Beyond Go-Live: Lessons from ECC-to-SuccessFactors migrations

Let me welcome all of you to our webinar on some lessons we have learned from SAP SuccessFactors migrations. More specifically, how we can enable your clients from your implementations who are already on ECP with payroll testing and unified reporting. I would just like to introduce myself. I am Mariel from Global Marketing here at EPI-USE Labs and we are really happy to have you all dial in today. There's quite a big registration for this topic so just a few reminders before we start with Golf's presentation. So this session is recorded. You can watch it offline after we conclude the discussion. It will be coming in from an email and please feel free to send in your questions. You would see it on your left side of the screen and we will be addressing them after the webinar as long as we have enough time to go through each inquiry. Thank you again for sharing your time with us. Now without further ado, I would like to introduce today's expert. We have Golf Chosanapong Kittiamornkul, our regional solutions architect here at EPI-USE Labs. Over to you, Golf. Thank you. Thank you, Mariel. Okay. Hi, everyone. Hi, for every partner. Yeah. We are very happy to prepare and deliver this webinar for you. So nowadays, we see a number of SAP customers who are either in the middle of planning their payroll migration, or have recently crossed the finish line. So many, for many, there is a common misconception that go live marks the end of the journey. We often think that once the data is moved, and the new system is switched on, the mission is completed. But in reality, this is just the beginning. Right? Okay. As we transition from legacy SAP ECC to modern, like SuccessFactors ECP or S4HANA, we enter a new phase of operational challenges. The success of migration isn't just about moving the data. It's about how to manage, test, and report on that data every single month after the project team has left the room. Hi, everyone. My name is Golf. I'm a regional solutions architect based here in EPI-USE Labs, Thailand. Today, I'd like to invite you all to take a closer look at a very important topic, the reality of life after go live. Once the project team leaves and the daily operation begins, we consistently see two major challenges emerge that can impact the customer's payroll stability. The first one, the ongoing testing requirement. Yeah. In a cloud or S4HANA enrollment, testing is not a one time event. It's a continuous job. Or the second one, the reporting complexity. Moving to a new architecture often means your data is fragmented, making it harder than ever to get a clear, unified picture. So migrating with PRISM on Payroll, yeah, the service for SAP HCM. Yeah. This is where PRISM for Payroll come into play. We don't just want to move data, we want to move it smartly, and based on our case studies, which I will highlight briefly. Yeah. PRISM allows a high speed automated migration that cut down the downtime and manual error, typically seen in the traditional ECC to SuccessFactors transition. The payroll risk reduction with Variance Monitor. Yeah. In a traditional setup, the case after migration or a system update is often manual, slow, and prone to human error. With Variance Monitor, yeah, we can automate your payroll checks, whether it's a parallel run or post update validation. It catches every cent of this discrepancy, ensuring a hundred percent accuracy with zero manual effort. And the last one, yeah, the unified report with Query Manager. Yeah. And we address the reporting gaps With the Query Manager SuccessFactors Integration Add-on, we solve the issue of unifying data from disparate systems. Stop manually switching between spreadsheets. Query Manager provides a real time single source of truth. In this demo, I will show you how to pull a unified report combining SuccessFactors data and EC payroll cluster all in one view. So to give you a clearer picture, let's look at the integration that many of our customers face today. Despite being automatic, the application is often complex and manual. This turns a seamless process into heavy monitoring tasks for your clients. And again, you're operating in hybrid environment with Employee Central in the cloud, and payroll on a different platform, naturally adding a layer of risk. If one side changes, an item might break without warning. And small mismatches are the most dangerous. Yeah. They often stay hidden under the surface and not and notice until it suddenly impacts your actual payroll run, or even worse, shows up during an audit. Replication log exist. Right? But they are overwhelming. Yeah. Customers simply lack the time or technical clarity to filter through a thousand lines of logs every day. Yeah. As more companies adopt SuccessFactors Yeah. We consistently see the same pattern. It has driven a critical need for a better, and more automated way to validate and reconcile data before it hits your bank file. Okay. Our payroll observation after migration. Yeah. To wrap up our observation, there are three critical areas every organization must prioritize post migration. The first one is the risk and compliance. Yeah. Payroll migration is risky. You need a partner and a strategy that doesn't just move data, but automates the management of those risk to keep you compliant. Payroll accuracy. This is the heartbeat of your project. Yeah. Manual checks are not enough. Yeah. Customers must have an automated solution to catch variances both before and after go live. And the last one, time and cost. Efficiency is key. Look for a solution that leverages proven templates and expert software to minimize the time and cost spent on stabilization. Cool. This