differentials, premiums, working time accounts, flextime, and time off in lieu
- Self-Service Time Entry scenarios
- Time sheet for positive and negative time recording scenarios
- Digital punch clock, and a workflow supported correction scenario (which can also be used with 3rd party clocks)
- Time Off for desk-based/deskless workforces
- Specific self-services to buy and sell leave
- Advanced Connectivity
- Real-time clock terminal integration
- Predefined integration into Employee Central Payroll and SAP HCM Payroll
- Connectivity options to 3rd party shift planning tools, and running integration with partner extensions for such scenarios
- Actionable Reporting
In short, the question on feature parity can’t be answered easily. It must be looked at use case by use case for customer scenarios.
2. Why should I convert from SAP HCM Time to SuccessFactors Time Management?
This section is relevant for all current SAP HCM Time Management customers who are considering a transition.
I will try to answer how it is different. The short answer is: A LOT of things are different. It is a real transition for all users who are impacted (employees, managers, and time administrators).
Conceptual differences
Let me start with explaining the overall SuccessFactors technology differences which are helpful, and then zoom into the Time Management specific differences.
SuccessFactors Technology
- First of all, technology is more modern and accessible to the outside world. The application offers APIs which are easily accessible and allow to connect to other applications. See more info for example here: https://api.sap.com/api/ECTimeOff/overview (this includes options to try them out)
- Secondly, the architecture is built such that the data model can easily be extended. For example, it takes minutes to add a custom field in SAP SuccessFactors Time Management (vs. days in on-premise SAP HCM).
- And I think we all know how often custom fields are needed to capture specific information related to either the organization or to satisfy a Collective Labor Agreement regulation.
- Thirdly workflows and notifications can easily be added and changed. Also, the Notification texts within the application are fully configurable, and can include hyperlinks to external knowledge bases. This is often a big benefit too to provide additional (process related) context.
- Lastly, the use of Business Rules and Integration Center. This flexibility is almost limitless to calculate accruals, steer hiring and termination process, have time sheet validations, etc.
- Of course, many things were possible in SAP HCM via BADIs (and I’m the last one to diminish this 😊), but this most often required coding. The biggest difference in the modern tools is that nearly everything can be achieved with configuration vs. coding. Obviously, this makes a big difference for the support organization for every customer.
Time Management specific differences
Next to the technology overall, many foundational things are different for Time Management. For example, the work schedule and the public holiday calendar are decoupled. This results in substantially fewer work schedules in the application, which makes it easier to manage.
Also the processing of time management data is different. SAP SuccessFactors Time Management offers a real-time valuation. This means that information is calculated immediately when it is entered in the time sheet (and not overnight when the RPTIME job runs).
This is a fundamental change which has big impact for all users. Let me try to explain this per user.
Differences for the Time Administrator.
In SAP HCM Time Management the first action of the day is to check the outcomes of the time evaluation and to try to resolve errors. These errors are most often resolved one after the other (e.g. via PTMW).
In SuccessFactors Time Management we try to be more action driven. This means that in our time valuation it is possible to raise errors and warnings which get sent to time administrators (or even managers) via mails. This takes away the need to check for potential warnings when there aren’t any. Users can self-configure which alerts they want to receive via mails and in which frequency.
Example:
Clock in Clock out errors
Another big area of usability and process improvement is the handling of clock in clock out errors. For example, if an employee forgot to clock out for lunch this needs to be corrected. Either by the Employee, or the Manager, or Time Administrator.
In on-premise SAP HCM this means that for that day no other time recording is automatically processed in the time evaluation. In the case of issues a Time Administrator must manually trigger an instant time evaluation out of the Time Manager Workplace.
If the Time Administrator is authorized to run this it is relatively easy to achieve. But if they are not then the process becomes cumbersome to get executed, and potentially leads to Time Administrators waiting another night to see if the nightly run then completely solved the issues.
In Successfactors Time Management this is not needed anymore. Potential issues get calculated/generated throughout the day and can get responded to in real-time.
This is also applicable for records which come in via a (3rd party) punch clock. With the new clock terminal integration service all successful time pairs get updated in the time sheet immediately.
This means that if an employee clocked in and out a few times on a day, and there was 1 time event missing, then all others would still immediately run through time valuation. This practically means that payroll can always get updated. Even though there might be a small issue on a day, there is never a complete day missing.
And all of this is immediately visible to the user. See the following time sheet screenshot, where the paired time events are displayed for each time record:
In addition, because this is all in real-time, immediately after the employee clocked out (or goes for lunch) it shows: was there any overtime or premium recorded? If so, does this lead to an overtime pay out, an update of the time off lieu, or does it get added to the flextime account? Hugely beneficial information for the employee to understand.
