Technical Articles
Extend SAP SuccessFactors with SAP Build
Are you looking for a way to extend and customize your HR processes to meet your organization’s requirements?
As organizations seek to optimize their HR processes, there is an increasing need for customized workflows that can handle complex logic and provide a higher level of UI customization. While SAP SuccessFactors provides a range of out-of-the-box workflow capabilities, sometimes you might need more flexibility. That’s where SAP Build comes in, SAP Build can be used to create custom workflows and applications that are tailored to your organization’s unique requirements.
In this blog post, I’ll walk you through an example of a custom application built with SAP Build Apps that pulls employee data from SAP SuccessFactors, and on submit it triggers a workflow on SAP Build Process Automation. The goal is to help you gain a better understanding of the integration and extension capabilities of SAP BTP and SAP SuccessFactors, and provide you with actionable insights for your own projects.
Architecture
While this use case is just an example, it demonstrates the integration and extensibility capabilities of SAP SuccessFactors & SAP Build. I hope it has shown you how SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) and SAP SuccessFactors can be used together to extend and enhance your HR processes. If you’re looking for a powerful, scalable solution for custom HR applications that integrate seamlessly with SAP SuccessFactors, I encourage you to explore the many features and capabilities of SAP BTP.
Ready to start building your own custom HR applications and workflows with SAP Build? To get started with SAP Build, visit the SAP Blog: SAP Build is now available in SAP BTP – Free-Tier and sign up for a free tier.
If you are interested to understand how to build this application with SAP Build App, check my Blog: SAP Build Apps consuming employee data from SAP SuccessFactors. I’ll dive into the technical details of how to use SAP Build Apps to create such an application.
If you have any questions, doubts, or concerns, don’t hesitate to post them in the comments or reach out to the community. We’re always here to help you make the most of SAP BTP!
It's a nice, simple demo -- if only the use case were not so disturbing 🙂
Thank you for taking the time to read the blog and leave a comment. I'm glad you found the demo nice and simple. While I understand the use case might be disturbing, it is based on a real request that we received.
Despite the use case, I hope you still found the demo to be informative and helpful in showcasing the integration and extension capabilities of SAP BTP and SAP SuccessFactors.
If you have any use cases that might be interesting, feel free to reach out. Thanks again for your comment!
Nice blog and video, Alejandro Rodriguez Barea. Thanks for sharing!
Thank you very much for the reading Karen Perez 🙂
Hi Alejandro Rodriguez Barea
Thanks for sharing. What would be a business case on workflows you came across that would require a SAP BTP workflow because SuccessFactors cannot meet the customer requirement? I am not understanding what part of the demoed process cannot be done in SuccessFactors with an MDF object tied to an approval workflow so trying to understand where the SuccessFactors EC/MDF workflow capabilities are limited vs what SAP BTP offers.
Also quick question : can SAP BTP do complex calculations like CPI can ? We are building something using CPI for a highly complex bonus payout for Directors for a customer in retail and I am just curious to understand whether SAP BTP could have helped us too. The requirement in a nutshell is to sum financial results from a custom object based on attributes of that object. The object is called STORE and each store has attributes ZONA, REGION and DISTRITO. We need to calculate at the end of the year the sum of financial results of each Zona, Region, Distrito and factor in any change that happened during the year (STORE moving from one ZONA to another during the year for example).
Example :
STORE 1 on 1/1/2023 is in Zona A
then STORE 1 gets assigned to Zona B on 7/1/2023.
Financial result and target (Reales/Target) sums for Zona A will have store 1 in their sum until 6/30/2023 and leave it out of the equation starting 7/1/2023.
That is required because Directors are retroactively evaluated and have their bonus calculated every 15 days through the entire year.
Thanks !
hey Xavier,
I think Alejandro is just demonstrating proper 'intelligent enterprise suite qualities' by using BTP for this extension scenario. e.g. use of cloud integration + workflow services .
What do you mean by CPI in your reply? Regards, H
Hi Henry Banks
CPI = Cloud Platform Integration which allows for complex business logics plugged into SuccessFactors. It allows to take data from SuccessFactors, do complex calculations with it like the one from my example, then feed it back to SuccessFactors.
Hayit Yuzis Yavetz pinged me on Teams to give me an example regarding my first question : SAP build uses the case that not all the signers are SF users for example for security issue security officers will sign with no access to SF so they can sign in a separated area.
Thanks !
Xavier
Thanks for the clarification Xavier Le Garrec about CPI. Yes, in my BTP role we still still a lot of CPI subscriptions bundled/co-termed with the line of business solution (in your case SFSF but also same for Ariba 'CIG') and there's nothing wrong with that of course.
However, as a side comment - unrelated to Alejandro's blog here - we are starting to see customers rationalize (i.e. reduce) their overall number of Cloud Integration accounts , by bringing those workloads over to a full-use Integration Suite account on BTP .. in a more centralized IT 'shared services' approach.
Thanks for all your help in the field! regards, H
Hello Xavier Le Garrec ,
Regarding your question about the use case for SAP BTP workflow instead of SuccessFactors, the decision was made because some of the approvers were not part of SuccessFactors and some processes involved cross-system processes and approval. Therefore, we needed a more flexible service that could handle these requirements.
In response to your second question, SAP BTP is not intended to be a rating engine or handle complex calculations like the one you described for the bonus payout for Directors. There are specific solutions within SAP BRIM that are optimized for handling high complexity rates and high volume. I recommend checking out SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management (SAP BRIM) for your use case. You can find more information about SAP BRIM in this blog post: What is SAP BRIM?
I hope this response helps.
BRIM is used totally for different process, not relevant to HXM process. Let's not deviate from BTP capabilities. I believe thru sap build it should be possible to do some additional logic for calculations.
Hi Alejandro Rodriguez Barea,
This is very informative, nice & simple DEMO, however, can you please explain more on the which are the Mandatory Components or Modules from SuccessFactors required to build custom solutions using SAP BTP & SAP build.
Currently we have HCM in SAP HANA and we have only implemented SuccessFactors Comp & Benefit module and we are planning to go for SuccessFactors RCM in next few weeks.
Can you please help, how can we use SAP BTP in BEST way.
Regards,
Uttam
Hello Uttam,
Thank you for your comment and I'm glad you liked the demo.
To answer your question, SuccessFactors is a modular cloud-based HR solution that provides different modules to manage various HR functions. There are no mandatory components or modules to use SAP BTP or SAP Build. Depending on your specific use case, you might need different modules. For example, if you want to build a custom app to display Job Requisition and candidate data, you would need to use the SuccessFactors Recruiting Job Requisition API, which requires the Recruiting module.
It's also worth noting that you could use SAP Build to build custom applications with SAP HCM, using the Odata integration:
When it comes to using SAP BTP in the best way, it's important to first identify your specific business needs and then determine which BTP services are the best fit for those needs. I would recommend exploring the different BTP services and speaking with an SAP representative to help determine the best approach for your use case.
I hope this helps!
Best Regards,
Alejandro
Even if the use case is a bit disturbing, this is a good example. Thanks Alejandro!
Thank you for taking the time to read the blog and leaving your comment, Pierre COL . I understand that the use case may be a bit unsettling. However, my goal was to provide a concrete use case to illustrate the integration and extension capabilities of the solution. I'm glad you liked the blog 🙂