SAP SuccessFactors Reviews

SuccessFactors is primarily used for employment engagement (e.g. payroll and claims) and to manage HR-related information.

SuccessFactors' best features are talent management and HR Analytics.

SuccessFactors' experience management is not so user-friendly - the launch through the initial dashboard is okay, but when you do a deep dive into certain applications or specific scenarios, the navigation needs to be improved. In the next release, SuccessFactors should include better integrations and reusable plugins. 

SuccessFactors is stable.

SuccessFactors' technical support is responsive.

Neutral

From a technical perspective, the initial setup is straightforward because SAP is engaged in the implementation. But from the customer's point of view, it's a little challenging because it's a new platform, so it requires some training before it can be used. That means that while the roadmap of implementation is six to eight months, there is an additional four to five months of user training.

I'd advise anybody thinking of implementing SuccessFactors to know their target audience and the kind of features they're trying to provide. I would rate SuccessFactors eight out of ten.

The self-service part is most valuable. Employees and managers can do a lot of things on their own, and they are not dependent on the HR organization. 

The data management part can be improved in terms of how you can manage data from the HR admin's or HR team's perspective. It has some limitations in the reporting part in terms of how you can update the data and fetch the data. SAP HCM comparatively has a lot of capabilities in terms of backup loads, data management, data changes, etc. You can do these things easily, which is not the case with SAP SuccessFactors. Data management should be simplified in SAP SuccessFactors in terms of accessing the data, reporting, and then manipulating the data.

I have been using this solution for almost three years.

I didn't find any issues from the data security perspective.

I didn't have any experience with them because we had an internal IT team that used to support us. They might have raised tickets with SAP. They sometimes used to say that they need to reach out to SAP to get clarity on some of these things, but for us, there was no interaction with the SAP support team.

I would definitely recommend it. SAP HCM support is ending in 2027. The organizations that are not yet on SAP SuccessFactors or are on SAP HCM need to figure out how soon they can move to SuccessFactors or other platforms. The support from SAP will end for SAP HCM, and currently, SuccessFactors seems to be a leading product.

I would rate SAP SuccessFactors an eight out of 10.

I primarily use this product for employee management. This includes an objective assessment of money made, creating performance reviews, and recruiting new employees and management.

It has improved my organization by enabling us to efficiently manage our personnel.

The features that I have found most valuable are the ability to set and review goals, and the ability to manage performance in general.

In terms of what needs improvement, in Employee Central, one of the features that I think SuccessFactors really lacks is the ability to view the time off of all employees at an organizational level. We have had instances where some of our clients wanted a version where at a glance, we can have an HR analytics that shows who is on leave, or has been on leave and when. You have that at a team level and at a peer level, but you don't have it at an organizational level. When you have to put together an agreement on leave with your client this is very lacking.

Also, it would be helpful if they could improve its ability to localize the product to Nigeria.

I have been using this solution since early 2017.

I think it's a stable solution. We have not had any issues with its deployment or use. It's been stable, so I don't know if there are any issues because we haven't had any challenges around it. 

My impression of SuccessFactors is that it is quite scalable. For example, we have clients who have slightly above 800 employees who are using it. We have clients that have over 1000 users using this. I also read online a few months back about a Russian bank that uses SuccessFactors with about 75,000 employees. It's the same product. All you need to do is to get different licenses.

If we had any issues that we were unable to resolve, we can always receive support from SAP. We raise an incident with them, and they respond depending on your priority. If you put priority one, it's almost an instant response. They reach out to you within an hour. On that call they asses the true priority level. If it's something we have to resolve as soon as possible, they will. While if it's something that is less of a priority, they will change the priority to something lower. But what I find is that at the end of the day, you always get a very good response from SAP.

Actually I haven't used a different solution.

The initial setup is straightforward because there are templates and best practices. We can just click on the button from the online center, deploy it into the system, and it sets it up for us.

The time it takes to deploy depends on the requirements and it depends on the number of modes that you deploy. As long as you have clear requirements from the client, it can take between three and four months. It doesn’t take too much time to deploy as long as you have clear requirements.

I work for a partner. I did the deployment with some of my team members.  

Before choosing SuccessFactors, we compared other industry solutions, including Microsoft. But Microsoft's HR product is really not top line in this part of the world.

I think the advice I'd give is that it's a nice solution. It's easy to deploy. It's so easy to use. You really don't need to know much about coding or be a highly technical team to be able to use it. It’s very easy to use. For example, for the traditional ERP that SAP had before, you had to be instructed to work with it. This one is really straightforward.

