Conclusion
Tonight the 2H 2021 release will be applied to all the SuccessFactors production instances, so I hope you have found something, if not many things, in our series of posts this week that will help you utilise the recent innovations.
Looking back over 2021, there has been a marked increase in the overall volume of updates compared to 2020. Employee Central and, to a lesser extent, Platform, Learning and Compensation, have all seen increases in updates, whereas Recruiting, Succession, Performance & Goals and Onboarding have all slowed slightly. Along the way, there have been more universal updates and fewer updates needing action from customers to take advantage of; hopefully, that is good news for most customers.
As the SuccessFactors HXM suite grows and SAP continue to innovate, we have seen new terminology appear in the release notes; Work Zone for HR, Opportunity Marketplace and SAP Litmos, for example.
Looking forward, what can we expect in 2022?
- In Foundation, I think there is still plenty being said about the “new” Home Page. I also hope to see further consolidation in “foundation” data for managing talent – skills, competencies, aspirations, jobs, etc. In my view, this is an area that seems overly confusing to HR teams. It is also precisely this type of data that underpins the Opportunity Marketplace feature. Look out for more information on SAP’s “Centre of Capabilities” in 2022, which is part of Platform/Foundation (i.e. no separate subscription cost – hooray!). You can gain some additional insight on this from its SAP News release.
- Time Tracking is a hive of activity, with a dozen updates this time around. I expect to see that really ramp up in 2022 although SAP acknowledge that it will take a while to reach feature parity with SAP HCM Time Management – a solution that a lot of customers heavily utilise, and is core to some industries.
- For Onboarding, the focus will undoubtedly remain on ensuring feature parity with the previous version (ONB 1.0) and providing migration tools (known to be planned for 2H-2022).
- Work Zone for HR is fast establishing itself, even winning a top HR product of the year award recently. I expect to see this continue to evolve including enhanced integrations with Employee Central Service Center.
- In Learning, we will see more “experience” features being built out with Work Zone to complete with the surge in popularity of Learning Experience Platforms (LXP) and continuing to drive forward SAP’s vision of Human Experience Management (HXM).
I wish each of you the best for the months ahead. Stay safe and we will be back next year, in May, for the 1H 2022 update with more analysis and insights.
Until Next Time
I hope you have enjoyed our series of posts on the 2H 2021 release of SAP SuccessFactors. If you have not read the other posts yet, I encourage you to go back and see which areas spark your interest. Furthermore, 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.
Twice a year my colleagues across the world at #teamZalaris rise to the challenge of bringing you their insights on the updates to SAP SuccessFactors. I thank them all for their efforts as authors, reviewers, topic experts and in supporting the process internally to enable us to publish. It really is a team effort involving dozens of people. I also hope that the broader SAP SuccessFactors community has also found them useful. We would love to hear your feedback! (by email or via our social channels on LinkedIn or Twitter).
If you are interested in SAP SuccessFactors and our expertise across Scandinavia, Germany, Switzerland, Poland, Baltics, France, UK & Ireland, then please reach out to us via our contact page or by email, and we look forward to speaking with you soon.
For 2H 2021, Preview instances of SuccessFactors were updated on 15th October 2021, and the production instances are due to be updated on 19th November 2021.