Blog

Oct 27 2020

How SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll Brings Simplicity to Global Payroll Management

Paying a global workforce is becoming increasingly complex. Payroll administrators have to balance compliance requirements for multiple locations and shifting workforce trends, all whilst ensuring fast, accurate, and safe payments. Without an efficient and flexible solution, your corporation faces rising payroll processing costs and lower engagement. Your HR department also misses out on the opportunity to build trust with employees through this vital touchpoint.

SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll enables global organisations to take payroll administration to the next level. An innovative cloud-based solution, SAP’s payroll system brings together all payroll processes on a single platform with embedded localisation for over 40 countries. It’s a next-generation solution that offers consistency, reduced costs, and a better user experience.

What Employee Central Payroll does

Employee Central Payroll (ECP) is the payroll module of SAP SuccessFactors Core HR. It’s an innovative payroll platform used by corporations located in Australia and all over the world.

An out-of-the-box solution with leading-edge capabilities, organisations can count on accurate, timely payroll no matter how diverse or complex the workforce. This is because ECP offers important advantages for global companies.

Sap Successfactors Employee Central Payroll

Flexibility and scalability

The reality is, there’s no one-size-fits-all payment model today. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic shook up global business operations, demand for alternative payment options was on the rise. A 2019 report on the Evolution of Pay found that over three-fourths of employers believe offering customised payment options can make them more competitive when trying to attract talent, and 62 per cent of employees cite off-cycle pay options as a worthwhile consideration when comparing job offers.

With SAP’s payroll solutions, you can standardise payroll processes across your entire organisation and adjust processes to meet changing needs and expectations. Actions that are challenging to implement with other platforms are simple with Employee Central Payroll. Retroactive and off-cycle payments are built into the system, and it’s possible to create custom or temporary paycheck processes as needed.

As a cloud-based system, ECP is fully scalable and can grow with you. Also, your organisation can enjoy disruption-free innovation as SAP updates the software periodically. These updates are automatic and don’t require any downtime.

Minimal errors with real-time monitoring

Payroll errors are traditionally time-consuming and expensive. They can also erode employee trust. Employee Central Payroll’s forward-thinking design practically eliminates mistakes with real-time payroll monitoring.

Unlike software that relies on batch-style processing where large amounts of data are processed in batches, the SAP SuccessFactors payroll module uses continuous payroll processing. As a result, payroll administrators can use real-time analytics and alerts to identify when they need to address a potential error.

This proactive response model can reduce occurrences of double data and other inaccuracies, ensuring employees are paid on time and for the correct amount. This gives the payroll department greater confidence that the correct payments are being sent out. It also saves time. Instead of digging through error logs every time there is a discrepancy, payroll staff can quickly resolve errors in the queue before they become a problem. As SAP includes clear and accessible event records, they can also easily view past actions instead of having to create Microsoft Excel lookups to find payroll-related errors.

Streamlined global payments

In the digital era, HR departments have to develop effective processes for managing data privacy laws. For HR and payroll teams of global corporations, this can be an overwhelming task as different locations have their own laws and regulations.

SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll eliminates a lot of the complexity and manual work with built-in localisation. It automatically complies with local regulations and data privacy laws. Localised tax calculations ensure you’re compliant no matter what region employees live in. The software currently supports payroll processing in dozens of countries, offering useful features including local currencies, languages, time zones, and a calendar with national holidays.

Full integration

Enjoy full integration with SAP’s SuccessFactors Core HR, which includes time management, recruitment, time and attendance, and workforce management. Align payroll processes with HR and create customised workflows to save time and increase efficiencies. ECP also integrates with third-party apps that are maintained by SAP partners such as SpinifexIT Easy Reporter and PCC Accelerator.

A payroll system designed to increase agility

With Employee Central Payroll, your HR and payroll administrators can build out processes that align seamlessly with your organisation’s unique needs.

Cutting-edge features, including organisational charts, inline comments, audit histories, and flexible workflows help to reduce error and increase transparency, while real-time processing capabilities ensure consistent, accurate paycheck processing. With global payroll out-of-the-box, your organisation can have total peace of mind that payroll is effective, no matter how large or dynamic your workforce. And supported integration enables customisation, empowering HR to create efficient solutions to problems and respond to evolving expectations with ease.

