Bridging the gap: Seamlessly combine SAP SuccessFactors & ECP data

Hello, everyone. I'd like to welcome you today to our webinar on how partners can enable your SAP SuccessFactors clients to have a seamless integration with their payroll systems. I'm Chris Arc, and I'm your partner manager here at FU Slabs. We're delighted to have you with us today. A few reminders before we dive into this topic. The session is being recorded, and a recording will be shared after the is it has been completed. And, if you would like to ask a question, please, use the queue box at your control panel, and we will get to those questions at the end of this session. So with that, I'd like to take some time and introduce to you our speaker today, Lane Small, who is our HCM product manager here at Epiuse Labs. Over to you, Lane. What we're gonna talk about in this, we're gonna talk about some of the most common and complicated report challenges that you and, you know, your SuccessFactors clients are facing, especially as they're migrating, from on prem maybe to EC and ECP. So we have a lot of experience with that. We're gonna go over some, key findings that we found with that and give you the best solutions for that, how we integrate disconnected HR and payroll landscapes, and make it disparate reporting and make it all consolidated reporting again. And then lastly, what we're gonna end on is just a few different query manager demos in case some of you are unfamiliar with query manager. We're gonna show you the possibilities that you have and how you can consolidate this reporting and make it all seamless integration and reporting for your clients and even help you during your implementations. Alright. So what's the gap? So SuccessFactors, it does have report center internally within, you know, Employee Central. Especially, that's what we're gonna talk about today. Now what we have found with clients, sometimes they find it a little difficult to work with and even more difficult when they wanna build, you know, custom or highly complex reports, that they have in there. Now it's also worth noting that report center only has, SuccessFactors data only in there. Does have a limited amount of payroll data possibly in there, but it's very limited what it has. Possibly have a bunch of older reports, you know, that you wanna get moved over. You know, especially as they're going to, let's say, EC payroll, they may move some of the older ABAP reports from on premise, but they may not work and need a lot of, coding to change. So that way, it works in ECP environment now that configuration has possibly changed. Not all data exist in employee central payroll as it did in the on prem days, and they possibly may even have something like, you know, analytics cloud or other data lakes. And that's gonna require even more technical resources to make changes to adapt to the new environments as they're making this move, to the cloud following SAP's release schedule. Now for employee central payroll, you know, and your on premise, they do have several reports, including things like standard, you know, the SAP or ad hoc query that you can report from, but that does have its limitations as well. And then they do have wayside reward, which is very good, but gives you limited, and basic payroll data, and you can't really configure that or customize it based off client needs. It's also worth noting that it is just that payroll data. And in the move to EC, it loses lots of those source key fields, that's needed for payroll reporting. And then some of the clients also may be using payroll control center once they move over. Now this is very good for when they're gonna actually process payroll, get notifications, KPIs. But one lack lacking thing with payroll control center is it's meant to process your payroll and do things through the SuccessFactors embedded there, but not necessarily meant to be a reporting tool. And we'll put on a little bit more of that later. Now all that being said, one thing that is missing is that combined view or consolidated reporting. So none of these different solutions gives you that combined view with payroll data, with the master data that's NEC and not replicated over, plus other data such as files folks may be having, where they're storing information outside of it, or disparate data may that may be in other system that needs to be consolidated within, a singular report to have that consolidated view. Alright. Reporting from disparate systems or disparate landscape. So one of the things we have, you know, as a partner is, you know, a comprised ability to ensure payroll accuracy and compliance. So how can we help you reduce that business risk in order to give you, consolidated reporting, all in one report? So that way you're not having human error involved and mix and matching different sets of data. For the master data replication errors, you know, we wanna optimize that data integrity. We wanna ensure that data matches cross systems. And there are things such as the replication logs that you have, and that's gonna give you all the errors. But there may be cases in which we've seen where data either doesn't trigger to replicate across, and that's not gonna obviously, create a replication log error. And then so we have instances where we can actually check data for you, from the EC side and the payroll side without checking the actual replication logs and do a physical compare of that data, and we'll get into that a little bit later. Difficulties and for the client side, difficulties generate that consolidated analytics view. And so we feed all of this data, you know, consolidated data from disparate landscapes via our query manager engine, into the analytics