is a good quote. Yeah. For SAP customers, yeah, considering SuccessFactors ECP. Yeah. PRISM for Payroll provide a complete turnkey migration service. When we say turnkey, we mean it. Yeah. We handle a heavy lifting of moving our customer's compact payroll data, configuration, and history into the cloud. Our focus today is on post migration management for ECP. However, I would like to briefly touch on three services that EPI-USE Labs offer to customers who are currently deciding on how to transition from their legacy SAP payroll. We have three options. Right? The first one, PRISM for SuccessFactors ECP. This turnkey service move customer from on premise to ECP quickly and easily without the need of a painful reimplementation. The next one, PRISM for SAP S/4HANA private cloud or PCE. Yeah. Our automated PRISM solutions can assist in the transition. It is specifically designed to minimize technical conversion activity and reduce the business impact, usually associated with an S4HANA transformation. The last one, the PRISM for S4HANA on premise or H4S4. For the customer who prefer to stay on premise, this part allows them to extend their core HCM and talent solution with a direct S4HANA upgrade, ensure the long term support and modern capabilities. So I just picked some of our success stories, the customer that we already delivered successfully on a PRISM project. For example, North American Lighting here, they migrated their SAP payroll quickly and efficiently using PRISM services from EPI-USE Labs. EPI-USE Labs built an entire employee central payroll with data migration within five days using our EPI-USE Labs proprietary tools and with payroll running. And, okay, Carrefour Belgium. Yeah. We support their HR roadmap by using PRISM for ECP to migrate their payroll system to SuccessFactors ECP successfully. Another one is PostNL. Yeah. We migrated their on premise payroll to SuccessFactors Cloud payroll as well. Okay. This one is quite important, like the payroll life cycle, the SAP HCM lifecycle here. Yeah. The critical point to remember is that payroll risk must be managed all the time. It's not just a one hour project activity. As you can see in the SAP HCM lifecycle diagram here, there are multiple states where the customer data is at risk. Whether it's doing a new SAP implementation, conducting upgrade testing with parallel run, or apply some support package. Even business change like mergers, acquisitions, or system splits, introduce massive complexity and room for manual error. The challenge is that identifying variance in your data is something HCM and payroll professionals have to do constantly. Unfortunately, SAP doesn't provide a native solution for this, making it complex, time consuming, and resource-intensive parts. This is where Variance Monitor comes into play. Yeah. It offers the power and control customer's need to highlight variance across payroll, time, master data, and FI posting. Clients can simply set their tolerance level and certify the field they want to check, turning a painful manual reconciliation into a seamless and automated process. Okay. You can see we have a headline from global brands. Yeah. Like Google. They all highlight a single tool. When payroll changes go wrong, the consequences are severe. The high cost of failure. Yeah, we are not just talking about technical bugs, we are talking about underpaid employees. Heavy legal fines and a massive damage to company reputation. Once an employee's trust is lost, it is very hard to win back. The testing challenge, to manage this week, customers face a difficult balance. Yeah. CompressNet, you must test hundred percent of employee record. Spot checking, a small sample simply is not enough to catch hidden cache errors. Yeah. You must test security. Using spreadsheet create a new risk of human error and data exposure. Yeah. And lastly, you have to do all of this quickly to meet Tycho like deadline. The clarity is that manual testing cannot meet these three demands simultaneously. This is why a new automated approach is required to protect our client payroll indicated. Okay. Moving to next slide. I want to highlight exactly how we help our customer with their HCM implementation. Our goal isn't just to move them to the cloud, but to modernize the way they work. Yeah. We provide a consistent, repeatable, and fully auditable testing process. This remove the guesswork and provide clear trail for your for the customer auditor. Yeah. Data security is paramount. Yeah. We maintain full security within the SAP authorization model by eliminating the need of manual export and spreadsheets. We significantly reduce the task the risk of data, deep or extend accidental exposure. Instead of testing just a small sample, we enable customer to achieve greater test coverage across their whole employee population, multiple periods, and every single wait time. We accelerate our testing timeline from week down to just days, which directly lowers the overall project, but just weeks. Our tool finds and categorize problems instantly, increasing speed while ensuring the date that client remains compliant to minimum threshold constant values. Finally, we ensure minimal disruption to the live payroll process by leveraging advanced simulation capabilities. In short, we provide the safety net for allowing customers to modernize with confidence. Okay. This is a quite good slide to show you how to understand how does the body monitor work for the customer. Okay. Let's apply this comparison logic to your monthly payroll cycle, or what we call period to period validation. In this scenario, yeah, the control data on the right represent the customer golden period. For example, last month