Companies that are considering which SAP solution for human capital management to choose are faced with a difficult decision. In recent years, SAP’s offering of HR solutions has been extended considerably, to include SuccessFactors solutions, mobile applications and complementary applications from Nakisa. At first glance, it seems that some of the products in the SAP portfolio perfectly complement each other and some are similar in respect of their functionality. It is not easy to make head or tail of this offer.

The decision on which human capital management solution to choose from SAP’s offering will be affected by a number of factors, including scale, specific requirements, whether the company is ready to accept cloud solutions, computerization strategy, etc. Certainly, familiarity with the offer and a basic knowledge of HR products developed by SAP will help in rational decision making. Let’s try to cut through the maze of marketing messages and look at what SAP now has to propose in the field of human capital management.

Traditional SAP HR

Most SAP customers use the traditional modular HR system which most often includes the functional organizational structure management, personnel administration, time management and payroll accounting. The aforementioned ‘hard’ HR functions are mature products, which in principle have no alternative in SAP’s offer. This set of basic functionalities will be a pillar of SAP’s HR offering for a long time.

In turn, there is an alternative to soft HR functions – cloud-enabled solutions from SuccessFactors. However, SuccessFactors solutions do not include time management tools, so even if customers decide to move their applications to the cloud, this part of the system will remain in their infrastructure.

The same applies to payroll. It will be used in the on-premise version for a long time. The available cloud solution SAP Cloud Payroll is nothing more than the old module transferred to the cloud and only in a select few national versions (the Polish version is yet to be included). Therefore, customers will develop SAP HR solutions in their infrastructure or in a hybrid model – part (hard functions) on-premise and part (selected soft features) in the cloud.

SuccessFactors

In February 2012, SAP AG finalized the acquisition of SuccessFactors (SF), a leading provider of the cloud talent management system. SuccessFactors offers BizX (Business Execution), the solution to support companies in acquiring talents, motivating employees, and human capital planning. A key part of the SuccessFactors BizX Suite is Employee Central, a central employee database which contains the basic personal and organizational data on employees used by other applications. This database will be fed with the data from SAP HR, if one is used in the company.

If a company uses SAP HR for payroll accounting and decides to use the selected BizX features in a subscription model, it will start operating in a heterogeneous environment in which part of the master data will be replicated from the on-premise system to Employee Central.

Customers may have doubts, which solution from SAP’s offering (SuccessFactors or traditional SAP modules) will best fit to their needs. There is no definite answer to this question. SF offers unrivalled user interface in terms of aesthetics and intuitiveness, but SAP modules such as payroll management and e-recruiting have much better configuration possibilities. The final decision will depend on an accurate identification of the company’s needs in particular areas.

However, customers using selected on-premise solutions must accept the fact that SAP will no longer develop them as intensely as it used to – at most you can expect minor changes and technical updates. For example, companies using traditional payroll management or e-recruiting in the SAP system will in the future have to use their own IT staff or SAP partners in order to develop these modules. Today SAP declares that talent management solutions in SAP ERP HCM will be added “selected innovations” for at least a decade.

Now, the priority for SuccessFactors is the use of the SAP HANA technology in SF analytical tools. Thousands of customers store their data in the SF cloud and some of their information is used (with their consent, of course) as the basis for valuable benchmarks (for example, the average seniority for different employee groups in similar companies, absence rates, the effectiveness of recruitment media, turnover of key employees, and many more). SAP HANA radically accelerates the processing in those huge data volumes. Availability of such analytics, enabling a company to check its position compared to other companies in the industry from different HR perspectives is a strong argument in favour of SF solutions.

And what about Nakisa?

As far as soft features in SAP are concerned, SAP Visualization Solutions by Nakisa, which are less known in Poland, is worth mentioning. These solutions are developed jointly by Nakisa and SAP, which gives them a rather privileged position among products from external vendors. SAP Visualization Solutions consist of two extensions of the standard SAP system: SAP Organizational Visualization by Nakisa (SOVN) and SAP Talent Visualization by Nakisa (STVN). Generally, SOVN supports the organizational structure planning and management, and STVN competence management, talent acquisition and career planning. And all this is presented in an attractive graphical design.

The acquisition of SuccessFactors by SAP has put into question a further intensive development of sales of Nakisa solutions. The company found itself in a completely different market reality and it must also compete with alternative products promoted by SAP. When thinking about the future of Nakisa solutions, it is worth considering that:

  • SuccessFactors does not offer replacements for all functionalities of Nakisa, first of all for organizational structure modelling;
  • as long as customers decide on on-premise solutions, Nakisa software will be further developed.

If for any reason the customer does not want to use cloud solutions, he can still choose to use traditional soft SAP HR modules or the software offered by Nakisa.

