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Workplaces have changed significantly over the past 18 months. Flexible arrangements and remote teams have empowered employees and organisations to persevere – even thrive – through tumultuous and uncertain times.

However, as work becomes more fragmented, businesses are grappling with more than the logistical challenges of a hybrid workforce. How leaders nurture staff productivity and engagement has shifted, and new technologies are pioneering post-pandemic employee satisfaction. One such technology is the new SAP Work Zone for HR.

What is SAP Work Zone for HR?

SAP Work Zone for HR is not just for HR staff – it delivers a one-stop, intelligently personalised, and highly intuitive employee experience for every member of an enterprise. In short, its online portal makes working simpler, leading to increased engagement, higher productivity, and improved retention.

Through SAP Work Zone for HR, employees gain convenient access to applications, processes, and communication tools relevant to their position and duties. The unified entry point saves time by delivering smart recommendations and contextual guidance and eliminating the need to log in to several applications.

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Three timely benefits of SAP’s new internal online portal

Benefit 1: Empowering the intelligent enterprise

Not long ago, the idea of workforce automation sent shockwaves of terror through employees who feared for their job security. Organisations were reluctant, too, believing the adoption of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) would only serve to complicate workplace processes.

But as digitisation has accelerated, thanks in part to the pandemic, attitudes have flipped. Intelligence has become the modern-day enterprise’s competitive edge, fuelling both engagement and productivity.

SAP Work Zone for HR can further empower the intelligent enterprise with time- and resource-saving capabilities that minimise friction and maximise action. For one, employees are saved from the time-consuming task of finding, connecting, and logging into content and applications across disconnected systems. The unified entry point is accessible via a single sign-on, giving team members quick and easy access to the software and information they need to execute their core duties.

Of course, a single sign-on dashboard is only practical if employees have access beyond the four walls of their office; SAP Work Zone for HR is available on any device via the online portal.

Once logged in, employees are guided through a series of personalised context-based experiences that streamline processes – even those that stretch across departments. Simplified workflows reduce distraction and stress to foster engagement and a sense of personal accomplishment. Engaged employees are more productive and can lead to over 20 per cent increases in profits.

Benefit 2: Supporting communication and collaborate

Watercooler discussion and other moments of organic communication are less common in the remote world, but research suggests collaboration is key to unlocking teams’ peak performance. In one study, participants primed to collaborate worked on a given task for 64 per cent longer than individual peers working alone. Collaborating participants also reported higher engagement and success rates and lower levels of fatigue.

SAP Work Zone for HR empowers office and deskless employees – as well as contractors and consultants – to communicate and collaborate seamlessly and in real-time. Team leaders can build a communication practice that aligns with the company’s culture while ensuring every staff member has access to relevant, up-to-date information. HR can even send out enterprise-wide notifications without calling on the IT department, again saving time and ensuring the prompt delivery of essential information.

When it comes to intelligent software, customisation is critical. SAP Work Zone enables employees to create project- and team-specific workspaces and communities where they can share ideas, ask questions, and collaborate on tasks.

Benefit 3: Building workforce agility

In the new normal, successful workforces are agile workforces. According to research by McKinsey & Company, agile workplaces experience a 20 to 30 per cent boost in employee engagement and an up-to-30 per cent hike in customer experience. Still, more than one in four executives believe their organisation is not agile enough to survive future market shifts.

Employee learning is crucial to building workforce agility, and SAP Work Zone for HR helps make it easier. By providing fast access to dynamic learning resources and knowledge-sharing spaces, Work Zone pushes staff to grow their skillset and explore new perspectives.

What’s more, as marketplaces change, organisations are face-to-face critical skills gaps. SAP Work Zone for HR streamlines on- and off-boarding, minimising the time and financial resources required to train new staff.

Have questions? Reach out today

The genius of SAP Work Zone for HR is its employee-centric approach. Designed to boost engagement and productivity through seamless day-to-day experiences, the software allows team members to ‘get into the flow’ fast – and stay there.

If you have questions about this powerful new SAP product and its implementation, please don’t hesitate to contact our friendly team today. We’d be happy to provide personalised advice.

Flexibility is the new gold standard in modern work environments. The SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking moduleempowers employees and leaders with an intuitive, self-service time and attendance solution that enhances the employee experience, improves visibility, and minimises overheads.

The cloud-based solution gives organisations innovative, easy-to-use tools that record and monitor their workforce’s time with razor-sharp precision. Employees have peace of mind knowing they will be paid accurately and on time.

