Mitigate SAP Payroll risks during SAP modernisations, transformations and routine operations

So hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar on how to mitigate SAP payroll risk during SAP modernization transformation and your daily operation. I'm Joey, and I look after the marketing here at AppEuse. Just a quick housekeeping note. Your line will be muted through the session, but please feel free to submit your question through the control panel on the right. We will address the questions at the end. Before we start, let me quickly introduce who we are and what we do. So at Appiuse Labs, we deliver value to our clients through innovative products and services. Our passion is to enhance your SAP landscape, and we have done this for more than a thousand eight hundred clients in fifty five countries. So in today's session, we will first discuss the real life payroll errors and how certain business event can increase your payroll risk, and then we will show how variance monitor can enhance the payroll testing and how it can lower payroll and data risk for a better security. And then we will follow this with a live demo of variance monitor to showcase its capability in real time. And then lastly, we will touch on the latest modernization in SAP SuccessFactor employee central payroll and how it can support your transformation. So today, I'm very happy to welcome our SAP HCM consultant, Jezsella Ramiuse, to join us today. With years of experience working on business and landscape transformation, Jezsella understand the challenges that HR and payroll teams face, especially when it comes to ensuring payroll accuracy. So over to you, Jessala. Okay. Thank you for the introduction, Joey, and thanks for having me here on this session to talk about IPslabs solution, which is Variance Monitor. So I greet everyone on this session a lovely day. Before we jump into what Variance Monitor is, let's start with some real world examples of modern day payroll or HR news, which made rounds in these headlines you see on your screen. Major and payroll professionals cannot afford for things to go wrong on a payroll project Because as you know, the consequences are severe and very public. We are not talking just about any minor inconveniences. We're talking about under overpaid employees, potential legal action, loss of trust, reputational damage, and regulatory violations. So to make a clean and error free payroll run, the most common challenge is actually in doing testings. So thorough testing means hundred percent of employee records must be checked, across multiple pay periods. Spot checking a few representative cases is actually not enough. Also, at no point made the data security be compromised. And there is always the tension between thoroughness in testing and the availability in time and budget to do all of these activities. So let's check out one organization that realizes these dangers in payroll errors and actually incorporate on their payroll activities the validation of data via variance monitor. So with variance monitor, we have helped many client to compare their HR and payroll data. Within the region, we have helped Fairprice group when they are transitioning to s four HANA. So with over twelve thousand employees, we have used variance monitor to test and compare payroll results during multiple parallel payroll cycles. So all of these achieved in less than actually four hours. So we also have helped American Airlines to solve their HR and payroll data, comparison challenges. Their employee size is roughly around, twenty thousand, employees. So before variance monitor, what they do is that they use manual spreadsheets. So they pull data out of their system and combine previews and current, payroll to get the percentage difference. So now they are utilizing Variance Monitor to compare their payroll results. So not only FairPrice and American Airlines, but we are also now securing over five hundred clients validation across the globe and across a wide range of industry. So we help these clients to reduce their payroll risks. So what is Variance Monitor, and what does it do? First,ly, Variance Monitor runs on an SAP system, and it compares data between those two systems. So, by SAP systems, what we meant here is your SAP ERP, ECC system, S4HANA, and even employee central payroll. So variance monitor reads the data between these two systems, do analysis, and accurately outputs the, the evaluation based on the review it did on comparing those two systems. So comparing data between two systems help lower, payroll risks on projects. So before you even go live with system changes or with a system migration. So it also helps when you find differences, between two systems, such as SuccessFactors, Employee Central, and SAP, Employee Central Payroll. So even before you run your live payroll run. Then various monitor also can help in comparison of data on the same system, but between two diff between two periods. So this helps lower payroll risks by highlighting any unexpectedly large variations in employee pay. For example, if your experience and your history in running payroll is that you always think of a five percent variation as something acceptable. But then when you run your payroll and you see something of a change, like twenty percent variation in your threshold, then that might stand out as a possible data or payroll error. So when would comparing payroll inputs and outputs help lower your payroll risk? So I have here the SAP HCM life cycle to discuss these payroll risks and how variance monitor help in reducing those risks. So first of this life cycle would be during SAP implementation. When you go live with, your new SAP payroll, you want to make sure your new payroll calculates at least as accurately as your previous payroll. So you want to compare a new system against the old system before you even go live. So let's say you already went live. Your payroll is now working, in DAU. So once you're live, you want to make or find this variation in pay that's greater than your accepted, dollar or percentage value tolerance. So because this might indicate