More focus on Usability
Another major differentiating point is the modern and improved usability. Maybe it is an obvious one in the cloud, but I still often talk to customers of whom employees run the most frequently used self service scenarios (which are always Time Management ones) on highly outdated UIs. And especially for the younger generations the expectations of modern employers are often different 😉
For SAP SuccessFactors user interfaces get frequent updates, which come as part of the half yearly updates of our cloud application. They get pushed and installed automatically. This means that customers always stay modern, both on web and on mobile.
Compared to the screens in SAP HCM there are many things which make it nicer to use. Not only cosmetic improvements but often also some process improvements. Let me give you some examples.
This allows employees to easily spot and correctly record before they submit at the end of the week.
We control this via a new Nightshift Bandwidth, which has a big usability gain for users who fill out the time sheet.
Third example: When employees who work on irregular shift patterns go on time-off they immediately see when they need to return to work the next time (vs trying to puzzle that out via work schedule views):
What about managers?
Next to employees, there are also good benefits for managers. Take for example the new correction scenario.
Normally managers want to know when employees have recorded a manual punch, vs recording one via the actual terminal. Therefore, there is an easily configurable workflow behind it.
However, the time of managers is scarce these days. And so, when the terminal is down (and potentially all time event clockings come in via correction) does the manger then still want to receive them? Probably not.
Via business rules this can now be configured. Based on any correction reason it can be determined if there needs to be a workflow or not and who the approver of that time event correction reason is.
Also the processing of the workflows is easier. These are displayed on a quick approval card on the manager’s home page, and provide immediate insight into all relevant activities and recordings for that employee in that week. For example, it provides immediate insight in allowances, on-call work, overtime, etc. See the following screenshot:
And if managers want, they can get a side by side comparison of all open time sheet workflows; across all direct reports. See the following:
This provides managers a complete overview of what was going on in their team in a given week.
In conclusion, the above is not meant to be an exhaustive list. These are just some of the numerous differences which in many cases just work a bit nicer for all users. It is truly a new experience.
On a side-note.
SAP HR (SAP’s own HR department) is currently implementing SuccessFactors Time Management. The users (my colleagues) all have a laser focus on efficiency and how things should work. Probably the most critical audience I can imagine 😊
After going live SAP HR runs Net Promoter Score (NPS) studies to assess the internal acceptance and satisfaction of its HR processes. The most recent internal assessment showed that Time Off and Time Sheet are the highest praised HR self-service scenarios which are rolled out within SAP.
And as you can understand for a company of 100.000+ employees, there are plenty of HR processes to compete with. Overall, who would have imagined that people would like filling out their time sheets? Therefore, I think this attests to the efforts which are spend on usability.
What’s next?
As I stated at the beginning of this blog, there still is a journey to go. But there is an aggressive roadmap to get there. Some examples of improvements which are on the radar:
As we now get into the territory of organizations who work 24/7, regardless if it is a public holiday or not, we need to improve the absence counting and public holiday handling. For example, we need to re-invent concepts for day types, but also improve end-to-end processing of premium generations for work on public holidays.
In addition, we need to crack mass processing use cases as equivalents to Time Manager Workplace.
Lastly we have many customers running on-premise CATS. And so, next to the HR use case of ‘When did people work’, we (SAP) also need to go beyond to cover ‘What people worked on’. Stay tuned on this!
Nevertheless, we do urge all SAP HCM Time Management customers to start preparing by looking into their unique use cases to determine when the time is right for them.
And that time might very well be now 😊
For more interesting, detailed feature analyses I can highly recommend these sources and articles:
- Our official roadmap on https://www.sap.com/products/roadmaps.html
- Release related blogs: Former Member
- Our community with best-practices and forums to talk to our product managers: https://community.successfactors.com/t5/Time-Attendance-Management/ct-p/time_attendance_mgmt
- Country specific best practice content: https://rapid.sap.com/bp/#/browse/categories/lines_of_business/areas/human_resources/packageversions/BP_SFSF_EC/SFHCM/2111/DE/22/EN/scopeitems/5WO
And if you have any questions, or feedback then please let me know!
Best regards,
Frans
Hi Frans, great post, thank you for providing these information. As a feedback - we are just following this approach with required capabilities for the unique customer requirements. Otherwise it's too complex and you are talking about everything or nothing. We did 2 demos in December with follow-up-meetings regarding customer specific requirements in January 2022. Therefore also for this you provide useful content. Thanks a lot.
I wish you wonderful Christmas season and a happy new year. Let's see where it takes us in terms of time tracking solution with SAP.
Hi Frans,
Thank you for such detailed post regarding to main differences between two systems. To be honest Sf Time Management lacks of providing some basic and main requirements of CIS Countries legislation(15 countries). For example we have the concept of the short day. The logic of the short day is if the next day is Tu-Sat and public holiday then current day should be shortened. This is only applicable for specific work schedules. In SAP HCM Time Management it was super easy to archive such requirement DWS variant and rule, but in SF Time Management we don't even now how to do it. The only logical scenario is temporary WS change for short days for all employees which is very time consuming.