To unlock the incredible efficiency and benefits Employee Central Payroll offers, get in touch with our team today.

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.

Aug 27 2020

Lessons Learnt from Implementing SuccessFactors Onboarding 2.0

When I started implementing SuccessFactors Onboarding 2.0 late in 2019 it was very new, only just General Availability and no customers were live as yet. There were definitely a few speed bumps as consultants and customers navigated through this new product! Here’s what I learnt along the way, which I hope will make for a smoother transition for other customers.

Adopt Standard System Processes, Rather Than Customising the System

Be willing to adopt rather than adapt the system. Instead of trying to implement multiple complex processes with the current limitations – keep it simple. The product isn’t at full parity with Onboarding 1.0 as yet and more features and functionality will continue to be rolled out.

When I started to implement Onboarding 2.0 late last year I was very fortunate to have a client who was both flexible and willing to change their processes so they could adopt the standard functionality Onboarding 2.0 provides.

Given the product was so new at that stage, this was really critical to the success of the implementation, and the approach I’d still urge clients to follow. There’s more growth to come in how much we can customise the system to suit individual needs, so be open to starting with a standard process and building out from there.

As an example, to include compliance forms and features (currently only available for Australia and the UK, with some US support planned for release in 2H 2020) you need to use the standard-delivered process variant. The next release will provide enhanced support to tailor processes to your needs while still supporting compliance features.

This will give more flexibility to have multiple processes configured for different scenarios, such as removing the “New Recruit Data Review” validation step at the beginning of the process. This step kicks off the onboardee paperwork and tasks but is really just a validation of the same information already provided, we could streamline the process by removing a potential bottleneck while waiting on a user to action a step that may not add much value.

Less Mapping But Less Flexibility

With Onboarding 1.0 we configure data mapping from Recruiting to Onboarding, then Onboarding to Employee Central, making the data flow slightly more complex and with more effort involved.

In Onboarding 2.0 we map directly from Recruiting to Employee Central, but with the simplification comes less flexibility. The Onboarding data model is configured using the same system functionality as adding contingent worker, apprentice, or other types of employees.

But it’s ONE data model for ALL onboardees.

While Onboarding 1.0 doesn’t support hire of contingent workers either, it did provide more flexibility to define separate onboarding workflows for each type of employee – the limitation being that they all end up in Manage Pending Recruits to be hired as employees.

For some customers this option works fine if they aren’t using Contingent Workforce functionality. For others Discovery has previously implemented a custom development at the end of the Onboarding process to hire contractors in “Add Contingent Worker” rather than an employee hire.

Now we have one set of data that can be captured for all Onboardees, with no capability to show/hide fields, or to include/exclude sections depending on the employee type. This becomes a problem when you consider that you then have National ID, Bank Details, etc included for contractors; information which isn’t usually required for these types of staff.

Support for contingent workers and other employee types is a critical improvement I’d like to see on the Roadmap for release soon, so customers can seamlessly manage all recruits via an integrated recruiting and onboarding process.

Custom Data Collection & Reporting

With Onboarding 2.0 we can create custom data collection objects to capture information from onboardees in addition to the key hire-related data included in the personal paperwork step, such as uniform requirements. This works well to cater for non-standard data scenarios, however, the data captured is only available via:

Reporting in People Analytics Embedded Edition
By mapping into a custom form which is only accessible in Document Management
With a custom extract using APIs or Integration Centre, adding extra effort to the project

Ideally this information would be visible in the Employee File after completion of the Onboarding process, but a system limitation prevents this currently. The next best solution is standard system reporting capability, and to do this you will need People Analytics Embedded Edition.

PAEE is the latest suite-wide reporting and insights tool being rolled out for SuccessFactors, which has a prerequisite of SAP Cloud Identity Authentication (IAS and IPS). If you haven’t already upgraded to these features it’s worth considering as part of your implementation, while the Onboarding/Offboarding Dashboards provide an overview of activities, you won’t get in-depth analysis of your processes.

Notifications & Form Requirements

Onboarding 2.0 delivers “Email Services”, a standard set of notification triggers and preconfigured templates. While it’s nice to have standard content available as a starting point, most customer requirements will include the use of standard and custom tokens (data already captured during the process), attachments to notifications, ability to send to external email addresses, and more flexibility in triggers; none of which are currently available.

