Highlights of SAP Successfactors Performance Management for 2H 2025

Learn what’s currently available for the latest Performance and Goal Management with the 2H 2025 SAP SuccessFactors Release.

Preview release was on October 13 and production will be released November 14-16.

For greater details, 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.

For tips on how to manage a release, check out our blog here. 

The SAP SuccessFactors 2H 2025 release focuses on enhancing the user experience and leveraging AI.  For your convenience, we’ve summarized the highlights of what’s new for the second half of 2025 release for Performance Management below.

Performance Management

Replacement of Legacy Performance Management Form Experience with Latest Experience

The latest experience of Performance Management forms is replacing the legacy one, which will reach end of development on November 14, 2025 and will be deleted on November 20, 2026.

The latest experience was automatically enabled in the Preview environment for customers using the latest Goal Management in the 1H 2025 release. This is not the case in the Production environment, the latest experience wasn’t enabled by default.

The latest experience has the key features in the legacy version with an enhanced user experience, a more flexible layout, more business rule scenarios, and generative AI features if the AI user license is purchased.

Enhancements to Latest Experience of Performance Management Forms

Some of the new features now available:

• EZ rater
• Goal comments and learning activities available when printing form
• Forms can be printed in custom layout
• “Print” button available for form snapshot
• Additional fields are available on side panel: unofficial rating, expected rating, rating gap
• Goal status colors display in form (if configured)
• Help text added for rating field for competency with behaviors
• Warning message to appear if proxy user does not have access to missing form content
• Read only forms will not show action buttons

Mass Route Ungrouped Forms to a Specific Step

Using the “Route Form” action, forms may be mass routed to a specific step when they are using the same template and route map. In the past, only a group of forms from the same launch could be mass routed, not forms across launches for the same template.

Within the “Route Form” action, search for the forms by specifying the template or uploading form IDs. In the search results, select the forms you wish to move

Once the forms are selected, they can be mass routed using the Move the form to a specific step option in the “Select An Action” step of the routing process.

Enhanced AI-Assisted Writing in Performance Management

With the purchase of the AI units license, the AI-assisted writing actions, Generate Comments and Improve My Feedback are now available for goals, as well as skills, competencies, and behaviors.

When a goal is assigned a rating, users can access the two actions in the comment box for that goal, from the context menu of the AI-assisted writing tool.

New Business Rules

There are some new business rules that may be configured when using the latest experience for Performance Management:

• Conditional Field Visibility, Editability, Required/Optional
  • Create business rules to set specific form fields to visible or hidden, editable or read-only, and required or optional, when certain conditions are met
  • Creating conditional rules provide flexibility to show form fields differently based on user input. For example, a manager giving a certain rating would require a comment

• Add Review Steps upon Form Routing
  • Business rules may be configured to add steps to the Modify stage of the form based on meeting certain conditions. For example, a certain rating by a manager can trigger an additional step to add another reviewer to the process.
  • These steps are pre-configured in route maps and marked as Hidden Until Rule Execution. When the conditions defined in the rule are met, and the form with a hidden step is being routed forward, the rule is executed, making the step visible on the form.
  • All step types are supported

Add link to People Profile Card View from Performance form

Links can be configured to the latest People Profile cards in the form template when the full profile of the latest People Profile is enabled.

In the Manage Templates admin tool, you can use the new configuration “[[CARDLINK|<cardId>|<displayName>]]” in the description section of a field to a add card link to a form template.

This allows the ability to link to a card in the latest People Profile when working within an employee’s form where they can view and edit the profile.

Card links to add include: badges, tags, goals, performance history, nominations, calibration history, trend information.

Access to Manage Templates to update, download and edit XML templates

A great new feature allows templates to be downloaded, viewed, edited and added via “Manage Templates”. This removes the need to use Provisioning to update the form template XML.

This permission is applicable to performance form templates, 360 form templates, goal plan templates, and development goal plan templates. You can download templates and view template revisions without any configurations.

This does require an update to a role’s role-based permission to a upload new templates and update existing ones. Care should be given to users that will receive this access.

Once the role has permission to upload and update XML templates, the user can upload new templates, update existing templates, view historical XML and download the templates via Manage Templates.

Goal Management

Here are some of the highlights of updates for Goal Management.

Purge Goals by Goal ID

The admin tool, Data Retention Management, has been used for data purge requests. For goal management, it has been used to purge performance and development goals by selecting the goal plan template in the purge request. This meant the process purged goal data for a specific user’s goal plan, and not just purging a single goal on the plan.

