Discovery Staff Editor

Sep 24 2020

Leverage SAP SuccessFactors Performance & Goals for Enterprise Success

Performance Management, Goal Management, 360° Reviews, & Calibration

For an enterprise to catapult to the top of its industry, it must have the right people in place at critical turning points. When corporate organisations leverage SAP SuccessFactors Performance & Goals to steer their employees in the right direction, those employees will have everything in place to step up and deliver.

Meeting your organisation’s goals is an essential aspect of your teams’ collective responsibilities at work. When your team’s strategy aligns with its goals – and with your organisation’s overall goals – doing the right thing becomes second nature to them. Even during challenging times, they will perform at peak levels, filled with the resilience that can overcome any challenge.

SuccessFactors Performance & Goals helps your employees to perform their best by aligning their strategy and performance with their goals. With its proven system, you can provide them with the kind of continuous feedback and inspired mentoring that drives engagement and increases productivity. Let’s explore all the benefits it can reap for your organisation.

Performance Management

These days, the kind of employees that will help your organisation rise to the top want to take ownership of their role.

SuccessFactors Performance & Goals allows that to happen. When employees engage in their own goal-setting, they take more responsibility for meeting those goals. Ongoing dialogue with you or their direct manager helps them see their progress through another’s eyes, driving a culture of continuous improvement.

The module’s intuitive interface allows you to assess each employee’s performance according to their developmental goals, their performance goals, and their competency in role-specific tasks. You can also factor in insights from direct managers, colleagues, and other stakeholders, such as clients and customers.

A writing assistant provides you with a large library of mentoring and developmental recommendations, while a coaching advisor helps mentors provide actionable feedback and advice to help employees grow into their potential. Another feature, called ‘Legal Scan’, red-flags potentially discriminatory or improper language to guard your organisation against legal issues.

The feature’s robust analytics gives you incisive insights into your employees’ strengths, capabilities, and potential for improvement. Seeing their strengths and capabilities stacked against their weaknesses allows you and their direct manager to look at ways their strengths can help them overcome their problem areas.

If you choose the continuous performance option, you can take a more agile approach, noting goal-specific progress and achievements and providing feedback. With this option, employees, too, can request and provide feedback, allowing them to truly take ownership of their role.

Goal Management empowers employees and management to visualise progress

The module’s Goal Management tool streamlines and automates every step in the process, including:

Creating goals
Aligning those goals with an effective strategy that can make them happen
Monitoring and measuring progress toward corporate, departmental, and personal goals
Visualising goals in an ordered pattern from strategic to tactical

With Goal Management, direct managers can break down broader corporate goals into SMART ones: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound, with the tool’s Smart Goal Wizard. The wizard provides step-by-step instructions on how to create those kinds of goals, while the Goal Library feature contains more than 500 role- and industry-specific goals, all ready to use for busy managers.

The Goal Categories feature makes it easy for managers to report and track goals, adapting easily to the Balanced Scorecard approach to performance management strategy. Using the Initiatives feature, users can associate their personal goals with corporate, divisional, and departmental goals, engaging them personally with the organisation’s mission.

Goal Management empowers employees to take charge of their careers, one goal at a time. In fact, if your organisation doesn’t yet have SAP’s SuccessFactors Succession and Development Planning module, you can use Goal Management as a career planning tool.

360° Reviews provide you with the complete picture

Employees don’t only interact with people inside the organisation. They are the face of your brand to the outside world. With the 360° Reviews feature, you can collect feedback on their performance from people outside of your organisation as well as people within it. It enables both anonymous and named feedback, providing your reviewers with privacy if needed to avoid interpersonal issues.

360° Reviews allows you to collect both qualitative and quantitative data, displaying it graphically so that you get the complete picture of each employee’s performance. Numeric ratings are possible as well so that you can see how an employee stacks up against others in his or her role as evaluated by the same objective standards.

A writing assistant helps reviewers to craft meaningful yet precise feedback, giving both management and employees an accurate picture of each person’s performance. A feature called ‘Detailed Reporting’ reveals employees’ hidden strengths and blind spots, letting them see in which areas they can bring more value to the organisation.

Configurable workflows allow you to customise the feature to your organisation’s routing process, and you can even send email reminders with its Outlook integration.

Use Calibration to evaluate employees by objective criteria

Designed to drive objectivity in compensation, succession, and performance evaluation, this feature allows management to rank employees in easy-to-read visuals. Choose from four data sources, each tied to a specific decision, including the employee’s talent profile, performance, compensation, and succession.