finalized or successful payroll run. Yeah. On another hand, the case data on the left is the current period payroll simulation. So Variance Monitor automatically compare these two periods, and here is what the result tell customers. In the green one, your data match. This confirm that the majority of the corporation Yeah. The payroll result are consistent with the previous month. This gives the payroll team peace of mind that call calculation remain stable. For our for the white box, yeah, the data missing. Yeah. This is the critical red flag. It highlights employee who were paid last month, but are missing from the current run. Yeah. And vice versa, it's an immediate check for headcount change or potential data error. For the green one, your data doesn't match. This is where the real value lie on our clients. It flags every employee who pay tax, taxes or deduction have changed. While some change expect, like, mid month pay rise and new overtime. Yeah. Variance monitor allow you to quickly isolate the unexpected variants that could single an error. Instead of try and manually compare spreadsheet and guess why the total payroll cost has shipped, very monitored provide an automated line by line audit. It ensures that every single dollar of difference between period is account and verify before your final, your final, finalize the LUN. Okay. Before I jump to the live demo, yeah, I would like to emphasize all of you again about Prism for Payroll. Our Prism is a software driven, selected data transition approach that allow you to reduce time and cost by fifty percent through the automation. Minimize risk to near zero with our upfront assessment and built in security. Okay. Before I let me switch to the demo. This is our internal demo system here, HD two client nine thirty. Yeah. We to make this demo easier to follow, yeah, we already had period to period comparison in advance. This one. K. This is our payroll comparison. Yeah. By country USA, then I will execute it. Yeah. I already prepared the Valiance for this demo. Okay. There you go. Yeah. The period the test period is October two thousand twenty, and the control period, The one that I would like to compare is the September two thousand twenty. Yes. Same year. Okay. Then I excuse. Okay. Before to explain this slide, let me jump back to this tab, statistic. Okay. This shorter information that this one works for you. I would like to point out here that the test payroll period is October twenty, and the control period is September twenty. It should be just like a real life situation that you need to compare the current period with the previous one. Okay? Okay. This is the result of the comparison. Okay. As a result, I would like to let you focus on the comments column. Yeah. The comment columns. Right? For most slide, you will see display equal value. Yeah. This is the great news. It means the amount of those specific grade type match perfectly between October and September. Right? However, if we look at the line sixteen, yeah, until twenty two, yeah, the comment disappears. Yeah. This is where VM three, our railway monitor, is highlighting a variance. The different column, you can see exact different and the percent of different right next to it. Right? Here, you can see. Yeah. The test value and control value. Yeah. The line that no comment is mean is variance. Yeah. The value from test value and control are different, and you can see the different number between those two value. Yeah. VM three is checking every single red type line by line. If you were to scroll down, yeah, I will see the same level of detail for every employee. Yeah. For payroll specialist, this is a live server. Instead of manually scan a fifty page PDF scoop, the system tell you exactly where to investigate. You can set threshold so you only see wherein that actually matter, like a five percent jump in gross pay, for example. Yeah. As partner, you are giving your client a tool that ensure that they never miss a payroll error. Yeah. Making them monthly cycle faster and significantly more accurate. Okay. This is the example for a vitamin monitor. Okay. This is a demo one. Okay. K. Let me jump back to the presentation. Now we are talking about Query Manager. As partner, we all know that the hybrid rarity is one of the biggest pain point for our clients. When HR data isn't in the is in the cloud and payroll remain on premise or in separate landscape, reporting become a fragment mess. This is where we enable our Ubiquity Manager. Our goal is to provide you with the tool that allow customer to deliver allow you to deliver higher value to our customer by addressing these four critical area. First, one, reduce business risk for our client. Often, customer lose their ability to ensure payroll accuracy because they can they cannot see the full picture. By using Query Manager, customer regain that visibility, providing them with a secure and compliance reporting environment that they can trust. Next one, we optimize data integrity. We know how much time is waste on master data replication error. Query Manager allow you as the partner to identify this discrepancy instantly. You can help customer ensure that their SuccessFactors and payroll data are perfectly aligned without waiting for bad job or manual checks. You can position Query Manager as a real time data engine. It allow you to free unify, leave data directly into their analytic tool or dashboard, providing the single sort of tools they have been looking for. And streamline processes. Yeah. The client move away from those complex, manual reconciliation processes by implementing Query Manager. They are streamlining their workflow and reduction, their dependency or