Track down your HCM and Payroll insights in SAP

Hello, and welcome. I'm Hannah. I'm from Effieus Labs. I'm here to introduce you to our webinar, track down your HCM and payroll insights in SAP. So I'll shortly hand over to our speaker, Dominic Ligneault. But before that, I'm just gonna go over some housekeeping and our today's agenda. So, everyone's microphone will be muted throughout, but we can submit questions. So, there's a chat box. Just pop your questions in there. Hopefully, we'll get time to go through them. If not, we'll still get back to you. There will also be a recording available after, we've finished, so you can share that with any colleagues. So our agenda, we'll do some introductions. We'll talk about the challenges that we have in today's climate, and then we'll look at how query manager and our analytics connectors can address these challenges. We'll do a demonstration, and, hopefully, if we get time, we can go through some use cases as well. So starting with our introductions. So I'm Hannah Burke. I'm product marketing manager here at FEEZ Labs, and our speaker, Dominic, he's one of our product delivery consultants. So he's helping our clients to streamline their reporting and data analysis in SAP and SuccessFactors. He's well versed in query managers. So if you do have any questions, now is a great time to, ask away. And a little bit about Appius Labs. So for those of you who are new to us, we're a truly global company. We're operating in fifty five countries providing solutions and services that maximize the performance management and security of SAP and SAP success systems. So to highlight a key a few key things about us, we've had twenty years experience in SAP data transformations. We have a really high client renew rate of ninety seven percent, which we're very proud of. Also, twenty three percent of our revenue goes back into r and d activity. So we're really investing resources to build products and services that really benefit our clients. Also, we're a member of Group Elephants. So that's a group of, global boutique services firms and software businesses, and one percent of the revenue that we make is channeled back into our charity, ERP, which stands for elephants, rhinos, and people. We're protecting Southern Africa's wild elephants and rhinos as well as working with communities that live side by side with these beautiful animals. Right. Just before I hand over to Dominic, I wanted to go through some of the current challenges in SAP reporting. So, who in HR or payroll hasn't felt like this little mick out here, sometimes a little bit frustrated perhaps with some of the challenges that are thrown their way. And some of these were actually discussed in our panel webinar, which was hosted by my colleague, Maria Robinson, and featured Danielle The Rocker and Zopi Lang. And they kinda talked about some of the challenges, like, especially things ex externally. So things like COVID, the way that's completely changed our working lives, and that's inevitably affected HR and payroll and the management of employees. That's also brought about a shift in the requirements for using SAP to, inform business decisions. So that kind of made HR and payroll play a more strategic role, in organizations. And then there's a need there for better systems that keep up with that demand for these insights. So organizations are, you know, now looking to transition to the cloud. And then with move to the cloud, of course, a big part of that can be the data split. So you can have certain data in cloud, certain on prem, and there's a need to report on data from both systems at the same time. Now it wouldn't be a webinar in twenty five if I didn't mention AI. So we are being pushed to adopt AI practices, which will completely transform the way we work, but to most of us, it's new technology that comes with its own challenges. But, really, there's a need there to make sure we have a solid foundational base with accurate payroll, secure data, and stable processes first. So with all that in mind, I'm now gonna pass on to our speaker, Dominic, who's gonna run through query manager for us. Thank you, Hannah. So let's start. So before we delve into what query manager is, let's quickly discuss some of the challenges that career manager solves. So the first thing, and these are just the top three complaints we receive from our ATM and payroll customers. The first one is that you need a multiple tools to create reports, just to mention a few of the tools that you would need to have to use or things such as add or query, s e sixteen n or s e sixteen, and words type reporter. These are just some of the tools that you need to use to in order to create reports from SAP, which tool you might need to use. You might need to memorize or you might need to ask someone based on what you remember. The second complaint is just you have to rely on IT to create some of the reports for you that you do need. So maybe there's a custom report that you might need an ABAP developer to develop for you, or there's just a big lack of payroll data as a result of just how SAP and the basic infotype data is stored, and that just means that there's a reliance on IT to create this. And the last thing is just that, there's often very limited non real time data available in sub business warehouse, and that's where query managers really just excels. So as a powerful user friendly and flexible reporting solution, query manager solves all of these challenges. Next, so what is Credit Manager? So Credit Manager is a very powerful solution. It enables you as the user to use an easy to use format. It gives you the ability to create your own reports and also customize reports. It also gives you the ability to send automated communication as well as push your