Let’s explore the game-changing functionality of the SuccessFactors Time Tracking module.

Introducing SuccessFactors Time Tracking

Today’s employees expect a favourable work-life balance, and businesses are benefiting from the increasingly globalised workforce. Remote and work-from-home arrangements allow employees to personalise their workdays and organisations to access exceptional talent nationally and abroad.

However, with more flexibility comes a new set of challenges – not to mention compliance risks and increased management demands. SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking solution aims to meet employee expectations while delivering insight into labour costs and alleviating pressure on administration.

Combining cloud-based technology, real-time data, mobile and desktop access, and leading-edge user experience, the SuccessFactors Time Tracking module supports:

Increased flexibility, thanks to:

• Built-in flextime capabilities 
• Advanced approvals for overtime, remote work, and travel expenses
• The ‘time off in lieu’ feature, which allows employees to choose between paid overtime or time off

Intuitive clock terminal integration, which enables:

• Employees to see working time and overtime calculations instantly
• Admins to view a specialised console to track time accurately
• Fast resolution of irregularities and disputes

Embedded analytics, which delivers:

• Insights built on predefined reports for internal stakeholders
• Potential risk areas related to productivity and overtime
• Identifications of attendance-related issues using predefined metric packs

Five benefits of SuccessFactors Time Tracking

Benefit 1: Deliver an exceptional employee experience

Almost half of all employed Australians work from home all or part of the time – flexible work arrangements are the new normal. SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking gives employees the tools they need to track their activities and ensure accurate and on-time payments that comply with local regulations. 

The cloud-based solution delivers anytime, anywhere access, ensuring workers can continue to track their hours in the office, at home, or while travelling.

Navigating the SuccessFactors Time Tracking module is straightforward, delivering the personalised and streamlined experience of a consumer-grade product.

Benefit 2: Maintain control over labour costs

Maximising productivity while minimising labour costs is a priority for many leaders competing in today’s competitive marketplaces. SuccessFactors Time Tracking equips managers and stakeholders with the real-time data they need to inform decision-making. 

Workforce-wide visibility gives leaders access to the following:

• Planned and recorded timesheets
• Time accounts
• Pay types
• Leave liabilities
• Productivity

Benefit 3: Mitigate compliance risk

The SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking solution was engineered to cater to both local and global operations, equipping leaders and administration staff with location-specific content like holidays and pay regulations.

What’s more, SuccessFactors Time Tracking can be configured to adhere to corporate agreements, premiums, overtime, break rules, and more. 

Benefit 4: Integrate seamlessly with your landscape

SuccessFactors Time Tracking integrates effortlessly with both SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central and SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll, as well as clock terminal integration services and on-premise payroll software from SAP. 

Prebuilt integration makes adoption quick and pain-free, allowing you to import data directly from third-party tools.

Benefit 5: Streamline administration and save valuable time

SuccessFactors Time Tracking module is packed with features that make administration easier and quicker:

• Smart time tracking allows HR to establish automated alerts that nudge employees to check their timesheets or clock out.
• Time alerts deliver live warnings, notifications, and error messages that enable admin staff to investigate and remedy issues. The result is lightning-fast resolution and minimal downtime.
• Alerts also keep admins in the loop regarding excessive overtime and other potentially malicious or fraudulent employee behaviour.
• Time valuation collates and delivers detailed, employee-specific valuations, which unpack the specifics of their individual time entries, including specialised calculations. Admin can then provide support and promptly and accurately answer any questions employees might have about their pay.
• Auto-approvals and mass-approvals – bolstered by automatic recalculations – speed up the payments process, benefiting both admins and employees.

Leverage next-gen time tracking on your journey to the cloud

The future is flexible, and flexibility demands the cloud.

Your ROI depends on your adoption of leading-edge technologies that empower your employees and simplify the management of an increasingly globalised workforce.

The SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking module is an intelligent and intuitive solution that delivers a streamlined user experience, time-saving features, risk mitigation, and real-time visibility across your organisation. The result: accurate and on-time payments that enable your business to provide its talent with the flexible work-life balance they crave.

If you’re ready to kick-start your integration, reach out today. Our friendly team of cloud experts are prepared to discuss your unique needs and design a tailored implementation roadmap.

Effective implementation is the foundation of every successful software deployment project. The more organised and thorough the process, the more empowered your business will be to leverage the full potential of your software.

