What needs improvement with SAP SuccessFactors?

In terms of customizations in specific modules for industry requirements, SAP SuccessFactors is much more generic and does not comply many times with industry requirements as a vertical. In my experience with SuccessFactors' analytics capabilities influencing decision-making, workforce analytics is still challenging due to customizations. It does not provide flexibility in terms of analytics, and we have to customize extensively. For the future of the product, I would like to see more AI implementation, Python integrations, and GPT integrations.

User-friendliness is a major concern for me, which affects my overall experience. Additionally, the change management process during the initial launch was not effectively handled, leading to a poor user experience.

The graphical user interface (GUI) is not very friendly. On the homepage, it is not possible to place advisories or announcements at the top. Advisories can only be placed at the bottom, which is less effective as employees may not scroll down to see them.

The user experience and interface are not user-friendly. It does not invite the user to interact with it, unlike Oracle or Workday. The learning curve is sizable due to the complexity.

There are quite a few things, like goal management, in terms of transferring goals from manager to subordinates, which is probably not one of the best ways to look at SAP SuccessFactors, making it an area that could have been done better. Route management and template management are pretty good areas. The reporting in the tool is not as great as I would want it to be from a PMGM internal management perspective. I just hope that SAP SuccessFactors comes up with a payroll tool that suits India. I don't see it as one of the best tools for the Indian scenario. I would love to see much better document management in the system, like onboarding. Onboarding has document management, but if I want to report through it, there is not much that I can do about it. DMS in SAP would be great since, in most places, DMS is maintained outside the system. I would have loved to see better DMS in SAP SuccessFactors. In terms of the reporting, I understand that since everything is moving to SAP SAC. Even without SAP SAC, it would be great if we could have better analytics within SAP SuccessFactors.

We encountered challenges with the tool's integration with third-party applications and deployments.

The Onboarding module must be improved. It doesn’t have many features.

Compared to the other tools in the market, I feel that SAP SuccessFactors should improve more in the area of employee experience (EX) in the cloud, where there are some shortcomings. The product doesn't have a modernized look and is not very user-friendly like other products. In the future, the product needs to have a more modernized look, and it should be made more user-friendly.

One area for improvement is making SuccessFactors more compatible with other countries, especially in terms of payroll and other functionalities.

SAP SuccessFactors needs to improve the LMS and performance management.

Visual representations, in the form of graphs and charts, can be added. This is beneficial for both management and employees. Upon accessing the system, they should generate graphical representations on their dashboard. These visuals illustrate aspects such as company-wide training progress and current company training status. The information encompasses both company-related data and personal profiles. This approach makes it convenient to grasp the company's profile along with individual information.

There are some limiting aspects to this product but I think it's just the nature of the game with any software as a service. From a business perspective, you're limited within a certain boundary.

