Tips for Integrating SAP HCM and SAP SuccessFactors

Integrating a new solution such as SAP SuccessFactors into your existing SAP HCM environment can prove to be challenging if you’re not fully prepared. With user acceptance often cited as the biggest challenge to overcome – many would argue that the work required to get an HR solution up and running is the largest hurdle.

With cloud solutions like SAP SuccessFactors, it is common for organizations to provide approval to their HR team to implement a new solution with support from IT. While it is definitely an asset for HR to be at the forefront of an implementation, we strongly encourage you to bring the IT team into the project so that you’re prepared from a technical and integration perspective. IT can add value by providing the technical background of your existing SAP HCM investment, ultimately increasing your return on investment. The following are tips that we recommend to all of our clients who are utilizing a hybrid SAP HCM and SAP SuccessFactors model.

Integration

Your IT department should help identify all integration in the current HR System landscape, including inbound and outbound. It will be important that with a new solution roll-out, that data flows are not interrupted. IT will also know the effort to update existing current integration. Does the company have access to modify the data or middleware? At times, when wanting to make a change to data collection or business process, companies are scared to do so because of an integration. It’s worth exploring updating an integration to support the business change.

Tip: Use standardized integration as a starting point – customers often want to take what is “working” in one system and move to the new system. This is the chance to better the current process and utilize the functionality of your new tools. Using standardized integration reduces time spent customizing, can reduce cost, and is easier to maintain over time. SAP offers many pre-built standard integrations between SAP HCM on-premise and SuccessFactors, as well as other 3^rd party environments.

Heads up: Roadmap new integration! With so many integration options available now, whether it be SAP Process Integration, HANA Cloud Integration, Boomi or even API’s – take a step back, and see how time and costs can be reduced without any custom integration or manual processes. Use this opportunity to improve your current business processes.

Data Points and Requirements

IT should help identify data points from integration, so they’re included in the new solution. Data points should also include data requirements.

Lesson learned: We’ve seen something as simple as data requirements overlooked in an implementation, and it causes some unnecessary headache.

Communication

Fully communicate project strategy and set expectations – both teams should be actively involved in project testing. Again, the process cannot be divided between the two teams. As an organization you want to test the process from start to finish including all integrations and HR business processes.

Lesson Learned: We have found that the organizations that test their processes thoroughly end-to-end have the smoothest deployments and greatest user adoption.

While a new implementation can be a lot of work, it is also a very exciting endeavor that the organization and project teams should be excited about.