Whitepaper
How to Actually, Optimise SAP SuccessFactors for Maximum Success
Optimization Strategies Checklist Included
Table of Contents
Optimization Strategies Checklist
Step-by-step guides on specific optimization strategies discussed in the whitepaper such as applying leading practices, selecting the right add-ons, or setting up resource augmentation. Checklists break large topics into clear action items and are simple to structure.
RESOURCES > WHITEPAPER > How to actually, optimise SAP SuccessFactors for maximum success
SuccessFactors (SF) is an SAP product suite that offers cloud-based business management that aligns recruitment, performance, and employee training. Organisations of all sizes in over sixty industries utilise this Software as a Service (SaaS) model. But when companies implemented SAP SuccessFactors, they often realised they’ve taken on more than expected. Due to the comprehensiveness of the software, it can be daunting for most users and even administrators. Deloitte’s 2020 Global Technology Leadership Study shows that more than 50% of survey respondents reported year-over-year technology spending between 2016 to 2020. It would be wasteful not to maximise what you already bought with so much at stake.
In this whitepaper, we explore different ways and additions users can consider to bolster their SAP SuccessFactors installation and truly maximise the value of this enterprise system.
Whether you are already on SAP SuccessFactors or planning to implement them, you should find the following information helpful.
What is SAP SuccessFactors
In 2001, Lars Dalgaard developed SAP SuccessFactors, with co-founder Aaron Au, as a cloud-based SaaS HCM solution. In 2011, SAP, the leader in enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, acquired SF and expanded upon its capabilities. SAP SuccessFactors servers store the software and application data on a remote cloud; you can access on-demand from anywhere using secure login credentials. Users can choose features and functionality in the standard version or customise their service based on the organisation’s needs. SAP SuccessFactors has a multitenant architecture with a single configuration that offers scalability. You can install the software on multiple machines and devices. Some options allow you to perform any active search you need. There are also tabs for To-Dos, quick access to daily tasks, and Help and Tutorial features.
Organisations of all sizes in over sixty industries utilise SAP SuccessFactors as a SaaS model. Only after implementation do they often realise that they’ve taken on more than expected.
The Key Benefits of SAP SuccessFactors Include:
- Delivers scalability and offers an unlimited extensibility
- Provides a total end-to-end recruiting solution
- Presents a straightforward approach for the goals and performance modules to track and maintain personal and professional goals
- Simplifies onboarding in a planned process that assists organisations in increasing job satisfaction and employee productivity
- Assists organisations in motivating their workforce in a pay-for-performance culture
- Offers performance management
- Streamlines compensation processes
- Allows you to create a policy that includes learning management solutions
And These are Delivered Over Several Modules Such As:
- Employee Central Module
- Employee Central Payroll
- Employee Central Service Center
- Performance and Goals Module
- Compensation Management
- Recruiting Management and Onboarding
- Succession and Development Module
- Learning Management System (LMS)
- People Analytics (including SAP Analytics Cloud)
- Work Zone for HR
Unlock Your SuccessFactors Potential
Boost Performance with Leading Practices & Strategic Add-Ons
The Key Benefits:
- Actionable Checklists
- Enhanced Performance
- Maximised Investment
- Improved User Experience
Optimising Your SAP SuccessFactors Installation
Check Out SAP SuccessFactors Resources
The first place you may want to check out is the SAP SuccessFactors website, where they produce extensive content, articles, documentation, guided answers, and questions and blogs to help address any users’ issues and ensure you can maximise your usage of their system.
Apply Leading Practices
Leading practices is a concept that accurately describes the reality of SAP SuccessFactors projects because it implies that the organisation’s culture, local legal requirements, and current state of technology are all considered constraints when implementing a leading practice.
Such Leading Practices Consist Of:
- Take some time to look over your current HR procedures. This is a great time to make things easier and look for ways to cut down on something. Leading practices make it easier to create processes and solutions that can be put in place faster and with less risk.
- Make sure that your solution design is based on real business needs and your company’s culture. People who follow best practices can help you determine your company’s needs and how the software’s available options can meet those needs. In addition, they help you better explain how you will reach the project goals and set the project scope.
- If other people are good at something you want to do, take the time to find out how they do it. The more you turn your back on the success of others, the less likely you are to have your own.
- SAP SuccessFactors solutions make it easy to add new processes that improve your business by adopting best practices supported by the software. Your first goal may be to fix or update broken processes. Even small increases in the amount of work you put into implementing your project can impact the business value.