Its drag-and-drop capability enables you to work quickly, while the dashboards’ intuitive design gives you an aggregate view of each subset of employees. You can set it up easily with only a few clicks, allowing you to choose people from an organisational chart and manage the tool’s security protocols. The Calibration feature provides your organisation’s executives visibility, ensuring that they are aware of departmental management’s decisions and their rationale for making them.

Finally, become familiar with Performance & Goals before you implement it

Like with any solution, it pays to get everyone involved up to speed with the features and operations of Performance & Goals before you implement it. Knowing how to do each task beforehand helps streamline each process when the solution is up and running. Prepare your teams for success, and it will surely follow.

Sep 07 2020

How SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting and Onboarding benefits your business

Recruiting and onboarding the right staff is pivotal to any business for ongoing growth and success, but for many businesses, the recruiting and onboarding processes can also come with headaches of their own. The SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting module is designed to eliminate the latter and enhance the former, making the whole process that much easier for everyone concerned.

Let’s take a look at how this benefits your business.

Expand your recruiting reach

When recruiting new personnel, reach is very important. It is unlikely that you have already made up your mind on a particular candidate before the process starts. This means you need to put your job description and job offer in front of as many pairs of eyes as possible, in an effort to secure the right hire.

The SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting module works towards this by helping you to approach recruiting as you would a marketing campaign. You will be able to connect with over 4,000 advertising channels, covering such things as social networks, job aggregation sites and universities, on your way to expanding your reach and broadening your talent pool.

You will also have the ability to craft your own dedicated recruitment site, which will give potential hires further insight into both the role being advertised and the experience of working within your company. All of this contributes to a far more qualified selection of candidates. It also makes it much easier for you to hit your recruitment targets.

Scaled-back process, but with highly effective results

The problem with traditional recruiting and onboarding processes is that they become bloated and convoluted. This results in an inefficient, lengthy process that is a drain on company resources and leaves candidates feeling disenchanted with the whole experience.

The module is designed to help you do things a little differently by scaling back the process to create something more streamlined and efficient. Each step in the process leads logically to the next, and there is little to no wastage of time or resources.

What’s more, this efficiency does not come at the cost of the results. Built-in tools enable a streamlined, efficient process without losing any key capabilities, while the cloud-enabled platform brings documents and data together in an effective way, even at high volumes. DocuSign integration, for example, enables the signing and storage of paperwork on a remote basis, while job applications can be optimised for mobile devices to make the procedure even more accessible.

Target a competitive candidate experience

SuccessFactors recruiting capabilities are set up in a way that is reminiscent of a sales or acquisitions funnel. By treating your candidates as customers in this way, you are able to offer a far more competitive experience to potential hires and project a far more professional image for your company. This can be instrumental in landing the best personnel whenever you need to fill a new role.

You will be able to set up a swift and efficient recruitment process that eliminates any of the bottlenecks and delays that frustrate potential clients so much. You will also be able to work flexibly within this framework and to reach out directly to candidates for effective support and communication.

This is bolstered by a suite of candidate relationship management tools that are included within the module. With these tools, you can foster engagement on a broad scale, providing mass updates and bulletins that keep your potential hires informed. You’ll also be able to nurture more personal connections with key candidates, which becomes particularly useful as you narrow down your search.

Leverage insight into the process

The SuccessFactors Recruiting module has been developed with data in mind. The developers understand just how important solid insight and understanding is to the recruitment process. As such, the module is designed to capture as much data as possible during the process – data that can then be used to hone and refine recruiting campaigns in the future.

This insight is leveraged via user-friendly interfaces designed to make data management and understanding simple and straightforward. The module also supports this with a number of intelligent tools that allow recruiters to do more during the process. These tools include automated bias scanning for job descriptions, helping you to remove any problematic language from the description, and machine learning capabilities that provide recommendations on salary and other benefits during recruitment.

Global recruiting with SAP SuccessFactors

Global enterprises need global recruitment capabilities. This means connecting with candidates effectively and profoundly, wherever they are located.

SAP SuccessFactors helps businesses achieve this and supports recruitment processes in 46 languages. With this capability, businesses can create a localised experience for hires in different markets, transforming operations on a truly global scale. As remote work culture enables increasing numbers of organisations to reach a broader market than ever before, this capability provides a huge benefit.

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With the recruiting module, bringing in new personnel becomes significantly easier. You can start looking forward to how you are going to deploy all that new talent rather than worrying about how much the process is going to cost in terms of time, money and resources.

