Future of work powered by AI: HR professionals gathered at SuccessConnect 2023

As is clear, the buzzword for 2023 is Artificial Intelligence. AI is everywhere, HR is no different and SAP follows suit. During SuccessConnect a full roadmap was shared and AI was front and centre in the key notes. It is apparent that SAP is spending a lot of time and money on building capabilities. SAP will be offering a broad range of AI capabilities, ranging from generative AI (e.g., support recruiters with writing vacancy text and helping employees create smart objectives) to deep learning for recommendations (e.g., suggest skills an employee could add to their profile and trainings to enroll in) to automation (leveraging SAP Process Automation) to conversational AI (the SAP Joule Digital Assistant to interact with SuccessFactors via a chat bot).
Per the 2H 2023 release, some of this functionality will become available; but there are some caveats. Joule only speaks US English, you cannot utilize the AI functionality if you have EU Access enabled (limit SAP support to EU only) and for some premium AI functionality you will need a use based license.
 

The next exciting topic is that SAP is leveraging the Talent Intelligence Hub to bring skills everywhere to the suite. In previous releases it was possible to register skills in the system and rate them on the employee level. But is was never integrated. In the new roadmap, of which we see a lot already implemented in the 2H 2023 release, skills will be shared over all modules. You can rate them in performance management, search for trainings based on them, review candidates against them, search successors based on them, and more. With a new manager view it is possible to see all the skills with their ratings of all the team members.

SAP is accelerating investments in payroll and time. A lot of work is going into SAP Employee Central Payroll (ECP) in combination with the Payroll Controll Center (PCC). Adding new countries, simplifying and strengthening the integration with Employee Central.
NextGen Payroll has been renamed to SAP SuccessFactors Payroll and will be coming to the UK, US and Germany in the coming years. For the UK it is early adopter ready. SuccessFactors Payroll changes the whole way payroll is done by making all calculations real time. Enter a new salary in Employee Central and all payroll results are calculated on the fly.
SAP SuccessFactors Time Management has matured into being the go-to solution for SAP. There are very few HR scenarios SuccessFactors Time Management cannot handle at this point with most improvements coming to the user experience (like monthly approvals on time sheets). For operational time management scenarios like booking hours on projects/work breakdown structure elements and planning SAP is working on seamless integrations with SAP S4/HANA modules. This way all data required for all time management scenarios is shared and employees only need to manage their time in a single place.
 

On the user experience side SAP is delivering on their new mantra “the new UI is no UI”. By integrating SAP SuccessFactors into Microsoft Teams there is no reason for managers and employees to access SuccessFactors for most of their tasks. They can clock in and out, change personal and job related data, conduct candidate interviews and a lot more directly from Microsoft Teams. This will greatly simplify navigation for employees. For companies or employees not using Microsoft Teams SAP is also simplifying the navigation by extending the quick actions on in the SuccessFactors mobile app and home page so there is no more searching for where in the system actions need to be performed.
But moving on there will be a lot more work on the user experience. Expect to see the content blocks from the home page and opportunity market place pop up everywhere. It is now in the new learning home page, it is there for custom onboarding tasks and will come to the people profile. The people profile with get a full redesign with different versions for different use cases (e.g., a view for employees to access their personal data, a view for succession managers, etc.).
 

SAP has announced a separate roadmap for the public sector. A dedicated team will work on enhancements to Employee Central and Employee Central Payroll aimed at the specific needs for the public sector. Here concurrent employment and detailed budgeting are some of the specifics being worked on.

Next year SuccessConnect is coming back to Europe. It will be hosted in Lisbon Portugal. We hope to see you there! Until then, stay up to date and keep tabs on everything you need to know about SAP and SuccessFactors with us at SD Worx SAP solutions.