We have found objects like Foundation and MDF most valuable.                                                 

In the next release, I would like to be able to configure objects from instances, not from import and export files. That would be easy to do and make the application mobile available for anyone who wanted to hire and recruit, not only employees of companies with the SuccessFactors system.

We have been using this solution for almost three months.

The solution is stable.

More research, more reading about SuccessFactors products, and a deeper understanding of human resources have increased my knowledge. The product is also scalable because it feeds to bigger companies.

On a scale of one to 10, I would give the product an overall rating of nine.

The overall interface is easy and user-friendly. 

I would advise future SAP SuccessFactors users to gain more skills in Employee Central solutions and issues and the customization of many projects because not all companies have the same customization. It's very different.

SuccessFactors is a good ERP system where you can handle all the employee records from the hire date to the retire date.

We like that all the employee events, everything, can be managing on one single system and it is very user-friendly and very agile.

The integration between the modules is very simple if it is a standard integration. 

The product supports third-party integrations.

The recruiting module has vastly improved since I initially started my career with SuccessFactors.

The initial setup was pretty simple.

This is a cloud product. Every six months or so, or very close to quarterly, they issue a new release. Different customers will therefore have different views. 

The pricing could be lowered a bit. It's a little expensive for many companies.

The stability could be a bit better.

When they try to do enhancements, they work to take every customer requirement and request into account. However, it might take a long time for clients to actually see the enhancement come to fruition.

I've been working with the solution for about six years at this point. 

The solution is mostly stable in the sense. That said, in some areas, it is not stable. When instability is detected, patches are released that can make the system more stable and more user-friendly.

The solution offers very good scalability. A company shouldn't have any issues with expanding.

So far, technical support has been good. Based on the priority of the ticket, we get issues resolved rather quickly. If it is a very high priority, we can get a resolution within three or four hours. They are helpful and responsive. We're satisfied with the level of support.

The initial setup is not overly complex or difficult. We found it straightforward. It's simple to set up. A company shouldn't have any issues with the process.

The pricing is a bit high for smaller to mid-sized companies. Larger organizations may find the solution reasonable. 

The licensing is based on the number of users. Therefore, the higher the number of users, the higher the cost to the company. If they could come down a bit on pricing, they may expand their market share as more companies could afford it.

We are SAP partners.

There are different ERP systems that are available in the market. Each one is unique with respect to all the features they have in-build in the system. With SAP, what we can tell the clients or customers is that they have a seamless integration between the modules. The data is very secure. They have business logic, which they can configure based on different events. All the records of the employee will show up in one single profile view. They don't need to go to different screens or different systems. It's very convenient.

I'd recommend the solution to other companies.

I'd rate the product at an eight out of ten.

SAP is our ERP. On the cloud we only have SuccessFactors for the recruitment.

We are currently looking for a better solution enabling us to better analytics. So SAP on-premise is pretty old and while it allows a lot of flexibility, it doesn't give us the flexibility to integrate to other modules. We have many interruptions and disconnection points into processes, which is why we are looking to another solution. We are not so happy with the system. We believe we have in the market better solution, so we are looking for alternatives but so far the system has been used a lot. It's brought to our organization a big big improvement. We would give it a good rating. 

The analytics part could be improved. Analytics are pretty poor plus some usability parts need improvement but in the end, the process is covered. In some cases, we don't have the possibilities to reverse the workflow. Overall, the product is a good product, I'm not saying it's bad. We are just looking for an integrated platform and of course, SuccessFactors is one of the possibilities. We are evaluating several alternatives.

In the next release, I would like to have the possibility to reverse workflows. There should be better automation. On the scoring, it's pretty fine. It really depends on the way you manage your recruiting. We are a wide organization so we have these type of issues. But for the normal recruiting process, it's more than enough.

The system is pretty stable. We have not had big issues with that. 

Scalability needs improvement. 

I would definitely recommend SuccessFactors but I think the roadmap for a better product needs to happen. Our overall rating is good but I think there is space for improvement.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. 

User Interface - Gives a polished look for both users and administrators when they login and access the system.

Workflow configuration - Can configure any level of workflow for approval process with functionalities such as dynamic group, dynamic role concepts.

Role-based permissions - Can define a very clear role-based permission based on portlets or fields level permission.

The implementation has helped the organization by having a unified process across all locations.

Configuration transportation functionality is not available in SuccessFactor. If this functionality is introduced, a lot of time can be saved configuring individual systems.

I have been using it for three years.

We haven’t had any specific issues except for few issues related to the upgrade, which was resolved by SAP.

No specific scalability issues have been found.

I would rate technical support average to good.