Jul 29 2020

SAP SuccessFactors Core HR – Employee Central, Employee Central Payroll, Time & Attendance

The undeniable benefits of SAP SuccessFactors Core HR components

Organisations and workforces all around the world are undergoing more change and upheaval than ever before. Leading businesses are expertly managing the evolving landscape with the help of some very smart tools. What’s the number one tool in their toolkits? Without a doubt, it’s SAP SuccessFactors Core HR and its key components – Employee Central, Employee Central Payroll and Time & Attendance.

What is SAP SuccessFactors Core HR?

This cloud-based software system lets you empower and manage your workforce at both global and local levels.

It takes complex, separate, time-consuming processes and integrates them onto one powerful, streamlined, easy-to-use platform that can be accessed on a variety of devices, whether you are in the factory office or company boardroom.

With all essential HR processes centralised and consolidated, organisations can automate, improve and extend all HR services right across the board, locally and globally.

Some of the core processes that SAP SuccessFactors Core HR and its components handle include:

Workforce management
Recruitment
Payroll management
Time and attendance
Legal compliance across 95-plus countries
Work visa management
Organisational analysis
Organisational reporting structures
Service delivery

Why leading organisations choose SAP SuccessFactors Core HR and its key components

From Microsoft Corporation to Jemena and CPA (Australia), organisations all around the world are choosing SAP SuccessFactors Core HR and its components because of the concrete benefits on offer. Let’s zoom in on those benefits from two important perspectives.

Benefits to the organisation

Enables organisations to easily keep track of all essential HR information across their entire workforce
Allows organisations to keep up-to-date with changes to their business and their workforce
Helps organisations model and visualise their workforce and provides data-driven insight into operations in real-time
Creates a modern and engaging workplace that appeals to talented employees
Enhances strategic decision-making and makes a significant contribution to business performance
Drives growth

Benefits to the workforce

Access to a top-quality, user-friendly, self-service experience
A simplified mechanism for accessing, editing and getting information about benefits such as pensions, reimbursements, allowances and insurance plans, resulting in time-savings and greater employee job satisfaction
The ability to easily record absences and attendance – employees can access instant, real-time information about their overtime, premiums and balances whenever they like
Better communication with HR through the employee’s preferred channel.

Employee Central – simplifying and streamlining processes

Employee Central is where all core HR processes come together in your organisation. It’s a dynamic, responsive self-service centre with some pretty impressive applications for mobile devices.

Key benefits of Employee Central include:

Scalability – Equally effective for Australian SMEs or global players, Employee Central is fully scalable and can be adapted to meet the needs of your business now and in the future.
Technologically flexible – The software is cloud-based and updated regularly to keep up with today’s rapid pace of change.
Organisationally flexible – Employee Central lets you define your unique organisational structure. You can also choose which data can be changed and by whom (employees, supervisors or other) and what follow-up steps are involved.
Global and local intelligence – Legal compliance is a headache for many HR departments. Employee Central is designed to ease the pain by ensuring both international and local compliance of regulations. It caters for over 95 geographical locations.
Quality service – Employee Central delivers a high level of service, the kind that people are used to receiving outside of their working lives. This is software that truly engages employees, giving them direct feedback when appropriate and inviting them to give their own feedback in turn.
Greater job satisfaction – The system allows workforce members to be rewarded and recognised, both of which have a direct impact on employee job satisfaction and an organisation’s ability to retain talent.

The clear benefits of Employee Central Payroll

When it comes to payroll management, organisations need a system that is accurate, timely and global. Employee Central Payroll is all that and more.

Accurate

Employees love Employee Central Payroll because they are accurately paid for the time they have recorded, according to their contract and in compliance with local laws. Organisations love it because of its reliability and because it flags potential errors and discrepancies before they become a problem.

Timely

Processing is automated and accelerated with Employee Central Payroll, ensuring employees are paid on time. The system also allows errors to be sorted out swiftly by payroll specialists in real-time.

Global

Employee Central Payroll, just like the other components of SAP Core HR, is built to ensure full compliance with relevant regulations. This is of vital importance when it comes to paying wages across a variety of jurisdictions.

Getting on top of time and attendance

Gaining control over time and attendance is fundamental for all businesses. And, that’s exactly what Employee Central Time Management was designed for. With this component of SAP Core HR, organisations can easily:

Plan, record and approve absences
Keep track of working time
Ensure compliance with all relevant labour laws
Automate the calculation of time and pay for employees
Obtain an overview of time accounts
Edit and analyse employees’ records
Manage notifications and alerts

To learn more about SAP Core HR and its components, reach out to our team today. You’ll be amazed by the benefits.

