What’s New in SuccessFactors Onboarding 2.0 H2 2022

SAP has announced the latest updates and changes for SuccessFactors for the second half of 2022.

Preview release was on October 28 and production will be released December 9th. 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.

For your convenience, we’ve summarized the highlights of what’s new for 2H 2022 Onboarding 2.0 below.

New Hire Enhancements

New Hires got enhancements to their email notifications. Welcome emails will now get sent after completing the New Hire Data review step if the onboarding process is restarted after onboarding initiation but before New Hire Data Review. Before the email never got sent in this scenario (oops!) There’s also new tokens for Legal Entity and Position available for email notifications.

There’s also now a new guided experience for onboarding in SuccessFactors Work Zone. Admins can configure an experience based on the 3 phases of “Before Your First Day”, “Your First Day”, and “Your First Three Months”.

Hiring Manager / Admin Enhancements

The Onboarding Dashboard (New) has been improved with multiple new UI enhancements. For example you can now view contact information of new hires and hiring managers by clicking the business card icons next to their names. Also, notification badges now let you more easily scan how many tasks you have for a particular category. The status shown for each onboarding task is now an interactive button that can take you to the task details page to complete the task. Also, instead of a “View Details” button for each row of data, there is now a > which takes you to the task details page.

Admins can also now preview what a new hire’s data will look like in a form by using a new “Document Template Mapping Preview” MDF object. This allows you to better troubleshoot issues with the onboarding user’s data. You can see in the screenshot below that the incoming data shows as an XML to further help troubleshoot this data:

The UI of the Onboarding General Settings screen and how responsible groups work got enhancements as well. Now, all responsible groups can be displayed – when more than 10 groups are created a “More” option appears to view the extras. Responsible groups can now also be searched by ID or name and sorted by name. Up to 200 people from roles, static users, or dynamic groups can be added to a single responsible group.

Country Specific / Compliance Form Updates

There continues to been large numbers of compliance form updates in the system – so many in fact that SAP will stop tracking these individually in the What’s New Viewer. You can now look these up in a new location here: https://help.sap.com/docs/SAP_SUCCESSFACTORS_ONBOARDING/d099b9437bda4e8aa965c3591c282d83/88a5dd3b98e34ea9ab28e27d2c4362ee.html

It is also important to note that DocuSign has switch to OAuth – so if you use DocuSign for Onboarding or recruiting, you’ll need to update your authentication method (no more basic authentication!). Do this before March 31, 2023!

Croatian Currency will change to the Euro on January 1, 2023

General Process Enhancements / Behind The Scenes Enhancements

At its core, an onboarding system is designed to streamline the onboarding process and make sure accurate data is flowing into the HRIS and other systems to that the new employee’s onboarding and day 1 experience is successful, productive, and easy. We can definitely seem some enhancements that speak to this greater goal in this release!

One helpful process enhancement is that when you complete the New Hire Data Review, it no longer triggers the follow up processes in position such as adapt hierarchy, adapt the to-be-hired status on the position, reclassify or transfer positions, and job relationship sync. Instead this only occurs after hire completion in manage pending hires. I can see where this makes more sense to push down stream in the process and will help data integrity – you generally wouldn’t want to make these kinds of changes until the actual hire (e.g. avoids situations where you’ve changed position data and the person is a no show or the hire is never finally made).

Another helpful process change is that you can now rehire with old employment data within the manage pending hires tool. This is setup for admin users by adding the corresponding permission to their permission role(s).

Data validation also got multiple enhancements. For example, the onChange and onSave events in Employee Central can now access Employment_Info, Comp_Info, Job_Relations_Info, Pay_Component_Recurring, and Pay_Component_NonRecurring. This is great for example if someone is crossboarding and needs to update these entities and trigger subsequent system actions. Another example is that redundant job relationship entries when the job relationship is passed from recruiting to onboarding. You also no longer have to pass dummy data from Recruiting to Onboarding in order to retain original values for dates like original start date, hire date, service date, etc. Country-specific field mappings can also now occur when data is passed from recruiting to onboarding. All of these new data integrity enhancements are activated by turning on the “Enable Enhanced Internal Hire Process” switch on the “Onboarding General Settings” screen.