content to analytics products like Power BI, Tableau, and SAP Analytics Cloud. We'll be exploring those solutions today, and it's really exciting to see, along with credit manager, we have add ons such as Analytics Connector. Once you add these products to credit manager, it really transforms the way you see your data, and it can just result in a seamless experience from transforming your SAP data to a stagnant form to a more lively and easy to use format. So by combining data from on premise SAP and SuccessFactors, Query Manager also gives you the solution for multiple sub reporting needs, so it's a very comprehensive solution that can help you on your journey to the cloud. So Query Manager is available for multiple client types, which is a great benefit. The first of those three that we can explore is SAP on premise ECC, and this is a really good solution. It really requires you to only have one single solution for all your ECC reporting. All your payroll time cluster data as well as configuration data is available through QN, And as you mentioned earlier, Query Manager needs no IT involvement. It really removes the involvement and the fact that you need to rely on your IT to get everything done. Major benefit is also your SAP security authorizations are respected, and that just reduces the risks of moving your data from with within or moving your data from SAP to an outside source. It's accessible to any user. If you have and you take the options of using our Fiori or our Excel add on, then no SAP GUI is required to access query manager data, and you can even access this via a mobile device. So those are just some of the benefits and how we can actually accommodate you by reporting on SAP on prem. The second option in the middle is our hybrid, that's SAP and SuccessFactors. My query manager gives you the ability to report on SAP data as well as SuccessFactors data live at the exact same time. So you can have the increased comfort level with SuccessFactors as you can also view your data from within SAP or SuccessFactors systems. You don't require a SAP GUI to access this, and you can also access your reports from within SuccessFactors home page. The last one is just SuccessFactors EC Payroll. So we have dozens of payroll reports designed according to the best practices, and they are delivered free. You can leverage QM to ensure proper data replication between your SuccessFactors data and SAP, as well as your payroll data is available live for dynamic consumption in a analytics program such as SAP Analytics Cloud, which we'll be also be exploring today to see how that seamlessly integrates with Grainy Manager. And as mentioned earlier, you can then work with your data in a program such as Excel, and those are just all the multiple client types that we do really excel in and how we can actually accommodate you in your environment. Next, just as a visual representation, I do really like this graph. It just gives you an explanation of the types of data that you would want to report on within your HCM space. On the left, we can see those typical data such as master data administration. I know org management and time and attendance data is also very important, but payroll data is essentially something that can never be left out. We can see there are multiple reporting solutions that we can use, if we don't use QM. So depending on which reporting solution, I might need to remember which one. I could use White Stripe reporter. I might need to refer to an adult query just to get some of my data in a report. After I've chosen or remembered what reporting solution I need to use, I probably need to then export that to a manipulation data tool and then manually manipulate the data. So that could be something like an Excel or Access or SAP BW. So data is essentially taken out of SAP and is no longer live and protected by SAP security. And once I've done all of that and I've remembered what to do, what to use, whenever I have my report or document. Sorry. And then using query manager, that simplifies your whole reporting process. So you can see on the left hand side we have exactly the same amount of data types. Once again, from master data all the way through to payroll and SuccessFactors data is now also included. You can then simply use your Query Manager as your main reporting solution. Your live data is protected by SAP security, and from there on, it immediately moves to your report or document. So it really simplifies the whole reporting process. It takes out the fuss of remembering which reporting solution to use, and it's as easy as just logging into credit manager, dragging in your fields, running your report, and then you can also simplify that by actually using built in tools within QM to communicate and then supply that to your analytics tool. So just a highlight, in addition to SuccessFactors data, QQM also provides you access to all, virtually all types of data as this slide just shows us, the different types of ATM data that we do see there, all the way from personal administration and benefits. All the way to the right hand side, we do see non SAP data. It's a very nice tool or it's just a nice slide that just highlights the multiple sample inputs that we can actually include in QM. As soon as we've done that, and you'll notice on the top of this slide it highlights that your SAP and SuccessFactors authorisation checks need to be approved. Once that's approved, the output types are then also endless. As you can see, it goes from the SAP ALV to a PDF Excel All the way to the right hand side, we also see that we can then explore different analytics solution. So your output is not just limited to reports. You can create documents, PDFs, everything, and the solution we are gonna be exploring today is our analytics