Mitigate transformation risks: Ensure efficient SAP SuccessFactors outcomes for your clients

Hello, everyone. So thank you very much for joining today's webinar, and we will be focusing on how SDT helps allow optimized project return on investment and faster transitions to SAP success factors. So I am Marielle from global marketing here at Appius Labs, and we are really, really so happy to have you join us today. Just a few reminders before we do dive into our topic. This session is actually recorded and will be shared through a follow-up email after the webinar. And, of course, you can ask questions through the control panel on your left hand side, and we will be answering them as we, wrap up the session. And without further ado, let me introduce to you our presenter for today. We have Juan Marrero. Over to you, Juan Mar. Thank you very much, Mario. Right. Okay. Welcome everybody to this, webinar, session. Thank you for your time. So just a bit of, background from my side. My name's, Jome Aleto, and I am the main, responsible in the APE's labs for all the HCM migrations, that we do in our organization for for our, for our client. So anything that is related to HCM carve outs, to either to on premise or to the cloud or migrations to employee central payroll. All of those, are architected that come by my, by my desk. Okay? And I am also a senior, developer and senior HCM technical consultant for more than, twenty years in the SAP, h HCM space. So, before we start, just a little background about, FUIs Labs as a organization. We have been, a company that, over the last couple, well, that over the last couple of years has been investing in providing software solutions for our customers to help them with certain challenges or certain activities that normally, fall out, of the regular, operation that you can normally do within, an SAP or an HCM, landscape. So we have always been, focused on creating, solutions that can help these customers with these challenges, from and developing for now for more than forty two, years, straight. So doesn't matter if it's about, if we're talking about, helping them with their, data privacy, regulations, optimizing their landscapes, transforming them, or helping them provide them with more intelligent reporting and, validation tools for their HR system. This is where we, where we are with Equidius Labs, an organization that has helped all these customers, transform and improve their business operation, day to day operations in, the much, strongest, way. And if we speak more in detail about migration and h HCM, we also had a big history here. We our first, call, our first HCM transformation project dates way back to two thousand and three where we used our, most senior component, the data center manager solution, and applied, coding to help build, and manage a strong complex transformation activity for a customer where we spit out, HCM outside of the existing, customer system. So since then, we've essentially been all around the place doing different types of, migration activities in the HCM space from, mergers and acquisitions, where company a buys company b, and then company b has to be integrated with company a. That is something that we have been, doing in the past due to all that transformation from simple carve outs where we just move the HCM solution out of the full ERP box. Now in the more, more recent years, focusing on doing that transformation, but onto the SAP payroll cloud. It doesn't matter if it's a PayCentral payroll on SuccessFactors or as for Using our, SDD, SDD technology, our selected data transitioning, technology, we have assisted customers. And, also, with them, their selected or untrusted partners help them move to these, cloud solutions. So, we come up with, sort of like a bundle of two main areas when we talk about our, HCM, portfolio. First, of all, the core of our HCM tools, our productivity suite will include not only the data copying tool, the IT manager that allows you to copy and refresh and pre data from topic a production, for example, to topic b, but also other satellite solutions such as query manager where you can use it to create your own, HCI reports and various monitor to which you would then use to be able to do payroll reconciliation, as as well. Okay? But also the not only the soft work, but we also have our services, which based on the solution that we have just described, we use to build all our, migration, capability. This migration capability, we brand it, under, one unique, naming, which is known as Prism. And every HCM transformation that we do right now in the HCM space, we, essentially associate it with that idea. It doesn't matter if it's, employees into a payroll, private transition with s four, or, for on premise h four s four. If there's, somebody who is, going with, an approach, we are, an expert tier, an expert, partner who you can rely on to help you take all the heavy lifting and move all the HCM payroll over to the new, system. Okay. So, obviously, right now, we are in a scenario where moving, talking about HCM is really, sort of like a very, very critical, critical stage. The classic SAP ERP HCM solution is about to be deprecated by, SAP, and SAP will no longer be extending or, no longer be maintaining the ERP six point o e h p s, e h p eight past twenty seven. And therefore, SAP is encouraging customers to decide exactly, where do they, with or where do they want to go or how, or where do they need to go. Okay? Depending on exactly what where they are as well and, how do they want to, transition. So, obviously, if you are currently on ERP, you must already have sort of, like, an idea of where you are right now and where do you want to go. SAP offers you a couple of options, in case that you, for example, want to keep maintaining ERP HCM still on premise past twenty seven, SAP will allow that, but only with an extended maintenance, the under certain