Leap to efficiency: Streamlining HR and Payroll reporting

Welcome, everyone. I'm Joey, and I'm the marketing manager for Asia at EPI-USE Labs. And today, I'm joined by Amy and Mariel. Hi, everyone. I'm Amy. I'm from the Middle East and Africa marketing team. And hello. I am Mariel. So I focus on Australia and New Zealand, also from EPI-USE Labs, and we are really pleased to have Eben De Lange, our product manager for Query Manager. So here he is with us today. I'd like to share just a brief introduction. Sorry, Eben. Thank you so much again for joining us. I'd like to just share a brief introduction about what we do here at EPI-USE Labs. So we feel very strongly about our slogan, and that is to deliver value to our clients through innovative products and services. Our passion is to enhance SAP landscapes, and we do this for more than a thousand clients in over forty nine countries. We are a member of Group Elephant, which owns and funds a nonprofit entity called Elephants, Rhinos, and People. And we focus on the preservation of at-risk elephants and rhinos, and we focus on the economic upliftment of rural people in areas adjacent to these reserves. Alright. Before we begin, please note that a recorded version of this webinar will be available and sent to your to view. And the lines will be muted, but you can ask your questions through the control panel. Let's move on to our topic today. Over to you, Eben. Alright. Thank you so much. So today, we are talking about payroll and about efficiencies in payroll and why it is so important. So we as a organization focus mostly on SAP HR and on SuccessFactors. And today, we're going to look at a couple of practices that we've seen over the years that we've been playing in the space and then terms of how you can maximize your efficiency when it comes to SAP reporting. So we're going to look at how to access your data from a single solution, how to report on live test results, how to build pre payroll checks to help mitigate risk, how to monitor your payroll via dashboards, and how you can distribute the content to the right people automatically. But, first, I am, going to quickly launch a poll. So let's see which of these concerns, concerns our audience. I think on your screen you should be, seeing a poll soon. So we'll give it, like, thirty seconds or so just so that we can get an idea of, what people are struggling with. K. I see we have a couple of results coming in. Give it another ten seconds or so. Alright. People are still voting. Still coming in. I hope some of you are not, second guessing yourself. Alright. Let's do that. So I think that's about it. So I'm going to end it. I'm going to share the results. You can see the results right, Mariel. I'm seeing So on my end. Okay. Perfect. Alright. So here's the results. So fifty percent of, people or attendees in the webinar said that they have difficulty in consolidating data from multiple sources. That's, a very common problem. That's something that we see as a lot as well. There's, seventeen percent said it's a lack of real time reporting. Seventeen percent said it's high manual effort. Eleven percent says there's some delays in getting accurate results. And then at least one person said that they have a problem ensuring data privacy and security. Perfect. Thank you so much for participating. Let's jump into these challenges. Let's first quickly talk a little bit about why efficiency. I think I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but I think most businesses out there are under more pressure to have up to date information. Right? So, we all know analytics are getting more important more and more important, in the HR space as well as in the rest of the business. COVID obviously had a big influence on, you know, the way we operate, the way that organizations work. But mostly it's because we have to make quicker business decisions. Right? We can't, you know, delay. You have to get the data out as quickly as possible. You have to be able to predict the future, which I haven't actually met anyone who can do that, sufficiently, but we're still expected to do it. In the HR space, this include giving accurate salary expenses, making sure that you can retain your workforce, making sure you can do you can get the correct people, making do with fewer people. Right? Because we know that many HR teams, especially in the SAP space, you know, a lot of the, traditional, the old school, SAP folk are retiring and having it over to a new generation of, HR people and HR information system users. And, of course, the good old one, you always have to reduce costs. So there was some research done by SAP Insights about a year ago or so. And know, in terms of the analytics angle, they said that fifty percent of companies are looking at changing the analytics solution within the next year. Right? So just an indication that people are not satisfied with what they have or there's big company wide shifts, and you have to switch to different solutions. Like I said, AI and predictive analytics are the order of the day. It's not going away. You know, don't know if you have an AI strategy yet. We're actively looking into that and working on ours. But I think some of the challenges that are facing HR teams in particular is that you are expected to do this in conjunction with your day to day reporting. In other words, your day to day reporting isn't going away. You still have to do that operational report or that, that recon that you have to give to a third party, that you have to give to your finance teams. Right? And