solution. Just some client success stories from clients that use Query Manager. So we've been helping SAP customers for over forty years and we do have seventeen hundred plus custom or clients. These are just three success stories that we'd like to highlight, the first one being Zurich Airport. They found Careemanager to be fast, flexible, creating tools in all of their SAP HCM environments. What really stood out for them was the fact that their managers could actually create a fully customized report without external help. As we've mentioned earlier, we take the files out of actually relying on ID. We give you the tools, and we actually help you to succeed in creating your own customized reports. And the additional benefits that Zurich Airport actually experienced was central management of reports and actually the mechanism to distribute the workload across a wider employee base. So with tools built into QM, you can actually distribute your reports much quicker and more easily. Second, is Amy. So they needed an easy solution that would reduce the complexity of their systems given the amount of data that they do have in their business. And what career manager did for them, it gave them flexibility to manage and control their reporting as well as just a quick and automated process that they could actually just simplify their reporting, but also it made them actually experience the quick turnaround of using QM for all of their SAP reporting needs. And the last one on the slot is Acceleron Metal Bremen is a manufacturer of crude steel, and premonitoredly transformed their HR reporting, introduced their development time from eight weeks to just one day. So saving them costly time in the development of reports, and this benefit really just helped them to handle large volumes of data, improve their reporting, and it just gave them time savings as well as increased reliability. Next, I just wanna touch on how we can report on data from SAP and SuccessFactors at exactly the same time. So we do realize that most customers will probably be going on a journey to the cloud, and the way they're going to report on data from the on prem system in addition to their SAP SuccessFactors data might change. And this is where we've designed Query Manager to integrate with both of those systems. And for the next few years, popular landscapes models in ATM customers will fall into what is known as a hybrid model. Or you might also be reporting from just SuccessFactors data, and that's where we also accommodate for this. So the beauty of the SuccessFactors integration, it allows you to really read data from SAP and SuccessFactors using an OData link or protocol. Your real time data, your real time and on demand data is then sent to your SAP, and there's no duplication of data, so there's no need for a data warehouse or anything similar to that. Your success factors data is available as a data source in query manager. As you can see from the images, we can see that there's an entity type in our o data API dictionary, and then that is directly mapped to query manager in a data source that you can then use. And then just simply drag your fields and your data types from SuccessFactors into query manager. And the good thing about actually how we integrate SuccessFactors into query manager is security is obviously one of the main concerns you do have when accessing SuccessFactors data. We use OAuth two with certificate based SAML authentication. This is an SAP recommendation, and what that actually means is it does adhere to your role based authorization in SuccessFactors data, meaning that only approved users will be able to report on both solutions. So if you do have a user that does not has not been approved to report on SuccessFactors data and that user then runs a report in QM, they'll simply not be able to see the results, which gives you peace of mind knowing that, you know, your users that are not supposed to see data from SuccessFactors will not be able to will be able to run a report, but they won't be able to access the results. That's one of the many securities that we've included with our SuccessFactors integration. So you might be wondering query manager and employee central payroll integration, how does that work? And this graph just gives us a nice visual representation of how that could then work with your solution. So as you can see, query manager has been installed on employee central payroll system. It then accesses data from SuccessFactors, as is mentioned earlier, using an OData protocol, and then you were able to access all your success factors that's including human resources, payroll, and talent acquisition, as well as people analytics. Then you as the SAP GUI or QM user would then access that from one of your chosen methods of accessing QM data. In this example, we've taken the SAP u GUI as an example. You can then access your data from your SAP GUI, and you can access both within query manager. So query manager the benefits of using this is Query Manager has access to all your payroll data, whether it's on prem, SAP payroll, or even SuccessFactors Employee Central payroll. Your data is then accessible as mentioned before through your chosen method of accessing data, which is web browsers, mobile devices, self-service portals, HR renewals, or even from within SAP employee central or SAP SuccessFactors employee central. And your QM also then feeds into analytics with payroll and time data that are not currently available within SAP Analytics Cloud. So how do we integrate with your analytics solution? We use what we call the query manager analytics connector add on, a very powerful add on. And what essentially the query manager analytics connector does, it makes your query manager data available and shares that data within