circumstances, and, obviously, after paying a hefty, increased maintenance fee for that purpose. So, realistically, if you're looking at, and, obviously, the maintenance will only be until twenty thirty. So, realistically, if you are looking for a future option, well, the ones on the right hand side are really the ones that you, would be, looking into. There's some new options like Panet partner managed payroll and, the PET option that is coming later on in the year. But I would want to focus really on the ones that are really now sort of like are the keys the keystone of what SAP is offering. And I'm gonna start with actually with the most, popular option of the one that SAP prefers, which is Optum six, which is to have everybody on their newest, more modern, HCM technology, which is SAP SuccessFactors. Okay? So SuccessFactors, obviously, it's a SAP cloud solution, which they have on their cloud. And, as one of the components, ECP is the only one that still relies on some of that, HCM, technology that we, know and that we have been using in the past. Okay? In parallel to that, another option for those who still want to maintain payroll as it is right now, the customer can still go or have the option of choosing, a Thrive Cloud edition as well. Similar to success factors, but in that case, what they would be you doing in PTEs would be that they would not only need to they would not be able to only maintain payroll, but also the organizational structure, the, master data, the employee master data, and the infotypes, the time and relation system, and everything, else that is still or not deprecated when they move over to ECP. Obviously, when you move to ECP, you maintain your payroll, but some of those other modules are just made reference to. You have to, use the cloud equivalent that SAP is providing. And then final, option, although this is something that, SAP is starting to sort of like, transition to oblivion and not really, produces very or publicize very, very, openly is to have, people go back, into another on premise system, but in this case, on an s four HANA, platform, which is the h which is commonly known as the h four, s four option. Now one of the things that I would quickly say about all these three options, four, five, six, is that there's gonna be different obviously, depending on which option you choose, especially with, with option six, six that the license is gonna change and you're gonna be less flexible there. Okay? However, the technological platform, which all of those solutions are built, is actually now the same. So it doesn't matter if it's h four s four PCE or SAP employee simple payroll. All those solutions involve going to, in some way or another, going to s four. For, for the HANA option, on premise, it would be s four HANA, h four s four. For PCE would be s four HANA PCE. And, for SuccessFactors ECP, you're actually going to an s four HANA twenty one ECP system. So in that case, also, you would be moving to a new and more advanced technological, platform in that space. Okay. So, obviously, with all of these, options, it could be very well, it could be very well reason to imagine that a customer or a client, may find themselves, like, a bit confused about where do they have to go or how do they or what is the best for them. So the best opt the best advice that we normally, try to give to anybody who is looking to, picking off any of these options is to obviously try to gather all the information that they can because the informed decision normally, ends up as being normally the, a good decision, a wise decision. Okay? So when we speak to our clients, we try to tell them exactly what do they need to know. I mean, we try not to encourage them to go, oh, you need to go success factors ECP or you need to go PCE. We outline, you know, all the technical changes, all the challenges in case that they, go to one side or another. If they go to success practices, it's a b for example, it's we can explain. Okay. So you do have payroll, but what about your time evaluation? Are you running time evaluation? What are you going to do to replace that? Because, obviously, we don't have that in ECP. We need to implement it. Are they currently, for example, on on HANA? Can we migrate directly into any of those solutions directly if you're not previously on on HANA? That information is really key to understand exactly the what is going to be the better way to get to where they want to go. And how can they gather this information as well? Is there a easy or simple way to retrieve the current information about their system and see exactly what is the correct, path here? So, obviously, you need to know what maybe you don't know. So, obviously, you do all each customer will have their, of course, their HCM box. They'll have their, HCM data in that system. But apart from running maybe their, business program, they don't really know that much about their system altogether. And this is something that, obviously, we would, try to see how we can help them make sure that they do get all the information, that they need from their system. Is the system heavily customized? Do they have a lot of custom reports? Do they have a custom tables? Do they have any deprecated components? Is there are their process working correctly? Are they modernized, or do they need or they are too convoluted? Is there a lot of manual steps or was fully automated? It could be the case that if there's different, problems or issues depending on how they work, they may want to decide to instead of just migrate to a new system, to also change some of the components that they have and reimplement part of what they have already, put together. So, also, as I said, what are the potential challenges that they would face if you want to go on one way or the other? Can we retain some of that history? What about the database volume? Do we know exactly how do we need to dimension those systems based on what we