Tag: Business Process

Overview

• Sabya Mitra

Process standardization is not a BPR (Business Process Reengineering) exercise

Business processes will play a key role in your implementation plan. How much effort you need to put in there will be based on what approach of implementation you embraced in the first place — an integrated approach or a hybrid approach.

Please pay attention to the fact that SAP SuccessFactors is not an old ERP solution where Business Process Reengineering (BPR) was a term used very frequently, and a lot of time and effort used to be spent on it by every organization to mold the ERP solution to behave as a customized solution that mimics your existing business processes. To read more on the difference between “Business Process Standardization” vs. “BPR”, please check our website.

That is not what is needed for SAP SuccessFactors, as it is a solution that is configurable and extensible but not customizable. You can read more on this in our blog titled SAP SuccessFactors for the Small & Midsize Business (SMB) Market.

Build a team

Whether you are implementing one single business process or multiple business processes, please do yourself a favor and build a good and strong team. At a minimum, this team should contain a business process owner for each process, a technical team lead, and your executive sponsor(s).

Involving key stakeholders from the preparatory phase has its share of advantages. The key employees who will be part of the implementation later become your key change agents among their colleagues and reports inside the organization. Information flows more laterally than vertically.

The team starts working — and more importantly starts thinking — about the upcoming implementation, which helps instill a sense of ownership. The core members of the team should be involved with the project from preparatory work through finalizing and signing off on the workbook requirements. They should also be the ones who sign off on the solution once it is built, and they play an important role in UAT before go-live. Call these committed stakeholders “Super users” or by any other name — they are the key resources for your project.

Project sponsors getting involved early means they will be much more aware of the higher-level decisions being made and their impact on the overall organization.

Last but not least, involve business process owners from other non-HR streams who are mainly the receivers of employee data, such as expense, payroll, and finance. They are important people to have on the team on a part-time basis so they are aware of the change coming with SAP SuccessFactors and how it will impact them. People outside HR also play the role of good change agents — so do not ignore them.

What should you do about the existing and future process?

Let us elaborate on what we mean by “Process Standardization.” When you are doing preparatory work, you should first focus on documenting your current HR processes. This is essential when you start discussing the workbooks with your implementation partner. Process maps are very useful to have, but if you don’t have them, do not try to create them from scratch — just document the process flows you have, or what you desire to have in the new system.

Accurately defining or documenting the process helps in designing the data flow between processes and, subsequently, identifying the integration between HR processes (if you have taken a “hybrid” approach) or with other non-HR applications. When documenting the processes, also remember to document any business-specific rules or workflows you would like in the new system. Early creation of these helps prevent longer workbook cycles and easier solution walkthroughs.

A few suggestions to keep in mind while documenting the processes:

• Identify and pay attention to known pain points in your current processes.
• Document those processes that are working well, and why.
• Understand which processes are broken, and why.
• Identify all manual processes and document why they are manual — is it because your current system can’t do that, or because there are too many exceptions? The answers will help you find out what you would like to do going forward.
• Find out all business rules, associated tasks, workflow requirements, and critical decision points.

Data Migration

While you look at process integration, you should also look at data integration. One common issue we see across industries is that adequate knowledge and information is not available regarding how to migrate data from the legacy system, or any data you are taking out of a SuccessFactors module to another part of a third-party HR system. This has the potential to delay the data migration process during implementation. Connect with the vendor and your technical consultant well in advance and plan this out.

What you need to do will depend on the approach you have taken — integrated or hybrid. The three more data-centric modules in SuccessFactors are Employee Central (Core HR or HRIS), Recruiting, and Learning. As you map the data across the systems (mostly in a hybrid setup), document the data conversions necessary to transfer information into SuccessFactors or vice versa.

Implementing SuccessFactors — or any new system — gives you the opportunity to re-look at your data and find out how clean it is and how much time and effort it will take to correct it. Effective decision-making can only happen if users have confidence in the data in the system. Depending on the volume and state of the data, you can either clean it manually or use one of the many cost-effective ETL tools available to help clean large data sets.

An interface is where two or more separate software products communicate under limited capacity; data is maintained in multiple locations, requiring more administration. You will mostly build interfaces in a hybrid approach. An integration is when two or more products work closely together to combine different functionalities into one product, with data maintained in one location — the case when you go for the SuccessFactors HCM suite. When documenting your processes, also document the existing interfaces between third-party systems and what would be needed in the future state, paying special attention to manual interfaces you would like to convert into automatic ones as part of the new implementation.