manual Excel intervention. This allow the client's team to focus on strategic tasks than data entry. Or in short, human managers decide to make all your job as partner more effective. It allow you to solve disparate landscape problem quickly, ensuring that the end customer get accuracy and speed they deserve. So this architecture will perfectly illustrate the power of Query Manager as a single solution for SAP, SEM, and ECP. The Query Manager simplify this for client. Yeah. Okay. It act as a bridge. Yeah. You can see the Query Manager in the middle. Right? It acts as a bridge. Pulling live data from both SuccessFactors and ECP simultaneously. Client can create a single report that combine HR master data with actual payroll cluster without any manual data movement. Notice the bottom of the slide that we have three boxes here. Query Manager is just isn't just a reporting tool. It is a data engine. It allows you to feed, unify, clean, and reconcile data directly into a popular analytic platform like Power BI, SAC, or Tableau. Instead of spending hour building complex customer ABAP reports or manual spreadsheet for your clients, you can use Query Manager to deliver this insight in the fraction of the time. Query Manager is a future proof solution available for all type of client environment. As partner. This gives you flexibility to support end customer, like at least, where they are in their journey. This is the command that allow customer to have report across both on premise SAP and SuccessFactors seamlessly. Yeah. We use the old data to read data from both system. There is no middle man. There is no duplication of data. Customer don't have to manage separate database. The data stay where it belongs, and Query Manager who is on the fly to combine with any SAP or ecosystem data. So what about security? Yeah. One of the first question customer will ask you about security. We follow the official SAP recommendation. Yeah. By using a certificate based on SAML authentication, she will manage your respect to existing RBP or robust permissions in the SuccessFactors. If a user cannot see Slyly data in SuccessFactors UI, they also cannot see it in Hearing Manager report either. The report only run for users who are authorized on both solution, ensuring total data privacy and compliance. We also have the integration monitoring service. You can see in the screen here. Right? The customer can directly and resolve replication issue before the impact to the business. Yeah. To emphasize our standing in SAP ecosystem, let's look at the how SAP view data sources. In many scenarios, SAP and SuccessFactors choose not to provide direct access to certain type of data. Instead, they rely on select group of prostate partner to break the gap. If you look at the bottom, the bottom right here in the chart, you will see that the most critical and complex data, yeah, specifically on premise payroll, payroll configuration, and on premise reporting. The partner explicitly mentioned is EPI-USE Labs. I also jump back to the system to show you a QM demo. Okay. I prepared two demo for Query Manager. The first one is the payroll register, and another one is the employee compensation information. The first one here is we'll collect only the data inside the ECP. Yeah. But another one is we'll combine the post source, the data from SuccessFactors and ECP. Okay. Let's get started with the first one. Typically, after migration, your payrolls specialist needs to produce a payroll register to verify every employee's earning, taxes, and deduction. In standard SAP enrollment, this is often a painful process. They usually have to run multiple standard reports from different sources and then merge that data manually in Excel. It's time consuming and prone to human error. And the moment data is export into a spreadsheet, you lose control over data privacy and integrating right away. But with Query Manager, we eliminate these risks entirely. We can provide the same comprehensive report without leaving the SAP environment. On my screen, you can see the clean interface is there. The end user. It's just a single click solution. Yeah. No need of complex translation code or manual data merging. As we look at the output here, yeah, You can see the important information, show like a personal number. Yeah. Yeah. Position and payroll area. Okay. Yeah. But more importantly, look at the rate type. Yeah. We can see everything from basic SLALI to withholding tab and social security. This is the slightly withholding tab and social security within one screen. So the Query Manager isn't just displaying data, It's organizing it. Look at the weird type classification, the last column. Yeah. It's automatically group item into earning, taxes, and post tax deduction. It even calculate the subtotal for each employee. Yeah. You can see. You can get your subtotal right away from same screen. The most important takeaway for you as a partner is this data stay within SAP. It less spec or existing SAP authorization, as I mentioned earlier. There is no manual marriage of data required. Everything you see here is pulled directly from payroll cluster in real time. For the second demo, yeah, I want to show you the real game changer. The biggest one of the biggest hurdles of any hybrid customer is getting a holistic view of employee compensation when master data live in the cloud and payroll data live in on premise. In general, customer would have to run report in SuccessFactors EC for HR detail and run another report in SAP for payroll result, and then spend hours manually merging them, yeah, as partner. Now you can eliminate this entire process with them. On the screen, yeah, at first glance, right, you look at the