For deploying SAP cloud applications such as SAP SuccessFactors and S/4HANA, SAP’s cloud-based ERP solution, your business, along with your implementation partner, can use SAP Activate, SAP’s powerful methodology for enabling agile SAP project implementation. It consists of three pillars: SAP Best Practices, guided configurations, and a six-phase implementation project lifecycle, and it’s an essential tool for ensuring a solution is properly configured for your needs and meets all of your business’s requirements.

Before we unpack the methodology, let’s explore why using SAP Activate is so important.

Why Use SAP Activate?

Whether your business is looking to deploy SAP cloud applications for the first time or you’re ready to migrate or upgrade to SAP cloud products, you’ll need to follow a series of steps and best practices to safely transition from project scope to going live.

With SAP Activate, you can minimise the risk of human error and experience seamless integrations with other SAP cloud software and third-party applications. Your SAP implementation partner will work with your teams through each stage, ensuring all deliverables are met and helping you take an agile approach, so your software is configured to best serve business goals.

How Is SAP Activate Different Than ASAP Methodology?

SAP Activate is the most advanced implementation and project management methodology for SAP customers. It builds on the foundations of ASAP methodology, which is commonly used to implement SAP on-premise solutions.

Because SAP is constantly evolving its products, it needed a more dynamic system to help customers take advantage of the huge and ever-evolving range of tech stacks, configurations, and destinations that are possible. With SAP Activate, customers can more easily modernise their software stack to suit business needs. It also includes explicit support for both waterfall and agile methods.

SAP Best Practices and Guided Configuration Content

SAP has created a library of accessible content and other tools to help SAP customers, and their SAP S/4 HANA and SuccessFactors implementation partners to support in the fulfilment of agreed project activities underpinned by the SAP Activate methodology.

• SAP Best Practices combines over 45 years of SAP’s industry-specific knowledge and experience with the most up-to-date best practices for integration, migration, and extensibility. It includes roles and responsibilities, standard test scripts, and business process flows. This is a cloud-based reference solution that you can use to access real-time updates to best practices.
• The guided configuration content includes administration tools, setup wizards, historical content, and how-to guides on product and implementation topics. The purpose of this pillar of the SAP Activate framework is to simplify the process of configuring your SAP system with a self-service configuration user experience.

What SAP Activate’s Six-Phase Implementation and Project Management Methodology Looks Like

The SAP S/4 HANA and SAP SuccessFactors implementation methodology consist of a six-phase project lifecycle. The six phases are:

• Discover – Define goals based on where your company is within its SAP journey. This phase involves technical research, which is conducted by your SAP SuccessFactors consulting partner.
• Prepare – Set up a project plan, which will draw upon details from the Discover phase, including your migration strategy and IT management approach.
• Explore – Refine business requirements, confirm businesses processes, review details and prepare for implementation and system conversion.
• Realise – Development environment build and test the configuration and migration process while finalising end-user training materials and documentation,
• Deploy – Setup the production system and IT infrastructure, migrate organisation data and complete all end-user training.
• Run – Make adjustments to system settings, configure new tools, and take other steps to fine-tune the software now that it’s deployed.

Within those phases, your teams will work with the main building blocks of the methodology: collections of related tasks referred to as streams. As you move through a specific stream, you’ll achieve one or more pre-determined deliverables.

The streams are then grouped into milestones known as Quality Gates or Q-Gates. Each Q-Gate marks the completion of one of the first five phases. The purpose of the Q-Gates is to give stakeholders the opportunity to evaluate the project’s progress and confirm that all deliverables have been met. Once this is done, the project moves on to the next phases. 

(image: Discovery Consulting)

Using an agile approach, your teams will follow a process of continuous innovation as you move through each stream and Q-Gate. This is why the SAP Activate methodology is so effective – your teams are constantly looking for ways to optimise the project so the software is configured in a way that will best serve your organisation.

Experience the Benefits of a Tailored Approach to SAP Activate

At Discovery Consulting, we use an end-to-end delivery approach for SAP cloud implementation. In addition to following the six phases outlined in the implementation and project management methodology, we enact our own steps in tandem with the six phases:

• Assessment
• Project Verification
• Solution Acceptance
• Readiness Acceptance
• Go-Live
• Solution Operability

We also use a specific suite of activities for legacy management, as well as for change management and benefits realisation. With additional project verification and solution acceptance steps, all tailored to your business’s objectives, we’re able to simplify implementation projects, helping you achieve more with your software and streamlining deployment.

Contact our team today to learn more about how our implementation roadmap can enable your organisation to get more out of SAP cloud products.