Now there is greater flexibility in purging user performance and development goals. In the latest version, the “Purge method” lists two options for purging goals: Purge by goal plan template and the new Purge by goal ID.

To purge specific goals, use the “Purge by goal ID” purge method. You can download the sample CSV file to get the proper file columns.

You will need to populate a CSV file with the goal ids. Goal IDs can be found by creating a goal management ad hoc report that lists the goal plan template goal name, goal owner and the goal ID.

Once the goals to be purged are identified, add the goal IDs to the CSV file and upload to the purge request.

The existing method, to purge by goal plan template will purge all data associated with the template.

Import Goals for Target Population

Within a role based permission role, in the Administrator Permissions section>Manage Goals, there is now an option to specify a target population to import goals for.

Previously, a role having permission to import goals would be able to import goals for any active users.

Now if attempting to import goals for users outside their target population, there would be an error message in the goal import email notification.

Minor Goal Management Enhancements

There are some minor goal management enhancements in this release which streamline the goal management experience for users.

• For the confirmation message and button label in the confirmation dialog for Edit Performance Goal, Create Performance Goal, Edit Team Goal, Create Team Goal, Edit Development Goal, and Create Development Goal pages. the confirmation dialog was “Are you sure you want to discard the changes?”, and the corresponding button label was “Keep Going”.
  • This has now changed to “If you’ve made any changes, they won’t be saved. Are you sure you want to discard them?” and the “Keep Going” label is changed to “Cancel”.

• On the Goals landing page, the warning messages for goal number and weight limits are now displayed as message strips. This highlights to users the defined limits of goal number and total goal weight.

• On the Goals landing page, the goal filter component no longer uses status colors

• Assigning Team Goals – users can select all loaded goals during the goal selection step in the Assign Team Goal and Cascade Goal dialogs. The number of goals is now increased to 100 from 20, and the checkbox is renamed “Select All Loaded Goals”

• Update to Sharing, Unsharing Team Goals – users with the Share Team Goals permission can now share and unshare team goals with anyone in the organization

• A more user friendly error message displays when saving goal plan template, it shows the cause of the error and provides a solution

• Consistency in use of “More”: on the Goals landing page and Manage Team Goals page, the button label “More” is changed to “Show More “

360 Reviews

Here are some notable updates for 360 Reviews.

Add Link to Detailed 360 Report in Email Notifications

A link can be added to the Detailed 360 Report in the “360 Document Complete Notification” email template by using a new tag [[PM360_DETAILED_REPORT_URL]].

When this tag is added to the 360 Document Complete Notification email template, users have immediate access to Detailed 360 Reports from their email.

How the tag is rendered depends on whether the option Enable HTML email notifications is selected in Company System and Logo Settings:

• If selected, the tag appears as a clickable phrase: Detailed 360 Report for {subject user’s full name}.
• If not selected, it’s resolved as a clickable URL, preceded by an introductory text: For an overview of raters’ feedback, view {URL}.

New switch to hide Radar Charts on 360 Detailed Reports

In the Advanced Settings for a 360 template in Manage Templates, there is a new option to hide radar charts on the Detailed 360 Report. The switch “Hide Radar Charts on Detailed 360 Report” is turned off by default.

Minor 360 Review Enhancements

There are new visual and functional enhancements in this release.

• The spacing of Competency and Objective sections have been improved
• When adding back deleted participants during the Evaluation stage, participant’s original category information is retained and pre-filled in the Add Participants dialog
• The Suggestions for Improvement section in Assisted 360 Reviews Insights now includes links to generate development goals
• Error messages now explain the issue and provide troubleshooting.when users open, send, save, or perform other actions on a form
• Information about behaviors (names, descriptions, ratings) is now used as input for generating comments

Multiple Review Reminders for Upcoming 360 Review Steps

You can now schedule several reminder notifications to prompt participants before a 360 review step is due.

In Manage Templates, in the Advanced Settings for a 360 template, there is a new option, “Series Due Notification Dates (days before due date)“. Using this option enables you to schedule multiple reminders when using step due notifications for the template.

You may set a series of reminders before a step due date. Simply enter the number of days prior to the step due date to define how many days in advance reminders are sent. Separate each number of days with a comma.

Using this option overrides any settings for the existing option Default Due Notification Date (in days), which supports only a single reminder.

To learn more, see the full set of documentation in the What’s New Viewer here.

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