Recent enhancements to SuccessFactors Employee Central integration with SAP ERP and 3rd party systems

[lukemarson]

As part of a current SuccessFactors Employee Central implementation that I am leading, we are integrating Employee Central with SAP ERP and 3^rd party applications (including Benefitfocus, Microsoft Active Directory, ADP, and more) so that our customer can continue to run its back office, manufacturing, distribution, and workflow functions in SAP. In the course of our work we have been advising our customer on some of the recent enhancements to the integration that SAP provides. In this blog, I wanted to highlight some of these to demonstrate the continued investment SAP is making to enable customers with a large SAP ERP footprint to ensure that they can continue to leverage this when they migrate to Employee Central.

Before we start: What is already provided by SAP?

SAP already provides a host of packaged integrations for a number of scenarios, as demonstrated in this SAP diagram:

SAP provides packaged integration between Employee Central and SAP ERP for the following scenarios:

• Replicating Cost Centers from SAP ERP FICO to Employee Central
• Replicating employee data from Employee Central to SAP ERP or Employee Central Payroll
• Replicating organizational data and organizational assignments from Employee Central to SAP ERP

SAP has packaged integrations between Employee Central and the following 3^rd party systems:

• Benefitfocus for benefits administration
• AON Hewitt for benefits administration
• Thomsons Online Benefits for benefits administration
• Workforce Software EmpCenter for time and attendance and workforce scheduling
• Kronos Workforce Central for time and attendance
• ADP GlobalView for BPO payroll
• NGA Payroll for BPO payroll

SAP also provides:

• SuccessFactors Adapter in both SAP Process Integration (PI) and SAP HANA Cloud Integration (HCI)
• OData API for replicating data in and out of Employee Central
• Employee Central Compound API for extracting data from Employee Central

Now, lets take at look at some of the recent enhancements.

SAP Note 2129443: EC to ERP Organizational Data Replication – Enhancements

Released on 11^th February, SAP Note 2129433 contains a number of enhancements to organizational data integration between Employee Central and SAP ERP. Notable inclusions are:

• Translations for Business Unit, Division, and Department objects
• BAdI for replicating matrix manager relationships
• Sample of a BAdI for replicating chief positions
• Sample of a BAdI for replicating multiple position assignments
• New report in SAP ERP to check organizational assignments of specific employees whom were replicated from Employee Central

The value of this SAP Note is in ensuring that the data required for routing workflows is fully available. This includes the chief position, position assignments, and any matrix relationships. Including object translations (i.e. object name or description) can also be useful for global organizations.

SAP Note 2141931: Payroll Result Export Report for data transfer to EC

A new report is introduced in SAP Note 2141931 to provide file-based transfer of payroll results data to Employee Central from Employee Central Payroll and SAP ERP Payroll. This so that Employee Central users can run analytics on their payroll results in Employee Central and Workforce Analytics.

The reports works by exporting payroll data from logical database PNP along with the Employee Central user IDs to a CSV file. The CSV file is imported and data is imported into Generic Objects built on the Metadata Framework, which can then be reported on using Detailed Reporting in the Analytics module.

Microsoft Active Directory Packaged Integration

In the Q2 2015 release of SuccessFactors, SAP introduces a packaged integration that:

1. Creates the user account in Active Directory when a new employee is hired in Employee Central
2. Deactivates an Active Directory account when an employee is terminated in Employee Central

This integration is fairly significant given the percentage of Employee Central customers that use Active Directory. In my time in consulting, nearly every customer I have worked with has used Active Directory.

SAP Identity Management (IDM) SuccessFactors Connector

In SAP Identity Management (IDM) 8.0, a SuccessFactors connector was introduced to enable SAP IDM to integrate with Employee Central. This integration enables two different scenarios:

1. User account data is replicated from Employee Central to SAP IDM, which then replicates the data to other SAP and 3^rd party systems
2. User accounts are managed in SAP IDM and data is sent to Employee Central

Summary

SAP are continuing to provide a wealth of integration between Employee Central, SAP ERP, and 3^rd party applications. As owners of both SuccessFactors and SAP ERP, SAP are in an unrivalled position to ensure that the complex integration scenarios are provided and covered. As we have seen, SAP are continually ensuring that customers have a starting point now and won’t have to wait long to receive the remaining functionality that they need to meet their system-to-system data replication needs.

Don't forget to keep up with the latest and greatest with SuccessFactors in the SAP and SuccessFactors LinkedIn group. Feel free to contact me for more information on Employee Central integration or any other Employee Central topics.