already have if we want to especially if we want to keep historical, data? And, obviously, as well, you know, make sure that, when they, acquire a migration service that they know exactly the effort and how much is going to cost so that it can be planned, accordingly. So from our perspective, we don't provide advisory sort service. Okay? We don't tell them you need to go to a or to b. We that's not right the type of consultancy that we provide, but we do provide valuable information to the clients so that it can help them to take an in an informed, decision. We can tell them exactly what they have in their system, what do they need to think about when decided for one option or another, And this is where we can certainly be of value to our partners and, to our clients as well. So to help decide, one of the, developers that we had in EPUS Labs is that we have a small program called our assessment report or prism assessment report that allows us to gather information from the customer system and then present it in a lovely interactive version that can then be consulted at any time by any of our customers. So this report can be done on any, customer system at completely cost and, obviously, only retrieving data that is essential to understand for migration purposes. So we extract metadata like the SAP levels or the database levels. We don't extract anything like, for example, names or addresses, no sensitive information. It's just the metadata or the method of the information that we need to understand to be able to help the customer decide whether they want to do it. So we talk about, database levels, the data volumes, and unicode check, the list of components, zed tables, volumes of data, the also the payroll errors that they have, what countries are they currently running payroll for. All that information can be gathered and then presented to our customers and clients who are interested in our migration services completely, free of cost. So once we've used that, assessment, we would be then able to essentially help any of our customers, do, any type of, prison for HCM, project, project. With our services, we are allowed to then help customers move their current, payroll solution to any of the options of their choice in a way that it would be very quick, fast, and very automated as as well. We use our key solutions, for that. We use, essentially a software, drain approach where we use our technology, where we move all the work into the cost configuration and all the MPE data in scope. So that means that we reduce a lot of time in terms of, transferring data from, from the legacy system to the new, ECP environment and then ensuring that, obviously, that we are, doing this in a nice and, effective, and effective way. We also have, security measurements built in. We can anonymize data after data copies have been, done so that there's no, live data remaining on the nonproduction environments. And we can also do certain level of transformation using our SDT technology. So if we have to do things like a merger or we need to, well, deal with, different elements, like, for example, number clashes or change, some of the entries in the in pre data, this is something that we can, also do. And we're able to do this because we have solutions that are really, top notch, that are completely SAP certified and, obviously, are guaranteed to be, working, effectively on any, customer or client environment, with, zero risk in terms of interacting with any of the components already existing from the, customer perspective. So there are actually two pillars to what we can consider, for what our, prism, methodology or prism solution, that we have in FQ's Labs. And these two pillars are, well, first of all, the excellent line of experience, migration consultants who are, who have a great, level of knowledge and expertise on how to, carry and move these projects forward for the best of our clients, obviously. And second of all, the other core pillar is obviously the solutions that we use in order to deliver the different types of migration as that we offer in, APUs Labs. So the core solution for the data copying, like, such as client sync and object sync are certainly part of this, of this, methodology of this, migration approach. But we also have different other toolsets, available to, cater for other parts of a potential, HCM migration. Our transformation engine will help us, obviously, in scenarios where we need to transform the data. Like, for example, when we're doing a merger, and we're bringing data from company a back into a system for, that belongs to now company b, and that has been acquired. And they now need to bring the employees into the same, level. Or for example, if we're talking about, just the purpose of validating the payroll as it's being migrated, we can also use Verint's monitor or position Verint's monitor as a solution that will help, tech technical teams do the payroll reconciliation and the validation for, for their, during their, test procedure. And other than that, there's also other options like data orchestration if we're talking about, SuccessFactors migration to EC and, even the decommission of data with, ArchiveCentral as an archiving solution for data that no longer needs to be replicated on the target environment as well. So we do have these, different options that we have for for migrating. Now, obviously, depending on the scope, other, different components will be able to be, enabled or disabled depending on exactly what the scope of the migration, would be. Okay. So now let's just talk about a couple of, examples where we work with, partners, to deliver, services and migrations for different clients. One of our, the one that we had, we completed just a couple of years ago, Catapult Belgium, was, migration where we migrated the customer to the, ECP system, to the SAP cloud, and where we assisted them with, moving, the payroll solution over to