Jun 23 2020

Using SAP Fieldglass to Set Up Your External Workforce Management

What Is External Workforce Management?

The external workforce is revolutionising the way business gets done. While once upon a time there needed to be an in-house department or — at the very least — an in-house specialist required to handle each role, this has not proved cost-effective. This results in rigid business structures, out of which expansion and evolution were difficult simply because businesses could not draw upon the required resources.

The digital age has brought with it a more flexible approach to the workforce and how this workforce is managed. Surveys suggest that around 44 per cent of the total workforce is now external, and this level is increasing.

How SAP Fieldglass Makes All the Difference

SAP Fieldglass provides an overarching digital solution from which to manage all aspects of your external workforce, from creating jobs and filling roles to filing invoices and paying wages. With Fieldglass, you know:

Who’s working for you
What they are working on
Where they are located
Which of your facilities they are accessing
How much they are getting paid

By answering these key questions, your business will be able to:

Simplify the engagement of the external teams and operatives needed to fulfil key roles within your business
Structure your approach to the external labour force and to payment (supported by automated features)
Ensure security and compliance, even if no direct payment is being made (for example, you know who has access to your facilities)

These are the key tenets of SAP Fieldglass, but there are other benefits you can expect from the solution, too:

Increased efficiency through process standardisation
Cost savings through rate controls on external workers
Full visibility from a single data repository coupled with powerful reporting
Legal and regulatory compliance

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How to Set Up External Workforce Management with Fieldglass

Setting Up and Getting Started with Fieldglass

The user begins the process by setting up SAP Fieldglass. This is achieved via a four-step procedure.

Register with the Ariba and Fieldglass networks.

SAP uses the Ariba network to handle communication and transfer of files between Fieldglass and SAP ERP. This means that users will need to register for both networks before they can begin.

Set up the Fieldglass account.

With the registration on both networks now confirmed, the user simply needs to complete the set-up on their Fieldglass account. This includes reviewing settings and parameters and making sure these reflect your own needs for Fieldglass.

Provide training and education to users on how to utilise the Fieldglass account.

In order for Fieldglass to be effective, your teams need to be able to process work items in the Fieldglass account. This means individual team members should have the training and support needed to use Fieldglass efficiently and effectively, managing the external workforce in a way that achieves targets in terms of flexibility and agility.

Provide training and education to external teams and other members of the external workforce.

Using Fieldglass to connect with remote workers is a two-way channel. The external workforce needs to be able to respond to support requests and posted tasks, just in the same way as your internal teams need to be able to access the platform to post these tasks. External teams also need to be able to access timesheets and other resources. Make sure that such teams are able to access this effectively.

Follow the Category Management Checklist

Before you can begin to properly manage your external workforce, you need to follow SAP Fieldglass’s category management checklist. Take a look at the following points and ready your business for external workforce management.

Bring the top levels of management onboard.

Upper management needs to be on board with the project from day one, providing their complete support each and every step of the way. Hold initial meetings to make sure that this is the case, and schedule regular meetings in the future to keep all levels of the company engaged in the process.

Manage external talent under a centralised platform.

This is the SAP Fieldglass solution. Fieldglass provides businesses with a centralised platform they can use to keep on top of the external workforce effectively. We’ve already taken a look at the initial set-up phase for Fieldglass, so make sure that this is completed.

Agree on clear responsibilities.

Each member of the team who is cleared to use Fieldglass for work orders and other management tasks must agree on their responsibilities ahead of time. Make sure every duty and every task is covered, and that every member of the team is clear on what they need to do.

Expand strategic cooperation with staffing agencies.

There may be times when your business needs are particularly acute, and you require more external support to plug the gaps. There may also be times when these needs are less intense and urgent. Connecting with staffing agencies via the Fieldglass portal will ensure that your needs are met.

Put each process through rigorous testing.

The category management checklist is almost complete, but you still need to make sure that proper testing has been carried out. Think about how you will be using SAP Fieldglass and put each process through its paces.

Defining Your Supplier Management Level

The next phase is to define which level of supplier management you are currently at so you can chart your progress over time. The levels are:

Decentralised

At the decentralised level, you will have several suppliers that you will manage internally. Procurement will be handled on an ad hoc basis.

Preferred Supplier

At this level, you will have a selective set of providers and contracts or service-level agreements (SLAs) with each of these suppliers.

Master Vendor

At this level, you may only have a single supplier who manages other suppliers on your behalf. This means only one point of contact and direct cost savings on bill rates via customised SLAs.

