Category: Onboarding

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 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.

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 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!

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 What’s New Viewer 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:

A screenshot of the Add New Integration screen in Manage Qualtrics Integrations shows Onboarding, with Internal Hire Process Completed as the event name.

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

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.

What’s New in Onboarding H1 2021

Photo by Duncan Meyer on Unsplash

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:

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
User Search
Correct I-9 from the Action Menu

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!

What’s New for Onboarding in H2 2020

As of October 9, 2020, SAP has released their documentation for the H2 2020 release.  You can view the full set of documentation in the What’s New Viewer here.  As a reminder, preview release will be October 16 and production will be released November 20th.  For full details on the release cycle, check out the SAP SuccessFactors official product updates blog here.  For tips on how to manage a release, check out or blog here.  For your convenience, we’ve summarized the highlights of what’s new for 2020 Onboarding below!

Compliance

Not surprisingly for Onboarding, most of the feature enhancements revolve around compliance.  The biggest news is the release of compliance forms for the USA (I-9, E-Verify, W-4. SWF and standard forms).  There were some customers in the USA hesitant to jump into Onboarding 2.0 until this happened.  In addition, you can also create custom compliance forms if any happen to be missing for you country.  Problem solved!

Onboarding is also now included in the platform-wide features of Data Purge, Read Audit, Change Audit, and Information Report.  There was a major overhaul of the Read Audit report screen to assign specific fields as sensitive across most modules (see below screenshot), and onboarding is included in this.  You can use the new screen to pick which fields you deem are sensitive instead of the system only assuming ethnicity, minority, and ssn are sensitive.

New Read Audit Configuration Screen Where you can choose which fields are sensitive

Additionally, there’s a ton of features to organize and enhance compliance usability.  There’s now a way to add a compliance step to your standard workflow for the onboarding process (see below).  Compliance forms can also now be categorized based on document type.  Email notifications can also now be sent based on compliance-related events.

Adding a compliance step to the Process Variant Manager

SAP has also added reporting on compliance in People Analytics that allows you to query on the status of compliance forms.

Business Rules

Business Rules continue to expand their usefulness in Onboarding as well.  You can now directly edit the event reason in onboarding using a business rule (before you had to make a custom recruiting field for event reason).

Another neat new feature is the ability to customize the user id and employee id formats that get generated automatically.  This is accomplished using a business rule and will allow administrators to organize the ids to follow helpful conventions rather than just being entirely up to the system.

Business rules can also be tied to email events for additional categories as well now too (Suite Mapping Error, Nudge Assignment, and Manage Assets Upload Categories).  Attachments can also be added to email notifications as well.

All in all, there’s 16 items being changed/enhanced in this release for Onboarding and we didn’t cover every detail here.  For more information, check out the What’s New Viewer here.

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!

It is time to review your OFCCP Voluntary Self Identification Forms

Photo by Cytonn Photography from Pexels

With discrimination coming to the forefront of world news lately, many organizations are asking themselves:  What can we do to actively prevent discrimination in our organization?  I’ve seen a variety of options out there ranging from internal audits by 3rd party anti-discrimination consulting firms to pro-active succession planning that tracks minority status.  While organizations I’ve worked with differ in these types of approaches, one solution at minimum in the United States has been clear for my entire lifetime: federal contractors must comply with the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) guidelines.

Per an announcement on the Department of Labor website, a new Voluntary Self-Identification of Disability Form CC-305 was approved in May.  As of today, Federal contractors must post the comply by updating the form by August 4, 2020.  An example new form can be found here.  I warn against simply using a search engine to look for updated forms as these may lead you to the expired form (check the expiration date at the top of the form first).

Also, while you are on the Department of Labor website and making updates to your  system in response, you might want to check out the updates to the Federal Contract Compliance Manual.  Specifically, the guidance around the Invitation to Self-Identify as a Protected Veteran.    Additionally, the “How to Comply” postings and notices guide is of great help.  I’ve found customers making updates to all of their voluntary identification forms based on these updates.

For SAP SuccessFactors customers, this typically means:

  1. Updating your job application template to include the new form(s)
  2. Updating your Onboarding forms to include the new forms(s)

I recommend referencing the Department of Labor website to understand the updated requirements and then working with your IT department, SAP Partner, and/or SAP to make updates to the recruiting application template and/or Onboarding forms to ensure compliance.

Hopefully this brief update has been helpful!  While many people are out there working hard to come up with a variety of solutions for today’s social issues, one thing is for certain: EEO is the law.

Do you need help implementing these forms in your Sap SuccessFactors system?  Contact mwellens@worklogix.com.