solution of their choice. Lastly, complex reconciliation, you know, requiring that extensive that manual intervention. So we want to minimize the human error approach. We want to streamline those processes for you so that way you can focus more time on the actual implementations and, you know, support via the partner versus having to download, and then and consolidate these reportings via third party, solutions like Excel, which may cause human, prone errors. Alright. So how can we do all of this? So is all of your clients data within a singular solution, within actually the SAP landscape, whether it's just HCM on prem or ECP. Now when they go to this either hybrid view or full SuccessFactors, they're gonna have different options that they have here. You know, on the left side, you kinda have SuccessFactors with its own, such as report center, where you can build your own reports. They give you some already built in reports. Now they do have people analytics and story reports in report center. Those are good. And, again, as we mentioned before, for highly complex ones, it may be a little too complicated for users to actually use, but it's also lacking one thing, and that is the payroll side of things. So either on prem or, you know, employee central payroll, it's not gonna have those payroll results there for a consolidated view. Now on the other side of things, you're gonna have employee central payroll where, it is, you know, your typical ABAP system is just like SAP, but it is lacking a few things such as all of the information that has been moved to the source system of SuccessFactors. But you can view things in there such as PC pay results, which payroll managers are in that, you know, all day long, especially around payroll processing time, and even things like WageTypeReporter. But, again, it is limited where it's gonna have limited amount of master data there, and, also, it's really not customizable. It kinda is what you get, and you're not able to add custom fields into that wage type reporter. You also have you know, clients could use payroll control center, which is, allows you to run that payroll processing from within your SuccessFactors environment. You know, it has lots of validations, KPIs, payroll checks, but the biggest thing with that is that payroll control center is not meant to be a reporting solution. It's more meant to work with your payroll processing, ensure that everything is validated before it's processed, and ensure that when payroll is run, that it's run valid, and then that all payroll results are correct. Now that's where query manager kinda comes into play here. Query manager allows you to consolidate all of the information from SuccessFactors and your payroll system into a singular report to view. Now once you have that, you can view that many different ways in which we'll talk about. You can view that via a web view in your browser. You can have it on a tablet. You can even view that, you know, for payroll managers, you know, who are still very much involved with Excel and have all of that going on, that you can view and get those results directly from Excel, fed from query manager. One of the biggest things as we're making the push to more of analytics solutions is that Query Manager can also feed all of this data into your analytics solution of choice, such as Power BI, Analytics Cloud, and even Tableau, just to name a few. And we're gonna show you actually just a short, a little demo of this and what we're able to do with something like Power BI with consolidated reporting, in just a bit. Alright. So what about this? Is query managers it's robust, it's scalable, and it's maintainable integration. Now that being said is query manager doesn't need any real technical expertise. You don't have to do any coding. You don't have to, know really the data structures. We manage that and deliver all of that content within query manager in itself, and we even give you ways to customize it for yourself or the client to that way so it meets their very specific needs within reporting. Simple drag and drop features are included within query manager, and even we give you a formula solution that's mimicked just like Excel. And it's so much that way that you can Google how to do x y z in Excel, and you can copy and paste that with inquiry manager, and it works ninety nine percent of the time. Many little tweaks such as, like, cell references versus our field references, but it works through and through. Alright. So now we're gonna get in just integrating with your analytics solution. So Analytics Connector is available to all the clients who has Query Manager, and it can be shared again to any data, within the Query Manager solution that you have built out in your report such as, again, payroll, configuration data, and then even combine all of that with SuccessFactors, and EECP data if you're on that full cloud approach, with external systems. It can even bring in file data and data outside of these systems, including that consolidated report, and then use that to feed to your analytic solution of choice. So this, is really ideal for, you know, applications where they don't have real time access to this data. We can schedule this, you know, to be fed into things like Analytics Cloud, Power BI, or Tableau. And we can put this on a distribution so that way it's fed nightly. It's fed every time your payroll is run, or we can even up it if you want, and we can feed this data into your analytics solution on a more frequent schedule such as, you know, if master data is changing very rapidly, we can run this ad hoc or even feed it, like, every hour similar to how replication, is working in your solution. Okay. Talking just a bit