SAP SuccessFactors Reviews

My organization began using SuccessFactors as two separate components for performance management and succession in 2019. However, there was no roadmap. When I joined in 2020, I created a roadmap for the implementation of a full ERP platform that focused on the human experience manager. This was aligned with our business strategy to digitize HR and provide a superior employee experience from hiring to retirement. We identified the various employee touchpoints and began implementing SuccessFactors in 2020, including EC, job profile builder, recruitment, onboarding, offboarding, performance, succession, LMS, career, mentorship, coaching, and compensation components. Our EC Payroll is currently on a hybrid server and on-premise, so we are working to move it over. We originally had 23 payrolls, so we first needed to harmonize the benefit structures and the payroll environment before we could design a future payroll functionality for the company.

Technology is not a core skill of HR, and HR is having difficulty adapting to digitization. SAP has done something great by introducing a new enablement platform in the middle of last year. This platform allows us to transfer our skills to an HR information system environment so that we don't need to rely on certified consultants for all of our needs. A lot of the templates and transactions need to be maintained internally, and SAP's platform has given my team an advantage. My team was previously one HR administrator and two payroll administrators, and now I have a team of three people that support the implementation of SAP SuccessFactors from a business perspective. The enablement platform that SAP provided has given my team the knowledge to use the various functionalities. However, for a normal HR end user, the gap between where HR is and where it needs to be in terms of digitalization is very large. HR is struggling with this.

There are a few features that are valuable to me. The first is that SAP SuccessFactors integrated solution, allows us to start the process from a recruitment marketing perspective and have our career site and candidate profile pull through into each other. We have designed it correctly from a design principles perspective, linked our external job sites to the appropriate source tracking, and brought 18,000 applicants or candidate profiles onto our portal in the last three years. We have also worked closely with LinkedIn to improve our talent acquisition. Additionally, our recruitment process flows seamlessly into onboarding, performance management, succession process, LMS process, career pathing, and planning. We have also taken advantage of the integration between SuccessFactors and Microsoft platforms, utilizing the full Microsoft functionality and rebuilding some of it back into SuccessFactors. The second valuable feature is the ability to set up various compliance elements and business rules that automate manual checking and controls. This helps us to identify red flags before they become an issue and keeps our HR system data clean. The third feature is that SuccessFactors does the checking for us when they make enhancements to their modules. They have two upgrades a year, in March and October, and they check and confirm the impact on the other environments and manage it for us, saving us time and energy. This ensures that our systems don't break when we do upgrades.

SuccessFactors has a best practices model for HR across the board, but there are multiple industries. For example, the pharmaceutical, engineering, and professional services industries may have different processes based on their business requirements and operations. SAP and Workday have one approach across industries. As employee experience becomes increasingly important, the kind of employees appointed in an engineering environment, a pharmaceutical environment, and a professional service environment are very different, meaning their experience touchpoints may differ and require adjustments. SuccessFactors should consider building their best practices around critical industries to help companies become more differentiated in the markets they operate in.

As a company, we have 118,000 followers on LinkedIn, and the unemployment rate in South Africa is quite high, at more than 30 percent. When we advertise a job, the number of CVs and applications we receive from people who want to work for us is overwhelming, we can get up to 600 CVs for a single vacancy. To make the process more efficient, we need to use artificial intelligence to identify the key elements of the job profile and match them to the CVs of the applicants. The pre-selection questions are helpful in reducing the number of applicants, but they don't measure the suitability of the CVs and profiles. This is something that needs to be built into the system, but it doesn't currently exist in the market. We have a good pre-selection program, but it doesn't take into account experience, qualifications, professional memberships, work experience, or critical performance indicators. We have enough information from CVs and LinkedIn profiles for the system to match the vacancy profile with the applicant's information and rank them from most suitable to least suitable.

I have been using the solution for over two years.

The solution is very reliable. We receive advanced warnings when upgrades are going to be made, usually on a Friday or Saturday night. This gives us plenty of time to inform our team that the system will be down for approximately 24 hours, usually over the weekend. Since 2020, we have been using the system full-time and have only had two outages, one of which was our fault. An employee in our implementation department mistakenly deleted items they should not have, resulting in a 24-hour outage. Fortunately, since we are in the cloud, we were able to log a priority one call with SAP and they restored our entire system within 24 hours using the previous night's backup.

We are part of a larger business. We are a distinct legal entity within this business, and we initially shared the platform with our parent company, which had over 13,000 employees. Last March, we split the business and the instances and the company went its separate ways as we could not manage multiple domains securely. We completed the tenant split with SAP support in eight weeks, which is much faster than the usual three to six months. We have had no issues since then, even with our go-lives over the last three years. We have not had to use Hypercare once with SAP since our go-live. Therefore, scalability is essential, and we need to consider the current and future needs of the business. If we need to purchase additional licenses, we can do so within 36 hours, allowing us to scale up quickly.

I communicate with technical support on a regular basis. I have an account manager located in Spain whom I can contact via WhatsApp. I tell him that we have an issue and provide him with the call number and details of the problem. He then escalates it to priority one and, since SAP is a global company, they have 24-hour support. Even if the call is worked on in South Africa and needs to continue into the night for us, the team in America will take over and ensure we don't lose any time. This usually results in the call being solved quickly since everyone is familiar with the platform and any potential issues.

Positive

Implementing SuccessFactors has been easy for me, but this is more of a general trend. 

Our HR team and employees are the most valuable assets to our business. Our team and staff are essential for success. Even if we have the best strategies and ideas, if our team is not aligned and we don't have a differentiated talent platform that makes people happy, we will continue to lose people. Our people will not be motivated to train or develop their skills. Therefore, the value of SuccessFactors is not just a platform, but it provides our employees with a differentiated experience that makes them want to work for the brand, be part of the company, and recommend it to their colleagues and friends. I would never skimp on a platform that provides that to the business, as it is our people and how we manage them that will drive revenue and make our business successful.

I give the solution a ten out of ten. I would rate SuccessFactors as the best based on our support, experience with them, and their enablement functionality to build a supportive team. If we get stuck, they are only a WhatsApp message away. They partner with us through implementation and provide support throughout, and they continually look for ways to improve. Twice a year, SAP users can submit proposals and recommendations for changes to the system in a global voting environment. This allows clients to suggest changes to their experience with the platform, which can be tested and opted out of if desired. There is a great deal of flexibility and innovation in this process which we appreciate.

We are a services business and an SAP partner. We sell and implement SAP SuccessFactors for other companies. We need our own take on this product so that we can show our clients that we support it. We looked at the functionality of various systems and found that SAP SuccessFactors was the best fit for our requirements in terms of digitalization. The solution has a component that feeds into S/4HANA from a finance perspective, such as for expense claims. We use timesheets in S/4HANA as it allows us to bill across multiple profit centers and cost centers, which is not possible in SuccessFactors. The integration between S/4HANA and SuccessFactors is seamless, as it is based on standard integrations that have already been built.

For those planning to transition to digital HR, it is important to first identify the essential components of the lifecycle. This includes processes such as recruitment, onboarding, and offboarding. We can then map out the business requirements and present them to the client in terms of how they would be implemented in SAP SuccessFactors. Once the client is satisfied, we can then provide a proposal and a roadmap based on their priorities. However, for the successful adoption of the technology, both a technical and cultural shift is needed. We must ensure that our HR team and business people understand the changes to their processes, practices, and mindsets that will be required. Otherwise, the implementation is likely to fail.