you're expected to do all of these additional, exercises. And I think, complexity is being amplified in that. So it's not getting any easier, because, of talent shortages and SAP's own HR roadmap in terms of success factors. H4S4, and private cloud edition, S/4HANA rides, etcetera, is not making any of this easier. In principle, it is. Right? If you can get to a consolidated platform, your analytics should be getting easier, but many organizations are facing this challenge in terms of where do we go next, what system landscape strategy should we follow. I think that's the irony of all of this is that even with all of this increased complexity and increased number of options, reporting is still an issue. So the cycling group that I mentioned earlier, released, in that research that they released last year, and they said according to the companies that they surveyed, reporting came out as a key gap in many HRMS applications. That includes, service delivery applications, time applications, recruiting applications, learning applications, and even, ironically, analytic applications. So what's the solution? Our view has always been that we will help you focus on some core tasks, such as operational reporting and making that reliable and efficient as possible. We want to help empower the HR team or the payroll team. We don't want you to be able to have to depend on others. That might include IT, you know, in the past or these days, a data scientist group or, an analytics group, and we believe that automation is important. We always believe that let's help you automate the basic, the painful manual items. Now, to put it in a different way, if you are combining and downloading reports and manipulating the results in Excel, we want to help you. We don't believe that's a very efficient way of doing things. Alright. So let's look at some concrete examples. So a lot of you mentioned that, you have difficulty consolidating data from multiple solutions. I think, you know, one of the most common scenarios probably out there is you have SuccessFactors on the one side. SuccessFactors comes with its own reporting solutions, such as the Report Center, and People Analytics, which introduced, I think, two or three years ago. So it's quite good. Right? Works very well. The biggest problem with that is that, if you are running employee central payroll, it's basically a different system. It has its own set of, reporting solutions. So it has the good old PCBI results transaction where you can view payroll results. As the Wage Stop Reporter. You might still be running on premise HCM, in which case, you know, most of your data should be in this environment. But if you're running this kind of hybrid environment, which most, companies these days are doing, then you have a problem because your master data is on this side and your payroll data is on this side. How do you combine that reporting? And then, of course, a lot of organizations out there have a third party solution as well. It might be your timekeeping system, might be, some other HR related system. It might just be that you have a big organization. You have all of these different environments. That is the area that we're interested in solving. So SAP has worked on this. Right? They have the barrel control center, which is really good. We, are big advocates of it. One of our sister companies on the group has a very good barrel control center booster pack, which you can definitely look into as well. But it's not really reporting. Right? It helps you run your apparel more efficient, but it, doesn't help you to report on it that well. And so that is where our solution query manager comes in. So what is query manager? It is a, solution that allows you to build your own reports directly on your production system. Right? That is, in the case of employee central payroll, your production ECP system, or if you're running on premise or, private cloud edition that is in your, main production system there. It allows HR teams to build the reports directly themselves. It's real time reportings. There's no staging of data. You don't have to, download reports on one side and combine it with another one. You can immediately just pull in the data from both sides. We support SuccessFactors data. We support many of the SuccessFactors modules. And then, of course, we include the payroll data, you know, whether that payroll data is on Employer Central payroll or on an ECC system. And, yes, we have some external sources as well. So we can pull in files externally. So if you can get a CSV file, example, from your timekeeping system, we can help you combine that into the report as well. And it's really easy to do. It's really, like I said, it's a DIY solution. It helps you do it yourself. So let's jump into the solution a little bit, and I will, give you a couple of examples. So what we have here, this is, the query manager Fiori app. So you can see here's your reporting tree on the left. You can organize the reports as you see fit. And, I'm going to start it off very simple. I'm just going to show you a birthday list that I build, you know, in five minutes or so. It's a fairly standard selection screen, and if I click Execute now, what it's actually doing, it is pulling data directly live from SuccessFactors, and it will give me the results in this, grid view. And, it's also very easy for you to actually download this into Excel. So we're not saying, you know, get rid of Excel completely, but if, if you do want to manipulate the data further after you've combined it from multiple