about, you know, reporting analytics and planning just to keep feeding on this, is that, you know, in analytics, in SuccessFactors, they have some of this, and they have a published road map, for this, including, you know, Employee Central, which is what we're focused on today. And that is their people analytics or in their embedded report stories within, SuccessFactors, for example. They also have workforce analytics, which is being fed out a little bit into the kind of analytics cloud for planning, that they have. Now for the reporting side, this is where query managers largely in play here. You know, we can feed data into query manager again from any on premise data that you have, HR, non HR, or even non SAP data that's sitting in there via files, maybe. We can read that from query manager. HR payroll and time data, SuccessFactors data, from employee central plus any other data that is exposed via OData, we can consume in, and then even payroll central. Employee central payroll Can be consumed via query manager. Then you have on the planning side of things where SAP has things like Datasphere, newly released, Business Data Cloud, such as Analytics Cloud, and then third party applications. And just to show again, this is where query managers can feed into that. So we can feed into things like Datasphere or the transformation layer of Business Data Cloud or even directly into that visualization layer, like Analytics Cloud. Query Manager can be consumed in all of these different areas. And we go so far as where that even own SAP's partner delivered data sources, you know, in scenarios where they don't SuccessFactors does not provide data directly, which they've already mentioned that they don't plan to have full payroll data, in these solutions. We are actually in that bottom right kinda highlighted in red. We are their preferred partner to deliver SAP payroll, payroll config, and on prem reporting into these, solutions and as the preferred vendor. So they've gone through. They've vetted our solution. We've shown them how it worked, and we've got put on this slide, that SAP uses. K. And before we get into the live demo, just to show you a bit on this, you know, we're talking a bit about analytics and success factors today, but just wanna mention that we also have these here, and these will be available for you after that. We offer more than that. So with query manager functionality, we do have SuccessFactors integration. We give you the Fiori piece, which gives you a UI five view that you can view via your web browser, the Excel add on, which gives us payroll managers or anybody using Query Manager direct access via Microsoft Excel, Analytics Connector. And lastly, we do have something called document builder, which allows you to create professional PDF documents, contracts, employee letters, pay information, send that to employees, and even include things like DocuSign in that. Alright. So with that being said, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna jump out of this and get into a live demo and just show you some of this functionality. Alright. So I'm going to minimize this, and then we're gonna jump live in the query manager. So this is query manager, which will sit, you know, via it's applied via transports to either your SAP system or your, employee central payroll system. It's worth noting that query manager is approved, to run on employee central payroll. We're on the official note for that. We're also fully certified within ECC as well as s four HANA and even RISE to s four HANA Cloud. So we're fully certified and approved to run on all of the platforms that SAP hosts, and provides. So it should be no issue getting that. And we have this solution, installed and close to a thousand clients worldwide. Okay. So what we're gonna show you is just gonna hop in and show you some delivered reports. Now we do have delivered content already within query managers that you're able to view, and we're just gonna show you some of this content that we've curated on this system that we have. So I'm just gonna go down. Today, we're really focused on that integrated reporting and consolidated reporting from SuccessFactors and payroll. So we're gonna jump right into some of this. So here we have our SuccessFactors folder. We're gonna go down, and the first thing we're gonna jump into is consolidated reporting. How do we get payroll data with SuccessFactors? So here we already have a written report that has payroll data with SuccessFactors manager info. And once we click on this, we see on the right side, this is our normal run screen that we can have. We also see that we have different tabs on the top. The great thing about career manager is we store those results for you. So no more of the days of running this in the background, going to the spool, getting that data out. You know, again, that human intervention, consolidating that down, and then doing something within that sale. You can kick this off to run. So we can see we have runs dating back to twenty three here. Kick this off to run, and then just go in the morning. You can distribute this out, have it send you an email, have that email, and the report even be encrypted with password protection every day if you like, or you can just log in the morning and view your reports. I'm gonna slide this over just a bit so I can get the full view. Here we have information from both our ECP system and our employee central system. Now we can see that these columns highlighted in green is information that's only stored in our employee central system. So here we have our personnel number and our name. This is our comp ratio and range penetration that we wanna see that's just from our employee