Cancelling an onboarding process also got simplified. The errors shown when a cancellation is requested are more clear now and less permissions are required in order to be able to cancel (e.g. previously this required OData permissions).

The ability to rehire using old employment data is now generally available (was previously just an early adopter feature).

Integrations / APIs

There is a new helpful field called “isRehireOnOldEmployment” in the createOnboardee OData API function import. The idea is that this field identifies if the person is a rehire so that the system tries to find the old employment record which will then be activated. By exposing this to the apis it allows external ATS systems to use the rehire functionality and not just SuccessFactors Recruiting.

There’s also a new getUserNameOfNewlyHiredEmployee API that gets the username of the of the onboarding new hire. This is a great function in my opinion! Many times the benefit of an onboarding system is that it can allow a new username to be setup and shared across systems so that access to multiple systems is ready to go on day one. Given that the HRIS system is often the system of record for the username, it makes a lot of sense to use this API to provision users across multiple third party systems.

Conclusion

The SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding product continues to grow and become increasingly more robust! This does not represent all of the enhancements in the H2 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.

SAP SuccessFactors 2H 2022 What’s New in Succession and Career Development

SAP has announced the latest updates and changes for SuccessFactors for the second half of 2022.

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

For your convenience, we’ve summarized the highlights of what’s new for 2H 2022 Succession and Career Development below.

Succession

On the Succession side of the house, the Succession Org Chart and position tiles received a functional enhancement to now be able to show the Job Title, Job Level, and Department in the header of the position tile. The options to turn these on is in the Org Chart Configuration screen in admin tools.

Enhancements to Calibration

There have been multiple enhancements to calibration sessions that impact Performance as well as Succession and Development. Specifically, you can now remove subjects from all calibration sessions where before you could only remove from inactive or setup statuses.

Additionally, there’s been enhancements to the enforcement of distribution guidelines so that more guidelines enforcement scenarios are supported when more than one session is finalized at a time. Specifically, you can now include more than one rating in the guideline, you can use operators other than “=”, and not all ratings may have a guideline. Before, these were only supported when you finalized sessions individually.

Reporting

Multiple new options are available in reporting on the Succession and development modules as well. The Career Worksheet is now available in Story Reports.

Mentoring data is also available now for Story Reports and Cross Domain Table Reports. This can be helpful for example if you wanted to cross domains of employee profile with mentoring to see which departments have mentors and mentees and which do not.

Career Development

SAP continues to catch up the old features of the old development module with the new look and feel.

Development Goals

For example, you can now copy goals from an old plan again. The comments feature is also now available in the latest goal management on the goal details page. In addition to Development Goals, this feature is also available for performance and 360 forms. To use this, you must add the comments field in the XML.

Career Worksheet and Career Explorer

The Career Worksheet now visually shows the gaps between target and actual competency levels for a role.

The career explorer is also generally available now with AI powered recommendations. It provides a hierarchy career path that allows for recommendations the employee may not have thought of pursuing based on career moves of people similar to them and/or roles from outside their hierarchy. The feature can also be a data source for the new opportunity marketplace.

You can also see why the system made such recommendations:

Mentoring

You can now add Country/Region as a matching category criteria for mentors and mentees. This option comes available so long as you have the country/region standard field setup in your data model.

Wrap Up

We have now covered the highlights of the Succession and Career Development related updates for 2H 2022.

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!

SAP SuccessFactors Platform H1 2022 Release Updates

SAP has announced the latest updates and changes for SuccessFactors for the first half of 2022.

Preview release was on April 15 and production will be released May 20. 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.

For your convenience, we’ve summarized the highlights of what’s new in the 1H 2022 Platform release below.

Overview

SAP continues to invest in numerous updates into the platform, topping most of the other modules for the past few releases. Due to the large number of updates (89 in this release!), we’ve highlighted only some of the most significant changes below. We’ve categorized the updates based on who the affected audience for each change: User Experience Updates, Admin Updates, and System Updates.

User Experience

SAP continues to remind customers that the Universal release of the Latest Homepage will be in June 3rd for preview and June 24th for production environments. If you haven’t reviewed the changes and opted-in, you should do so now and plan your communication strategy so your users aren’t caught wondering why their homepage changed!