ECP. Well, our partner, in this case, FPUs, Belgium helped assist the customer not only with the validation, but also with the integration and even, adjustment in the recalculation process of the gross, to net pay as well. And that was something that we also, delivered quite successfully for the for this customer. A very good, effort there, both combining the expertise from the from the apparel team that, FPUs in Belgium had, but also our technical experts helping to move the config, the data, the workbench elements all into e c ECP. And, another good example is, maintenance aviation. Probably not the biggest implementation that we did, but one that we managed to deliver in, such a very short period of time, less than, four, four and a half months. We migrated all the twenty thousand, UK employees over from, one, existing, cloud solution, managed payroll they had at the time, which was managed by, a b a BPO, implementation partner. And we moved all of this across into, also into a place into a payroll as well. System wasn't really that big. It was pretty much one hundred and twenty five gigabytes of data, but we managed to move this across in a very effective way, with barely any cutover time. The copies were done in less than, several hours, and we managed to, well, essentially, give the customer a new, payroll, system, fully integrated with the PE central and, obviously, working on, in a in a good fashion. Right. Okay. So, one of the things that I would like to finish with is to talk a bit about what, options we have for, collaborating with both partners. So, obviously, Prism, when we position Prism to customers, we like to think of it as, Prism, like, giving you the option to be, like, one piece of the puzzle. Normally, when we talk about migrating payroll, and it's, obviously, the migration of the data and the solution itself is a big piece of the implementation, but it's not normally the only unique piece that has to be delivered. So, normally, we like to establish, like, a good ratio with a partner because we know exactly what we can do, but we also know exactly where the partner can come in and assist, with for the customer themselves. So, for example, what the things that normally we can offer is, for example, the possibility of, an assessment report. There's one that we can, offer free of charge, which is simply, a single transport with report that can be run and that no, personal identifying information that is, selected there. If the customer wants to go into more deeper dive, more detail, then that is something that we can also, look into, although that case will probably be with, with an extra surcharge in that case. But, well, any customer interested in this assessment report, that's something that we can offer, essentially out of the box without any cost for that. As for our Prism offering, essentially, what we're doing is for the especially for the ECP part is that we're offering the possibility to do the payroll migration or the, only for the payroll in case we're moving to a place central payroll. All the h two migrate migration is to totality if we're going to, for something like, for example, private, cloud environment with s four. So we move payroll, your structure, and the time oration, etcetera, etcetera. We can also do, carve outs, splitting out the system out of the full ERP or a merger. So we have two different boxes. I'm putting one inside to another. Okay? This is your exclamation as well. In case that we need to remove data from the system or maybe, even clean up data from an existing, system as well. That's something we can certainly do. And code implementation is also possible. That is, normally on the part demand as well. However, this is a part that, essentially, we rely on SAP traditional, expertise. We don't have an engine to do anything in that space. It would be a manual. So this is for some one of the elements that can be agreed with a partner to be delivered, either by us or by partner themselves. We also include some basic services when we migrate to employee central payroll is for the initial stages of the of the projects as well. Okay? As for premigration, in case that the customer needs to unicode conversion, this is certainly something that we can also, address. And as for HANA and code adjustments, we're also including that as a part of our offering. Although depending on the volume, we may, need to reevaluate exactly, how much of that code has to be, remediated if we need to do a HANA code transition. For those who don't know, again, the ECP systems that SAP is now delivering are all on the s four, HANA, code, platform. That means that before if the previous was on HANA, Hannah code remediation would need to be, part of the scope. And as well, we also for the projects that we do, we rely on the staging system, which is where we're going to do the make transformation of our, of our of the system before we move over to the target environment. So if the customers doesn't have the hardware, we can offer, a cloud solution of our choice for moving, that prior to the new environment as well. Other, options that we offer to our partners, we can do, reports for, query manager, and define new reports in case that the customer needs specific reports that need to be built, data validation reports, personal reports, and pretty simple reports, exception reporting to look for data losses as well. And then we can also provide training for users for those who want to keep using this solution after their project is finished. We also, offer services on top of various monitor, our, our conversion tool. Not only for the project, but if the customer wants to keep using the solution, we would be able to provide them with the ability to be able to do payroll reconciliation and enable them to do conclusions not only during the project, but after the go live is finished so they can do their reconciliation on a monthly basis. And, obviously, on