data, or payroll calculation errors that, will actually need your attention. So you could simulate your payroll and fix, you can simulate your payroll, find and fix these issues before you even run your, live payroll, run. So if you have a hybrid system landscape with an SAP employee central system, feeding to an SAP ECP system, you want to check that the payroll relevant data in SAP is actually matching the relevant data as well from your employee central system. Then from time to time, as you need to make changes to support packs, configuration changes, or upgrades, you want to make sure the payroll and time calculations are performing as expected. You can perform this by comparing the SAP payroll and then the time results after the change versus your results, you have before the changes were made into your system. So there should be no unintended differences between those two. Now let's say, for example, you wanted to carve out part of your organization. Maybe absorb a part of another organization as part of a merger, acquisition, or divestment. Variance monitor can help you confirm that the data you loaded are actually matching in respect between the source and the new system. So as data and system change, variance monitor can help you pinpoint and address unintended variations. And if there are no variations or variances in the variance monitor report, you can rest assured that all things payroll and time management are in perfect qualification. So today, we operate in a fast paced environment with constant change, newer technology, newer and modern technology, and these adaptations to all of these changes in the system. So these examples of business events could create significant disruptions, and risks to your payroll operations. So these events aren't actually rare occurrences, but they have become regular business activities, that every organization must navigate safely. So we cannot avoid these changes as it moves the organization forward. But we have to make sure that when we navigate these changes, we navigate it securely. So examples of these would be anything related to, let's say, upgrading your organization's infrastructure, whether it is the production data or privacy compliance, or updating your system to comply with new tax legislations, as well as managing merger and acquisition activities. So each of these events isn't, if these changes will happen, because they will happen at some point. But the question really is if it's whether the organization can navigate them safely without compromising the payroll accuracy and compliance. Since we are talking about changes in the system, let's take a look why there is a need for variance monitor and how the solution can help you reduce this transformation or oftentimes synonymously, we term it to a migration or implementation approach or process. So if you change your payroll software for any reason, you need to make sure that hundred percent of it is correct before moving ahead with those changes. In the life cycle of an SAP payroll we saw earlier, changes to the software or configurations are often, required. And you want to introduce or if you want to introduce new functionality or change some conditions of service in your current system, you need to test or make testings to those changes and make sure that no unintended consequences, actually arises. So you could perform these validations using WageTypeReporter and a spreadsheet, but using the tools that introduces additional risks in the process. So not only is it very tedious to use spreadsheets by, you getting more error prone in doing lookup formulas, but these spreadsheets are also very difficult to audit. So furthermore, to use them, you need to export data out from your SAP payroll system, which increases the risk of data and information breaches. So payroll information is highly sensitive. We all know that. And, if you have done, or done these kinds of transform validations rather using spreadsheets, you would know how quickly you run up to the million line limit in a worksheet. So spreadsheets are willing to take that volume, but just not able to process that amount of data. So on the other hand, variance monitor is really fast, and it doesn't require that you export the data from SAP. So I recently used Variants Monitor in a migration with over thirty five thousand active employees for a major airline here in Asia, and the validation run is actually in less than an hour. So that's how fast, Verint's monitor does the validations. This allowed us to test more frequently and turn around a parallel run very quickly. All access is also controlled by SAP, SAP's authorization. And once you have created a few comparisons you like, you can always reuse them over and over. So now on a project and when you need to move from one payroll system to another payroll, or SAP payroll, Variance Monitor helps to lower your payroll risks by, firstly, helping you find and fix error in the personal administration time and leave data that are or were migrated. So it also helps you to confirm that the new payroll and time results matches the previous system when comparing the same period. And when you need to change your software by applying these support packs, upgrades, configurations, these changes, variance monitor can help you confirm whether there are no unintended consequences by comparing your payroll and time results before and after these changes. So variance monitor is also able to help you in same areas. If you add or you move a group of employees, let's say, for example, from your payroll system due to a merger, acquisition, or divestment, if, you are moving to a hybrid landscape, so such as with SuccessFactors employee central system, and that is connected to an SAP payroll. So it will help you find and fix those errors and confirm the hybrid cloud landscape integration between those two systems works before you even go live. So and one day, if you choose to depart, let's say, from SAP payroll, into another solution, Variance Monitor is also able to help you confirm that your payroll and time results between the old and new systems are