SAP also continues to add more quick actions to the latest homepage, thus increase its usefulness as a quick way to access needed areas of the system without having to click through navigation. The actions added include “Candidate Talent Pools”, “Learning Administration”, “Mobile Activation”, “View Company Documents”, and “View Tile Reports”. The homepage also now allows for grouping of custom cards within the Organizational Updates section as seen in the screenshot below:

Screenshot of Card Groupings within the Organizational Updates Section

You can also see an example of the new half sized custom cards in the screenshot above.

There are also various updates to the opportunity marketplace including allowing Assignment offer approvals, allowing assignment owners to see descriptions of capabilities including proficiency levels when creating assignments and applicants to see their own capability details. The capability picker also got updates you can read about in our blog here: https://worklogix.blog/2022/04/17/sap-successfactors-1h-2022-whats-new-in-succession-and-career-development/

The org chart also got a nice update where you can change the order of direct reports below a manager. Check out the configuration steps here: https://help.sap.com/doc/62fddbd651204629b46bbccbabf886ba/cloud/en-US/780a0273693342c79ded9930b9057110.html

You can also now turn on a data privacy consent form for uploading photos that is shown to users as in the example screenshot below:

Screenshot of data privacy consent message for employee photos

Also related to photos- you can now have just one photo for a person on global assignment with multiple employments.

After many years of service, quickcards have finally got an upgrade across the system. This gives a better look and feel consistent across the platform. An example is shown below:

Admin Updates

Do you still love to use the old admin page like me? I’m sorry to say the nostalgic use of the OneAdmin page will end on May 20th this year. Time to start using the NextGen admin page.

SAP also continues to increase the list of jobs available to monitor in the Scheduled Job Manager. You can check out the list of jobs here: https://help.sap.com/doc/62fddbd651204629b46bbccbabf886ba/cloud/en-US/55e3deb65bf14190b102ff7ad1f803fc.html

Are you an admin that loves unstucking stuck workflows or resolving HR data issues? You might be interested in the new custom fields you can add to admin alerts! Check out the list here: https://help.sap.com/doc/62fddbd651204629b46bbccbabf886ba/cloud/en-US/055e9cd78d2543d283fd556cbca2132d.html You can also now see the name of the current approver for stalled workflows within admin alerts.

If you are a security or compliance admin, you’ll be happy to know you can now perform read and change audit reports on multiple users for up to 30 days now. The storage limit has also been increased from 1GB to 10GB.

The still evolving transport system in SuccessFactors also got an enhancement in the form of Bundle Management in Configuration Center. You can now create bundles, edit them, and even share them with others! Checkout the screenshot below:

New Bundle Management Feature Screenshot

There’s also now a handy import history report available for download in the Configuration Center as well!

The Check tool has now been integrated into the instance refresh too. Admins will now get an email that includes a summary of check tool results when a refresh is processed and can also download an error log. The list of items the check tool checks has also been updated. The detailed list can be found here: https://help.sap.com/doc/62fddbd651204629b46bbccbabf886ba/cloud/en-US/354e3d1428d8493d89dfb7487e5dcedf.html

Security admins will also be glad there’s a new potentially neck-saving notification when they change a role that impacts a large number of users. Don’t worry – you can select the threshold of users so you aren’t getting unwanted pop-ups! Checkout the configuration steps here: https://help.sap.com/doc/62fddbd651204629b46bbccbabf886ba/cloud/en-US/c7b923c87ca3494c8416349431fa8a49.html

The RBP admin screen also got a new facelift! You have the option to turn this one on by selecting the option on the old screen. Check it out below!

System Updates

Access to APIs based on HTTP Basic Authentication will no longer be supported on November 17 2023. This gives customers about a year and a half to adapt any existing interfaces that log on to the APIs directly to OAuth 2.0.

The APIs will now also start to be throttled. Probably a smart move on the part of SAP to keep system stability, but but news if you have interfaces that make lots of calls. Don’t worry – the limit is now 40 requests per second so you’d have to be doing A LOT of calls to be affected.

The APIs have also been enhanced with more linking between a variety of entities. Check the main What’s New Viewer page for specifics.

