It’s that time of year! As of April 9, 2021, SAP has released the documentation for the H1 2021 release. The preview release will be April 16 and the move to production will be May 21st. You can view the full set of documentation in the What’s New Viewer here. For full details on the release cycle, check out the SAP SuccessFactors official product updates blog here. New to the release process? For tips on how to manage a release, check out our blog here.
In the SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding H1 2021 release, we’ve mainly seen updates to compliance forms and processes as well as some user experience enhancements and security Features. Let’s take a look at what’s new in the Onboarding module below!
Compliance Forms & Processes
As expected, SAP continues to expand the number of compliance forms supported. In this release SAP has included these forms:
- TD1 forms for Canada
- Pennsylvania Residency Certificate for the USA
- E-Verify for the USA has also been released for early adopters. You can check out the full details on E-Verify here: https://help.sap.com/viewer/c94ed5fcb5fe4e0281f396556743812c/2105/en-US/f5342606aaf34351943af48ed680295a.html
- USA I-9 form features have been enhanced to allow for data correction in sections 1 and 2, reverifying employment authorization in section 3 and allowing remote data collection workflow to gather employment eligibility information. You can get more information on I-9 here: https://help.sap.com/viewer/c94ed5fcb5fe4e0281f396556743812c/2105/en-US/d9e6b7923a9049a6a742f13d05b28d5a.html
In addition, reporting information is also now available for I-9 and E-Verify data so that you can create Stories in in People Analytics using the information.
Also important on the compliance front: Russian Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data will also now be stored in the Russian data center from Day 1. For more details, take a look at the help guide here: https://help.sap.com/viewer/c94ed5fcb5fe4e0281f396556743812c/2105/en-US/d9e6b7923a9049a6a742f13d05b28d5a.html
User Experience
In addition to compliance features, there’s some nice enhancements to user experience. Of all the modules, I think onboarding is one of the more confusing to navigate as an admin user and these enhancements help address this issue. Let’s take a look!
First, users can now navigate directly to the onboarding dashboard from the global navigation (early adoption feature). I personally liked this one because when I first started with Onboarding, I was used to the main page of every module being accessible through the navigation menu – onboarding was the only one where you had to click on a home page tile instead. I think this will provide some nice consistency for users.
In addition to easier navigation to the dashboard, its features have also been enhanced. Here’s a list of the new feaures:
- New Hire Search – allows onboarding users to type a name to search through new hires
- Checklist Task – can now be viewed under “New Hire Tasks”, items can be added for a specific user using the “Delegated” drop down (delegates can also be notified via email when the task is assigned to them), and under “View Details” users can edit the checklist tasks,
- I-9 – corrections to section 1 can now be initiated from the “New Hire Details” action menu
- E-Verify – view details from the “E-Verify Case Details” link on the “New Hire Details” screen
Its great to see the dashboard getting some new features to make transitioning between screens easier!
Next, the locale for external users of Onboarding will now be updated automatically based on their recruiting settings. This is a common sense win. Locale can also be set when manually adding users via the “Add New Hire to Onboarding” screen. If no value is specified in either scenario, the locale will default to the default language set in provisioning.
Security Features
In addition to compliance enhancements and improvements to usability, there’s a few cool security features worth mentioning.
First, the target population for the external user target population can now be based on the division, department, and location of the user. This allows organizations to have multiple admins specific to division, department, and/or location rather than just admins who can see the whole new user population.
Next, on the new hire side, the external user visibility tool lets you make objects visible to new hires. This gives a level of flexibility to administrators they previously had to contact SAP to modify. For a full list of objects and how to configure, check out this link: https://help.sap.com/viewer/c94ed5fcb5fe4e0281f396556743812c/2105/en-US/5df8a72caabf4848a145b74f0516cff8.html
Last, read access audit logs for onboarding have been enhanced to show context and reason why sensitive fields were accessed (e.g. through the UI, or APIs, or a downloaded document). This is designed to give auditors better understanding of why data was accessed.
Wrap up
I hope you’ve enjoyed this quick review of the latest Onboarding features available in the H1 2021 release! Do you need help managing your SuccessFactors Release cycles? Download our support services brochure or email info@worklogix.com to see how we can help!
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