or for with any analytics solution. So the data that you have with inquiry manager is being shared with any analytics solution. As you can see on the screen, we've just mentioned a couple such as Power BI, Tableau, SAP, and the latest cloud, and many more solutions that actually use an o data link to access data. This is ideal for any application that does not currently have real time access to data. So you can see on the screen, it goes from credit manager to analytics connector, which is actually an add on built in credit manager just for the purpose of representing how the process works. It then goes from analytics connected to any of your analytics tools, and that's where you can see a dashboard such as that shown on the screen can then be built to highlight any insights from the data within credit manager. A very powerful tool. We can next move on to a use case that we've actually seen and that we've developed for this, and this is a gross pay dashboard. We jumped that example. We can have a look at that. So on the screen now, you can see we do have a gross pay dashboard that was designed in SAP Analytics Cloud. The beauty of this dashboard is, I think, as many of you that are accustomed to SuccessFactors data will notice is we've then included SuccessFactors data in the form of business units, divisions, departments, and we've also included employee details. But then again, we've then used that alongside our ECP payroll data. We've then created a query that can then give us the details according to success factors, divisions, or departments, and we've linked that back to our payroll. We then create a nice dashboard where we can actually look at the different divisions, employees, and all of that, and we can actually filter using the built in SAC functions if we were to click on that employee to also give you more details with regards to that employee. So I do like this example. I think it's a brilliant example of how we've actually incorporated success factors data along with employee central payroll data into a dashboard, we've easily pulled that into SAP Analytics Cloud and we've been able to exploit that data to get more insight into our payroll data. Just jumping back to our presentation, Yeah. We'll just move on. And with that in mind, I just wanna bring our attention to SuccessFactors integration monitoring. I think it's a topic that we probably be more widely discussed as we move on. So clients running both SAP and SuccessFactors have unique integration challenges. Data replication is meant to be a seamless process, but in reality, we do know that some clients do face challenges, and this could be as a result of the complexity of data models and just the whole process does seem challenging if you do have large scale data available on both your systems. So what we do offer at APUs Labs is known as a SuccessFactors integration monitoring service, and this service is meant to actually help you to more easily detect and resolve integration and replication issues between your SAP and SuccessFactors systems. We do you offer this service because this will help you to identify those issues before they impact your business. And it's really a good service that really leverages on SAP certified solutions. It takes your ATM data quality and checks that your data quality across your hybrid SAP and SuccessFactors landscape are matching, and it really helps you to identify issues before they become a big issue before your payroll process is ran. So we in integrate the solution. It helps you to control the flow of the integration between SAP and SuccessFactors. This is also a way that we can actually unlock, as the topics suggest, the HR and HN insights of your data. It helps you to more easily identify replication issues as we've seen, and this helps you to up to simplify the upgrade and support backtesting that we see. Now we move on to a use case where we can actually implement this and this is where we're actually going to use query managers, success factors, and the analytics connector add on together. So what's nice about this, we've actually used the success factors add on, we've developed integration monitoring queries, we've then been able to export those into a dashboard in Power BI by using analytics connector add on. And along with that, we were able to develop a dashboard such as the following that just highlights how we can actually get a better grip and more insights into our actual replication monitoring. So if we were to then just jump to that dashboard, we could clearly have a discussion about that. We can see the use case for replication monitoring along with Query Manager SuccessFactors add on and Analytics Connector is an integration monitoring dashboard. So what's nice about this example, we've been able to create replication queries. We've taken those queries and we've we've exposed them to Power BI using analytics connector add on, and then we were able to create this dashboard. So it's a very nice dashboard. It really represents how we can actually unlock insights into what exactly you want to see from your replication monitoring, and that's why it's called the enhanced integration monitoring dashboard because we were able to unlock insights to really enhance the way we monitor our integration. Some of the features of the dashboard, we can just see, you know, there's four tabs at the top. It's gonna look at an overview. The overview is just a look at the successful replications, the failed replications. It gives me an overall view of how my replications are actually doing. Now next, when we jump to the mismatches dashboard or tab, we can see that this is where we can actually get specific details with regards to entities within SuccessFactors, and we can actually see the fields that are