If you’re an existing SuccessFactors customer, you’ve likely stumbled upon the People Analytics, which launched in 2020. An evolution of Workforce Analytics, SAP SuccessFactors People Analytics delivers improved reporting and visualisation tools that empower a more insightful analysis of HR data.

In this article, we’ll break down the new SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics and Planning and detail what the update means for your reporting capabilities. This is People Analytics – simplified.

People Analytics and SAP Analytics Cloud: What’s the Difference?

When SuccessFactors first announced People Analytics, there was some confusion around the relationships between the software and SAP Analytics Cloud. The messaging from SuccessFactors suggested that SAP SuccessFactors People Analytics was moving to SAP Analytics Cloud – this is not the case

Reports in People Analytics and SAP Analytics Cloud are strictly not the same. Instead reports in People Analytics does utilise the SAP Analytics Cloud embedded edition.

Kim Lessley, SAP SuccessFactors Director, Solution Management, later addressed the confusion.

“We are embedding SAP Analytics Cloud technology within our SuccessFactors products,” Lessley said. “[That] means that customers will be able to leverage a lot of the SAP Analytics Cloud functionality without requiring a separate license for SAP Analytics Cloud.”

What Is SAP SuccessFactors People Analytics?

SAP SuccessFactors People Analytics is an HR analytics tool that amalgamates SuccessFactors’s reporting and analytics capabilities into three distinct solutions:

• Embedded – comes free with SAP SuccessFactors modules
• Advanced – requires licensing fees
• Planning – requires licensing fees

We’ll take a closer look at each edition below. First, here is a bite-sized overview of People Analytics’ key features and reporting updates:

(A quick note on terminology before we get started: a story is a type of report created in SAP SuccessFactors People Analytics.)

• People Analytics provides access to transaction data and workforce analysis using a single data model. This means you can create and share new fields from various modules across your SuccessFactors suite.
• Stories are better integrated with role-based permissions (RBP). This means you have more control over who sees reports and dashboards.
• The linked analysis feature enables visualisation components to be connected across stories. When viewing stories, People Analytics will automatically filter data according to the specific component values selected.
• The explorer feature allows you to modify charts by adjusting dimensions and measurements or adding and removing filters, awarding you greater control over your HR data.

People Analytics Embedded Edition

The embedded analytics functionality is included in all existing SAP SuccessFactors modules. Users are not required to pay an extra license fee, and it will not be visibly apparent that a new or extra solution has been added.

Embedded reporting and analytics enhance SuccessFactors in two ways:

• Back-end data models are unified to streamline the reporting process for end-users.
• Front-end visual tools are powered by SAP Analytics Cloud, simplifying the report creation and sharing process.

Enhanced and new visualisation capabilities give HR professionals access to more accurate predictive capabilities. What’s more, by adopting SAP Analytics Cloud, People Analytics is more closely linked to the SAP Intelligent Enterprise. Information that is typically isolated in HR is now more available and more relevant to the broader organisation.

People Analytics Advanced Edition

The advanced reporting edition represents the next iteration of Workforce Analytics and Planning functionality. Advanced is available to new and existing SuccessFactors customers via a separate license.

This edition is designed to translate pure transactional data into practical best practice measures. Advanced reporting achieves this within both the SAP HANA database – which all SuccessFactors customers already use – and SAP Analytics Cloud. SAP Analytics Cloud empowers cross-module data sharing by utilising a single data model.

The automated data integration offered by the advanced edition ensures data quality. Further, curated metrics and interactive analyses empower HR teams to define benchmarks and map future strategies.

Workforce Analytics did provide similar capabilities. The key difference lies within the updated visualisation and modelling functionalities offered exclusively by People Analytics.

People Analytics Planning Edition

Customers looking to leverage planning capabilities in People Analytics will be required to purchase both advanced and planning licenses – planning applies the metrics uncovered by the advanced solution.

In the planning edition, users will find dashboards for headcounts, diversity, and workforce supply-demand gaps. HR analytics encompasses more than people – People Analytics also provides financial modelling, business risk analysis, and strategic guidance.

Transitioning to People Analytics

Switching to People Analytics means gaining access to new reporting capabilities and connecting workforce data to your organisation’s overarching growth strategy. Preparing for that transition means taking preparatory steps to ensure a successful move without downtime; setting up role-based permissions, cleaning out outdated reports, and revisiting your HR strategy are just the beginning.

Boost your company’s capability today with SuccessFactors People Analytics, powered by SAP Analytics Cloud. Get in contact with the Discovery Consulting team today for personalised guidance.