Minimise SAP HR and Payroll headaches when moving to a new system

Hello, everyone, and we are really, really happy to welcome you to this webinar where we will be talking about the SAP HCM life cycle and how to find and also eliminate inconsistencies in your clients' HR, payroll, and time data. So I'm Marielle from global marketing here at AppEase Labs, and we are really happy to have you today. And just a few reminders before we actually start with our topic, this session is actually recorded, and it will be shared inside a follow-up email. And you can actually send your questions on the left side of your screen, and we'll be addressing them as we wrap up the session. And if we haven't got the time to actually answer your question, we'll be answering them via email. Now, without further ado, I'm happy to introduce our speaker for today, Adan Willemse. Over to you, Adan. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mario. Really appreciate it. Good day, everyone. Today, I want to talk to you about Variance Monitor fast and comprehensive payroll testing, how partners can help their clients respond to business events that affect payroll and data risk. A little bit more about APUs Labs. More than twenty years experience in SAP data transformations in more than fifty five countries, an SAP Gold Partner. And something that's very dear to my heart, one percent of our revenue is channeled towards the protection and conservation of elephants and rhinos through our ERP program. Right, we are living in a fast paced world where our clients need to respond very quickly to business events that may impact payroll. Today, I want to tell you about Variance Monitor and how it can be your competitive advantage when supporting your clients through system changes that affect payroll. I also want to briefly mention an immediate business opportunity that you could capitalize on, and lastly, show you a quick demo of Variance Monitor. My name is Adan Willemser. I'm the product manager for Variance Monitor at Epus Labs and it's really nice to talk to you, our partners, about Variance Monitor today. Okay. RSP payroll clients operate in an environment today where the rate of change, the level of competition, and the standards for compliance presents an unprecedented challenge. They are constantly responding to business events that could create significant disruptions and risk for their payroll operations. These events aren't rare occurrences, but have become regular business events that every organization must navigate safely. So whether it's deleting production data for privacy compliance, updating systems to comply with new tax legislation, upgrading their infrastructure or software, or managing complex mergers and acquisitions, each of these events has the potential to impact payroll accuracy and compliance. The question isn't if these changes will happen, as you know. It's whether your clients will be able to navigate them safely without compromising payroll accuracy and compliance. Your clients need your help to safely navigate these changes without risking payroll accuracy or compliance. They cannot afford for things to go wrong on a payroll project because as you know, the consequences are severe, swift, and very public. We're not talking about minor inconveniences. We're talking about incorrectly paid employees, possible legal action, loss of trust, reputational damage, and even fines. Thorough testing to avert these risks require that you test one hundred percent of the employees. Right? We need to check every employee's records across multiple pay periods, and spot checking a few representative employees is not enough. At no point either in this process may data be compromised. And there's always the tension between thoroughness on the one hand and the available time and budget. So this is exactly why your clients come to you and request your expert guidance to navigate these processes. So good news, as our partner you have access to Variance Monitor, right? Variance Monitor I believe is your competitive advantage when testing payroll changes at scale and at speed. Variance Monitor is SAP EC Payroll approved and it transforms the way that you can deliver payroll testing services. With Variance Monitor, you can offer clients up to seventy percent faster testing cycles with comprehensive validation that keeps all their data secure within SAP. It's quite a special product, but without going too much into the weeds, it has many features that sets it apart from others. For example, the rule network automatically classify and categorize errors into buckets based on your configurations. We have an encrypted file snapshot that gives you additional flexibility when you're juggling hardware constraints on a project. And of course, we can simulate pay runs, which means you can iterate really quickly because you don't need to reset the payroll results. Variance monitors set you apart from your competition and unlock superior payroll testing value for your clients. Okay, so how can variance monitor help you offer these services? With an understanding of variance monitor's capabilities, you can help clients better plan their testing to maximize the advantages from using Variance Monitor. It speeds up testing, supports various approaches to match the client's budget and available time, be it small or massive multinational payroll projects. Apart from planning, you are able to rent variance monitor for the duration of the project as you help deliver these testing services. Be it configuration changes, support backtesting, upgrades, migrations, and more, Variance Monitor enables you to take on very large and complex engagements with confidence. And once a client is live, there's the opportunity to help them install process controls and validations as you help them improve and optimize their ongoing payroll process. Each of these areas addresses critical client needs and positions you as a trusted adviser who can deliver on what they need. Okay. Variance monitor not only enhances your barrel testing services opportunities, but it also does specific things and do so in a specific way that helps you lower and control payroll and data risk. It offers you a consistent and repeatable process that