central. Then we have our actual payroll information. So we have our check date, gross pay deductions, then we wanna show deductions and negatives. So this is just a formula that we're able to do to simply we can switch that, if needed. So that way, you can actually see the deductions as a negative for summing if you wanna get down to a net pay, via manual effort. So that way, you can see what it is, and it's actually a negative amount. We have taxes. We have net pay. And then we also have our supervisor information. So this is our supervisor information. It's only stored in e c that just gives us their ID, their name, and their email. Now the great part about this, distribution feature within query managers, we can take information like this. We can run it once, and we can distribute it out, to our managers if needed. So we can run this once. We can say I wanna send to all of our managers, and what's gonna happen is it's gonna pick and pull all the employees just for the singular manager and send them all of their relevant information. So for miss Ellen here, it's gonna run this. It's gonna extract just these two records and send Ellen those two records, via email if you want, again, with full, encryption and password protected files, and only center that. So you're not having to run this for each employee or each manager and send them their own information. You can run this once and distribute it out. And let's go in, and let's actually create a report similar to this. So I'm just gonna choose create query. It's gonna give me a pop up, and I have different options that I can do. So I'm just gonna do a, e c ECP example. Now we have different starting templates, and these are just templates. It gives you a few basic information and already have certain settings checked. We have basic standard, OMPA data if you need it. We have payroll, both clustered and declustered payroll. And then we have direct success factors data such as the employee, a user, and even ESS and MSS modes for success factors. Here, we're gonna start with payroll. I'm gonna hit my check mark, and it's gonna bring us to our main run screen. Now what our template does, in the middle section here, if we focus on this one for a second, these are just prepopulated fields that we have, via the template. So we have our personal number, our name, the period for the payroll, our payroll amount, and our payroll wage type. Now our payroll wage type can be a technical wage type. I can double click on this if I want here. I can go in and I can set filter if I wanna maybe just bring in slash one zero one for my gross pay. I can make that selection right here and filter that down. I know that's my gross pay, and this is the technical wage type. If we wanna get to the text, simple right click, add text field, and I can say wage type long text so I get that full length text of what the actual wage type is. Alright. If you want more of a technical view in here, you can turn on things such as data sources, and then you see that this is actually a payroll data source. Employee name's coming from info type one. You can even turn on the technical field so you can see that the technical names of each field as well. For this demo, we're just gonna leave that off. Now in order to get our SuccessFactors data, it's simple on the left side. These are our different views. This is our curated content that we have for EC, and this is for SAP side of things. If we want to get to SuccessFactors, and all of this is customizable, by the way, I'm gonna hit my drop down for our related objects. We're gonna go to our SuccessFactors employee and just bring in our user ID. Now on the left side, we'll see that, we do have some custom views in here, but these have changed. And this is SuccessFactors relevant only data now. So here we have our user ID. And, for example, if I wanna go in and bring some information about maybe master data, I can go into our employment information. I can go to job information. Maybe I want to bring in something that won't be there. Maybe their job classification, I can simply add that in, and their job title, and that's coming straight from SuccessFactors. And I can see that all of that data is within my report now. Once that's finished, we can simply hit finish, and it's finished, and curated this report now. And there's different ways that everybody joins the data, and then we can set that per client instance of how you actually join the data from EC to, your payroll system. It may be straight partner to user ID mapping. You may wanna use the back end mapping tables that are there that, map the user ID or work assignment to the personal number. We support all of those different mappings, and we can even add customized mappings if you want. But that should show you quick and easy, how easy it is to create a consolidated report, that contains both employee central and payroll data. Now, lastly, what I wanna leave you with is, some of the consolidated reporting across replication, to validate data from EC and your payroll data. So I'm gonna go to our replication ones. I wanna look at some of this. For example, let's look at home address. We can see that we have some prior runs already here. We're gonna go and view one of these. And what we see for this one is that we're able to output the data and consolidate data from both EC and SAP, and we've labeled these. So you see in the column headings, we have SF for SuccessFactors and SAP for the SAP side, whether it's on prem payroll or ECP. Now what we're able to do in this is we're also in adding functionality with consolidate error, conditional formatting. So that way it shows and highlights your data that could be incorrect. And this