Again, this is an adopt rather than adapt approach, while we wait for the product to develop. It looks like attachment support for notifications is expected in the next release and I hope a few more nice surprises here too.

In some scenarios we can work around these limitations, e.g. attachments, by providing documents to the onboardee in a custom homepage tile for easy access. We can also provide policies and documents for review and signature during the paperwork process. SAP’s standard eSignature or integration with DocuSign provides online signature support.

Consider how many policies/forms are required to be included in this step, as the more data to be mapped and the more forms required, adds extra effort to the project.

Existing SuccessFactors Employee Central Customers

For customers already using SuccessFactors Employee Central, factor in time to review and update existing permissions and business rules. One of the big improvements of Onboarding 2.0 is that it utilises platform business rules rather than “advanced conditions” and role-based permissions, rather than the current syncing process for Onboarding 1.0.

This provides much more granularity and consistency in role-based permissions, as well as making it easier for client system admins to maintain, but with that comes more complexity in getting it right. Existing roles need to be updated to ensure that we aren’t giving too much access, or not enough, and that they work in conjunction with any new Onboarding permissions.

Business rules also need to be reviewed. Where we might be validating certain data fields on save when adding a new employee, these same rules will be triggered during onboarding steps and may need tweaking.

Benefits and Upcoming Improvements

What customers will gain from implementing Onboarding 2.0 is:

A user interface and experience more consistent with the rest of the suite
Tighter integration with Employee Central, which should only continue to improve with subsequent releases
Simplified approach with no need for user, permission, and foundation data syncs; use of To Do tile tasks; capability to map standard foundation objects such as Division, Department, Cost Centre, Location from Recruiting.
Improved Offboarding process with new tasks including Knowledge Transfer Plans
On/Offboarding Dashboards to view all tasks in one place and flexibility in assigning those tasks to different user groups, unlike Onboarding 1.0
All UI screens built to be mobile-responsive
SuccessFactors Employee Central and Recruiting modules aren’t prerequisites, integration with third-party systems managed by either SAP CPI or SuccessFactors Integration Center, using SuccessFactors OData API (EC mini-master IS required).

As well as expected fixes and improvements to business rule support and crossboarding processes, the current roadmap for the 2H 2020 release includes the following:

Attachment support for Email Services
Ability to generate person id with EC business rules; currently does not comply with customer requirements for different number ranges
Support for creating custom processes with compliance steps, enabling steps to be skipped or reordered
US compliance support for US Federal (W-4) and state withholding forms, restricted availability for I-9

With future releases it seems unlikely that Onboarding 1.0 will continue to experience much growth, while getting in on the ground floor with Onboarding 2.0 will be the key to gaining benefits from new features.

Final Thoughts

Onboarding 1.0 has no confirmed end-of-support date currently, it’s not going anywhere just yet and compliance updates will continue to be implemented.
Onboarding 1.0 and 2.0 can be run in a hybrid approach, existing customers could implement 2.0 for Australian employees only, with the remainder of countries continuing to be processed with 1.0.
Capability to utilise migration tools is proposed for late 2021, if you’re ready now – don’t wait.

Aug 13 2020

SAP CPI and SAP SuccessFactors Monitoring EP02: The one where CPI writes logs to Execution Manager

This blog post originally appeared in the SAP Community on 12/08/2020.

Discovery Consulting was recently involved in the global SAP SuccessFactors Implementation Design Principles (IDP) workshop on SAP SuccessFactors Integration patterns. Our practice of logging the results of SAP CPI iFlows into SAP SuccessFactors Execution Manager was picked up by the group as a potential SAP recommended best practice! Hopefully, we will see something come out from SAP in the future around this. However, whilst we wait for that to happen – here’s some details about how we at Discovery use this integration best practice to help our clients support their SAP SuccessFactors instances and be better equipped to deal with issues if and when they occur.

This post is targeted at an audience of SAP Cloud Integration developers and the SAP SuccessFactors administrator that they work with. It is a quite technical post and gives some great detail on the solutions that we use with our customers.

