The general concept of SaaS is that application management responsibility is left to the customer while the tasks of IT maintenance complexity and software deployment remain with the provider. The right partner helps you bring applicable new features live into your SuccessFactors instances.
Background: SuccessFactors new releases are deployed on a quarterly basis, which means every 3 months a major universal upgrade hits your SuccessFactors instance, interfaces, middleware and landscape. This 2016, you will enable Early Test, allowing you 30 days for testing prior to production deployment. Are you ready? Your Cloud solution requires your involvement to keep it up to date while managing the changes.
This 2015 Q4 release comes with many features, the 7 most relevant are:
1. People Profile Upgrade
People Profile is a universal upgrade to Employee Profile (EP), providing a single dashboard experience that is responsive and adaptive to desktop, tablet and mobile. All information that was previously displayed on many different pages or tabs now appears on a single page and can be viewed at a glance.
Some advantages:
- Role-based and context-aware UI to highlight the most relevant data for each employee (manager, self, public view)
- Responsive design for desktop, tablet and mobile
- Supports accessibility settings and right-to-left languages
- Mobile ESS/MSS
What will happen to my Employee Profile with the Q4 release?
- Customers who previously upgraded to either EP v12 or to New People Profile will experience no change.
- EP v11 will no longer be available after the 2015 Q4 release. Customers previously on EP v11 will be automatically upgraded to New People Profile (EXCEPTION: Customers that do not have RBP enabled will be upgraded to EP v12 only.)
2. Managing and Showing Out of Office
An “Out of Office” display status for individuals is already available in commonly accessed areas, such as people profile, quick cards and org chart, enabling the user to see employee leave information without drilling into profile details.
- Managers/HR and peers now have a better overview of resource availability without much effort. The information comes to you in just one click.
- To simplify workforce experience, the employee directory has been updated with the inclusion of additional advanced search and filter options. The presentation and clarity of search results has also been improved.
3. Intelligent Services — Notifications/Alerts Now Available to Employees
SAP is overall moving their self-services into so-called intelligent services. A key component of this is the ability to react automatically or manually to events. Now you can imagine: a tool that addresses the alerts or event management and monitoring gap.
The Event Center is the answer to any end user’s or administrator’s need to be notified of events based on predefined rules and settings. With this feature, Subject Matter Experts can also track employee-related actions (e.g., hire, change in manager, first-time manager). Creating suite-wide process events and notifications is now possible. A notification/alert is available on the screen to quickly access those.
4. Employee Central Document Generation and Time and Attendance Enhancements
Enhancing the document generation feature of Employee Central has been under the radar for some time, and now the use of placeholders in templates with multiple entries, such as pay components, is possible. You can generate documents with employee master data for both past and future dates. It is also possible to apply auto delegation to all workflow requests, regardless of the number of users initially addressed.
Time and Attendance Management has been enhanced to be more user-friendly and complete, relieving you of the complexities in using third party products.
- Employees can record their time in the payroll timesheet using clock times. This means they can record actuals of work start and end. Enhanced functionality includes collision checks in time-off and payroll timesheet to prevent multiple time records at the same time. In addition, negative time recording methods can be used to record only deviations from planned work time. Automatic generation of timesheets and merging with actual deviations can be done to generate overall records.
5. Talent Now Shows Enhanced Information Including Full Job Profile
In the SuccessFactors Succession and Development solution, employees, managers, and HR can already have quick and easy access to view full job profiles (not just job titles and descriptions). Powered by our job performance builder feature, one can click on future and suggested roles to get more detail on the job and its requirements.
- With this new feature, you spend less time getting a complete overview of a person in one place, and no longer have to shift from one page to another. This helps facilitate decision making.
6. Mobile — Android Gets the Right Attention!
SAP announced the release of a completely redesigned mobile app for Android, now delivering the same great user experience, as with our apps for iPhone and iPad. This app provides support for Android for Work, allowing users to separate business apps from personal apps so that they could use their Android device for both work and play and leverage Android’s productivity apps.
- To meet the individual company’s security requirements, administrators can require longer, more complex passwords to replace the current 4-digit numeric password.
- Mobile approvals have been expanded, including several new workflow approvals, such as position approval and timesheet approval.
- Requesting time-off on a mobile device has become much more versatile. Employees can now edit the duration of their leave in various ways, from hours and minutes to fractions of days.
7. Learning — iPad Simplifies the Student’s Check-in with the Use of QR Codes
iPad can already recognize QR codes as part of the enhancements for the Instructor Role. Instructor can monitor physical attendance by scanning a QR code the student may bring on his mobile device or from an email enrollment notification. Students will be checked-in with his own QR code, enabling attendance monitoring. Data is stored in the Cloud and is available instantly, paperwork process is removed from the instructor making check-in more dynamic and user-friendly.
Empower your maintenance and ongoing operation. Avoid stalling applications while functionality gets old over the succeeding releases. Simply receiving universal updates while new features remain disabled is not enough. Ultimately, a universal release will impact your integration and you will start “living with unresolved problems.” Do not lose focus by troubleshooting; engage a partner to optimally deliver improvements and new features to your end users.
--Raul