Managed Service Provider

A business at this level has only one contact point for their suppliers. They will leverage direct cost savings on the billing rate, leading to a better management of total spend.

Total Talent Management

This is the level everyone is aiming for, characterised by a reflexive and agile management set-up that is achieved via the Fieldglass platform. At this stage, suppliers are engaged and managed as and when required, with no gaps or shortfalls.

With your current level defined, you gain a clearer idea of what you need to do to reach the next level. In this sense, working with SAP Fieldglass can give you a better understanding of how your business is operating.

To learn more about how to get the best from Fieldglass or how to make the solution your go-to for external workforce management, reach out to our team to learn more.

May 06 2020

Before You Start Your Cloud HR Implementation

Best Practices Before You Start Your Cloud HR Implementation

For those looking to modernise HR administration and control, migrating from legacy HR management systems to a comprehensive cloud-based human capital management (HCM) solution may be the best approach.

Integrating cloud HR with your overall digital strategy will help align your HR processes with your business objectives in an increasingly information-based environment. These processes include talent search, onboarding, performance and experience analysis, and payroll.

However, the success of implementing an HCM system hinges on several critical internal factors that dictate the overall end results. Here are a few essential things you need to do before making the switch to cloud HR, in order to realise the full benefits.

Understand What You’re Getting Into

The very first thing you need to do before embarking on cloud HR migration is to ask yourself whether your organisation is ready for the radical change, and what an SAP SuccessFactors HCM solution really brings to the table. Part of the readiness assessment is HR’s willingness and capacity to unlearn old ways and adopt new practices.

Take an objective look at your current HR model and identify all the roadblocks, bottlenecks and inefficiencies you’re hoping to eliminate by shifting to cloud HCM. In addition to this, make sure you understand all the changes that come with moving HR processes and data to the cloud. Examine all this with a long-term perspective, to understand the big picture of what this course of action entails, and to gain an accurate projection of the ROI.

Involve Your End Users in Solution Design and Decision Making

Although the ultimate goal of an HCM system is to serve the best interests of HR for the greater benefit of the company, you must consider how the transformation affects those directly involved. Your end-users, in this case, are potential job candidates, team leaders, supervisors, department heads and the individual employees.

Collaborate with the end-user’s representatives in brainstorming ideas for an ideal system that fits perfectly with everyone’s expectations. Keep in mind, however, that even with a highly customisable solution, there are limits to how well a digital system will match the already established HR structure. As you define the fundamental principles of the system, help everyone understand that some of the HR culture may be lost during the translation to digital. Also, identify and resolve any political, social and hierarchical issues before they arise when making significant changes.

Prepare Your In-house IT Team

Your in-house IT team will do a lot of the heavy lifting in facilitating the migration to cloud HR. On top of that, they’ll have to work closely with HR and management in collecting data, making essential system configurations and installing support equipment where necessary. Prepare your IT team for the additional workload by arranging training sessions or bringing in extra hands with useful expertise and experience in cloud HR prior to implementation.

Also, ensure that the IT and HR departments are well aware of their roles and responsibilities during the implementation process and continued support of the HCM. This will help smooth out the transition by avoiding any delays and complications due to unforeseen technical challenges.

Define the Implementation Methodology

Once you have decided on what you need and have prepared your business for the transformation, it’s time to decide on how it’s going to take place. You can go one of two ways when implementing the cloud HCM. One approach is to install the entire SAP SuccessFactors HCM suite and adapt all HR processes to the platform across the board. The other is to implement just the core application at the beginning and making incremental expansions with time.

A slow and steady implementation gives your businesses some breathing space after every major change and lets your staff adjust to every transition. Complete integration means your business makes the switch in one go. Either way, remember to keep your eyes on the price and consider the long-term plan of the implementation.

Selecting an Implementation Partner

Adapting and running a cloud HR facility is not a journey you want to take alone. Find the right SAP SuccessFactors partner to assist you in planning and integrating the right SAP solutions for your HR needs. You want a partner who knows the industry inside and out and with vast experience in guiding businesses formulate mission-critical strategies. That partner must also be in a capacity to provide long-term support, ideally for the foreseeable lifespan of the product.

A SAP SuccessFactors partner will help you make well-informed choices for your business and update you accordingly as new changes in methodology and technology emerge. At Discovery Consulting, we work closely with businesses in planning and implementing SAP HCM as a way to modernise and improve the efficiency of outdated HR management styles. Get in touch with us today and start your cloud HR journey with a capable, hands-on partner.