Firstly, a little background. Too often in the past I have seen support calls from customers about SAP SuccessFactors to/from SAP ERP (and other systems) integrations and a request to “find out what went wrong.” Many/most of these issues could be solved if only the SAP SuccessFactors administrators had access to any error/success messages that the integrations were producing. The aim of these blogs is to show how easy it is to incorporate logging to SAP SuccessFactors Execution Manager into all your SAP CPI integrations so that admins and developers have a simple way to monitor all SAP SuccessFactors integrations.

This post is the second in a series about this logging – you can read the first post which gives some details about the Execution Manager and using OData APIs to update it here:

SAP CPI and Successfactors Monitoring EP01: The one with the Execution Manager Dashboard

Enough background – on with the show!

From my first post we, hopefully, now have an idea of how easy it is to log information into the Execution Manager Dashboard in SAP SuccessFactors. It is now time to put our knowledge to use. As Dale Carnegie once said,

“Knowledge isn’t power until it’s applied.“,

It’s time for us to finally go ahead and see a bigger picture of how exactly we can harness the Execution Manager to our advantage. In this post, I’ll be focusing on how I implemented the Execution Manager in SAP Cloud Platform Integration iFlow.

Bird’s eye view of the implementation

This implementation consists of an iFlow and a simple reusable groovy script to generate EMEvent payload groovy script. Just to make things a bit modular here, I broke the iFlow into the following integration processes:

Main integration process,
Few local integration processes for the following:
2.1 populating demo data(in external parameters and body) to imitate the process of generating data to be posted to Execution Manager Dashboard, and
2.2 sending data to Execution Manager Dashboard using HTTP adapter
a separate local integration process for exception handling, and
a groovy script to generate EMEvent payload to be sent to Execution Manager Dashboard in SAP SuccessFactors.

Now before I get into the details, I would like to quote an expression by Tess Flanders in 1911 that fits here perfectly,

“Use a picture. It’s worth a thousand words“.

So here, I share with you how exactly the implementation looks like when it is ready to log everything we need in the Execution Manager Dashboard **drumrolls**

Fig.1: iFlow to log data in Execution Manager Dashboard

Digging into the iFlow

Now let’s see what’s really happening here in the iFlow above (I’ll try explaining things in the order I’ve mentioned above).

1. Main Integration Process

Fig.2: Main integration process

a) In this example, every execution of the main integration process logs 3 separate events into the execution manager dashboard, i.e. START – data/error/warning/failure (you can log as many events representing these between a START and END event) – END :Initializing the external properties for EMEvent payload. Here’s what the ‘initialize properties’ step looks like. I have included a sample payload to log a single event from my previous post and how it maps to the properties initialized.

Fig.3: Properties defined for EMEvent and EMMonitoredProcess payload

note: The EMMonitoredProcess payload needs to remain the same, as a single execution of the iFlow represents a process in Execution manager. All the events logged under a single process are clubbed together enclosed within a ‘START’ and an ‘END’ event.

b) Once the properties are initialized, the properties for the EMEvent payload needs to be changed for every event we wish to log. The most important one here is the ‘event_type’ property as it decides the type of event logged into the execution manager. So, the next step here is to change the event_type in a content modifier to ‘START’ as we initially need to log a START event.

c) The next step in line is to log the data that matters in the form of multiple events showing data that is required to be presented in the Execution Manager Dashboard. That is where the ‘log data’ step comes in, which triggers the Log data integration process mentioned in the next section. This integration process can be used to fire multiple events as the iFlow carries on its execution. In this case, the iFlow is designed to log a single event of the type INFO to represent a portion of information.

d) Once, all the data/error/warnings have been logged during the execution, there is another enclosing event that needs to be logged. You guessed it right, END event it is 🙂

If we fail to log the END event for a process, the process in all would have an ‘IN_PROGRESS’ state rather than the expected ‘COMPLETED’ state (please refer to my previous blog if you need a reference to different scenarios and the final process state for each).

2. Local Integration Processes

2.1 Log Data integration process

Fig.4: Generating data to log

This local integration flow is to represent a process/set of processes that execute during the lifecycle of an integration flow where the iFlow does what it is actually designed to do (pick data from source A, transform, write into destination B). This could be a single local integration flow, or a set of flows to get your job done. This is where we log the events depending on what data is really required by the business.