I think the improvement would be, you know, when the first thing that I'm not feeling is right, it's not right. You have a certification, and you can't lose it. They only block them down the site. You can only implement it to that level. And then just have to not refuse to get a person certified. That is absolutely unacceptable because it is SAP who made a mistake in operation. Are you telling me to enroll in university now for another seven years because it might have an attack in operation just to qualify and get a doctorate? That's absolute nonsense. SAP has a lot of consultants, and I'm one of them. We've been seeing projects for many years. And to scan the academies and the certification, what is the certification? It's like a driver's license. Once you've got it, you can't say, "I'm done driving my car all the time." They should rather look at such things. And now they have deltas which are books. So what are you really measuring? Because I can look at the four answers out of the delta and the manual. So I've got the answers now. I then state it on file, and I stay certified. That is something that really has to be worked on. And the fact that when implementing partners, put in junior, I mean, a person who has never even worked in the HR business environment or in a business itself. And then you put them on there since now they're a senior because they certify, and the people underneath them are not certified. But the people under them know SAP on-prem. They've been around the house many times. That doesn't gel. There have been cases involving a lot of re-implementations and frustrations within clients where they have the workbook sessions, the workbook workshops and things like that. And I think that doesn't really go down well because the workbooks are very technical and, a lot of times, very confusing for the client. And I think that doesn't really go down well because the workbooks are very technical and, a lot of times, very confusing for the client. And the fact that the business processes are not discussed upfront at any go. It's only discussed here and there when they open the workbook. And they say, "Right, now we stop. This is the workbook. This is the field. This is for the Employee Central. This is support." They do not have the language between the old SAP and the new SuccessFactors. Those are for clients that are moving from on-prem to SuccessFactors. If you have a new client, the induction should actually be a proper one-week session with them where you're actually taken through the demo client, and they then play with the look and feel and understand where the data comes from and actually have a country-specific demo where they can actually play, and they can relate, where they can see the payroll, where they can see the integration and things. That is not happening. Implementing partners tell clients that we can do it for them within six weeks. And the thing that I think is a downfall for us is implementing partners that have these express and golden clients. The expectation is later on, the client wants more functionality, and now it's more costly. And I think that is a killer because if the client doesn't understand the implications, because it's never spelled out, what are the implications when you want to move into more functionality within SuccessFactors, for example? You know, what is going to be needed? That's not changed up front. It only heats them up because they've been on the system for a while. The investment is there. Now you're obliged to carry on. I asked the implementing partners questions, and they said, "Oh, no. There are no issues around. There's no issue." So the question now is, I want to add some things. Now you have to switch it on. I said, "Okay. Now I have to switch it on. So what are the implications for me?" "No, we'll have to see." And now, what do you want to see? Do you see? So, one thing I've noticed is that no proper business process taken from the client actually mapped back into SuccessFactors and said, "Right, this is how it's going to work." Now after a while, you have a process, and you want to bring this in. No, no. You have to bring in the business rule. "Oh, no. Now you have to bring in the workflow. Oh, this workflow is not going to work for this." There's no proper setup, there's understanding, and there are only 200 other rules for them. By the way, are they relevant? Regarding the reports, there are only limited reports that can be downloaded. Why? Because you're using MyExpress. Does MyExpress belong to SuccessFactors? And that is the thing that I find that's not, but there are a lot of underlying things happening with SAP allowing the partners to do that. And what's actually happening out there? And I can tell you ninety percent of the clients that are going to move from SAP to Workday are because of that. The templates are not working for them, and they do not understand how they can move to what we call the EC portion, and now it's better for them to rather implement a new product and carry on with that.

There is room for improvement in the pricing model.

The price of the solution could improve, it is too high.

There is an area of improvement in integrating SuccessFactors with different platforms. There are other HR solutions, such as Mercer and Oracle, that companies are using, so integrating SuccessFactors with these products would be good. Oracle and other HR solutions are present in the market, so we can offer the customers the option to continue using their old HR system but integrated with SAP SuccessFactors.

SAP SuccessFactors can improve their recruitment module and artificial intelligence features associated with ATS. I understand that is very much in the roadmap, but must be expedited. More powerful analytics are needed.

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.

SAP SuccessFactors could improve learning management. The module is desperate and should be included in the primary solution. Additionally, it is missing some business use cases.

An area for improvement in SAP SuccessFactors is that it has a lot of quarterly updates. Still, the updates need to be more industry-specific because every industry has specific compensation modules. For example, every organization has a different compensation structure and incentives, so the compensation module and other modules still have room for improvement in SAP SuccessFactors. What I want to be added to SAP SuccessFactors is a chat box where SAP staff can give support to users.

We would like to see improvement in the initial launch of the product, as it is currently quite slow. We would like to see the addition of a dashboard feature, to enable faster access to regularly performed tasks.

The back end for the administration and the front end is too overtly complex and it's not aligned with our operations and learning needs. Its entire front-end user experience needs improvement. All back-end administration functionality needs to be simplified. The whole interface needs to be revamped.

The single problem that needs to be solved is that once you submit a form it cannot be edited. It would be helpful if that were a possibility. If I want to make a change, it means going to the HR department to gain access.

I find that the website sometimes has problems loading, but I'm unsure if it's an issue with SuccessFactors. After the login, there are some connection issues. We get some errors telling us that it cannot connect to the host.

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.

The downside is that SAP resources are expensive and not very common from a tech stack point of view. Anything you want to change or any customization is expensive. Our user experience is not great and we're looking at building a privileged user experience layer on top of what exists.

There's room for improvement in SAP SuccessFactors, particularly in terms of innovation. I'd like more flexibility in its functionality and more customization. In terms of what additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of the product, it depends on the module because you have various modules in SAP SuccessFactors, so it's easier to go module by module and understand what features you have in each module. The product has a lot of features coming up, but the product being more mobile, or having mobile features would be nice.

