Employee Central

1.Features in EC and how does this help HR improve the HRO process.

SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central, the next-generation core HR system (HRIS) is designed for the global enterprise workforce. It is delivered securely via the SAP SuccessFactors cloud, which is serving more than 27 million users.

Following are features of EC:

1. One global system of record: It has effective-dated entries across geographies, cost centers, legal entities, and employee types.
2. Complete workforce data: It provides combined HR and talent data, thus resulting in comprehensive employee profile.
3. Powerful analytics: It correlates workforce data with financials, CRM, and other data for actionable insights.
4. Social collaboration: It optimizes workforce productivity and accelerate innovation.
5. Seamless integration: It easily connects with on-premises or cloud-based apps like ERP, time and attendance, and benefits.
6. Continuous innovation: Cloud-delivered enhancements are provided 4x per year, with no additional cost or disruption.

 

Most of today’s HRIS solutions are merely for record keeping without any business impact. They prevent companies from making workforce decisions based on a 360-degree view of the employee. They also have primitive analytics capabilities which provide minimal insights into the workforce and there is no support for workforce planning.

 

The most of Core HR systems available today are made for super-users and specialists. These systems requires extensive training and results in low adoption. Also, the on premise Core HR solutions available today are expensive to implement and maintain.  There is a little room available for innovation, and are difficult to upgrade.

 

The SuccessFactors Employee Central not only provides comprehensive, integrated Core HR capabilities but it is also supports business execution. By providing seamless integration with talent, Employee Central provides the ability to make more impactful workforce decisions. By using complete employee profile, talent, and core HR information, companies are able to make more well-informed people decisions by setting goals aligned with employee strengths and interests, promotion, and development driven by a complete view of the employee, and effective onboarding, among others.

 

Employee Central helps HR measure the workforce- business results link, and make decisions that impact financials by having all workforce data in one place and support for financial and operational data from external systems. It also provides simple reporting tools, 2000+ built-in metrics, benchmarks for any company, and support for trending and drilled- down analyses.

 

Employee Central enables employees to leverage their talent, Core HR, and personal profile data to collaborate on business goals. It provides intuitive tools to form groups, network, and share knowledge around common goals, interests, projects, work experience, locations, etc. It is an enterprise-grade Core HR solution driven by effective dated entities. It provides support for any combination of business units, geos, or cost centers to model and manage any workforce. It enables HR to quickly implement any job structure without code, spreadsheets, or offline processes. It also supports any pay structure enabling companies to vary pay by geo, job class, grade, or legal entities. It also facilitates reporting and industry compliance by making sure all user actions are saved and easily accessible through point-in- time reporting and easy audit trail reports.

 

Specific to core HR transactions, it reduces errors in self-service and boosts adoption through innovations such as built-in wizards, smart business rules, org charts, inline comments, audit history, and flexible workflows. It provides Seamless Integration between Employee Central and any system including payroll, benefits, ERP, and time management solutions. Its cloud-based integration platform enables enterprise-class, fast, and cost-effective integration. Also, SuccessFactors’ partnership with leading payroll providers further accelerates integration through the use of pre-built connectors. Thus, Employee Central is a pure SaaS-based solution with a much lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than on premise core HR solutions — customers have seen up to 3X lower TCO over five years. Also, it easily scales as business needs expand while delivering constant innovation without disruption.

2. Compare Features of EC and SAP HCM and note differences   
    EC is a Successfactors cloud based, SaaS Core HR system whereas SAP
HCM is an on premise solution for HR.

Following features are in EC but not in SAP HCM:

• Glocalization – One of the biggest advantage of Employee Central is that it serves as the global system of records. It provides localization for 71 countries and 37 languages which includes country specific company and job fields, validation and dropdown values, localized regulatory and compliance reporting, advances and deductions, global assignments, global benefits, etc.
• Self-Services – Employee Central offers built-in, both ESS (Employee Self Services) and MSS (Manager Self Services) without any need to provide separate portal to provide these features to employees.
• Data Quality and Consistency – Data quality and consistency is guaranteed by the use of picklists, rules, data propagation, event derivation and association so that correct values are selected and validated ensures that data selections are validated.
• Integration – SAP provides several packaged integrations and standard integration templates to integrate EC with SAP ERP, SAP Cloud applications and third party applications. Customers can use the open integration platform provided by Dell Boomi Atomsphere to integrate with Time and Attendance, Benefits, and Payroll.
• Mobility – By the functionality provided in the Successfactors HCM Mobile applications, EC helps to facilitate mobility. The Successfactors HCM mobile application is not only free but it does not require additional infrastructure setup and easy to download and setup.
• Mass Changes – Administrators can create mass data changes such as organization changes, job relationship changes etc..
• Position Management– This allows one to manage the use of positions in employee central. This allows to store and track position attributes such as regular, part-time, job description etc., enable positions to inherit attributes from the assigned job code tec.
• Time Off and Absence Management– This allows companies to manage their employees planned time-off or leave of absence. The time-off request can be created via browser, mobile or tablet.
• MetaData Framework – SuccessFactors new MDF framework allows to create, modify, and maintain objects, screens and business rules.

Reference –

• SuccessFactors with SAP ERP HCM

 

3. Compare features of EC and Workday, note which is better
The SuccessFactors platform was not developed organically, but by the integration of several bits and pieces acquired either by SuccessFactors or SAP. So, it is not a true SaaS offering as it can be deployed in-house or in the cloud, whereas a SaaS system can be deployed only in the cloud. Second, SuccessFactors has to develop its own payroll module. Currently, it is relying on interfacing to SAP’s traditional, on-premises payroll, currently known as, Employee Central Payroll. SAP Successfactors is a leader in Talent Management suite as per Gartner’s 2015 Magic Quadrant report.

 

Workday is a true SaaS environment (single codeline, all customers on the same release, no customization but configuration, several releases per year). Workday is based on next-generation technology (object and in-memory) with a great user experience, mobile friendly; robust functionality; and covering all HR domains. Workday is stronger in the HR administration and payroll segment than in the talent space. It has a new product for Recruitment. However, Workday needs to improve products such as time tracking to allow for more complex scheduling functionality. Currently, its payroll products supports only U.S, Canada and France.

 

Although Workday is better than SAP Successfactors, customer satisfaction is higher with SAP Successfactors than with Workday.