Wrap Up

We have now covered the Platform update highlights for 1H 2022! SAP continues to invest greatly in the platform to expand the overall capabilities of the system, concentrating on consistent and enhanced user experience while giving admins more helpful tools.

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!

SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding H1 2022 Release updates

Photo by Longxiang Qian: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-people-boarding-airliner-1710482/

SAP has announced the latest updates and changes for SuccessFactors for the first half of 2022.

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

For your convenience, we’ve summarized the highlights of what’s new for 1H 2022 Onboarding below.

Overview

In this update we see SAP continuing to streamline the onboarding experience. From helpful to-do tasks and a few features that help smooth out the rehire process, SAP continues to pay more attention to details now that the latest onboarding product has begun to stabilize. We’ve divided up the new functionality in the latest release into 3 sections based on who is using the system and their visibility to the updates: “Onboarding Experience”, “Admin Updates”, and “System Updates”.

Onboarding Experience

In this section, we cover updates that are visible to new hires /rehires/managers/HR or affect their perceived onboarding experience. First, the Latest Home Page now shows 3 cards in the “For You Today” section relevant for Onboarding Tasks. The cards are “Data Review”, “Manager Activities” and “Compliance”. An example is shown below:

Example of 3 cards in the “For You Today” section of the Latest Home Page

Within the “Data Review” card, users will see the “Review New Hire Data”, “Review Offboarding Data” and “Complete Rehire Verification” tasks. Within the “Compliance” card, users will see the “Complete Form I-9” and “Complete Form I-9 Signature” tasks. Within the “Manager Activities” card, users will see the “Set Goals for New Hires”, “Recommend Links for New Hires”, “Write Welcome Message”, “Assign a Buddy”, “Schedule Onboarding Meetings”, “Recommend People for New Hires”, “Prepare for New Hire’s Day 1″, Update New Hire’s Day 1 Locations”, “Request Equipment for New Hires” and “E-Sign Employee Documents” tasks for Onboarding. Also within the “Manager Activities card, users will see the “Announce Termination to Coworkers”, “Write Farewell Message”, “Create Knowledge Transfer Plan”, “Complete Knowledge Transfer”, “List Assets to Return”, “Schedule Offboarding Meetings”, “Track Return of Assets”, and “E-Sign Employee Documents” tasks related to Offboarding. This allows for quick access for managers and employees/new hires to complete their needed tasks.

Last, external hires can now also authenticate using IAS before day 1. This allows for a more consistent login experience between onboarding and when they are a full employee. You can read through the exact configuration requirements here: https://help.sap.com/doc/62fddbd651204629b46bbccbabf886ba/cloud/en-US/736b4c0e36fd46108cc6313c88a57722.html

Admin Updates

In this section, we cover those updates most relevant to system or HR admins. First is an update to the rehire process. Rehire can be a painful process if you don’t catch the fact that someone is a rehire during the recruiting and onboarding process. Not identifying a rehire properly can lead to miscalculation of benefits, giving away new hire bonuses unjustly, or even hiring blacklisted candidates mistakenly. This functionality helps fix just that problem! Now, when you use onboarding with SAP SuccessFactors recruiting, the system can automatically choose matching profiles as shown in the screenshot below.

Image of Employment Record Match and Selection during Onboarding Process

This feature can be turned on using the switch on the “Onboarding General Settings” page as shown in the screenshot below:

Onboarding General Settings Page showing where Rehire Settings can be updated

You will also need to make sure you have the needed permissions and configuration settings listed here: https://help.sap.com/doc/62fddbd651204629b46bbccbabf886ba/cloud/en-US/58849ff3c0a44d6a991c22ec5df52abb.html

Additionally on the latest home page, users can now view an onboarding guide that includes onboarding meetings organized by their managers and orientation meetings organized by their HR admins.

Screenshot of “For You Today” section on the Latest Home Page as well as View Onboarding Meetings within Your Onboarding Guide

There also now more compliance forms available for end users to fill out including the Starter Checklist for the Welch locale for the UK, the CC-305 Voluntary Self-Identification of Disability for the USA, DR 0004 Colorado Employee Withholding Certificate for the USA, and the WI – 221 Nonresident Military Spouse Withholding Exemption for the USA.

