So let’s dissect the announcement in our customary news analysis style (it can be found here):
LAS VEGAS — August 11, 2015 — Managing changes to employee data can be costly and consume excess company resources each year. HR processes often include disparate transactions that cross multiple organizational boundaries, leading to wasted time managing the complexity and correcting errors. Most human capital management (HCM) software can’t handle this end-to-end view, forcing end users to guess what they need to do or rely on costly shared services. HR and employees need software that can quickly and easily guide them through the necessary steps when dealing with an employee change.
MyPOV – SAP is right that much of HR software has been built with single task automation in mind. The reality of business is more complex and usually even simple real world people events require a number of transactions that need to be processed by a variety of users. SAP is right at pointing at significant sunken cost of the status quo and it is good to see vendors questioning how business best practice has been performed so far and looking at new innovative ways to perform the same process – better and leaner.
Today, SuccessFactors, a leader in cloud-based human resources (HR) software and an SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) company, is introducing new capabilities in its HCM suite that transform the entire concept of HR service delivery, moving from series of individual and isolated self-services into end-to-end intelligent-services that can easily cross software modules and integrate processes. Intelligent services is designed to connect – and even predict – the impending transactions resulting from a change and automatically adjust them for the user, helping improve the employee experience and reduce reliance on – and cost of – shared services. This announcement was made at SuccessConnect 2015, being held August 10-12 in Las Vegas.
MyPOV – So here SAP opens the Pandora Box of the software innovation. It is good to see the vendor thinking about ways to improve the way how HR business should be done in the 21st century. Where it gets really interesting, when these actions can be predicted – as the above paragraph hints to – with some ‘true’ analytics (read more here), those who perform an action or at least recommend a course of action.
“We are taking the guesswork out of self-service by evolving to software-driven intelligent services,” said Mike Ettling, president: HR Line of Business at SAP SuccessFactors. “Relying on software-driven intelligence to remove complexity from typical HR transactions, employees are empowered to do more on their own, reducing expenses in shared services and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). ”
MyPOV – A good quote, with the focus on good thing for enterprises these days, reduction of complexity, employee empowerment and cost reduction… All highly desirable goals for enterprises. Let’s see how SAP wants to achieve this.
With intelligent services, managed in the new SuccessFactors event center, individual transactions that make up common workforce events but cross multiple systems and software modules are consolidated into a single experience. Instead of managers or business partners having to guess all of the relevant tasks when a change takes place, or rely on shared services to fill the gaps, SuccessFactors does it for them, freeing up valuable manager and employee time. For example, workforce changes triggered by SuccessFactors’ core HR system, Employee Central, can be cascaded to other SuccessFactors modules such as Learning and Performance Management, as well as 3rd party systems. The end result is a simpler and more efficient employee experience, helping rapidly changing companies manage employee changes and transitions in stride and reducing the costs of shared services and BPO.
MyPOV – So now we learn a little on how SuccessFactors wants to deliver this innovation – with a new event center, that consolidates events into a single user experience. We have seen this before, the ‘magic’ will be in bringing together all the relevant steps in an easy and user friendly manner. Where today it’s the human brain serving as the integration mechanism, bridging separate information systems (unfortunately even often of the same vendor!), SuccessFactors will try to create more powerful cascaded actions and integrations.
It is good to see that SuccessFactors will also address 3rd party systems. One of the; dirty’ secrets of HR automation is that no vendor can (and will) provide all the systems that HR departments need to operate. So ‘integratability’ is a key capability, often an afterthought, good to see it here in a (very) early product stage. And also positive to see cost servings as a benefit again, the real benefit though is missing – enterprises become leaner and faster when their business users are enabled to do more in less time.
Unlike any other HCM suite, SuccessFactors enables an HR transformation from intelligent services that is:
• Integrated – An HR transaction no longer begins and ends with a Core HR system, but extends across all impacted modules to create and end-to-end, complete process.
MyPOV – Integration is probably the most used and abused term in enterprise software. Definitions are plentiful, but as the problem doesn’t go away, vendors keep stressing integration as a system design point. Rightfully so, as SuccessFactors does, too – we will have to see if and how it will be different this time.
• Intelligent – Each capability is aware of the smallest changes that happen in another and automatically responds with intelligence. It predicts the next step in the change, guiding users to the right place according to existing rules based on groups, role-based permissions and notifications.
MyPOV – This quality is much more interesting, as it applies ‘intelligence’ (aka ‘true’) analytics to a course of action. Predicting the next step(s) a user may want to take is key for user productivity. As with all analytics it has to answer the question: Does it work? Too early to tell at this point, but a very compelling vision.