2.2 Execution Manager Logger integration process

Fig.5: Generating and logging payload to Execution Manager Dashboard

This local integration flow is principally responsible for 2 tasks:

Executing a script which generates a payload to log an event by using the external properties and body populated by components before this integration process is called.

Firing a HTTP call to SAP SuccessFactors Execution Manager Dashboard to log the event.

3. Global Exception Handler

Fig.6: Handling errors and exceptions

While working on the solution, there were times when the iFlow during its execution ran into errors such as errors with the script, HTTP connection issues, etc. that caused the iFlow to fail. But how does that impact our logging and why should we care?
As mentioned before, it is important to log an ‘END’ event for every execution to ensure the EMMonitoredProcess does not end up in a ‘IN_PROGRESS’ state even when the actual execution of the iFlow has stopped/failed.

Therefore, this local integration process is to take care of all the errors/exceptions/failures that occur during the execution and ensuring that proper error messages are logged in to the Execution Manager, followed by an ‘END’ event.

4. EMEvent payload generating groovy script

As simple as it should be, this script picks up data from the external properties and populates them into one single JSON payload consisting of an EMEvent and an EMMonitoringProcess.

Script 1: Generating EMEvent payload

*disclaimer: Script provided for discussion purposes only, any attempt to use this script or a variation of it in your own integrations is at your own risk. No fitness for use in any particular purpose is, or should be, implied.**

**this said, some of our experienced technical team would be more than happy to help you work with this framework to build out the best solutions for your SAP SuccessFactors instances if you’d like us work with you!

Reaping the results

Just for the sake of demonstration, I have considered executing the iFlow 4 times, once for each ‘event_type’ and its impact on the ‘final process state’ of the EMMonitoredProcess/execution as mentioned below.

Use Case Scenario	final Process State
Use Case A: event 1- START event 2- INFO event 3- END	COMPLETED_SUCCESSFULLY
Use Case B: event 1- START event 2- ERROR event 3- END	COMPLETED_WITH_ERRORS
Use Case C: event 1- START event 2- WARNING event 3- END	COMPLETED_WITH_WARNINGS
Use Case D: event 1- START event 2- INFO event 3- FAILED	FAILED

Table 1: EMEvent use case scenarios and their impact on final process state

And this is how the scenarios look like when executed one after the other:

Fig.7: Execution Manager Dashboard after logging the events

But how do I debug this? How do I trace a Process/execution back to the message in CPI?

If you scroll back up to Fig.3 and look at the EMMonitoredProcess payload, you will notice an attribute called ‘processInstanceId’. Process Instance ID as the name suggests, is to uniquely identify a single execution/process which clubs together several events under it.
But don’t we have something similar in SAP CPI to identify a particular execution of an artifact/iFlow?

As mentioned in the Developer’s Guide (2020), every message that travels across in an iFlow has a few header fields by default which has information about the iFlow/artifact they belong to. One such header field is ‘SAP_MessageProcessingLogID’ which uniquely identifies a particular message/execution of the iFlow and can be found under the Label MessageID in CPI’s ‘Monitor Message Processing’ page.

Let me show you below, how the ‘processInstanceId’ external property that we populated with the field ‘SAP_MessageProcessingLogID’ in CPI can be correlated with Execution Manager Dashboard’s ‘Process Instance ID’.

Fig.8: Mapping an EMMonitoredProcess to an execution in SAP CPI

Conclusion

With everything in place, I hope you can see how this is an effective and relatively simple way to standardize the monitoring of integration flows in SAP CPI for an SAP SuccessFactors admin. It does this in a way that collates all the integrations associated with your SAP SuccessFactors instance in a single place to enable the developers and admins to monitor everything from a single dashboard.

This not only helps the developers but the business users who need to check the overall performance of the Integrations without having to access SAP CPI and learn how to navigate that platform as well as SAP SuccessFactors.

That’s all Folks!

I hope that you enjoyed these posts. I’d like to thank my colleagues and their collective efforts for helping me pull these together. It’s great to work with a team that continues to innovate, extend and make SuccessFactors integration as easy to use as possible for all our customers.

Thanks for your time!

References

Developer’s Guide, 2020. Developer’s Guide: Managing Integration Content. [Online]
Available at: help.sap.com
[Accessed 11-08-2020].