Q2 2018 Release Highlights: SuccessFactors Employee Central

SAP SuccessFactors has delivered enhancements and updates across the SAP SuccessFactors® HCM Suite as part of their Q2 2018 product release. Here are a few key updates you should consider for SuccessFactors Employee Central.

EC Core

• New MDF object has been created, to change the hire date for all impacted portlets.
• Limitations are that the hire date must be in the past (earlier than today) and not available for rehires, global assignment or concurrent employment.

Why is it important? Before this release, if you had to change the hire-date retroactively for a new hire, you would have to change the date manually in each portlet that was impacted. This typically had to be done via file imports which was time consuming.

New National ID Permissions

• Current Role Based Permission (RBP) for National ID is a on/off permission that either allows full access (edit and/or display) to National ID records irrespective of country and type.
• With the new National ID permission setting, customers can restrict the access of users to only the relevant (i.e. the National ID of the country or employment). Any other National ID (e.g. those of other countries entered in the context of previous employments) will be surpressed.

Why is it important? Customers want to prevent their users to view any National IDs stored in Personal Information that do not belong to the country (determined by the legal entity) of the actual employment but relates to previous employments in different countries for data privacy reasons.

EC Core/Profile

• The compensation portlet will incorporate a responsive table into its layout.
• Now the pay components will be displayed in a data grid.
• A responsive behavior is used to render the grid, so if there is no space to fit a column, it will be rendered in the next row.

Why is it important? Improved readability of the compensation data.

Numerous Fixes to People Profile (PP3)

In this release, there are numerous Notable Fixes to issues in People Profile (PP3) as the V12 is on its way to sunset with the Universal Upgrade to People Profile in the next release b1808.

Why is it important? V12 profile is being sunset with the Universal Upgrade to People Profile in the next release, b1808.

• You can now configure fields in the Emergency Contacts portlet in Contingent worker model in the Business Configuration (BC UI) to use them in the Contingent Worker Wizard & Profile.
• Currently, the following portlets could be configured for Person Type “Contingent Workers” – email Info, Biographical Info, Personal Info, Job Info, Employment Info, Home Address, National ID , Job Relationship Info, Phone info and now Emergency Contact Info.
• A responsive behavior is used to render the grid, so if there is no space to fit a column, it will be rendered in the next row.

Configuration Type: Universal

Why is it important? Due to specific business and legal regulations, customers may need to manage additional set of fields for contingent workers.

EC Position Management

Move Position when changing Manager/Supervisor in Job Info

When an employee’s manager/supervisor is changed in job information, a popup will display asking the user if they want to move the employee’s position to the position of the supervisor.

Why is it important? Before this release, it was not possible to move the position along with the employee when changing the manager/supervisor in employee’s job information record.

EC Time & Attendance Management

• The team absence calendar is now available in the UI technology SAPUI5 and has been enriched with some new features which are:
• Employees planned working and non-working days according to the employees work scheduled and public holiday calendar are shown.
• Clear distinction of “Peers” view and a “Direct Reports” view. Peer views shows the employees in my team who are reporting to the same manager. Direct reports view shows the employees for whom I am the manager (if applicable)
• In the “Direct Reports” view, the manager can see more details on the team absences like; time type, start times/ end times for partial day absences and time account deduction days..

Why is it important? Team absence calendar now will display the real working time of the Employee; previously Saturday and Sundays showed as non working days.  The old version was too static and gave too little information.

EC Time Sheet

• Time collectors/counters can now be configured in an UI component which means they can be shown to employees in their time sheet.
• When such a time collector (or counter) is calculated a link is provided where an employee can see the actual collector values.
• The values shown do not consider the approval status of the time sheet but are calculated and displayed on the basis of the save action.

Why is it important? Before this release, time collectors only displayed to time administrators in the time administrator workbench. However, there are business use cases where an employee needs to know the value of a time collector; such as when an employee enters hours over the allowed hours for the month and receives a warning or enters hours for the week over the overtime limit and receives an error message.

EC Localization

• Document generation now supports the possibility to generate “Document” for Inactive Users.
• Relieving Letter and Experience Letter is provided to employees even after leaving the organization Employment Verification Letter requests come from employees who have been laid-off and need the information and documents for new employment and background checks.
• HR admin will Hire the employee within EC entering all personal, job and compensation information with hire date in the future. Then they would like to be able to generate a document called “Employment Contract” for this employee before hire date is reached.
• Service Certificate is provided to ex-employee on request basis for various purposes like Visa Application, Higher Education Conduct Certificate is provided to ex-employee on request basis for purposes like Visa Application, Higher Education Ex-employee can request for a recommendation letter in prescribed format for applying to foreign universities while seeking higher education opportunities.
• Creating documents even for all employees who are in-active by taking Long Leave of Absence for at least 3 months or 6 months

Why is it important? The requests for certain documents from ex-employee is a very common scenario and also to generate documents for employees that have not started yet (hire date is in the future). Currently, documents generated via Document Generation Tool can only be done for active employees.

EC Global & US Benefits

New Top Level Savings Plan

Enables Benefits Administrators to configure US savings/spending accounts with a new benefit type category of "Savings Plan."

Why is it important? Savings Plans benefits offered in the US such as flexible spending accounts, limited flexible spending accounts, dependent care spending accounts and commuter benefits can now be set up using this new benefit type category.  Employees can enroll in them during the open enrollment window.

EC Payroll

Enhancements to Master Data Replication Functionality

Provide possibility to filter out non-relevant data in master data replication.

Why is it important? Customers may now filter out non-relevant data that they are not using for payroll.  There may be countries not needed for payroll and now those can be filtered out.

Business Configuration UI

• There is now an Audit report that can be generated via a provisioning job which allows the Audit record for configuration changes done via Business Configuration Manager in the UI.
• Once the provisioning job is scheduled, the actual report can be downloaded from Monitor Job.

Why is it important? Customers need this data in order to analyze the changes and who did the changes. For the last few releases (since b1708), this was available via a Support Ticket process.   Now, this functionality will allow customer support and professional services to schedule a provisioning job to obtain the audit report for a rolling 90 day period.

EC Service Center

Hide “Ask HR” Button by defined target group

New permission in Role Based Permission to restrict access to Ask HR and with that the usage of the Employee Central Service Center.

Why is it important? Customers that are going live country by country don’t want to show the Service Center in all countries at the beginning. With the new functionality, we provide the possibility to configure and set country by country live.

EC – SAP ERP Integration

Keep Wage Types Configuration in Sync with Employee Central

Customers can now use a new report (ECPAO_TRANSFER_FO_OBJ_TO_EC) we provide in the ERP system to transfer wage types and wage type groups from ERP to Employee Central. A generic interface has been created which upserts the foundation objects (as of now Pay Component & Pay Component Group – further foundation objects planned to be added).

Prerequisites: Configure the migration/integration according to the documentation with the latest SP (22) of the PA_SE_IN 100 Add-on.

Why is it important? Enables the customers to easily transfer ERP wage type configuration to EC. This is also important because additional Foundation objects will be added in future releases which will enhance the integration for Foundation objects.

For the full list of updates to SuccessFactors Employee Central, visit the SAP SuccessFactors Community.

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