can be audited. It maintains data security within SAP by keeping all the data within SAP. You don't need to export data. It protects against data theft and exposure because there's no need to export the data. It offers greater test coverage. Right? So earlier, we mentioned that, we don't want to do spot checks, but we want to test the full staff complement, all the affected employees over multiple pay periods, with Variance Monitor you can do that. It's very fast, so it accelerates the testing timelines where clients typically go from weeks to days, and it helps as a consequence to lower the testing budget. It finds errors quickly, and as I mentioned earlier, the rule network categorizes problems based on your configuration into buckets, which improves the speed of identifying and classifying problems, and assigning these then to teams of people who need to go and investigate and correct whatever's gone wrong. This automation and rules based classification also reduces human error and speeds up the classification of these issues. It, helps ensure compliance. For example, you could use constant values to monitor and test for compliance against minimum threshold values. And because we can simulate payroll, it minimizes any disruption if you were ever to come into the live payroll environment. So by addressing payroll and data risk in this way, Variance monitor helps you deliver the type of service that addresses the core issues that keeps payroll managers up at night. The combination of your services expertise and variance monitors capabilities unlocks real value for clients. Lower payroll and data risk, lower testing costs, and increased testing efficiency over the long run yields for your clients, increased stakeholder confidence, and takes care and looks after employee trust. The ROI of variance monitor typically shows up in both hard and soft dollars. Using variance monitor to elevate your payroll testing service allows you to maintain and expand your trusted relationship with your clients. Let's now turn to an immediate opportunity created by SAP in the marketplace for all your clients who may be live on SAP EC Payroll systems. As you may know, SAP recently announced that they will be modernizing over two thousand EC Pay clients, starting q two of twenty five. So what that means is they will go from the ECC stack to the s four HANA stack. And while SAP will handle all the technical conversions, your clients are responsible for the critical testing and validation work. This double checking is not optional. Every SAP EC payroll client will need expert help to ensure that they navigate this change safely. Right. With Variant Monitor, you can offer your EC Pay clients some guidance and specific things to help navigate this change. You can offer comprehensive validation that compares all the employees' calculations before and after the conversion, identify any unintended changes and prevent them, also preparing documented proof within Variance Monitor, the whole record of testing, and all the while maintaining the data within the system, ensuring nothing is compromised. The timing advantage is very important. You can approach clients right now to start planning and establish baselines and build testing protocols to make the most of this opportunity. Okay. I want to show you a quick demo of ECPAY. Well, I don't have an ECPAY system. I have an S4HANA system and I have an EHP system. And I wanted to show you how Variance Monitor could compare data using an RFC connection between those two systems. As a reminder, Variance Monitor is SAP approved for use on ECPayron. Alright, so let me switch to my SAP system. This is an S4, an H4S4 system. I hope this session is still live. Let's have a look. It is. And as you can see, we're running HANA twenty three, I think. On the other side of the comparison, we have an EHB seven system from memory. But first, let's look at the results. Right? Here's our test employee. And what we are looking at is the wage type values in the ANR system compared against the equivalent wage time values from the original EHB system. Now there's many more wage types that we are suppressing from this view because we are only looking at the differences. In a minute, I will show you the rule network, but let's just have a look at what we have on the screen. We are checking the data for employee ten one three one thousand and thirteen, Wolfgang Humboldt, And it looks like we have a difference on wage type slash five six zero, the payment amount. In the HANA system, it looks like we have got an amount of a thousand three hundred and thirty euros. But in the original system, we have a thousand three hundred and thirty six. A difference of five euros and seventy two. And it looks like we have a further difference on employee taxes and total employment tax. So a hypothesis is starting to form in my head. But let's go back and let me show you the logic of the comparison that we used to produce those results. This is what a typical variance monitor comparison looks like, a very simple and small one. Some of our clients have two or three hundred rules. This one has only four. And what it does, it starts by processing all total gross wage types. And if you have a look at the flow chart here, if the total gross wage types match on success, the check is successful, then we proceed to test amount paid, wage type five sixty. If total gross and the amount paid match, then we conclude that everything's okay and we exit processing the employee. However, if total gross does not match, then we might drill deeper into all gross wage types. Or if total gross matches and we have a mismatch on the amount paid, it is likely that there's some deduction that is causing the problem as we saw in the results. We do have an issue on the tax deductions, and so that's where we will start our investigation for this employee. Now, of course, this is a very simple flowchart, very simple rule network. And you can build this out to group and categorize your earnings wage types, your deduction wage types, and to help you classify these problems according to your business rules. What's nice is once you've got this set up, be it generic or for a specific client, you can reuse this. You can