We used legacy human resource systems in which there was no employee self-service functionality, as well as no workflow for the approval process. The authorization part was so rigid that it was very hard to maintain. Hence, we switched to SAP SuccessFactors.

The setup is straightforward and SAP provided adequate and updated version documents for reference.

There is room for negotiation with reference to pricing and licensing, which SAP supports.

There were other products evaluated, but we found SAP SuccessFactors to be more promising with reference to functionality and from an implementation perspective.

The first activity any company should do is to streamline their policies and procedures, set a clear authority matrix and identify their reporting requirement before going for implementation. A good policy can add real value during the implementation.

The Admin Tools functionality in Employee Central is great. For a technical/functional associate within our IT team, we can accomplish many (but not all) of the requests from our business partners.

The role-based permissions functionality is beyond great (in my opinion) and is honestly more robust and flexible than any other security setup/process that we have with other business software that we use (and have the ability to maintain security roles with).

Prior to implementing SuccessFactors, we had nowhere to go for a single snapshot of our entire company. Today, we have our entire North America, Europe and Hong Kong businesses in the system and therefore easily accessible.

SuccessFactors allows us to have an online performance/review process that is consistent across the organization.

SuccessFactors has a workflow/approval process in place to ensure that updates are made/approved by the official ‘manager’ and 2nd level ‘manager’ for that associate. Prior, everything was done on paper and faxed to payroll for entry into the legacy JDE system.

All department/store leads now have the ability to see employee information for those reporting through them (initial level and cascaded down).

All department/store leads now have the ability to make change requests for anyone in their reporting tree without having to fill out a form and faxing to payroll.

The entire company now has a tool to view basic information (including associate photos) on their fellow associates.

I think the integration methods can be more user-friendly.

SuccessFactors modules must become more integrated than they are today (i.e., EC with Performance, Goals, Onboarding, Compensation, etc.).

SuccessFactors modules must become more integrated with other SAP products (i.e., SAP ERP, Concur, Fieldglass, etc.).

Would be nice to have more standard integrations created for SuccessFactors. Currently, we are aware of standard integrations with WorkForce Software Time & Attendance and BenefitFocus. Others would be good to have (i.e., ADP).

The new hire process should have direct deposit entry as part of the initial step; we had to custom build this to ensure that every associate had at least one direct deposit record upon hire (we are 100% direct deposit company).

We went live with EC, Performance, Goals and Compensation in May 2014; a little over 2 ½ years ago.

We have not really had any stability issues. During performance review time (i.e., August/September) there seemed to be data center issues where associates were all having system timeout issues, data was being lost from Performance Reviews documents, etc. This has been resolved, but was an issue at one time.

I am not aware of any scalability issues.

Technical support has been an issue since day one. We have made our concerns quite apparent. We pay extra for Premium Support (SAP Preferred Care) and honestly cannot see what we are really getting at times. We have an assigned CSM, but this is our 3rd one (although we like our CSM now). When a priority issue is sent to ‘Engineering’, it becomes a black hole of sorts. The priority of our case is no longer relevant as the CSM (and team) cannot do anything once it gets sent to the Engineering Team. This is a problem, since for us, SuccessFactors support is SuccessFactors support, regardless of what department/level the case sits in.

More direct interaction with the case specialist would be very helpful. When we occasionally have the ability to speak with the person actually working on the case (i.e., not CSM or initial support team), we find it extremely helpful (but unfortunately, doesn’t always happen).

We had no specific HR system. Employee data was housed in the payroll system and not available to anyone outside of HR Payroll. Performance reviews and comp were all manual with Excel and other Microsoft tools. The organizational chart was basically Excel and not always accurate.

Setup was straightforward, but that was only because our implementation team (IBM) did all of that for us and walked us through everything. Eventually, we realized how intuitive the process actually is.

The only other product we were going to use was SAP HCM On-Premise for HR and payroll with a connection to SuccessFactors for the Talent Management suite (i.e., Performance & Goals, etc.). That project never got started and once we saw Employee Central as a SaaS offering, we determined to keep the existing payroll process (it has since been upgraded to ADP) and go forward with the Employee Central/SuccessFactors integration (especially since SAP purchased SuccessFactors and should’ve had SuccessFactors/Employee Central fully integrated, which it wasn’t).

I would make sure they do their homework on an implementation partner, as that can make all the difference in the world.

I would make sure that all potential business changes are reviewed ahead of time so that the implementation partner can incorporate accordingly. For example, organization hierarchy changes, performance/goals modifications, job code changes (if necessary), etc.

Inquire about what all of your integration and reporting options are within SuccessFactors.

Inquire about how much you, as a customer, can do (i.e., Admin Tools) once implementation is completed.