consistent. Okay. So we have just looked at how Variance Monitor can help you lower the risks associated with going live, with a new payroll or making changes to your SAP payroll in a project environment. But the pressure and, actually, the responsibility does not stop when you go live. So there's still a lot of checks to be done, every pay, and these checks resets by the time you need to do your next pay cycle. So and, of course, Variance Monitor can help you there even after go live. It could help you find data from your SuccessFactors AC system that are not synchronized, not synchronized yet and may lead to payroll errors. It could also help you simulate the pay period to compare with previous period and identify, unexpected large variations in pay even before you run your payroll live. So as you know, running simulations is actually way, way better because you can simulate the pay without having to lock the control records. So in an operational scenario, Variance Monitor can help you identify cases where two systems are not in sync. So be it splitting your, let's say, finance and HR systems or your hybrid HCM and SAP payroll system. In the time of actual pay run till after or post pay run, variance monitor could help you simulate the pay period to compare with the previous and identify unexpected large variations in your pay. So you check your data, you run your simulations, you pay, or you run the pay. And once you have run your pay and created your postings, and your posted documents, you can compare these against the previous period. So similarly, in the same fashion, you can compare pay results to pay results and payroll posting also versus payroll post ings. So Verint's monitor, lower payroll and data risks by, okay, number one, speeding, speeding up your testing and validation process, making it more repeatable, hence, more manageable. Variance monitor eliminates the manual spreadsheet comparison, therefore, effectively reducing risks of mistakes and data breaches. It helps maintain data security within SAP, so by using the SAP authorization model. Verint's monitor also identifies the cause of data discrepancies with structured and flexible rule of network workflows. It also offers greater test coverage. That means you can test the whole population, multiple periods, all reach types. Variance monitor also helps minimize disruption of your live payroll by using its simulation comparison capabilities. And lastly, variance monitor enables you to reduce payroll errors by testing more thoroughly after projects and during every pay, period validation. Okay. So much for this talk about, Variance Monitor. What I'm going to do is showcase to you the solution in itself. So I have here Variance Monitor installed in one of our ERP systems. Let's do a very simple comparison for payroll. I have here preselected is my variant. So this variant will check out all employees under payroll area US for the period twelve twenty thirteen against the previous period eleven twenty thirteen. So with a simple click of execution with the results stored, Verint's monitor is now reading through all of the information of all employees under the said payroll area for these two periods in here. And what it's doing is checking one by one wage type per wage type, the pay results of all of those employees and will give us an analysis on how the data looks like. So now it gives, it gave us these, analysis in a form of a report. Let's first check out what the statistics is. So the statistics, statistics will give us an overview of what the comparison did. It will give us an overview of how many, employees were evaluated, how many of them in terms of record counts actually did pass validation, meaning the data from both the two periods are exactly the same and how many of them have some variations or variances. So these are things that payroll associates would also want to check out because they want to see or check where or why these variations are happening in the comparison. So let's take a look at the details of the comparison. So we see here at the summary level, it's the employee. This employee for your test and control system, which is your, twelve and eleven period, it lists out the wage type one by one, does a comparison, and effectively gives us a comment of where the values is matching or where the values is actually not matching. So take, for example, this particular slash five UK wage type, which says no matching record found on the test system. So there is a value on your control, but there's nothing in your test system. Similarly, if you scroll down below, we will see more of these cases, whereas this line here for slash four zero five for this particular employee has value in both test and control system, but then the difference is here. It prints out a difference in numeric and also, the difference in percentage. So these are the cases wherein we need to I, identify, investigate, and, check why there was such a change or a difference in the pay. It could be that last month, the employee received a bonus, whereas this month, it's a regular pay. Or if the employee perhaps was on a long term unpaid leave, and then the employee just, went, back this month. So these kinds of changes or these kinds of variations in pay, if you do this in a spreadsheet, you have to check this one by one. You may use solutions or the SAP standards like WageTypeReporter, but still, doing the validations, doing all of those formulas to check these kinds of changes will take you time. And as you saw earlier, it just took a few seconds in order for Variants Monitor to check out almost a thousand employees on this regard. So that's how, Variants Monitor does the whole validation, and this is only for payroll. So Variance Monitor is not limited to payroll only. You also do, validations against master data. Okay. So much for that. Going back into our, oops, into our presentation. So that's what variance monitor is. Now in terms of attention to modernization by SAP, all live SAP Employee Central Payroll clients must now turn into this new, news by, SAP. So as you know, SAP is modernizing over two