"Hidden" Gems: 10 Underused Features in SAP SuccessFactors Core HR

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Are You Getting the Value You Pay for with Your SAP SuccessFactors HCM Subscription?

The SAP SuccessFactors HCM Suite is a very powerful solution and it offers lots of options. Time and again I see HR or HR-IT departments not using parts of the solution even though they are part of their subscription. I'm not referring to features not needed for thethe customer's requirements, but features that would really add value by

• Improving HR process efficiency
• Driving adoption and user experience for employees and line managers
• Reducing IT workload
• Allowing for improved HR Services

In this article, I'm pointing out 10 of those features in SuccessFactors Core HR - they are all "hidden" in plain sight. Some can be configured and used within minutes, some may require a considerable implementation effort. They are all included in one of these modules and are not requiring an extra subscription:

• Employee Central
• Employee Central Payroll
• Time Tracking
• and Platform, which is the foundation available to all modules without requiring a licence (subscription) of its own

How did I select the 10 HCM Features?

There is nothing scientific in my selection. It just occurred to me on the train home from an SAP Payroll Workshop in Walldorf, the centre of the SAP world: many SuccessFactors users could be happier without paying any more for their HR-software and I scribbled down these 10 features thinking of HR and HR-IT teams I had talked to. I'm sure I have missed some - please feel free to add them in the comment section!

The purpose of this article is to start a thought process with SuccessFactors process owners, key users, project managers or HR-IT teams. It won't provide any detailed guidance about the 10 features, but I'll follow up with more detailed articles or videos for the most popular ones based on your comments. And maybe there'll be a similar article about SuccessFactors Talent Management.

So, without further ado and in no particular order, here are the 10 improvement opportunities for your digital HR processes:

1) The SAP SuccessFactors Mobile App

This had come first. It remains a mystery to me, why any organisation using the SuccessFactors HCM Suite would not roll out the mobile app.

I know, there are always discussions about not everybody having a company phone and about security risks with BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) scenarios. However, many organisations have found answers to these questions and so will yours. There are all kinds of security offerings for company apps on mobile devices from a variety of vendors and SuccessFactors itself offers a bunch of security features including, but not limited to

• Enforcing an extra mobile app password
• Disabling attachment, screen capture, downloads and copy&paste on device
• Device management

And while you are thinking about this, why not starting with company phone holders? 3 of the most important groups of mobile SuccessFactors users are line managers, field sales and field services. In most cases, they will have company mobile devices anyway.

Enabling the mobile app can be a huge step change in adoption and user experience, so don't wait! The biggest value of mobile use is almost certainly in Time & Attendance (Employee Central Time Off and SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking), where mobile punch can even replace time clocks. But there are plenty of other use cases.

2) No-code Integration with SuccessFactors Integration Centre

Just like the mobile app, this feature is also part of platform and therefore available to all modules without a separate licence. Integration Centre allows users to create outbound as well as inbound integrations between SAP SuccessFactors and 3rd party data. On top of that, you can also create direct data flows between different parts of the SuccessFactors HCM suite: something that's often used for custom automations like automatically creating a job requisition, when a new position has been created.

Integration Centre is not designed to do the heavy lifting of highly complex, big volume integrations or sophisticated live integrations. That's where the SAP BTP (Business Technology Platform) Integration Suite comes in (succeeding SAP Cloud Integration, SCI or HANA Cloud Integration, HCI). However, SuccessFactors Integration Centre is still very valuable for simple or medium complexity integrations, especially bespoke file export sor imports. One added benefit: it can be combined with SuccessFactors Intelligent Services, thus allowing for event-triggered integrations.

This screenshot shows that there are a variety of options coming out of the box:

I see it under-used especially for the simplest use cases. Often there are exports or imports for one-off occasions. Key users may not ask IT for help due to budget considerations, availability issues or simply complicated cross-departmental processes. However, well-trained key-users can also use integration centre. Of course, any continuous integrations connecting to other systems within the organisation's landscape must be lead by IT. However, a one-off data import or export doesn't. They are done by key users anyway with the standard import and export tools in SuccessFactors, but when those are not offering enough flexibility, integration centre can fill the gap.

So, I recommend reviewing the use and training of Integration Centre within your SuccessFactors team. There may well be some "proper" integrations you can tackle, but my guess is that the wasted potential sits primarily with relatively simple import and export requirements, where standard tools are currently combined with a lot of manual juggling in MS Excel.

3) Employee Central "Compensation Structure"

This is a quite specific feature within SuccessFactors Employee Central. It has been around for a year now and can improve usability in the Compensation Portlet. Users coming from SAP ECC HCM or SAP HCM for S/4HANA have always missed the option to easily assign wage type patterns for certain groups of employees (SAP ECC feature LGMST).

The new object "Compensation Structure" (see picture) and simple business rules allow you to easily make sure the right pay components are available, defaulted (beta testers), pro-rated, and made mandatory for each employee.

4) User Help Texts in Employee Central

There are some easy ways to provide help to users to understand how to fill in certain fields or portlets. Here are two extremely simple ways of making users' lives easier, which are not used as much as I would have expected:

Field help in MDF objects like position:

and portlet help links in the SuccessFactors Employee Central People Profile:

5) HR Document Generation

Many HR departments use 3rd party solutions for managing and creating documents anyway and the most common ones usually offer an integration with SAP SuccessFactors HCM. However, where such a solution is not in place or too complex for quick and simple use cases, Employee Central comes with its own Document Generation solution.