The SAP SuccessFactors integration with old versions can improve. We are using an older finance module but we are having migration issues. The problem we are facing is with our employee culture. It is difficult for some users to use the solution.

SAP SuccessFactors functionality doesn't meet the expectation of our end users. There are other solutions that have better functionality, such as Workday, which is one of the top applications. Additionally, the solution could be easier to use.

Considering the entire suite, Learning is on the verge of many upgrades, but it still needs to be upgraded to such a scale that it almost feels tightly integrated with SuccessFactors because Learning is on Plateau, and SuccessFactors acquired Plateau, and later SuccessFactors was acquired by SAP. Learning is still based on another Plateau platform. Much more progress is required in the Learning space. Everything, including the provisioning dependency, should be moved to the instance, and coding should be kept to a minimum. Wherever possible, coding should be minimized, and everything should be a drag-and-drop. UX and UI are already user-friendly, but there are some aspects that require some HTML or XML knowledge. It's not for everyone.

SAP is heavily invested in bringing new features and functionalities in SAP SuccessFactors with every release. Integration with the core financial and HCM / Payroll systems is very critical. This is the area where SAP can leverage its own product portfolio like S/4HANA and provide a much seamless integration

The integration between the recruitment module and employee central is a big problem. With WFA, People Analytic, and SAC, the confusion that we have now is regarding what should be used and what should not be used, which is a big problem. For me, analytics is a big gray area in SuccessFactors. A person like me would want a tool like Power BI to be integrable to SuccessFactors in a way that I'm able to derive analytics and reporting the way I want to, and not get enrolled into three or four solutions. I would rather have a direct connector into a good BI tool, like Power BI, and derive whatever I want from there, which of course, is not there. There are no inbuilt connectors for that. The different ways people use analytics shouldn't be guided by the way the software is structured, or the way an ERP is structured.

SuccessFactors could be improved by making it usable on mobile and making its features less rigid. Right now, if we make a customization and then SuccessFactors issues an upgrade, we get stuck because our customization doesn't come over from the previous version.

What needs to be improved in this product is the user experience. In general, for SAP products including SuccessFactors, the user experience is not so great, particularly the whole user interface. A lot of new age products beat them on that. While SAP products are great from functionality and feature standpoints, the whole user experience element is always lacking. That's one area SAP should focus on. There are other areas where we have not liked SuccessFactors. For example, as a recruitment solution, it's not great for onboarding and exit. Two years ago, we decided to use a different product for recruitment, onboarding, and exit. We're no longer using SAP SuccessFactors for those activities.

The process for long modules needs to be improved, because compared to how it's done with a competitor (Meta4), the competitor's process was simpler. I am satisfied with SuccessFactors, at least 85% satisfied. As for additional features that could be included in the next release, I developed a portal for life insurance. I asked for the medical insurance, but they did it for me in the HCM side, from the payroll side. It would be nice to have it in SuccessFactors because some branches, countries, or companies may need this info in case they want to go up to the cost of the employee, and usually any insurance cost is part of your employee cost as well. Another feature I was asking for which they asked me to develop outside as they can only extract the data for me, is the CV builder: the CV for mass builder, not the CV content because they have the data and I added two screens only. I asked to have a CV like the World Bank format which has a columnar way, but they weren't able to achieve it. I don't know if it's because we didn't buy the business intelligence module, or because the reporting tool in SuccessFactors is cloud-based, it's always limited and you need to build your own sophisticated report layout outside.

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.

The solution needs to offer more languages. Many in Indonesia, for example, are not so good at English. In this product, English is the default language. We need to translate it to our main languages, which is difficult. The pricing of SAP is quite high. It would be good to have tutorials for employees. If we had something to distribute to them to help with a general understanding of the solution, it would be quite helpful.

The reporting and cloud integration could be done better in this solution.

The initial setup could be simplified.