System Updates

In this section, we briefly cover items that the system handles automatically or are less visible to general users and admins. First, with the SAP Master Data Integration, workforce integration now replicates rehired employees only after manage pending hire is completed (before manage pending hire didn’t have to be completed). This allows for better data integrity so that only needed employees are sent to SAP Master data.

Secondly, the Compliance Metadata Sync, Onboarding Process Closure, and Where to Go Sync jobs have been decoupled from one job into three. This allows for better troubleshooting and more precise issue correction when one of the individual jobs fails and/or needs to be re-run. These jobs exist in provisioning so this update is transparent to all users except partners and SAP.

Wrap Up

From new cards on the homepage and simplified authentication to a simplified rehire process, we continue to see SAP making the onboarding process more smooth for all types of hires as well as HR and System Admins!

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!

SAP SuccessFactors Center of Capabilities: An Introduction

I’ve implemented and supported many SAP SuccessFactors systems across my 15+ year career. One repeated issue I’ve come across throughout these years is how to catalog skills, competencies, and the like in a systematic way that allows employers to record, categorize, evaluate and search through employees who have specific skills at specific skill levels. Imagine starting a new project or opening a new plant and being able to see who out in your existing talent pool has the skills you need to success instead of hiring new full time talent or contractors. Up until recently, the only way SAP SuccessFactors customers have had to do this out of the box has been the employee profile which lacks the rigid structure needed to really properly catalog skills.

As the SAP SuccessFactors product as continued to expand, SAP has set out to solve this problem. SAP’s answer to the problem of how to record, categorize, evaluate and search through employee skills, competencies, and the like in a systematic way is the Center of Capabilities.

The Center of Capabilities provides a framework where the skills, competencies, and other similar employee attributes that matter to your organization can be cataloged and assigned to employees. The framework consists of two main components: the Capabilities Library and the Capabilities Portfolio. As you might expect, the library contains the listing of all capabilities (skills, competencies, etc.) that are important to your organization. The portfolio shows which particular skills, competencies, etc. are assigned to individuals or job roles (for more information on job roles, check out our blog Introduction to the Job Profile Builder or our book that covers this and more talent management topics). Let’s take a closer look at these two components of the Center of Capabilities.

The Capabilities Library

A Capabilities Library stores a collection of related skills / competencies / attributes. For smaller organizations you may have only one library divided into a few major categories. For larger organizations you may have multiple libraries each containing a single relevant functional area further divided into smaller categories and even groups beneath those. In addition, behaviors can also be added to competencies. Two examples are below, the first a snippet of a simple single company-wide library, and the second a snippet of a larger company collection of libraries with competencies that also contain behaviors (note that as of writing this blog, only competencies are supported in the library, but the long term plan appears to be to include more types of capabilities):

Library: ACME Company Library
- Category: Finance
  - Competency: Analytical Approach
  - Competency: Financial Responsibility

Library: Information Technology
- Category: IT Project Management
  - Group: Project Planning
    - Competency: Achieving Deadlines
      - Behavior: Clearly lists key/critical dates
      - Behavior: Provides consistent status reports
    - Competency: Being Adaptable to Changes in Plan
      - Behavior: Takes in New Requirements following change control procedures
      - Behavior: Adjusts project plan using proven estimation techniques
  - Group: Meeting Facilitation
    - Competency: Listening to Others
      - Behavior: Implements active listening techniques
      - Behavior: Records key group member discussion points into meeting notes
    - Competency: Guiding Others to Desired Outcomes
      - Behavior: Understands and interjects when meeting is becoming derailed
      - Behavior: Facilitates agreement between meeting participants
- Category: Systems Administration
  - Group: Configuring Systems
    - Competency: Following Change Control Procedures
      - Behavior: Reviews change control procedure documentation
      - Behavior: Records system changes
  - Group: Developing Programs
    - Competency: Applying Software Architecture Standards
      - Behavior: Listens to and implements architectural review board feedback

The screenshot below shows a sample of what a competency with behaviors assigned looks like within the Library. You can access the library via the “Manage Center of Capabilities” screen (make sure you assign this permission first as well as end user permissions – you can find more details in the admin guide at help.sap.com).