Another very common requirement is quarterly and yearly overtime calculation and it is hardly written in employees contracts. For example overtime for all warehouse is payed on quarterly based but for security on yearly based.
In December 2021 governments announce the factory calendar (planned working per month) for the year 2022 and all overtimes should be calculated based on this planned hours no matter what is in employee's work schedule in Job info. Planned hours per month calculated based on 8 hours a day for 5 days Mo-Fr (taking into consideration public holidays and short days) and is different each month. For example in January if you have 21 working days and 1 of them is short day then planned hours are taken as 167 hours for January. This means threshold for each month is changed dynamically and it makes it impossible to use it in Time Valuation.
Regards,
Fuad
Hi Fuad,
Thanks for your feedback. This helps us. Like for the day types, we indeed also need a solution to cover the daily work schedule variants. This is in our backlog.
Also, it's clear that we need more processing power in our time valuations, e.g. to accommodate other time periods (like quarterly and yearly time intervals. We are now designing the concepts for extending the time periods (and to also include rolling/consecutive time periods).
As I tried to state at the beginning of my blog, we now started the journey to build the successor. Thanks for already doing detailed assessments, and I always appreciate the feedback and new use cases! So please keep that coming
Cheers, Frans
Hi Fuad Garayev,
may I ask you how the short days are calculated?
Would appreciate your feedback 🙂
Kind regards
Virginie
Dear Virginie Klein
It is Option 2 used and it is applied only to employees who work 8 hours from Monday to Friday.
For Example I am working from 09:00 to 18:00, five days in a week and Saturday and Sunday are my Day offs. Lets suppose Friday is Bank Holiday. in that case my working hour for Thursday should be 1 hour less, in other word for Thursday I should work from 09:00 to 17:00.
Regards,
Fuad
Thanks a lot Fuad Garayev, for the feedback!
Kind regards
Virginie
Hi
Thank you for the post, really informative
very detailed post Frans, thank you for sharing.
Excited to see fast pace innovation in SF Time Management space.
Hi Frans
Thanks for your blog. I really enjoyed reading it.
For a customer I need to implement the overtime calculation in a Time Sheet. One of the requerements is that a different remuneration is paid on different holidays. E.g 300% on the first Christmas day and 200% on second Christnas day (Boxing day).
in the current Holiday Calendar there is no option to set a kind of code for the Holiday to identify the different holiday (like holiday type in HCM).
thanks
Eric
Hi Eric,
thanks for showing interest! In the upcoming 2022 releases we plan a lot of updates to the whole Public Holiday handling. Additional holiday classes is one of the primary planned features.
Cheers, Frans
Excellent Blog Frans !!!
Looking forward to the new functionalities , especially those involving “ Capturing ,what type of work “ similar to CATS !!!
Regards
Prem
Great blog, thanks a lot!
After a year, can we consider everything is still valid? What are the learnings of 2022?
Thanks
José
Hi Jose, yes this is still valid. IN the customer community you can find a Feature List for time management which clearly spells out which features we delivered in the last releases. Also, a detailed view can be found in blogs from Volker Ruof.
Cheers,
Frans
Hi Frans,
Can you throw some light on if this feature “ Capturing ,what type of work “ similar to CATS !!! is now available in SFSF Time Management ? We are looking at evaluating Time Tracking vs SFSF Workforce Solution and we are a heavy CATS user in terms of allocating time against Projects, WBS and Work Orders to capture costs. Can this be handled with any of the above solutions?
Hi Husain, we're now developing a similar approach as for on-prem CATS, where you can link the S/4 Timesheet to the SuccessFactors time management processes. Here is the official roadmap text:
It's planned for H1 2024. Find more info here: https://roadmaps.sap.com/board?PRODUCT=73555000100800002827&range=CURRENT-LAST#;INNO=FF9E799E4CEE1EEE94FBF18CB0F4B147
Hope this helps? Cheers, Frans
Thanks Frans for the information.
So as per the above roadmap there will be a new FIORI My TImesheet app in S4 which will be used as an equivalent to CATS. This will integrate with SFSF Time Tracking to do the time valuation.
I have few questions on this.
1, Where will the work schedules , shift planning be hosted in S4 or SFSF Time Tracking? If they are maintained in SFSF then how would employees will be able to enter Time in S4 against their shift?
2, Time OFF will be requested via the My Timesheet in S4 or in SFSF?
3, Can we feed Time valuation data to external Payroll system to calculate the Gross , if we do not have EC Payroll?
Hi Husain, here are my replies:
If you sent me a mail then I can share some slides. Frans.smolders@sap.com
cheers,
Frans
Thanks Frans.
So this means we ill be entering Time using the S4 FIORI My Timesheet app and not in SFSF.
I have few questions
Great blog. Very informative!