thousand Employee Central Payroll installations. So according to SAP, this upgrade will affect more than two hundred million pay statements annually. So SAP said they will commence this upgrade actually in q two of twenty five. Actually, for new, Employee Central payroll clients, these were already switched over, from January of this year. While SAP handles the technical conversion from the old ECP platform to this new s four HANA environment, SAP clients are actually the one responsible for the critical testing and validation, work. These changes are not optional. So every SAP employee central payroll client will need expert help to ensure they navigate the business, event safely. So with variance monitor, you can now navigate these changes confidently because variance monitor will be able to do a comprehensive validation that compares hundred percent of calculations before and after conversions. So it can identify any unintended changes and provides documented proof of payroll accuracy, all while maintaining security within SAP environments. So if you are at the stage of planning, established baseline, and building your test protocols, variance monitor can be included as one of the tools to test and validate your payroll accuracy. Again, thanks for having me on this session, and I hope that the value of variance monitor has been realized throughout this discussion. So I think now I would like to open the floor for any questions that were perhaps raised during the discussion. Over to you, Joey. Yep. Thank you, Jessala, for this session, and let's move on to some of the question we have received from the audience. The first question is, what type of data can Variants monitor compare and test? Okay. So the demo that I demonstrated to you would be comparison of payroll in two periods. So not only can we do payroll comparisons, we can also do master data that's really useful during, migrations. Also, another one would be time. So all of your time, data, you can also compare, and postings. So your FI postings. I see. Okay. Thank you, Jessila. Let's move on to the next question. There is this attendees that say we are using another payroll system planning to move to SuccessFacto ECP. Can Variance Monitor accommodate and run comparison for data from non SAP data? Yes. So the answer is yes. So, we have this what we call comparison via file. So what it'll do is that Variance Monitor will now read the data from your legacy or non SAP system if you put those data into a file, let's say, as simple as a CSV. And now Variance Monitor can read through that file and take it as if it's a source system. So we can do also comparison even if the system is non SAP system. And, also, if you're comparing it or you're moving into an ECP system, it is within the variance monitor's capability to actually also do comparison now with SF data. Interesting. Well, perfect. The next question we have here is how can payroll testing be done without exposing sensitive employee data? Number one is that leave spreadsheets. So if you want to have error free, risk free comparison validation, You don't want your data being exported out of your SAP system. And spreadsheets in spreadsheets case, it needs the data, the, downloaded first and then moved into the spreadsheet to do all of these validations. To leave your spreadsheets, Let Variants Monitor do the validation for you so that it you would have the liberty to actually, do other things with the time you would be spending doing manual validations through spreadsheets. So spreadsheet is fine, but then with the kind of industry that we're in, wherein we're handling sensitive information, the best tool out there would be variance monitor. Yeah. I think everyone loves to use Freshii. I personally love to use it, but it causes a certain risk there. Okay. So we have another interesting questions here. It's a small sample group enough for testing. My time is sorry. Time constraint is always my concern. Yes. So I hear you on that. Always in a payroll run, everybody is on edge to meet deadlines. So we all know that. And then a compromise for that is doing validation in a small sample population and hoping that sample population, if it is one hundred percent valid or correct, then the rest of the population would also be correct. So we're hoping always to do that kind of testing because we are time constrained. But with variance monitor, this tool handles large amount of data, doing comparison in fairly, very minimal amount of time, and that gives us now the ability to do testing for your whole population and even do multiple counts or multiple retest around because it handles and processes data very fast. So you saw earlier. Right? In a couple of, seconds, we already have our validation report. So, no, my answer is no. Don't do testing in a sample group. Do it for everyone. Thank you for clarifying it. So let's move on to the last question for today. How often should payroll validation be done, and can I only do it after the system change? No. You don't or you should not only do these comparisons and validation every after configuration change. You have to do this validation every after payroll run. So we have, runs for payroll, like, for example, monthly, bimonthly, or weekly. Those kinds of runs is tedious in doing validations. But with the help of Variance Monitor, you should be able to do them every after your payroll run with little to no disruption in your usual, work since Variance Monitor handles the validation now for us instead of you doing it manually. So you have to run these validations every payroll run. This is to ensure that you are capturing any potential issues and fixing them before you even release the pay to the employee. Thank you for the insights, Jessala, and thank you for answering all these questions. For the attendees today, if you wanna learn more about variance monitor or if you have more questions about variance monitor, please feel free to reach out to us. We will also include all the useful links in the follow-up email, so please look out for that. And thank you for all your time today, and take care, everyone.