The Capabilities Portfolio

The capabilities portfolio is what ties an individual to a set of capabilities from the library via their job role. Capabilities can be assessed via a performance form. Each capability has a proficiency rating scale assigned to them that determines what their scores can be. Before you can use the portfolio, you’ll have to use the setup wizard pictured below in the “Manage Center of Capabilities” screen to setup the rating scale / proficiency levels. You will also need to associate which performance forms will show the proficiency history.

Once your setup is complete, you can select “Capabilities Portfolio” from the main navigation to look at your capabilities. As capabilities are rated via performce forms, they are updated here. You can look at the capabilities of another by searching for their name and selecting “Go to -> Capabilities Portfolio” from the action menu.

Conclusions

As of right now, the “Center of Capabilities” is mostly a rebrand of the existing competency library. However, taking a look at the SAP release roadmap, we can see that subsequent releases should prove to have more functionality that will expand the functionality beyond the initial limits of the legacy competency library. Speaking with contacts at SAP, the vision is to have the Center of Capabilities serve as the location where HR resources can find out all kinds of information about what individuals within the organization can do for it and conversely empower individuals to seek other opportunities in the organization that need their unique capabilities.

Do you need help setting up the Center of Capabilities? Contact us at info@worklogix.com!

What’s New in the SuccessFactors Platform for H2 2021

On October 9, 2021, SAP released documentation for the H2 2021 release. Preview release is October 15 and production is November 19. In this article we take a quick look at the latest updates for SAP SuccessFactors Platform. It’s a huge list for Platform this release – so we’ve tried to summarize the most interesting items. You can view the full set of documentation in the W hat’s New Vie wer here. For full details on the release cycle, check out the SAP SuccessFactors official product updates blog here. Let’s get started! We’ve categorized the enhancements below for you starting with the most compelling in our opinion!

Of Special Interest

What stood out to me as the most interesting part of this release is the introduction of a Digital Assistant! As with most digital assistants, the feature is basically a natural language processing program that appears in the form of a chat window. Right now SAP is reporting they have over 250 scenarios programmed on the web version and over 20 on the mobile app. This feature is currently only available to early adopters.

The latest home page showing the Digital Assistant chatbot in action.

What Everyone Needs to Know

In this release, SAP announced a Tenant Preferred Time Zone feature. SAP is migrating servers to the UTC timezone. If you want to keep your server time zone where it is today, check out the link here: https://help.sap.com/doc/62fddbd651204629b46bbccbabf886ba/cloud/en-US/d5e86fa8bb564058820592217d3a21d4.html

The Center of Capabilities continues to expand its functionality. There is now a proficiency rating scale available that allows you to quantify the skill level of employees in the skills within the Center of Capabilities. There are also a new Center of Capabilities Library Reports for Stories in People Analytics.

The settings, such as providing a unique name to the rating scale, defining the number of proficiency levels, and assigning the numerical value as 0 or 1 for the lowest proficiency level are available on the Rating Scale page of the Capabilities Portfolio Settings wizard.

There have also been some general UI Enhancements to the center of capabilities functionality overall. In addition, the capabilities portfolio is now available which is the main experience that shows the list of capabilities for a worker.

The Capabilities Portfolio page provides information about the capabilities assigned to a user. This page also provides users the option to navigate to the Opportunities Marketplace.

There are a large number of new To-Do Tasks across all modules available on the latest home page. Examples are shown below. Check out the full list here: https://help.sap.com/doc/62fddbd651204629b46bbccbabf886ba/cloud/en-US/34c3515e0de14431b35d76525dfb00df.html

Example of the home page showing several pending tasks: approve job offers, approve job requisitions, approve time off requests, approve time sheets, complete calibration, and complete 360 evaluation.

In addition, there are a lot more Quick Actions available on the latest homepage. For example, there is a My Team quick action for managers to review info and take actions on their team members. Clock Time lets you clock in and out. Complete Payroll tasks, Delegate Workflows, My Profile, Org Chart, View Admin Alerts, and View Team Absences all pretty much do exactly what you would expect them to do as well. You can check out the full details here: https://help.sap.com/doc/62fddbd651204629b46bbccbabf886ba/cloud/en-US/f6d92d1c4a834f29b8b1998c7b845d1b.html

Also the header page now conforms to Fiori standards. This is always great news to me to see more and more parts of the system align with Fiori – have you notices how much better the web system looks on your mobile phone these days? That’s thanks to Fiori!

