Let's Talk HCM

Every organization has forms and documents that need to be completed on a specific template or design. These forms can include Tax documents, enrollment forms, government forms, etc. In old-school SAP, customers would have to leverage tools like SAP Script to produce these complex documents via a time-consuming and complicated process. This old process required the creation and design in a development client by a trained programmer, its respective transport to a Quality Assurance (QA) client for testing, and then on to a Production client for use, repeating this process with each iteration and update. 

With EPI-USE Labs’ Document Builder as part of Query Manager, this is easy to accomplish. In this quick blog I will show you how I populated data from my SAP HR/Payroll system on to a standard government form.

Read on for more...

Tricks of the trade for customers still using SAP Query, the Ad Hoc Query and transaction code SQ01.
In my 20-plus years in the SAP HCM space I am probably most known for reporting. After a few books, hundreds of speaking engagements around the world and more articles than I can count, I am still here talking about SAP Query. What’s fascinating is that there is still a very large number of SAP HCM’s approximately 14,000 on-premise customers who are using these SAP delivered tools for reporting.

In 2017, SAP SuccessFactors published a White Paper entitled “100 Critical Human Capital Questions” designed to assist HR leaders and corporate executives to intuitively recognize the importance of human capital to the growth and success of their enterprises.

This paper included a series of questions designed to help organizations understand these metrics, and to make those decisions.  Sample questions specific to Workforce Demographics and Diversity include:

1. What percentage of your workforce will retire in the next year or in the next five years?
2. What is the average age in your organization? In the last five years, has it increased, decreased, or remained the same?
3. What is the average tenure of people in your organization? In the last five years, has it increased, decreased, or remained the same?
4. What is your ratio of managerial to non-managerial staff? In the last five years, has it increased, decreased, or remained the same? 

We all want to remain up-to-date with the latest advancements in our SAP HCM and SAP SuccessFactors ecosphere. Before 2012, we had a long stretch of ‘business as usual’ in the SAP HCM space. With the advent of HR Renewal, SAP’s acquisition of SuccessFactors and the launch of SAP SuccessFactors Managed Payroll, there is new information of interest every single day.

To help you stay in the know, I have compiled a list of my Top 40 favorite SAP HCM and SAP SuccessFactors influencers (in no particular order) to follow on Twitter. I hope you find them as informative as I do!  

Comparing Apples to Oranges

Query Manager is the leading reporting solution used by thousands of SAP HCM customers around the world every day to solve SAP HCM reporting challenges, including:
1. Reliance on IT to produce reports (using technology like custom-coded ABAP)
2. Multiple solutions/utilities + Excel needed to create reports for various modules
3. Transactional and Payroll data not included in BW

As SAP HCM became more mature, and with the acquisition of SuccessFactors, Query Manager has added functionality that allows users to execute reports via a browser (including mobile devices) and includes the ability to report on data from both SAP and SuccessFactors at the same time.

Some of the most common themes about Query Manager reporting include:

1. No implementation required to install (it’s simply an SAP transport), you can be up and running in minutes
2. All data is live, in real time, and you can include data from virtually any data source*
3. The tool is easy to use and automates the delivery of reports via email, your portal MSS, etc.

Query Manager sounds great, so why is comparing it to the highly regarded SAP SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics like comparing apples to oranges? In this blog, I review three of the main reasons why.