The Source

Nov 28 2020

Create a Culture of Learning with SAP SuccessFactors Learning Management System

Business success ultimately depends on the skills and knowledge employees possess. Employee training is also essential for compliance reasons. Yet, facilitating a culture of learning isn’t easy without the right tools. The SAP SuccessFactors Learning Management System (LMS) module offers a next-generation solution for corporations that are ready to redefine the learning experience.

Why fostering a modern learning environment is a business priority

According to Deloitte’s 2019 Global Human Capital Trends report, 86 per cent of survey respondents believe that reinventing the way people learn is one of their organisation’s more pressing issues right now. The reality is, learning is becoming more integrated with work as companies tackle two long-standing challenges: the skills gap and compliance regulations. However, employers are struggling to cultivate an effective learning experience and to foster an authentic culture of learning.

In Australia, 78 per cent of CEOs believe not enough availability of key skills is a major threat to growth. When asked about the implications of the skills gap, 55 per cent of business leaders said it’s stopping their company from innovating efficiently and 44 per cent said it’s making it harder to meet growth targets.

Compliance training is a struggle for both employers and employees. Authors Hui Chen and Eugene Soltes sum up the problem well in a Harvard Business Review article – they explain that the costs of compliance don’t always justify the ends. The average multinational spends millions a year on compliance training, and this doesn’t account for the thousands of valuable employee hours consumed every year engaging in training and other compliance activities. Still, businesses don’t see clear benefits, while employees don’t appreciate having to complete “mindless training exercises.”

The key to successful employee training is to create a modern learning environment that engages employees, inspires curiosity, and makes managing compliance simple.

SAP SuccessFactors LMS delivers on all of these objectives, whilst at the same time redefining what’s possible when it comes to upskilling, reskilling, and maintaining compliance.

SuccessFactors LMS enables employees to succeed – and drives business growth

Turn employees into proactive learners with a learning management system purpose-built for engagement. SuccessFactors LMS takes training to a whole new level with machine learning-powered personalisation, accessibility, and clear paths to career development.

Curated training content can align with business goals. Offer courses and curricula to support organisational development, performance goals, as well as compliance needs.
Personalisation makes learning more effective. Employees receive personalised recommendations based on their goals, past training, and the learning of their peers.
Mobility lets employees learn from anywhere. Learners can access course content on any device or download for off-line use.
Give learners control over their development. With the ability to search and filter training content, employees can create learning paths tied to their career and skill development goals.

With SAP’s LMS, employees – as well as partners that sell or support your products – develop new skills and gain knowledge that’s necessary for growth. This can lead to a range of benefits, including faster innovation, greater resilience, and the ability to source talent from your in-house team for new roles and promotions.

It also boosts engagement. With quality career training that’s easily accessed, employees can pick up new skills to help them move ahead in their career. With the SuccessFactors LMS, employers also get a 360-degree view of employee training with complete learning histories, surveys, certificates of completion, and assigned goals. You’ll have more clarity over who’s ready to take on new challenges and what skill gaps persist at your organisation.

SuccessFactors takes the complexity out of compliance

There’s no one way to tackle compliance training. Legal mandates change regularly, and keeping employees up-to-date is a never-ending task. With SAP’s system, administrators can configure workflows and easily stay on top of compliance needs, even in highly-regulated industries. SAP Success Factors automates, simplifies, and ensures total peace of mind.

Customise training by group. Send specific learning assignments to different audiences, such as new employees or those who handle data directly and require updated training.
Reduce legal risk with faster training. Push mandatory recurring and one-time training assignment to learners quickly, ensuring employees are informed, and your obligations are met.
Save time and reduce administrative costs. All of this can be automated, which can dramatically cut down time spent on compliance management.
Gain important insights. SuccessFactors learning analytics offers detailed information on compliance training status and activities. Managers can use this information to stay on top of which employees need training and when.

Managing compliance training doesn’t need to be a headache for everyone. SAP has created a learning management system that makes it easier for employees, managers, and HR teams to tackle compliance efficiently.

A learning management system designed to empower modern corporations

In a compliance-heavy, high-tech world, corporations can’t move forward without a strong culture of learning. Give your stakeholders the tools that will enable them to thrive, and in the process, unleash your organisation’s potential.

Employee training doesn’t have to be challenging – contact us to get started with SuccessFactors LMS.

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.