To explain one feature that I would like to see in SuccessFactors, I must describe a similar feature as seen in Oracle. In Oracle, there's a feature called Workforce Prediction, and with this feature, we can predict some of the behaviors of any employee. For example, the software can attempt to predict whether the employee might resign in future, or perhaps if they will start to perform better. This is something that is missing in SuccessFactors. Another thing that can be improved with SuccessFactors is that, although the reporting tool is not bad, there are often separate reports for different areas of the software. For management and other processes like onboarding, this is not ideal. For example, you may have separate technologies being used in the different modules, so the Payroll module may have a reporting system that is distinct from that used by the more basic modules. What we are looking for is some way to unify the reporting tools with one technology because otherwise it gives us difficulties when we need to generate a more complete and encompassing report. How it works now is that if we need to get the report from the Payroll module, we must first ask someone with Payroll experience. And if we want to get data from the basic performance or recruitment modules, we must ask another person for that info. I think that unifying the reporting features is the most important thing for us, which we hope to see in future versions. However, at least for standard processes, it does give us what we are looking for. We can work with cybernetics cloud integration, and that gives us very good insights. So it's not necessarily about making up a gap in the technology, it's more of a matter of being able to better handle who is responsible for what inside the organization.

It is not that user-friendly. It can be made more user-friendly.

Its overall integration and user experience can be improved. SuccessFactors is a system that is built out of three different systems. The elements part was bought from Plateau, and the original performance dialogue was built by SuccessFactors itself. After that, SAP bought it, and it hasn't improved in the last few years. SuccessFactors is a perfect tool if you use it the way it is meant to be, but if you start building custom sessions and try to use it differently, then it is a total mess. It is not agile. It is like an old Mastodon truck or whatever. We don't have the Employee Central and Competence Management modules. Our company made the choice to not implement the Employee Central module. We also didn't implement the Competence Management module. We use the learning module to do some competence management, but I am not that fond of it. It would have been best to have the whole suite. SAP should never sell this without selling the whole suite because it just doesn't work. The biggest gain for me would be having the possibility of doing strategic personnel planning and managing internal mobility. If it could be used for social purposes, such as creating communities and connecting with media channels, that would be perfect. It should also have the possibilities for local admin and agile product development.

The most important thing about SuccessFactors is that they need to adapt to the future with reporting analytics. They have a separate solution relating to Analytics. Which means they have to pay more. They have data there, they have everything there, they have to make current reports, dashboards, everything in the system. They have to pay for other tools, which is very complicated. They should be more user friendly and give us more tools to make it more flexible.

The user experience could be simplified. In the next release of SAP SuccessFactors, I would like to see mobile apps.

There are a few features that are missing. There are specific features on the HTM, such as telecom safety, that just isn't there. It's not a very detailed solution in that sense. However, it is maybe not expected to have those kinds of features on the surface level of the product.

The solution is losing a lot of utilization capabilities because most companies don't function in just one country; they operate in many around the world. It seems to have issues with handling the master data. One module is not the same across all countries. For example, in one case you will see the coverage of all of the localization processes related to the USA, but when it comes to the UK, it's covering maybe 50%. It's worse in other countries. In the Middle East, you might only get 10% coverage, for example. We were surprised at the level of variance from country to country. The solution needs more localization, especially for the Middle East and Russia and Germany. There needs to be more end-user training.

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.

The user interface could be improved. The pricing model should be adjusted. It takes a long time to deploy the solution, and it should allow for faster implementation.

The GUI needs to be enhanced to be in line with the latest and complete version of the solution. We would like to have more information on integrating this solution with other systems, such as financial solutions. The predictive analysis functionality should be expanded to offer more recommendations.

LMS, Learning Management Systems, needs improvement because there were some stability problems.

Some of the screens aren't that user-friendly, older employees especially have a hard time with it. They have some problems with it. Challenge management parts should be improved. Also, the recruitment part module should be improved to help managers to select the right person without an HR.

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.

They should improve the reports. We had a problem with the reporting. If we compare it to Oracle products, Oracle has much more comprehensive and a better reporting system all in all. They really should work on the reports and making it more user-friendly. There's room for more customization in the reporting. This is the feedback I received, that the main edge that all Oracle products have is the reporting system, which is the main reason why I'm using the system in the first place. In the next release, I would like for them to make the system have a slot for regular, back and forth feedback. It should have a feedback form on the system.

Analytics could use some work.

Related to Employee Central, the administration of Global Assignments have room for improvement. It is not so simple to manage the effect of global assignments in the Talent and Learning modules once this is activated in EC. EC Payroll and Time Management should provide more functionalities and flexibility, there is still a big gap between the SAP HCM On Premise System and Employee Central.

The Reporting/Analytics and User Interface need improvement.