Interested in what’s new for Employee Central for H1 2021? There’s quite a few enhancements! In this quick blog we run through the major release updates that caught our attention the most.
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.
Qualtrics Integration
Increasing the integration between Qualtrics and SuccessFactors has been a priority for SAP – we’ve seen multiple integrations across modules and now there’s a few more for EC. SAP has added 4 email survey integrations based on intelligent services to trigger in the below events:
- Employee Rehire
- First Time Manager
- Transition from Individual Contributor to Manager
- Transition from Manager to Individual Contributor
These surveys can be very insightful to find out if employees are comfortable in their new roles and identify where they might need help!
BizX Talent Integration / Succession Data Model
Integration with the BizX Talent side of SuccessFactors has also been improved. In particular, SAP has made it possible to run a full HRIS sync (that pushes data from EC to BizX) based on individual user ids.
In addition, they’ve made it easier to view what the HRIS mapping looks like in the Manage Business Configuration Screen with an overview screen of all of the mappings in one location. Previously you had to dig through all of the fields individually to find this information! Check out the screenshot below:
Admins can also now export the Succession Data Model and Country/Region_specific Succession Data models from Admin Center (previously only partners could do this in provisioning). Simply give the new permission “Export Succession Data Model or Export Country-Specific Succession Data Model” permission and you’ll get access to the screen shown below:
These enhancements help make the integration between employee central and the talent modules more clear cut.
Business Rule Scenarios
Multiple new business rule scenarios are now available that allow you to:
- Configure cross-entity rules triggered from a source entity with changes executed on the target entity
- Calculate Full Time Equivalent for a user
- Create business validations / raise alert messages for HRIS elements
These enhancements contribute to the ongoing effort to increase the flexibility and robustness of business rules.
SAP Integration
If you sync your HRIS data with SAP, you’ll be happy to know there are 10 enhancements to this integration including:
- A comparison tool that compares configuration between EC instances
- An enhancement considering the purging status of ERP communication data while replicating employee communication data from EC
- The ability to select specific foundation objects by object ID ad choose log or list view when viewing the Foundation Object Transfer Report
- In Define Employee Data Settings for EC instance, the field names have been changes to “Standard Mapping (PERNR)” and “Standard Mapping (CP)” for clarity
- The Enhanced Work Schedule Rule Transfer Report was updated with a new BAdi to maintain the external code of work schedule rules
- Better data replication that considers purged data
- Replication of inactive employees that were terminated in EC before the full transmission start date
- Sample contract elements (IT0016) content
- Replication of OM data infotypes even when relationship data (IT1001) can’t be replicated
- Organizational assignment data that was marked as status “Failed” will change to “Outdated” once the next replication job runs
These enhancements help to make the interface more robust and reliable for customers wishing to replicate employee data to on-premise SAP.
Global Benefits
Enhancements and automations came to the global benefits functionality as well. Let’s take a quick look at these:
- When an employee has a job change that affects their benefits eligibility, this can now trigger an intelligent service event to create or update benefit enrollments
- When benefit master data changes, a new automatic enrollment job now exists to handle creating and updating enrollments
- A new pension / retirement savings plan type has been introduced called “Workplace” that offers additional contribution options
Once again, we see how the system continues to provide helpful automations and features to make this functionality more simple and robust to use.
Reporting
Custom fields are now allowed in story reports. The fields can be seen within the query designer.
Conclusion
The SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central product continues to grow and become increasingly more robust! This does not represent all of the enhancements in the H1 2021 release – only the highlights we found most compelling. Check out the What’s New Viewer here for the complete list of enhancements.
See this great article for useful information on how to prepare for a SAP SuccessFactors Regular Release.
Contact info@worklogix.com for any assistance supporting and implementing your SAP SuccessFactors Modules, or download our support services brochure.
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