systems, you can use Query Manager. And our Excel output is really good. It's not a CSV file that you have to convert to Excel first. So what it's doing nowadays is going directly to SuccessFactors, pulling the data from, SuccessFactors, and then showing me a very simple birthday list. But, of course, that's not really what you're interested in. Right? That you can do with standard SuccessFactors reporting. Even though we've heard a lot of our customers actually prefer, Query Manager, above and beyond the standard SuccessFactors reporting capabilities. But let's look at a more advanced one. Right? So this one is a gender breakdown report that I've done. So once again, I can open the results that I did previously, like a cooking show. I've used some, formatting here, you know, just to, to well, sorry. No. That's the next one. I actually wanna show us we do have some basic graphing capability in our Fiori app. Alright. So you can switch to this. You can build some basic charts. Here we can see in our organization, you know, obviously, our US headquarters are the biggest, part of the organization. I get some build down capabilities as well, so I can say, okay. Actually, I think often as HR people, we are the type that says, listen, show me the data. I like the graphs, but can I see the individual results? And with Query Manager, you can. Once again, this one, the first one we showed was a Pure SuccessFact report. This one is actually a pure on premise report. That's why if you recognize personnel areas there at the bottom, you will recognize this as an on premise report. And then finally, here's the combined one. Right? So one thing that we've seen with Query Manager that a lot of our, our customers really appreciate is the ability to pull data in from both systems and then compare it. So if you have, for example, synchronization problems between SuccessFactors and your payroll system, you can use Query Manager to help you find these errors in advance. So that helps you, once again de risk payroll because you can see, oh, there's a synchronization issue. It's going to break payroll. Let's fix it, you know, already now. So you can see this report shows me your state stuff from your SAP system, your state stuff from your Success Factor system. There's some mistake there. Obviously, a lot of this is not pulling through, or, this might have been an upload issue where we went from an existing on premise system to SuccessFactors. And then there for a different part of the organization, there's just, you know, a couple of hits and misses there. You can see I can use query manager has a very strong formula language, which is based on Excel, and I can use this to build logical rules, business rules to show me and say, okay. Show me, you know, where things do not match, then I can, of course, filter afterwards and just show me these type of things. Now that's, more of a technical report. I also have one that says let's just combine payroll data with managerial data. So once again, I'm just going to open up one that I did earlier. And so, even, you know, if you have that typical environment that we mentioned, in the beginning, then you will know that your master data is most likely in SuccessFactors. Your managerial information, your employee details is in SuccessFactors. And of course, your payroll is in the payroll data. Right? And so this report pulls those two pieces of data together. As you can see, this, shows me everything in green is from SuccessFactors, and everything in blue is from my payroll system. And it's all in one report, so you don't have to run two reports and combine the data afterwards. Alright, so that was how you can access your data from a single solution in, in SuccessFactors and SAP AGM or Employee Central Payroll. Alright. Let's look at the next one. Right. Oh, by the way, we can also play with the analytics space. I'll, show you how we can get into Power BI and some other analytic solutions, how you could get payroll data in a short bit. Alright. But first, let's go to the second topic, and that is reporting on live test results. So I already mentioned, you know, that we're a big advocate for the employee sorry, the payroll control center. So this is a visual depiction of a typical, payroll month, right, or a payroll period. Of course, if you're running payroll more often than, you know, you're doing this multiple times within a month. And, you know, usually, at the end of the month, you have live payroll processing. You typically use the wipes of your portfolio quite a lot. Of course, we know that the payroll controls enter allowed you to start doing payroll, you know, in the beginning of the month, that other period of time, you know, before the payroll crunch. So in this time period, the payroll control center is your friend, allows you to create test results, allows you to build validations and to do monitoring of your payroll, and, you know, start getting some of the ideas that you might be struggling with later in the month earlier so that you can attend to those earlier. And if you can use it, you know, you can start addressing payroll, problems immediately. Now, one thing that we've noticed, and we're not the only ones, is that you can't actually use that website reporter to report in the test results during this period because SAP saves it in a separate database table, they save it in the declasted table, and they store the test results, those temporary results that you're creating, they store it in a different place, which is really unfortunate because, yes, you