This may not cover the requirements for complex contracts or testimonials, but it does allow you to

• Define various document templates including simple formatting and logos
• Include placeholders representing Employee Central fields that are filled with current data, when the document is created
• Generate these documents for individuals or groups of employees
• Distribute by email or download documents
• Allow access to line managers or employees in Self Service
• And with the 2H/2024 release we also expect that an integration with Docusign for e-signatures will be possible

Document generation doesn't require a lot of initial configuration. Just get your key-users trained and you can start.

6) Contingent Workforce Management in SuccessFactors Employee Central

Licence implication for contingent workers

I need to start with a warning: Whilst Contingent Workforce Management as such doesn't require an extra subscription fee, contingent workers added via this feature are counted as users towards the licence. So, no extra cost, if you compare it with managing contractors and agency staff in Employee Central without Contingent Workforce Management, but if you increase the number of people in EC, subscription cost goes up. The good news is that you can usually manage those people under a "functional use" licence, which comes at a lower price tag per person.

What's the value of EC Contingent Workforce Management?

But now for the solution itself: contractors, agency staff and any other contributors not on your organisation's payroll can easily make up between 10 and 50 percent of your total workforce.

Managing them solely through the procurement function simply doesn't cut it. They are, after all, part of the "Human Resources" your company relies on and you often need their data to be considered in processes like:

• Operational Workforce Planning
• Budgeting
• Training - especially, when regulatory requirements demand proof of it
• Skills management
• Time recording
• Day to day team management by line managers
• ...

Of course, you could keep their data in Employee Central like employee data and use configuration to manipulate UIs accordingly. However, the data needed for them is very different from employee data, so SuccessFactors offers a separate data model tailored towards the needs to contractors and agency staff. Most notably, there is usually no compensation portlet, but a special portlet with contractual assignment data including the agency, day rates etc.

So, consider using this feature to achieve total workforce management with dedicated data models and screens. You can also integrate it with SAP Fieldglass to cover the commercial aspects.

7) Payroll Tasks with Employee Central Payroll

When using SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll, all major events like new hire, transfer, termination etc. are started in Employee Central. And all personal, organisational or contractual data are also held there. Only "pure" payroll data like tax information or social insurance are managed in the respective infotypes in the payroll system. But for an integrated user experience, even those infotypes are usually maintained out of the Employee Central UI through so called "Mash-up" screens - each corresponding to an infotype in EC-Payroll.

When an event like New Hire has been executed in Employee Central, it is easy to forget that tax, SI etc. still need to be captured. This is where the concept of payroll tasks comes in. It allows you to configure a bespoke sequence of mash-up screens that need to be completed. As soon as the new hire has been replicated to EC-Payroll (usually instantly via push-replication), this sequence of infotypes is displayed as an open task under the Complete Payroll Tasks transaction:

8) Replicate Payroll Results to Employee Central

The main flow of data replication goes from Employee Central to Payroll. However, there is often a need to see some payroll results directly in EC. This could be for informational or reporting purposes or for downstream integrations.

Whilst Employee Central typically holds contractual compensation data, it may not hold time dependent payments like overtime or night shift allowance and unless SuccessFactors Time Tracking is used, those compensation elements won't be available for Story Reporting. Also, it is often required to see calculated pay components in Employee Central such as

• total gross salary
• net salary
• actual payment

I expect this to be used much more, when customers are starting to make more use of Analytics and Story Reporting with SAP SuccessFactors HCM.

9) SAP Payroll Control Centre

This would easily fill 10 pages, so let me be very succinct:

• Payroll Control Centre allows you to manage all of your payroll process except for a few hard core admin tasks from a user friendly UI inside SAP SuccessFactors.
• Apart from process control, it offers operational KPIs and most notably the management of alerts and todos related to data maintenance and payroll errors/warnings
• You can get away from screening individual payslips each month to "management by exception", thus freeing up valuable time of your payroll specialists
• You can also achieve a more continuous stream of work instead of the monthly frenzy just before pay day.
• Together with the capabilities of EC-Payroll the PCC can help you to insource payroll, when you realise that the objektives (or dreams) of outsourcing payroll haven't been achieved. The fact that you flatten the peak of workload that's often concentrated on 3-4 days each month, is one major contributor to this option.
• PCC is available in EC with Employee Central Payroll as well as for Core Hybrid Scenarios, where Employee Central is used together with the "traditional" SAP ECC HCM Payroll or HCM for S/4HANA Payroll.

There are 2 types of under-use I observe regarding PCC:

1. You are not using it at all: please evaluate properly - there is much to be gained
2. You are using it, but haven't set up the alerts and team assignments to cover most of your cases. This is normal for an initial set-up. It makes sense to start small. But you should add to it as you go along.

10) SuccessFactors People Analytics Story Reporting

This is the biggest one by far and it's sad, it's still on this list.

Story Reporting may have had a slow start, but it's the best reporting tool in SAP SuccessFactors now and improving continuously. If you are not using it yet at all, I urge you to

1. define your transition roadmap now
2. train your admins / reporting key users thoroughly
3. use story reporting for all new report requirements
4. transition existing reports as still needed according to your roadmap

If you are using Story Reporting already, but you feel you don't get the full value, the first points to check are

• Do you have the right people assigned to build new reports and is a good process in place?
• Do those people need extra training or coaching?
• Are you offering easy to use dashboards to line managers, execs and other stakeholder groups and do those dashboards help them doing their jobs?

Most HR software projects come with an objective to improve reporting and analytics. Many of them run out of steam just before the finish line. Don't be one of those and invest some time in Story Reporting.

Note: If the need for using IAS is still holding you back, here's some good news for you: IAS will become mandatory for SuccessFactors user log-in in the next couple of years anyway, so here's an extremely strong argument for getting started with IAS asap.

For more info about Story Reporting, check out this article about the 1H2024 release for SuccessFactors People Analytics