Leading practices make it easier to create processes and solutions that can be put in place faster and with less risk
The Right Add-Ons
The SAP store has Add-Ons to help you get the most from the SF platform. In addition, they offer software extensions, software solutions, services, and training. These add-ons work in the SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Business ByDesign, SAP Business One, Ariba, and many more. They can help with data source connection and creating dashboards with collaborative planning.
How do You Pick the Right Add-Ons? The Following are Areas You May Want to Pay Attention To:
- Are they built for SAP SuccessFactors ? If they are, not only will you be saving extra integration costs, the data flow will also be seamless between the add-ons and SAP SuccessFactors.
- Is it a tangible solution or just a workaround? Not all add-ons are the same. The good ones are built from the ground up to address specific problems, whereas the bad ones are just patched work as a lousy workaround.
- Is the pricing structure transparent? Low cost is one thing but knowing the total costs of ownership is also important. You want to accurately budget how much you will be spending on these add-ons and not be held hostage by opaque items such as annual maintenance and upgrade costs.
- Can you configure it to suit your organisation? Every business and industry come with different requirements. Good add-ons understand this and provide a degree of configurability to suit any situation.
- Do they provide good support? Again, chances are, you would need support over time as you get new users and/or new requirements. But, again, knowing how quick that turnaround is will be helpful in the efficiency of your operations.
- Are they easy to use? The last thing you want to buy is a white elephant, and that can only be prevented if the add-ons are easy to use. This is typically achieved with an excellent user interface and putting users at the centre of the experience.
- Do they already have great customers? No one wants to be a guinea pig. It is safer to get an add-on with tried and tested customers.
One of the more popular add-ons is REIMBUR$E, an intelligent expense management tool
that works directly with SAP SF Employee Central. It ensures a direct integration with your SF system. Another add-on to consider for companies is ePFile. It is a centralised employee document management app built for SF Customers.SF has evolved dramatically over the past decades, creating the dream solution of an end-to-end cloud platform. However, there would still be instances where their focus is spread too thin and cannot provide the deeper point features that niche HR Tech vendors offer. Having such add-ons would provide the best of both worlds.
REIMBUR$E and ePFile are intelligent employee expense management and document management add-ons respectively, that ensures smart integration with your SAP SuccessFactors system
Better User Adoption & Maintenance With Application Maintenance Support (AMS)
You have invested in SAP SF and appointed your HR director as administrator. Now what?
How do you support the system and drive adoption immediately after implementation, without adding to or building an internal team and balancing support and change management? And it is not just about providing a ticketing helpdesk with reactive-only support.
A possible solution is to consider Application Maintenance Support which caters to the day-to-day management of system issues and provides an ongoing adoption analysis. That allows your organisation to identify system improvements proactively and enables you to address employee concerns and user experience. They ultimately lead to higher user adoption.
One key takeaway is that the AMS isn’t just a help desk for tracking problem tickets. It also includes tracking processes to identify login statistics, user feedback surveys and helpdesk ticket flow and types. And with users’ sophistication for consumer-grade experience on enterprise systems, the notion of a typical chat experience will also evolve. Imagine simply initiating a chat on the front end by the users as they would with WhatsApp when they converse with their friends and family.
No worries about ticket creations, keeping track of the ticket number or trying to recall who you spoke with when you need to revisit the conversation. Bots will take care of the backend heavy lifting, resulting in a user friendly, simple, efficient, automated and seamless manner for customer support experience. All these lead to the ability to identify trends to determine the cause to support solutions. Those may come in the form of targeted user training and communications, implementation of config optimisations, and new features.
Other Benefits of AMS Include:
- Cut down on operating costs. IT teams become more efficient because the AMS takes some of the stress. This results in lower operating costs because fewer tasks and problems are to deal with.
- Having the ability to grow and thrive. When the maintenance of applications and technology is done by someone else, your employees have more time and space to make critical business decisions and help customers faster.
- There will be less of a risk. The outside company will work around the clock to fix bugs, update SAP systems, and keep you running at total capacity.
- Stability. From behind the scenes, an outside company will look for problems and make sure they are fixed. This operation runs smoothly, taking care of all your tasks, so you don’t have to think about it.
