As I mentioned in my introduction, Employee Central received many updates with the ability to configure New Hire in Manage Pending Hires being one that I expect will be very well received. In addition, the Address Validation-as-a-Service is now available for the United States (to add to Belgium, Brazil, Germany and Netherlands) – I’m sure many other countries will be delighted when this address validation service reaches them too!
Another area there is (and will be more) innovation in, is the new Time Tracking application that works alongside Employee Central (replacing/enhancing the previous EC Time Sheet functionality). In recent times, SuccessFactors has tripled the Product Management engineering capacity for Time. With this initial release there are improvements in the timesheet capability with a new UI, cross midnight handling and single-entry approval so that elements of the timesheet can be approved individually. There is also a clock terminal integration service. Customers can expect much more over the next two years including mobile punch clock, improved alerts, pre-approval of overtime, monthly timesheet, advanced time allocation and temporary work schedule enhancements.
If you’ve read several of our articles in this release series, you’ll have probably noticed that there are again further touchpoints between HXM processes and Qualtrics to gather experience data in Offboarding, Calibration, Mentoring, EC Service Centre (on closing a ticket) and Compensation. Planned for H2 2021 are opportunities for surveys to be initiated from Recruiting (Interview), Learning (item completion), Talent Pools and the reimagined Home Page.
Recently, SAP announced an extended partnership with Microsoft around integrating MS Teams. You might recall that MS rolled out SAP SuccessFactors across their 109 countries to 230,000 employees a few years ago. Recently Christian Klein (CEO, SAP SE) and Satya Nadella (CEO, Microsoft) announced an expansion of the existing partnership to integrate Microsoft Teams across SAP’s solutions. In SuccessFactors, I’m told it will offer new ways for staff to share knowledge and learn skills. As a daily user of both Teams and SuccessFactors (within Zalaris), I look forward to hearing more details soon. But with the H1 2021 release, you can already see further SuccessFactors & Microsoft integration with the implementation of a “Customer Community Idea” (from Feb 2019) to enable the ability to provide feedback directly from MS Outlook directly – there have been some issues getting this ready for Preview release in April, but hopefully all will be resolved for the Production release this month.
In my introduction, I mentioned the “Health and Vaccine Status Tracking Block/Portlet in SuccessFactors People Profile”. The solution also includes a Report Story dashboard (SAP Analytics Cloud); it is great to see the use of a Report Story here. The H1 2021 release has also made Learning data available in report stories and the Workforce Analytics solution can now be used as a data source inside SAP Analytics Cloud to provide pre-aggregated data for planning scenarios. Just in the last few months at Zalaris we’ve been rolling out our initial report stories (on core HR data) for managers and they look great.
Each release I also try to highlight a valuable resource that should be of interest to customers; this release I wanted to highlight “Innovation Alerts”. Innovation Alert communications are a supplement to typical release communications and provide information on feature/functionality deprecation or migration to a next-generation feature/functionality/solution. Examples include IE 11 browser support ending, Workforce Planning entering Maintenance mode or the migration to Admin Alerts 2.0. With each item, you can find out the important information, dates and actions required. SAP are also usually pretty good at communicating directly to affected customers (i.e. if you have a feature activated that is being deprecated, they will identify affected customers and notify you directly). If you have SuccessFactors system responsibility then check it out (forewarned is forearmed)!
Until Next Time …
I hope you have enjoyed our series of posts on the 1H 2021 release of SAP SuccessFactors. If you haven’t read the other posts yet, I encourage you to go back and see which areas spark your interest. Also, please keep an eye on our website and our social media accounts on LinkedIn or Twitter for this release’s eBook covering all the articles – it will be free to download, and you are welcome to share it with your colleagues.
I want to take the opportunity to thank my #teamZalaris colleagues across the world for their hard work in bringing you their insights. I also hope that the broader SAP SuccessFactors community has found them useful too. We would love to hear your feedback! (by email or via our social channels on Twitter and LinkedIn).
If you are interested in SAP SuccessFactors and our expertise across Scandinavia, Germany, Poland, Baltics, UK & Ireland, please reach out to us via our contact page or by email, and we look forward to speaking with you soon.
Preview instances of SuccessFactors were updated on 16th April 2021, and the production instances are due to be updated on 21st May 2021.
We will be back later this year, in November, for the H2 2021 update with more analysis.