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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.

The success of any corporate organisation ultimately depends on its employees. The more productive they are, the more innovative they are, the better your company’s chances at taking the lead in your industry. All things being equal, more innovation and more production drive revenue.

If your company culture doesn’t compensate innovative, productive employees for their efforts, costs rise – because employees won’t stay around in such an environment. Without a system to reward highly engaged employees, such as SuccessFactors’ compensation management module, your organisation runs the risk of losing them.

As employee engagement expert Michael Brenner points out, hiring new employees to replace disgruntled ones can increase costs anywhere from 30 to 400 per cent of each employee’s salary. SAP SuccessFactors’ Compensation module, along with its companion module, Succession & Development, can help align these employees with your business strategy through a pay-for-performance culture. Here’s how this module can benefit your organisation:

Take the Guesswork out of Employee Engagement

SAP SuccessFactors Compensation uses leading-edge forecasting and modelling capabilities to find the ‘sweet spot’ that keeps employee pay within your budget while tying employee compensation to bottom-line results. With this module, you can plug in your company objectives, the going rate for each role, and your yearly budget to arrive at bonus pay and long-term incentives (LTIPs) for those employees who help meet your objectives.

As your business goals and challenges shift with the changing times, you can adapt your compensation plan to ensure that you remain on budget. With all the factors that impact compensation already tied into the software’s algorithm, you can stay competitive with other possible offers yet never go over budget on performance-based pay.

Keep Up with Local Compensation Regulations

With SuccessFactors Compensation, corporate organisations can tailor their employee payment arrangements to country- or state-specific statutes. If your company, like so many these days, employs freelance or contract workers, the module can help you reward them for superb performance as well, regardless of where they reside.

Ensure Stability and Growth with SuccessFactors Succession & Career Development

Even with optimum employee engagement driven by rewarding outstanding performance, your organisation will lose a valued employee from time to time. Whether from illness, injury, retirement, or moving away, some employees will leave your company.

Like in sport, a winning business team needs a deep bench. When you take a proactive approach and provide for a ready backup workforce, you can ensure continuity and improvement among your teams.

SuccessFactors Succession & Career Development module can enable you to fill these essential spots quickly while providing your employees with the chance to advance their careers. This tool helps you create development plans with mentoring programs that train current employees to move into other roles seamlessly.

Not only does this module ease the succession process, but it can also provide automated recommendations for employees who have the potential to fill possible openings. Hiring from your in-house teams also helps you trim costs since you won’t need to go through the recruiting, hiring, and onboarding processes.

When your entry-level employees see the potential for advancement your organisation offers, they’ll be less likely to look for greener pastures with one of your competitors. Additionally, these opportunities will likely motivate them to boost their performance in their current role, making them more valuable even now.

Leverage the Power of SuccessFactors, the Single Platform Solution

Compensating superb performance and developing promising employees into better-paying, more challenging roles are two sides of the same coin. SuccessFactors’ developers created all its human capital management modules on a single platform to simplify human resources workflows, engage and provide career advancement for current employees, and have a seamless succession plan for employees who leave the organisation.

SuccessFactors modules share common data to best meet your organisation’s needs, giving your organisation a comprehensive approach to everything from recruitment to retirement. Before you get started with your SuccessFactors suite, though, make sure that you have all the documentation ready. Once you’ve inputted all the data, SuccessFactors will automate many of the tasks you once needed to perform manually.

Create rules that define the performance levels that qualify an employee for raises, bonuses, promotions, or other perks. If you include the Succession & Career Development module in your suite, define the criteria that identify promising employees in each department or field of interest.

Larger organisations might want to assign responsibility for promotions and other rewards to departmental heads rather than HR leadership. Since they are the ones who see their direct reports’ work every day, they are usually a better judge of what criteria constitute an outstanding performance.

Allowing specialists to be the final arbiter is even more essential for highly technical or creative teams since they have expertise in those areas. With SuccessFactors, you can grant them permission to access the files within their respective departments.

Finally, document your organisation’s compensation and succession workflows to ensure that everything works as it should within the tool’s automation feature. Once the system in place, it can save your HR team’s time while empowering your employees to perform at their best.

With a culture that rewards those employees who help meet your corporate goals, your organisation will rise to its potential and surpass its competitors. To get started with SuccessFactors Compensation and its companion module, Succession & Career Development, get in touch with the Discovery Consulting team today.