UX strategy – user experience

More recently, SAP AG has offered three new products which perfectly fit into the so-called UX (user experience) strategy derived from the simple observation that SAP should provide users with a positive experience. The HR application must therefore be attractive to the user, ergonomic and comfortable to use. This is good news, because as far as SAP HR solutions include many advanced features, the degree of “user-friendliness" left a lot to be desired. These three new SAP solutions include: HR Renewal, SAP Fiori, and SAP Screen Personas.

New face of SAP HR – HR Renewal

When comparing the user interface offered by SuccessFactors with traditional SAP HR forms, the former indisputably wins. SAP does not give up, however, the development towards greater ergonomics and ease of use, which is reflected by the traditional HR renewal program launched some time ago, called “HR Renewal".

What is HR Renewal? It is primarily a new role-based HR user interface for key functions accessible from the personnel administration and organizational structure management transactions (e.g. changing employee master data, creating organizational structure objects, personnel events, group changes).

The new interface, in addition to better ergonomics and aesthetics, enables faster navigation and efficient execution of the personnel event functions (e.g. by combining the PA and OM data editing in one step). HR Renewal is a proof that SAP is still committed to the development of their on-premise solutions.

Examples of new SAP HR interface (SAP Renewal)

SAP Fiori – new user experience

SAP Fiori grew from a simple idea: to give the user access to a select of functions via the same visually attractive and simple interface, regardless of the device (computer, tablet, smartphone) and thereby to motivate the user to execute tasks within a workflow (if I can perform a function from any location and device, what’s stopping me?). In addition, the technologies used – HTML5 and SAP NetWeaver Gateway – simplify the solution administration.

Among 25 role-based applications, SAP Fiori offers the planning and approval of leaves, business trips or time sheets. In accordance with SAP, these 25 SAP Fiori applications are responsible for 30% of the most frequently used transactions and may be helpful to 80% users in large organizations. These figures show that the solution’s target audience is very wide and covers virtually most of SAP customers.

Looking at SAP Fiori screens, one may have the impression that the inspiration for the authors of the applications was drawn from online stores and social networks. When shopping online in a given store for the first time the buyer does not require any training to cope with it. So is the idea of SAP Fiori – visual attractiveness, simplicity and availability.

SAP Fiori – a single interface on different devices

SAP Screen Personas – personalization without programming

SAP Renewal or SAP Fiori provide a well-defined function package. And what about other traditional SAP transactions or client solutions with an outdated interface? The answer is SAP Screen Personas – a simple tool for the personalization of user screens. Here are a few situations where it is worth using Screen Personas:

  • the use of the transaction with a screen of 40 fields, of which only 5 need to be filled in (the rest is filled up with default values); with SAP Screen Personas you can quickly build a new visually attractive screen without unnecessary fields;
  • the use of a transaction with multiple tabs on the screen; navigating through them requires a lot of clicks to finally fill in a few fields in the last tab – again, SAP Screen Personas allow you to build a screen which is easy to use and pleasing to the eye.

When deciding on buying Screen Personas, you need to remember that this solution is designed to personalize the screens within a single transaction. If you need a screen consisting of more transactions, you need to use other technologies (for example portal-based). Only Dynpros known from the traditional SAP GUI can be personalized (so forget about transactions prepared in Web Dynpro). For many customers these limitations are irrelevant, and the benefits are obvious: nicer and easier to use screens, definitely faster transaction management (less screens, tabs, fields and clicks), and above all – no need for programming.

What’s next?

SuccessFactors is slowly entering organizations that are already using SAP HR, but the traditional hard modules will not be superseded by cloud solutions. So it seems that the popular approach will be a hybrid model – hard HR functions in SAP ERP, soft functions in SuccessFactors. Surely, many companies will choose to additionally “facelift” hard SAP HR features by using SAP Screen Personas, HR Renewal, or SAP Fiori. It is worth noting that some analysts indicate that there is a kind of a barrier in the sale of SuccessFactors. Those organizations that consider talent management as a competitive advantage may not want to give up their tailor-made solutions for standardized tools (if all players manage talents in the cloud in a similar way, it is not a competitive advantage any more). One thing is certain – the portfolio of SAP solutions for human capital management will become increasingly diverse. In order not to get lost in the maze of choices and reasonably plan for the optimal HR development, you should follow a few simple guidelines:

  • If you are looking for systems to support payroll and time management, today we can only recommend SAP ERP HR – at the moment these are unrivalled tools;
  • If talent management in the company is unique and is subject to evolutionary changes – the configurable SAP on-premise tools are also worth considering;
  • If you are looking for off-the-shelf tools prepared according to best practices and you are ready to use the cloud model – SuccessFactors solutions are worth considering;
  • If the unergonomic interface of an old SAP solution is an issue – consider SAP Screen Personas, HR Renewal, or SAP Fiori;
  • If you want to have the same attractive user interface on mobile devices and computers – check if SAP Fiori has the right solution for you.