synchronous, seamless table, but behind the scene, Query Manager is performing a real time join of two different data sources. Yeah. From the column, I going to highlight company business unit division department. Yeah. These four columns, the data come from SuccessFactors EC. We have our full organization context for every employee without any manual data entry. Yeah. Right next to the SuccessFactors data, we have the live payroll resolve. Yeah. From SAP. Yeah. In this example, we are showing the total employee versus employee contribution Based on the specific pay component in the system, you can see the pay period slightly, medical HRSMO contribution, and even life insurance amount. Here is the best path for you as a partner. Yep. Building this requires zero above skills. Query Manager is designed for the functional user. It use a very user friendly interface with Excel like formula and function. You don't need a technical developer to create complex cost system reports anymore. K. That's all for my end for the presentation and demo. I over to you, Mario. Thank you, Golf. I really appreciate that you went into so much detail about both The first solution that you kind of focused on was Variance Monitor and then the second was about Query Manager SuccessFactors Integration Add on. And you mentioned that there's actually a turnkey service that's available for partners to also utilize. It's called Prism for Payroll. So quite exciting, especially in this climate that everyone's kind of racing towards going into the cloud with the deadline looming all over the enterprises globally. So let me just go into some questions that we received from today's attendees. I would like to read one. Okay, so they're asking about Query Manager. So the question reads, how does it handle data synchronization and ensure data accuracy and consistency across systems? Okay. Thank you for the question. Yeah. Yeah. The data synchronization and data accuracy is the most important part for the reporting. Yeah. Especially for the cost, different the hybrid enrollment. So when consolidating our SAP HR payroll data with the SuccessFactors Cloud data, yeah, QA manager rely on specific mechanism to ensure their integrated data remain accurate and completely aligned. Yeah. For example, we are using a real time API access. Yeah. The integration user, the SuccessFactors all data API to retrieve real data, the real time data that we form module like EC or recruiting rather than rely on a sterile extract. Yeah. And another example, another example is refreshing metadata. Yeah. Administrator must regularly use the refresh metadata function to retrieve the exact configuration of the SuccessFactors system. This action synchronize their latest entities, properties, association, and navigation properties so Query Manager can construct fully accurate data source based on the external systems current validity. Yeah. This is a question for, to address it. It's a quiz That's really interesting. So in simpler terms, it maps everything that you need. So I would like to ask another question. We're running out of time but I think this question is quite interesting for all the companies here on the call right now. So this one is about Variance Monitor They're asking how often should payroll validation be done? Is it okay if I do it after system changes only? Yeah. Actually, it depends, but the best practice or what we recommend is, while many customer traditionally view payroll validation as the project only activity. Sometimes you do after the upgrade or migration. However, the reality is the modern payroll is quite different. Yeah. We recommend to customer to do like a the proactive approach rather than reactive one. Yeah. Just some key point. Right? We can do in the project best. Right? Naturally, this is a must have phase anyway. After migration, system split or apply support package. Yeah. You have to do the payroll run, of course. For the business as usual, this is where the real value lie. We encourage client to learn validation every single pay period. Because even without system change, your master data change constantly. New high termination or complex rate calculation that might be Strength. And lastly, audit and compliance readiness. Have customer have to prepare for the auditing. By running regular checks, client aren't just fighting error. They are building an auditable trail for of accuracy. Yeah. I really agree with all points, but mostly number three, especially with the news articles that you shared in your presentation. It's quite a daunting number for a corporation of any size actually across all industries to get that kind of not only financial burden or reputational risk but really the effect of it on the lives of the employees themselves. Anyway, that's all the questions that we can address. We still have some questions coming in right now, but I would just like to wrap up the webinar. So thank you all for sharing all your questions and for participating in this webinar. So if we ever did not get to your inquiry, we will be reaching out to you via email so that we can have a one to one question and answer opportunity. So again, all the useful links will be in a follow-up email and of course if you want to know more about the other software solutions within the Prism for Payroll service that both mentioned, we'd love to share more information. So if it's suited for your project requirements for functional testing and for unified reporting on payroll, we would love to talk and connect, hopefully to help you in your implementation projects that are in the pipeline. So that's it. I won't take much of your day. Thank you very much and take care. Stay safe. Bye. Bye.