top of that, we will also offer the training as well. And as one of our, two file points that we do for, for Prism, We could tackle data anonymization, so any nonproduction environment can be anonymized after all validations have been achieved. And finally, for the commission of data, we can move data out of, of the existing preexisting system and archive some of the historical data that is not required in the tablet system and host it over onto, archive, central. Okay? Right. And, that is it for me and up to this point. So now, I'm going to be, going back to Mario, who is going to talk a bit about the workspace, system. Mario, over to you, please. Thank you very much, Wenma, for sharing about all of the collaboration model, that we can offer to our partners. Now just to share that, we do have a partner workspace, which is actually accessible through ClientCentral. So if you are interested in more information about the solutions that we've actually discussed today, there are a lot of materials that are available on the partner workspace. And, also, if you do have any clients or prospects in mind who would be a great fit for any of the discussed, case cases or use case for migrations, especially to SAP SuccessFactors. We'd be happy to assist you especially through lead login. Just get in touch with your account manager. And that's it for the partner workspace. We really want to encourage you all to visit that one. And now let's head on over to some of the questions that we have from our attendees. Okay? So if you could just see on the left side of your screen, you could actually send some of the questions or feedback that you have on any of the discussed items that we have today. Just to start, Juanma, we have one. They're asking which industry verticals or company sizes are best suited for this approach? Okay. So if we're talking about, HCM, there's no major different reality in terms of what type of, a business. Essentially, HCM runs pretty much more or less the same for any organization, especially if it's, if it's normally private sector. There's more different there's more differences, for example, if we're looking at maybe the payroll country itself. So there's certain places where, you know, you can pay yearly on a monthly basis, and therefore, for those, it's more much more easier to organize. But then you have other computer, like, for example, in US, if you are, for example, in retail, they even had normally, in those type of, scenarios, you would have customers who would run even payroll on a week on a daily basis due to legislation. So it could be a bit more convoluted in that scenario. But even with that in mind, our approach is pretty much, pretty much valid for different types of organizations. It doesn't matter if it's public to private. There may be some, as I said, some quirks that we may need to ramp up the because the volume of data for an exchange is lower normally than, for example, if we talk about finance or logistics, our approach is still suitable even in those, more complex scenarios. Yep. Totally understood. And then we have a couple more. They're asking how is data consistency and integrity ensured during the transition? So, using our solutions when we use our our tools to do the integration, what we ensure is that we do have, like, for example, a validation process where we check the number of records that have been extracted and imported. That's something that we can do, during the projects. We do our own internal, testing just to to verify that it is from the technical perspective that everything has been copied across correctly, that the system is working as as intended. There's no dumps. Obviously, if we're talking about functional testing, that will always reside either on the side of the client or a third party that the client, nominate. But in terms of the technical validation testing, that is something that we can do, during the project using our internal solution. Alright. And the last one that we have, they're asking what are the estimated timelines and resource requirements for a typical project using an SBT approach? Right. So that would vary essentially depending on the scope of the project. It's not the same. For example, if we're dealing with a system where we are, you know, just moving payroll or if we're doing a PCE implementation, which we move for HR entirely. Of course, data volumes, would, fluctuate and, also that it would depend as well what else is happening at the same time that we do the migration. Because, obviously, if we're migrating to ECP, it's not just ECP, but also be central and the other aspects as as well. The net time for the migration is pretty small. So, normally, it can be done what we've seen, we've done it. The fastest that we did, it was four and a half months. But, obviously, that's really a very easy, very simple simplest scenario. We have been doing produce where we have normally taken, like, five to six months, even seven, and the biggest ones, even, something around, twelve because there were other complexities like, like, for example, some adjustments needed to be made as well. So it it can vary in that track and spectrum. The smallest four point five, it is something like a ten line, the penyard. Thank you very much for sharing all of that with us, Juanma. And that's it for today's webinar. Any of your questions that we weren't able to address for this session will be, responded to offline via email. So, since this session is actually recorded, you'll be able to access all the useful links through a follow-up email. And, of course, if you want to know more about Prism, we'd be happy to share more information about that. Just send us an email at an info at labs dot epis dot com, or just reply to the follow-up email that I will be sending afterwards. And then that's it for today. We thank you so much for bidding our partner, and as always, thank you for your continued support.