If you are still on the V12 Employee Profile, its time to move to the latest employee profile! This functionality is finally deleted.

Security

Certificate-Based authentication is now supported for standard third party integration packages for Boomi and CPI. My sources inside SAP tell me that certificate-based authentication will be the preferred method of authentication going forward for interfaces in general. Aligned to this, SAP also announced the depication of HTTP Basic Authentication for APIs. End of maintenance is November 19, 2021 and deletion will be November 1, 2022! Get your certificates ready!

You can also now Restrict API Access to Specific Users through OAuth 2.0. Additionally, you can now restrict individual user’s login to specific IP addresses. These allow for an extra layers of security in your integrations and general user access.

IP restriction can be applied to individual users.

Also of Note

There were also some minor curiosities for me in this batch of platform enhancements that I thought were pretty…pretty good! For example, you can now provide a Zip file for the job that updates employee photos en masse. Before this was a bear for anyone who suffered through putting a bunch of uncompressed photos on an SFTP server and waited for the large data transfer!

There’s also deep linking now available to go straight to someone’s employee profile. I could see this being useful for succession planners or managers talking about employees and wanting to share their profiles.

The employee import email also now includes a new troubleshooting section to help you figure out what went wrong on the import. Nice!

Conclusion

The SAP SuccessFactors product continues to grow and become increasingly more robust! This does not represent all of the enhancements in the H2 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.

What’s New in Onboarding 2.0 H2 2021

The latest release updates are here! In this article we take a quick look at the latest updates for SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding 2.0. Preview release is October 15 and production is November 19. You can view the full set of documentation in the W hat’s New Vie wer here. For full details on the release cycle, check out the SAP SuccessFactors official product updates blog here. Let’s get started! We’ve categorized the enhancements below for you!

Security Enhancements

In the category of security, there’s been an enhancement to proxy where you now have more granular control over whether or not a person who can proxy has access to onboarding. You can select the check box on the Proxy Management screen.

A screenshot of the Proxy Management page with a box highlighting the new Grant Proxy Rights options.

Compliance Form Updates

There’s been a number of compliance form updates. Form I-9 was enhanced so that the instructions of the form now show up in the system help icon sections. Various popups and warning messages make the form more informative to users. You can view the complete list of enhancements to form I-9 here: https://help.sap.com/doc/62fddbd651204629b46bbccbabf886ba/cloud/en-US/587c828977e84747868fa5125cf38eb9.html

A screenshot of the help text displayed for the First Name field in USCIS Form I-9.

In addition to US I-9, the Canadian TD1form for all provinces is now supported. The New Zealand KS2 KiwiSaver deduction form, Tax code Declaration, and Tax rate notification for contractor forms are now supported.

Qualtrics Integration

SAP continues to further their integrations with Qualtrics across the board. There’s now a new Intelligent Services event to send internal hire information to Qualtrics. This allows you to send email surveys to employees when the internal hire step is completed. There is a new configuration screen that makes this setup easy! It is shown below:

New Hire Enhancements

A few enhancements have been made to the new hire experience. New Hires can now complete the onboarding process on the homepage. There’s new “To Do” tasks that show up for onboarding here for the new hires such as compliance tasks and completing personal data collection.

New hires can also now access LMS courses before their first day of work as shown below!

A screenshot of the home page where new hires can access the assigned courses.

The complete new hire experience for the home page can now be done on the latest version of the homepage.

Hiring Manager / Admin Enhancements

In addition to new hire experience, the hiring manager and admin experiences have seen some updates as well. Future Managers can also now access information about their new hires in the onboarding dashboard and “To Do” tasks. Role-based permissions also now allow you to assign based on this new future manager relationship.

The Restart process for onboarding has also been enhanced so that you can choose whether or not to retain data or instead reload from recruiting.

The switches to determine the new hire information after restart are available under Restart Settings. The Allow Recruiting Update switch allows you to determine whether values must be updated from Recruiting or the existing values must be retained in Onboarding for auto-restart. The Retain Onboarding Information switch allows you to determine whether to update new hire information from Recruiting or retain the existing value for manual restart.