download comparisons and upload them and perform the same checks in a consistent manner. Alright. And I just want to show you that I will run this based on my selection. I select this system QMX, which is the EHB system I was referring to and noticed that there's the RFC destination, and I'm comparing this employee one thousand and thirteen's pay results with that comparison for the pay period of January twenty fourteen. If I execute this, I'm prompted to enter my credentials for the control system, which is the EHB system, so that I can retrieve the data via RFC. And there you go. Variance monitor has gone, retrieved the data over the network, brought it back, done the comparison in this system, and now we're looking at all the data, not only the differences, but also the equal values of this employee in the current the new system, the S4HANA system, and comparing that against the same wage types from the EHB7 system. So that's what variance monitor does. It's very quick. And I'm now gonna just go back. I think for safety's sake, I've just taken a few screenshots, which we won't need now. I just wanna pause now after having shown you that demonstration just to loop back to the upgrade, the EC payroll upgrade opportunity. So right this minute, your SAP EC payroll clients needs advice and support. There's an immediate opportunity. It's great timing. The question is just how can you capitalize on this opportunity? We recommend that you start by reviewing your current EC Pay client base and identify who might need your assistance. And then consider how to integrate variants one of the into your service offerings to maximize this revenue opportunity. Please reach out to us. We are here to support you with training, go to market strategies, and ongoing partnership support. The EasyPay modernization wave is here. Let's make sure that you are positioned to maximize the opportunities that comes with it. Thank you very much. Now handing back to you, Mario. Alright. Thank you very much for that wonderful discussion about nirvana monitor. And now, let's read up some questions that we have from the partners. I'll start off with one. They're asking, do you mind expanding on why comparisons aren't advised to be done through spreadsheets? Spreadsheets are great. They're, they're really good. But I found personally, especially in larger look. There's a few things that's not so great about using spreadsheets. Right? In a fix, you can make do with spreadsheets. I've run into issues personally with spreadsheets in various occasions for different reasons. One very large client had an excess of a hundred and fifty thousand concurrent employees, right? And if you think about that number, let's say there were one hundred and only one hundred and fifty thousand unique employees. There were more because some of those concurrent employees were two or three people because they had two or three different employment roles, job roles. So let's say there were two hundred thousand unique employees to test or unique payrolls to test. If you only include the ten most crucial pay codes, that means you end up with two million records that you need to compare against two million records on the other side. Spreadsheets can't handle that. Right? The moment you hit your one million limit, you've gotta go and split those files in something like Notepad. The moment you have to split files, human error enters the chat, and people make copy and paste errors. It happens to all of us. And it's really difficult to explain to the auditors what exactly you did and that you really got the full staff's complement tested, because you have to prove that. That's just one practical example. The other thing is someone's really nice and automated spreadsheet formula is really difficult for someone else to understand. Alright? So especially if these spreadsheets are created ad hoc whenever they need it, and it's not a fixed set of tools that's reused and adjusted. People don't get used to it. The formats always change, and it's, it's a learning curve. Let's put it that way. Finally, even if you do manage to get things going, and you've sorted out all your VLOOKUP errors and other formula problems, is quite slow, especially if you try to deal with the kinds of volumes that I was referring to earlier. So, of course, that also doesn't talk about the elephant in the room, the fact that you have to take the data out of SAP, expose it, and stick it into a spreadsheet. Nowadays, people understand that it's important. So most of these spreadsheets are hosted on SharePoint or similar where access is controlled. The fact is there's no authorizations that protects that data, and it's a risk. I personally rather would not take that data out of the system. So I love spreadsheets, but they're not the right tool for this specific problem. Thank you for expounding on that. And, just one last question that we have time for. You're asking whether Variance Monitor can compare data from SuccessFactors employee central versus SAP HCM data. So, yes, that it's a provisional yes. Variance monitor integrates with its sister product, query manager. Right? So if query manager has data, it can pass that along as a control data source to variance monitor. And Query Manager has the OData connector that connects to SuccessFactors EC systems. So yes, we can compare SuccessFactors EC master data against SAP data provided that the client also has query manager and the OData connector. So the data will flow through the OData connector to query manager, from query manager then on to variance monitor. But you need variance monitor, you need query manager, and you need the OData connected. Thank you for that. And that's all that we have time for today. Thank you very much for participating in our webinar and q and a session. So all the useful links, and, actually, we can also share this presentation with everyone. We'll be having it in the follow-up email. And if you want to know more about Fire and Smarter, please do reach out to us. As Don said, we are happy to share training and go to market support to that. And that's all for today. We really, really thank you for being a partner and for your continued support. Have a good day. Bye. Thank you. Thank you. Bye.