may have really good validations, as you should, but there's always, you know, that month where something just goes wrong, and you just want to dig deep in the results and really try and figure out what's going on. Now we've noticed that, like I said, we're not the only ones. So if you go into the SAP influencer pages, you will see that, someone else has also asked for this, give us the ability to report in the PCC test by all results. Unfortunately, SAP doesn't seem to really do much. They promise an update in twenty two, and we really haven't seen that update yet. And you can see there's at least a couple of organizations out there. Another, person has said, listen. The WhiteHat Report is not available during monitoring. Some reports require complex analysis about the results, and this requires additional reporting. Can we please have those options available? Right? So that is why in Query Manager, we've enabled this. So here is a very basic monitoring process. You can see I've already started it. I've created some test payroll data. There's the reports that have run all of this. And I've, created this for period twelve for twenty four. I think I should have shouldn't have kicked that. Right. So we've done it for the US payroll, area. So if I do go into the website reporter, this is an older one, and I run it for that same period, then, of course, I get nothing back. Right? Because there's no cluster data. There's no even, you know, live payroll data or declusted information available. If you are on the older systems or, sorry, on the newer way of supported, then at least you get the ability to report on that declasted information, but, once again, not the test results. Now in query manager, we do allow you to do this. So I'm going to go into query manager here. Right. So this is the back end transaction. This is the area where you build queries. The Fiori app that I showed you earlier is where you can execute queries, where you can view those graphs, etcetera. But as an HR team, this is where you will spend more of your time, you know, actually building reports and tweaking them and changing the ones that we give you, etcetera. So I'm going to go into customer demos and then into my webinar. This is the same folder structure that I showed you earlier. Let's see how we can report on those live results. And so here I've built a report that enables you to pick which results you want to use, whether it's live battle results or test results. Come on. There we go. And so I've prepopulated it. So I said, listen. Give me the results for period twelve twenty four, and there's the scopes. I can say give me the test results or the live results. I'll run it now to show you the one that I did yesterday. And there you can see there's results. So there is the employees that I've run. Actually, you know, something must have gone wrong. I've seen, you know, in period for this period, actively seeing retros going way back. I can see all of the wage type results. I can see the amount. And we actually even add a couple of additional fields that a lot of our customers find very useful. I have a field that says, is this a test result? If we are retroing, is it using some of the test results to view that retro? Is it a retro? Right? If you edit this and you change it even further, we really give you solutions. So this is the editor. This is where you build the reports. We give you options in terms of payroll reporting, you know, that we've tailored made for payroll teams out there. So we can give you different payroll views to really get the one that you're interested in. We can give you options to decide if you're interested in red in regular or off cycles. Do you want the original results, just the retros or the re originals and the retros. Right? So it can it really allows you to dig deep into your payroll real results and actually look in terms of what's what went wrong, what's working, what is not working, what has changed, that type of thing. Right? And then, of course, whether you're using the live results or the test results. Okay. So that was how we enable you to report on live test results for quicker turnaround. Of course, I know, hopefully you don't have to dig into these type of abnormal situations every month, and we can also help you even if you're not using the BCC or you are using it, you need some additional things. We can also help you build, kind of pre payroll runs and exit checks. So we've built using query manager. We've built reports that look for those success factor sync issues, look for the missing data, that might affect payroll, whether it's master data, whether it's time data. For example, if you were using workflow software, it might be synchronizing into some of the two thousand info types. You want to know as a payroll person in advance, is that data there? Did it synchronized correctly? So you can use Curium to build some reports to check that. We can help you build reports that checks for certain thresholds and whether that has been crossed. Right? We can help you look for trends as well, maybe gross differences. Now, we're not limited as a power control centers to a single company area. You can use such reports for many company areas. You can switch it yourself on the selection screen or you can hard code that report and build it into it. Let's look at a couple of examples. Let's go back into my query manager, back end transaction here. Switching my time a bit. K. So you know what? I'm not going to go into that demo folder. Let's go into some of the reports that we've