General Process Enhancements / Behind The Scenes Enhancements

Behind the scenes, there’s been some other updates as well!

When it comes to picklists, the mapping from recruiting to employee central can be a pain. The system has now been updated to map based on a series of potential exact matches rather than just on labels. First, the system will attempt to map based on the option id since this is the most unique identifier. If no exact match is found, then mapping is performed via label using the external code value. If no external code is available, then the label alone is used.

Also behind the scenes, when a major patch/release is deployed to the system, the default onboarding process in the Business Process Engine is now automatically upgraded. Previously, an admin had to manually upgrade the flow.

The upgraded versions of the Default Onboarding Process flow are visible under Process Definitions.

The rehire process has also been enhanced to make life easier for admins managing this process. Values such as date of birth, national id, legal entity, and user records can now be seen as shown below:

Enhanced version of the Rehire Verification screen with date of birth, national ID, legal entity, and last working day.

No shows and rehires are handled better as ell. The value “No Show” has been added as an event reason for cancelling the second rehire check. There is also a new welcome email template specifically designed for rehires.

Conclusion

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.

SAP SuccessFactors H1 2021 Employee Central Release Updates

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 21^st. You can view the full set of documentation in the W hat’s New Vie wer 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 W hat’s New Vie wer 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.

What’s New in Onboarding H1 2021

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 21^st. You can view the full set of documentation in the W hat’s New Vie wer 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!

SAP SuccessFactors H1 2021 Release Updates for Succession

It’s finally here! 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 21^st. You can view the full set of documentation in the W hat’s New Vie wer 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 this release, we saw a wide range of enhancements across the Talent modules – some specific to Succession and others that lay across the modules but help out succession planners. Let’s take a look at what’s new in the Succession module below!

Succession Management Specific Changes

Let’s start with what’s new just for Succession Management before we take a look at some general talent improvements that are relevant to Succession.

Nomination History

The main new feature exclusive to Succession Management is the ability to view nomination history in the talent card and in the people profile. Users will with Succession Planning permission can click a history icon on these screens to see a list of positions for which the employee has been nominated and information about the nomination history for each including the date, nominator, readiness level, status, change type, and notes. The information includes deleted nominations as well.

Hide Pending Nominations for Talent Pools

Succession configurators have had the ability to hide pending nominations from succession planners for some time now, but the ability was only extended to position nominations. Now, this feature works for talent pool nominations as well. This configuration setting remains in the same in Admin Center -> Nomination Setup.

Form-Based Nomination Deleted

Another update specific to succession with this release is that form-based succession nomination will be completely deleted as of May 21,2021. This was a legacy method of approving nominations – if you never used it, then don’t worry because no action is required. If you are still using forms to approve nominations, you have little time left to switch to the newer permission-based method!

General Talent Management Updates Relevant to Succession

There are also numerous updates across the talent modules in general that affect not only Succession, but also Performance, Goals, Development, and/or Calibration. Let’s take a look at these briefly below.

Editing Talent Info Directly on a Talent Card

It seems like every customer for whom I’ve implemented Succession has asked why they need to switch between the employee profile view and other views to edit talent information. Why can’t customers just change the information right on the talent card that shows up across the different views that contain the talent card? This way data like impact of loss or risk of loss can be updated when the user has the contextual information they need to make the decision. Well now, customers can!

Users can now click the icon shown below to open a popup that allows these fields to be changed.

My Jobs Downloads

Previously Succession (and other talent reports) could be downloaded from the Scheduled Reports page in Classic View. Reports may now be downloaded from My Jobs page within Report Center. This eliminates the need to switch to Classic View prior to downloading.

A report with multiple files can be downloaded in a compressed .zip file or downloaded individually.

Numerous Calibration Session Improvements

There are a variety of calibration session feature that have been added/updated as well. For example specifying default facilitators or allowing managers to more easily create calibration sessions for their teams. For more information on these improvements, check out our blog on What’s in in H1 2021 SAP SuccessFactors Calibration Release.

That’s a Wrap!

That’s all of the updates for H1 2021! We hope you found this blog informative!

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!