Conclusion

Former Member · ‎05-31-2018

Employees are most companies’ greatest assets and at the core of many fundamental processes. The following picture can give you a glimpse at the importance of HR data across the whole enterprise.

So, no matter if you use SAP S/4HANA Cloud as an administrative ERP or are using one of the industry solutions, e.g. professional services, the ability to handle core HR functionality is of utmost importance. In this blog I will help you understand how your workforce, both employees and contingent workers, can be handled and maintained in SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

There are three different approaches each with its own benefits and use cases.

Integrate SAP S/4HANA Cloud with SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central

Upload excel sheets via the Fiori app "Import Employees"

Use our public whitelisted APIs on SAP API Business Hub

Integrate SAP S/4HANA Cloud with SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central

The most recommended way is to use SAP's best of breed HR solution in the Cloud - SAP SuccessFactors – and to utilize its out of the box integration to SAP S/4HANA Cloud. The native integration enables the broadest HR functionality with the most granular data available.
If implemented fully the integration covers more than 200 standard integration points.

SAP offers predefined content and guidance for setting up the integration which is available through the SAP Best Practices Explorer (BPx) in high detail.
In addition to the overall description of the Integration you can find multiple assets to help you during the complete lifecycle.

The Set-up instructions guides you to easy DIY success integrating the two systems. My colleague Hoang created a very detailed end-to-end how-to guide in his Blog, which I encourage you to read.

You can find an easy to understand visualization of the business processes by looking at the Process flow, either as a picture or in the BPMN2 format.

Once the integration is up and running you should test the standard processes to ensure everything is working as intended. For this purpose, SAP offers recommendations on what to test in which order in the Test script.

Instead of downloading the Set-up instructions and following the steps manually you can utilize SAPs brand new tool called "Cloud Integration Automation Service" (CIAS). CIAS offers a web based guided workflow, that has partially been automated. As of now CIAS is still in an early stage, so you should definitively check the official note 2608492 and Stefan Jakobi’s Blog if this sparked your interest.

Upload spreadsheets via the Fiori app "Import Employees"

Especially if you are a smaller company, with a rather low amount of employees, or want to approach the cloud implementation in phases, there might be the need to handle your workforce or parts of it manually. In this case SAP offers an easy-to-use solution via spreadsheet templates and the SAP S/4HANA Fiori app "Import Employees". Via this app you can maintain

Basic Employee and Contingent Worker master-data

Basic Employment Information including direct manager and cost center assignment

Basic availability data (working time per week)

Use our public whitelisted APIs on SAP API Business Hub

In case you are using a different HCM system that is not supported via predefined content, either on premise or a 3^rd party solution in the cloud and are not planning to migrate to SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central you need to build your own integration. SAP publishes all whitelisted APIs on the SAP API Business Hub. Usually the following APIs are of special interest for integrating a HCM system to SAP S/4HANA Cloud:

Employee and Employment Data

Availability Data

Cost Center

Company Code

By following the links, you can find more detailed information to each of these APIs.

Conclusion

I hope this blog helped to clarify how HR data can be maintained within SAP S/4HANA Cloud. If you have any further questions or suggestions for further blogs please leave a comment below.