Bridge HR Across the Business: 5 Key Takeaways from SuccessConnect 2022

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In the spirit of sharing, I wanted to provide a quick recap of some of the key takeaways from a few of the great sessions at SuccessConnect 2022. Whether your organization is currently evaluating your go-forward technology approach for cloud ERP and Human Experience Management (HXM) or looking for ways to optimize your existing landscape and resulting experiences, these insights provide some things to consider, barriers to avoid, and tools for ensuring organizational-wide success. Here’s to an amazing group of industry leaders willing to share their wealth of knowledge!

1: Achieving ‘better’ starts with collaboration between HR, Finance, and others

The name of Purdue University’s initiative to close the gap between HR and Finance says it all – Transform Purdue. It’s not about transforming HR. Or transforming Finance or IT. It’s about an organizational-wide transformation with organizational-wide impacts. Stephanie Bloyd, a Lead Cross-functional IT Business Analyst, shared how the HR and Finance teams came together – starting with an evaluation of more than 1,000 processes requiring HR data. Now, with SAP SuccessFactors and SAP S/4HANA, the organization is achieving what Stephanie referred to as ‘gold standards’ – integrated and automated business processes, simplified reporting and tools, and a more powerful yet lower-maintenance infrastructure.

 

2: IT environments impact more than backend processes – prioritize the employee experience

How many different systems are your employees accessing today? And how many different logins are required to access those different systems? Celanese Corporation, a global chemical and specialty materials company, shared how they’ve tackled this ‘access and experience’ challenge head-on – for their 8,500 employees, spanning 40+ manufacturing facilities, across 19 countries. Mahesh Hari, HRIT Ops & Strategy, shared how his organization is leveraging a variety of SAP solutions, including SAP SuccessFactors solutions, SAP S/4HANA, and SAP Concur, as well as other third-party vendors to help achieve their business objectives. To eliminate the friction for users, they recently upgraded their infrastructure for identity and access management to SAP's Cloud Identity services. Besides supporting the latest security technology standards, these services are connected with Microsoft Azure Active Directory as the corporate identity provider (IdP) for Celanese. Now, HR transactions like a new hire or a transfer trigger an automatic data flow from SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central to the SAP Cloud Identity Services and the corporate IdP. As Mahesh shared, this enables consistent and up-to-date user data across the IT landscape and ensures easy access to all business applications for their employees, increasing usage and ROI.

 

3: Connected cloud ERP and HXM brings additional value to the organization

ERP and Human Experience Management (HXM) solutions both have significant impacts on an organization’s operations and success. But when connected, even greater impacts are realized and accelerated. In her session on ‘KPIs to Measure Value from Your Cloud HR and ERP Digital Transformation’, Parul Thakuria, an SAP HR Value Advisor, shared how organizations can ensure they are on the right course to achieve their goals via a four-step value realization process. One of the key scenarios highlighted was having both SAP S/4HANA and SAP SuccessFactors solutions, which brings forward additional value in the areas of Time to value, Compliance and risk management, Total cost of ownership, and Business performance. Parul shared the tools that SAP provides to help organizations with their value realization, including the SAP Value Lifecycle Manager.

 

4: Don’t add unnecessary complexity to your transformation by trying to reinvent the wheel

FMC Corporation has been leading the path of innovation in agricultural sciences – starting all the way back in 1883 with John Bean’s invention of the insecticide spray pump and continuing today to advance farming through innovative and sustainable crop protection technologies. But as Lea Muqbel, Director of Global HR Operations, shared, when it came to paving the way to becoming an intelligent enterprise, leveraging leading practice guidelines and “out of the box” pre-configured solutions were the obvious choice. Lea shared how her organization has made the move from a siloed approach (with seven separate ERP systems, a disconnected HR solution, and a lot of manual processes) to a connected approach (with a single platform for ERP and HXM) – noting the value add of proven best practices and expertise from the SAP Preferred Success team.

 

5: Total workforce management is more than planning – it’s also the experience you deliver to permanent employees and external workers   

As SAP’s HR Business Information Officer and Future of Work Digital Lab Lead, Ralph Schneider had a lot to share on talent market trends, (supply-demand gap for digital talents, rise of independent workforce, demand for flexible work options), SAP HR’s evolution towards the Future of Work, and what’s currently at play and to come for SAP’s TWM strategy. One of the primary headlines from Ralph’s How SAP Runs SAP session was ‘Total Workforce Experiences @ SAP’. He showed several examples of how SAP is delivering consistent and engaging experiences for all, including SAP’s intranet SAP One and the Digital Assistant, the ability to access profiles (via People Profile and Org Chart) and learning courses, and giving managers easy access to all self-services via the SAP SuccessFactors Home page.

 

To learn more and see other examples of organizations who are strengthening the connection of HR across with business with SAP SuccessFactors, check out my Virtual SuccessConnect session on Improving Business Performance by Connecting Cloud ERP and HXM.