matching and mismatching between SAP and SuccessFactors. So this gives me a better view on what's actually happening within my SAP and SuccessFactors. I do really like this as it gives me as the user the exact personnel number or the exact field that's mismatching and maybe my replication job might actually be successful, but because there are fields within SuccessFactors or SAP, it might be set up incorrectly or the replication is failing. We were able to see that there. The next step is an employee detail tab, and that just gives us more just give gives us a better look at per specific employee, what's happening, what's on the ground, me as the parallel admin or the person responsible for the replication, I can get a better view of what's actually happening by looking at this tab. And this is all possible through career manager and analytics connector, and just exposing this to a platform such as Power BI gives us a seamless experience. It helps us to quickly understand what's happening on the ground and, yeah, it just makes our lives as the parallel admin, the rep the person responsible for replication, or just working with the days on a day to day basis a lot easier and more seamless. I'm gonna go through a client success story, Sellerfield Limited as it's that's a large nuclear site in the UK. It's responsible for the UK safe storage of nuclear waste. They employ approximately twelve thousand employees and seventeen thousand five hundred contractors. So as you can see, there's quite a large number of people that really move through their databases and their subsystems, and they really had a need to streamline their reporting activities. So they were taking each report individually. They were extracting data. They're bringing it into Excel and then doing pivot tables to try to understand what was happening or to gather the insights from the data. So prior to using QM, we know that the reporting was clunky and manual. After using QM, they were able to fully integrate their data with Microsoft Power BI. So this is a they had a seventy to eighty percent manual data manipulation, and that is now a fully automated process. The good thing about an analytics connector, it's a you can set up your data to fully be automated into a program such as Power BI, and I think it really changes the way that you see your data and you can move your data from SAP to any other program. So equity manager has essentially helped Sellafield become a more data driven organization. It's enabled them to just have better informed decision making, and it supports their strategic workforce planning. Just a quote from Sean Mossop, the people information systems lead at Sunilfield. He just said using a combination of query manager and Power BI, we were able to fully automate the process from end to end. It enabled us to establish those standardized reports, which didn't have a mechanism for creating prior to that. I think it's just a good quote to end off, just to help everyone understand just how a creative manager can transform your data driven process and streamline what you need to see from your businesses. Brilliant. Thank you so much, Dominic. We have had some questions come through, so, I'm just gonna read some of those out. So how easy is it for nontechnical HR staff to build or modify reports? So the good thing about Query Manager and the thing that we do strive to really take into consideration is making it an easy to use platform. Along with that, we do offer training and will ensure that those users that are meant to be using Query Manager fully understand how they can actually create reports, edit the reports, and run those reports. And that's actually just one of the ways that we do strive to improve on is just making it easy to use for our customers. And then we will just walk with our clients and to ensure that they can actually use those tools we give in incrementor to actually achieve what they need to achieve. Right. Thank you. Another one. Can you report on declustered payroll results? I think that's a very good question, Hannah. The short answer is yes. You can. And I just wanna touch on what declustered means for those that are not aware of that, but declustered payroll results are created when you do use payroll control center or PCC. And it can it contains entries or special entries for test runs. And the good thing is we've included that into query manager. So query manager can easily report on these runs as well as it can also report on clustered and declusted payroll results. Brilliant. Thank you. And, there's a couple of questions about compatibility, so I'm just gonna amalgamate them into the to one if that's okay. So is it compatible with, employee central payroll, S4HANA, and RISE? I think that's a very good question. I think it's a question that I think most of our clients actually ask us. You know, we see the landscape changing. We do see the need for clients to upgrade, and the short answer is yes. It's compatible with all of those systems. We also do help our clients if they do upgrade systems. We assist with them and we help them to actually get a newer version. Or if there's a specific version they upgrade to, we'll also provide them with the necessary trans transports and the steps to actually upgrade to those systems so we are fully compatible with all of those systems. Brilliant. Thank you. I think we'll leave it there for the webinar. So I want to thank you, Dominic, for being our speaker today. It's been very valuable, so thank you for that. And thank you to our audience for attending. Just to let you know, there will be a survey, at the end. So, if you do have time, please, fill that out. That would be really useful for us. Thank you. And there'll be a recording available after. So thank you, everyone.