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.
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