built for customers. Our US team is quite active. Alright. So here's some post exit payroll reports. Right? So there's overtime reports. There's claim reports. There's net pay over four periods. Right? There's a report of retro differences. We do quite a lot of posting recon work, right? So, we help, organizations, recon or, you know, reconciliate their payroll with their, finance teams. Of course, we have some pre exit ones that you would typically run during the payroll period or like we see on the test results in the beginning of the month. Right? So this one in particular, I think, is quite good. That's an audit report that we have available that shows you, certain info types which may not, have data, which are supposed to have data, and those are typically going to be the ones that will affect payroll. This is a bit US oriented. You can see this picks up specific missing info types for only the employees that are missing those. Right? And you can go and, correct this now. This is a demo system. We don't typically have, you know, what, one, two, three, four, five, Johannes von Amaris. Yeah. But actually, we do have a content pack, a viral oriented content pack that, helps you find ghost employees or duplicate employees. Right? So in some, you know, countries, particularly in some African countries, that is a big problem. So we have reports that can help you find, employees that has the same personnel areas, the same ID numbers, the same bank details, etcetera. We also have reports that help you find, those retro problems. Where's that one? Oh, this one. Anticipated by all reconciliations. And even tells you, you know, which, infotype has potentially caused this retroactive calculation. So, yes, the Viral Control Center is good. It's a really automated process, really helps you to automate, you know, to make a process out of payroll and to plug validations into that. But if you are not using it or you want to be able to run some reports with additional details or you want to build your own reports, you know, for those crunch periods, then you can use Query Manager very efficiently to do that as well. K. That is how to build, for reports to help mitigate risk. Now I've told you earlier that we don't just play in the, operational reporting space. We also play in the analytical space. So we have what we call our analytics connector that allows you to bring that payroll data and SuccessFactors data to dashboards. It allows you to build a safe connection between those solutions. One thing that we often see is you can download the data into Excel file, put it on the ShareDrive or a SharePoint folder somewhere, then use that to access your analytics. You could send it to an email, but that's not the safest because then you're pushing very sensitive payroll data and potentially leaving it lying around. And so we use our Analytics Connector to connect to these major BI solutions. Right? So not just, in the SAP space. We allow you to if you're a Microsoft shop to bring your data into Power BI, for example. And, like we say, we can, help you build it, or you can do it yourself. Here's just a couple of quick examples that we've built. So this is a very parallel oriented one, so this is almost as an alternative to the PCC. And so this is missing data. This is, you know, a variety of different data areas. You can see this is all Power BI, so I've added some folders. All of it is interactable. Right? So if I click on something, the whole report filters out and, adjusts itself. And all of those data is feeding live, semi live. It's not true. It's not really that live, but you can decide how often it refreshes. Once again, we're in the business of handing over control back to the HR team. So you can decide the schedule. It's still pulling the data directly from query manager, and it's pull still pulling the data directly from your production system. So there's no data sphere or, business warehouse in between or data lake in between. We can also play with those if that is your strategy. And you want to bring payroll data into, your data sphere, then, yes, Square Manager can help you as well. So here's another one. This one was one that we built for an organization a couple of years ago that helps focus on employee costs. You can see that, German organization as well as a US organization. But if you turn this off, you get a combined view. So we use Square Manager to consolidate the currencies, to consolidate or to aggregate, you know, the different benefits into a kind of a super grouping that you can then see on a dashboard. And, yes, we can play with SAP Analytics Cloud as well. We don't just, you know, force you, to use, Power BI. If you are a SAP shop and you have BTP and you have SAP Analytics Cloud, we can also help you plug into that. I think we're almost out of time. So just quickly show you a little bit. So this is, how we see this. Right? So there's operational reporting. That is where we are very strong traditionally, where SAP has some options like report stories and people analytics as well. It's analytical space, and then there's the planning space where SAP strategy is going to the digital boardroom, data sphere live. And if you get the query manager analytics connector, we can help you bridge that. We can take that parallel data that's typically operational reporting or, you know, very process oriented, bring that data into your company's overall BI strategy. Alright. So I don't think I'm, unfortunately, running a little bit out of time, so I'm not going to show you the full demo for this.