• Efficient – Intuitive software fills the gaps instead of HR, shared services, or business process outsourcers, helping reduce time and expense spent on tasks that don’t drive value to the business. HR professionals can easily configure workforce changes based on rules and settings, allowing the right steps to be presented at the right time.
MyPOV – Another overused quality of enterprise software. What SAP needs to do has to be ‘uber’ efficient – more efficient than the single step. It may also grasp effectiveness (ask: Are we doing the right thing?) – but we will need to see that in software first.
“We will deploy these more intelligent capabilities from SuccessFactors to empower our HR teams to be more streamlined,” said Marc Farrugia, vice president of Human Resources at Sun Communities. “We’re looking forward to the next generation of HR software that is capable of handling business changes, providing a world-class experience and equipping HR to make more informed strategic decisions.”
MyPOV – Always good to have a customer quote on a press release for a product announcement, customers need to endorse innovation and with that the portion of change management that it requires to implement these changes.
Available now, SAP and SuccessFactors are enabling 16 pre-defined workforce changes - including Become a Manager, Leave of Absence, Hire, Termination, change in Employee Info, change in Job Info - and will add new events in future releases. The SuccessFactors HCM Suite can even be linked to external systems to enable integration with 3rd party applications. HR administrators can also easily configure intelligent services based on rules and notifications settings within the SuccessFactors event center. For more information on intelligent services and event center from SuccessFactors and SAP, visit http://www.successfactors.com/en_us/lp/intelligent-services.html.
MyPOV - Very good to see that this is not just an announcement – but real software that is available now. It will be interesting to see how well these 16 pre-defined workforce changes work in real life. And as always with announcements of the analytics nature – will they work ‘out of the box’ in production, or are they examples and the vendor is ‘only’ shipping a tool to set them up. Anyway, SuccessFactors seems to have both option open at this point.
Overall MyPOV
Good to see SAP starting to think about innovative ways to practice HCM. The timing is good, as the vendor had to solve (and finish) some homework first, e.g. delivering the EmployeeCentral product. Though SuccessFactors points out rightfully that integration will be available to the SuccessFactors Talent Management modules, too – the bulk of the first predefined actions will work on top of EmployeeCentral. Nothing wrong with that, as new HCM best practices should start at the core, and that is HR Core, for SAP and its customers that is EmployeeCentral. And overall there is a need for speed in the enterprise – that HR departments need to respond to – see more here and here.On the concern side we have to raise the general cautions of new product announcements: What is the functional scope (SAP seems to have defined that), what needs to happen to implement the new functionality (Skills, Training etc.), what is the cost and what is the roadmap going forward. All four factors need to be factored in by HR decision makers before making the call of using the new functionality SuccessFactors has announced today. And as with all analytics offerings ‘Does it work?’ is the key question to address and SAP will have to show the benefits and savings that early adopters can reap from the new functionality.
As we have researched, blogged and spoken before – the empowerment of the business user is the real disruptor in enterprise software (see e.g. our vision of Transboarding over a year ago (see here) – combine internal transfers and onboarding of the transferee in an efficient fashion). As business users are under pressure to do more in less time, they will naturally gravitate towards enterprise software that makes them more productive and empowers them to do more. With SuccessFactors throwing in the hat early into this race of next generation applications and HCM software, we are off to a promising start. So overall a good move by SAP, that doesn’t have the reputation of being early out of the gates when it comes to software innovation pertaining business best practices. Such moves take courage and are usually not seen by the very large vendors, so kudos to SAP for the guts to come our early.
Needless to say the new software has to work, so we are off to the show floor and demos to see more of this new SuccessFactors capability in action. Stay tuned.
- News Analysis - SAP delivers next release of SAP HANA - SPS 10 - Ready for BigData and IoT - read here
- Event Report - SAP Sapphire - Top 3 Positives and Concerns - read here
- News Analysis - SAP and IBM join forces ... read here
- First Take - SAP Sapphire Bill McDermott Day #1 Keynote - read here
- In Depth - S/4HANA qualities as presented by Plattner - play for play - read here
And more about SAP technology:
- HANA Cloud Platform - Revisited - Improvements ahead and turning into a real PaaS - read here
- News Analysis - SAP commits to CloudFoundry and OpenSource - key steps - but what is the direction? - Read here.
- News Analysis - SAP moves Ariba Spend Visibility to HANA - Interesting first step in a long journey - read here
- Launch Report - When BW 7.4 meets HANA it is like 2 + 2 = 5 - but is 5 enough - read here