- Productivity will rise. AMS saves your employees time to work on your main business instead of other things
Extended On-Demand SAP SuccessFactors Resources
Often, there is a delay in many SAP SuccessFactors projects due to a lack of knowledge in the customer’s team. As a result, you may find that your organisation needs flexible, expert post-implementation on-demand. Beyond the capabilities of the AMS teams, you may lack an internal resource within your organisation to provide your teams with expert product guidance. You don’t want to waste resources on support hours for minor requests. Where can you find reliable SAP SuccessFactors expertise on short notice that is flexible?
To achieve the best balance of turnaround time, costs, flexibility, expert knowledge and short contract term, an ideal consideration would be Resource Augmentation. Resource Augmentation is a type of business outsourcing model in which qualified people are hired on a short-term basis to help an in-house team meet specific business goals. Many people have been using it for short-term SAP projects for a long time now because hiring full-time workers for short-term projects is a lot of work, and it costs the company a lot of money over time. The Resource Augmentation service provider does the entire process of finding new employees. This saves the company a lot of time and money. For example, it would take just a few days and a lot less money to finish a month’s worth of work.
Importantly, Resource Augmentation service providers bring in SAP expertise to do an excellent job of evaluating and screening the candidates they send to them. Then, the company just needs to figure out where their teams lack skills and what skills they need. It also becomes easier to upsize and downsize, and it adds a little bit of flexibility to make it easier to grow. In addition, short-term projects are easier to manage when there are many new and different people to choose from, rather than having to keep hiring and firing people all the time.
However, not many businesses can get the most out of Resource Augmentation for various reasons, including not planning well enough and not passing on the correct information. Unfair pay practices and communication gaps are also to blame for not making the most of it.
Here are Some Crucial Steps to Make Sure the SAP SuccessFactors Resource/Staff Augmentation Goes Smoothly:
- It’s essential to establish communication between the company and the Resource Augmentation service provider at the start of the project so that it doesn’t go wrong. As most augmented staff work remotely, the company needs to open all communication channels to make it easy for them and the in-house team to talk. The company also needs regular meetings between its employees and the people hired.
- Consider choosing short-term projects and projects that are time-bound. The cost of hiring a full-time employee for a one-time project will be high for the company. However, if you have in-house workers, let them keep the project running for a long time to come.
- Do a talent audit check to figure out the gaps between what the company has and what it needs. To finish a high-quality job on time, you need help from other people.
- Don’t Forget the Legal Aspects: Signing contracts is vital to keep business relationships open and safe. A weak contract can lead to extra costs, less control over the quality, less data security, and other problems. It is also essential to make the vendor and the people they hire sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement to protect your intellectual property rights and keep them from being used.
- Vendors must be clear about how much they charge each of their developers each month. The bill should include both the developer’s pay and the service provider’s fee for the service.
- The company needs to work with a well-known vendor. This means that the service provider must meet all of the company’s staffing needs. It also needs to hire on-site and off-site people and provide round-the-clock support.
Resource Augmentation service providers bring in SAP expertise to do an excellent job of evaluating and screening the candidates they send to them, while taking care of cost, time and flexibility.
With the high demand for SF consultants, it might seem like a pipedream to secure SF experts on short notice and at low costs. That is why Rolling Arrays created our HR Tech Academy to train and supply a constant pipeline of quality SF consultants to fulfil these requirements. Trained by long-term HR-tech consultants, they are imparted with industry know-how and best practices. They have been deployed across different real-world projects to gain the practical experience to fulfil any clients’ requirements.
Driving Future Success In Your SAP SuccessFactors Implementation
The recent global pandemic has left organisations looking for virtual solutions for a remote and hybrid workforce. SAP SuccessFactors offers that solution to help virtual teams collaborate and communicate more effectively. There are many ways to improve your current SAP SuccessFactors or upcoming SuccessFactors implementations. And in the new post-pandemic world, success can be achieved by having the right combination of leading practices, virtual teams, vendors and support.
Reference:
- https://www.techtarget.com/searchhrsoftware/news/252488025/Aaron-Au-looks-back-on-SuccessFactors-looks-ahead-at-Gloat
About Rolling Arrays
Rolling Arrays has been driving SAP SuccessFactors-led HR Transformation since 2009. The company specialises in SF consulting, implementation, and support and also builds applications to enhance the utility of the SuccessFactors platform. It is committed to designing systems that help its customers to attract, develop and retain talented individuals. In 2021, Rolling Arrays was recognized as one of the top 75 fastest-growing companies in Singapore by The Straits Times & Statista.
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