is just a quick view for this to show you all of this, incorrect data that may be. We also can go as far as doing country specific reporting. So you may have a lot of country specific mapping, especially for home address that can be there. K. And this is just a few instances that we have. So we do alternative cost distribution. We extract, if you're on prem, some of the business integration builder configuration, give you consolidated view of your configuration, biographical contact information, compensation information, job information, your nonrecurring and recurring, pay, and even things like personal information that we can consolidate and show you, in a singular report. Now you can view that data as is, or you can use our analytics connector, which I'm gonna leave you on today, and then show you a consolidated view that you can have even via a, an analytics solution that you can have, which is very good during go live so you can see exactly what you, are able to have or the how good your data is prior to go live. So here's one that we've set, and we call this our enhanced integration monitor. Now this is not just checking it's check checking your failed replication that you've had. So this is actually using the data replication monitor that we have. We're pulling that data out and showing you that, but this is also doing the actual EC to your payroll system check and validating that the data is correct on each side. We give you different options here such as the overview. This one is actually gonna show you detailed mismatches. So for this one, I said, for my middle name mismatches, yes. This is gonna show me different information such as middle name. There's not a middle name in EC. There is one in ECP. Here's two instances of where it's an EC and not ECP. So we show you whether it's in one or not the other, and we also show you, if it's mismatching between either one. We can go for the employee detail, give you more information on employee details for this, show you how many failed attempts each employees has, if they have any mismatches, or if they not actually have any data in one of the systems. So in this case, this person has failed attempts of two. They also have two mismatches in this more extreme case. For Vincent, they've had fourteen failed attempts and then three mismatches where some data is mismatched across the systems. K? And then if we choose this, it gives us this date. So for November twenty first, they've had, fourteen total attempts. Here's three, just examples of this where certain data didn't match, and then just gives you different statistics, for this and different views of the data, that don't match. So here's call center matches. Here's where the job and position actually doesn't match, and, also, that middle name doesn't match. And that would be our total of those three mismatches. If we wanted to even go into messages, this is just, either from your log or your, data replication monitor. We can actually pull that in as well. So in this one instance with Analytics Connector, we're pulling three really different sets of disparate data together in a consolidated dupe where we're having, Employee Central actual data. We're having payroll data. They're also having replication data and config data in one showing you where that data doesn't mismatch or has failed during replication. Alright. So with that, I'm gonna go ahead and stop and, allow this to continue. Thank you so much, Lane and team. That was very insightful. In addition to the information that was just shared with you, I would like to, just kind of recap on our partner workspace that you should have access to. You can find more resources about query manager on our partner workspace, which is accessible through our client central system. We encourage you to check it out, especially if it has been a while since you've logged into the portal. Within this workspace, there's also information, on other solutions in addition to the solution we covered today. We have the functionality for partner managers and authorized sales teams to log leads. So if you find an opportunity for query manager or any of the other products, this is where you would register that lead. So with that, let's open it up for discussion, and everyone is welcome to send in their questions again using the little cue box at the top of the screen. To start off, our first question is what level of support can we expect during client implementations? Okay. Yeah. During client implementations, so we offer a few different options for this. We can have, you know we, of course, have, you know, implementation periods that will help you implement, and ensure the solutions are up and running correctly. We have hypercare periods, and we wanna ensure that, you know, it's up and running and you're successful with the implementation that we can offer. And we also have client central, which is our online, help desk that you can go on, and I can show real quick, here, that you can go on and actually log, direct tickets on and receive support, from our support team. And even if it's hard enough where it is an error, we can then get our developers involved and help you resolve those, errors that you is occurring during the implementation. Thank you so much. That is all the time we have today for questions. Please continue to send your questions in, and we'll respond to those as soon as possible. All the useful links that you've seen today will be in a follow-up email. And, of course, if you'd like to know more about Query Manager or any of our software solutions, we're happy to assist you. Please just shoot us an email or reach out to us via Microsoft Teams. Again, thank you for your time today. Take care.