Oct 02 2020

Key Resources for the SAP SuccessFactors 2H 2020 Release

The SuccessFactors second half (2H) 2020 release is scheduled for deployment in Preview data centres on 16th October and Production on 20th November. Finding the relevant information can be challenging at times, these are the key resources SAP provides, so make sure you have access to the SAP SuccessFactors Customer Community for all the information hot off the press.

This year SAP changed from a quarterly release schedule to a half yearly deployment schedule, which means a longer wait to receive goodies (i.e. enhancements, new features) but also more time for businesses to bed down each release before being managing another one.

The Road to Release Document – 2nd October 2020

This document is usually a high-level explanation of the release process more than actually giving away much of what’s coming out. It’s aimed at system administrators and includes the following key points:

Understanding the update process, e.g. the release and scheduled patches
Steps for administrators to prepare for the release, including using the What’s New Viewer tool, subscribing to useful newsletters, internal planning with key business resources, and activating and testing the release features.
A timeline of when the information and release is scheduled for delivery
Explanation of Universal versus Opt-In features

If you’ve been through releases before, there’s no real surprises here. This is mostly useful to understand the timelines of when certain information is available.

What’s New Viewer – 9th October 2020 at noon PDT

The What’s New Viewer is the one we all eagerly await, as this will explain every feature/update/fix that’s included in the release. It replaced the old Excel spreadsheet that used to be provided with a searchable, mobile-responsive view which can be filtered as well as exported.

You can use one or more of the following filters to narrow the list:

Filter Name	Description
Module (changed from Solution in 2H)	Use this filter to limit the release items to specific products or modules.
Feature (changed from Feature Group in 2H)	Use this filter to find release items related to a set of features within or across solutions.
Type	Use this filter if you want to look at release items based on whether they are a change or something new.
Availability	Use this filter to limit the release items based on their availability status.Release items with Full Availability are available to all customers, subject to their configuration type. Most release items are fully available.Release items with Limited Availability are only available to a subset of customers, usually because they require an additional agreement.
Major or Minor (new in 2H)	Use this filter to limit release items by their impact to your business.
Configuration Type	Use this filter to limit release items to those with a specific configuration type.
Software Version (new in 2H)	Use this filter to limit the release items to those in the release you’re adopting. By default, the viewer is pre-filtered to the current release. We keep older versions in the viewer so that you can go back and see all changes to a feature or module over time

The What’s New Viewer also includes:

Links to more information and resources
Indicates whether the feature is Universal or not
Which module/s it relates to
Short demo videos for some topics.

Recent updates to terminology help make the filters clearer as well as including a filter to differentiate between releases. For more detail and screenshots read this blog post i n the SuccessFactors Customer Community.

There’s a LOT of information to digest in the What’s New Viewer, so one of the services we offer our AMS support clients is to provide analysis of relevant features based on our knowledge of their system, to help highlight the most critical feature that may be of interest or resolve known issues.

Release Highlights Video & Document – 16th October 2020

This information includes high-level module summaries of what to expect, not a lot of detail, more a 1-pager executive summary per module.

Similarly there’s a short overview video and additional videos for some modules giving a taste of key changes.

Release Q&A Series Held – 1st-13th November 2020

This is the real gold right here! Make sure you pre-submit any questions you have about specific updates, Q&A Release Series Question Pre-Submission opens 12th October in the SuccessFactors Customer Community.

Customers can already register for the Q&A sessions and there’s APJ friendly times as well. There’s a different registration process for partners to follow via the SuccessFactors Partner Delivery Community.

What Can You Do Now?

Don’t have access to the SuccessFactors Customer Community? Get set up now!

To access the Community, an SAP-ID (S-user ID) OR a Universal ID linked to an S-user ID is required.
Your company’s user administrators manage S-user IDs and authorizations.
If you do not have an S-user ID, contact your company’s administrator to request an account without additional privileges.
If you do not know who your administrator is, please contact the SAP Customer Interaction Centre.

Then you can register for the Release Q&A Series webinars relevant to your modules.

What Can You Do Later?

Review the What’s New Viewer for your modules when it’s released to the customer community on 9th October 2020 to see what might benefit your organisation.
Run some regression tests in your Preview system before AND after the release is applied on 16th October, this gives you time to identify and raise any questions or issues that come up!
Activate any new upgrades or features you’d like to test further, in some cases you’ll need partner support if Provisioning changes are required.

Need Help?

If your business would like assistance to manage the on-going release cycle and ensure you’re getting the most out of your investment in your SuccessFactors system, get in touch to talk about our support and Health Check options.

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.