Looking at SAP HR for Higher Education

When SAP created the HR module most of their customers were in manufacturing. Over the years they adapted the HR module to fit a broader range of customers, and the past few years they have been expanding it for Higher Education customers. That expansion is still happening, and there are still some rough spots in what SAP delivers – and doesn't deliver – for Higher Education HR. Here are a few things to be aware of when taking a look at SAP HR for use in universities:

Concurrent Employment: Also known as CE. This relatively new functionality allows a employee in the HR system to have multiple work assignments, each with its own rate of pay, employee type, and so on. This is a great piece of functionality, but it does have some technical and practical implications. First, each assignment an employee has must be in the same pay frequency. So when there is a (biweekly/non-exempt) staff person who is also a part-time faculty (exempt/monthly) it requires new ways of thinking about pay frequency, for example. In this case, you end up paying a part-time faculty a fixed amount on a biweekly basis, or a full monthly amount on the last payroll of the month. For some customers it's a real mind-twist to make biweekly, exempt faculty payments. It would be easier to pay everyone biweekly, but that is not likely to happen (if you do it, please let me know!).

And how do you identify the main assignment, and when it changes? If there are two assignments in different employee groups, which one is used for determining benefits eligibility? What do you do – and how do you know – when that changes? The system handles all that just fine, but getting the business policy, process and change management worked out can require some significant effort.

When recruiting, you might fill a position with a new person, or by adding a new assignment to an existing person – figuring that out in the recruiting process gets complicated. Many universities use a non-SAP recruitment software, making this even more complicated.

Concurrent Employment has received some bad marks from some consultants the past few years. Like any new functionality SAP releases, it is rough the first few years and the first few implementations. However, CE does work fine now if you know how to work with it. It's stable and being released in more countries. If someone is telling you to avoid CE or that it has all kinds of issues, I would bet they haven't spent much time with it or they don't understand how to work with it.

Position Management: The position creation, budgeting and approval processes are much more complicated due to some Civil Service requirements as well as Position Budgeting and Control (PBC) practices. Setting up PBC is not all that complicated, technically, but adjusting business practices to how it works can require a lot of change.

Multiple Employee Groups: Many companies have distinct employee groups to manage – executives, staff and workers, for example. With universities, the groups are faculty, staff, students and non-employees – each has its own requirements and some specific processes. Recruiting, hiring and on-boarding varies a lot among those groups, for example.

System Integration: In Higher Education there are several enhancements that need to be done on top of the delivered SAP functionality to tighten up integration among HR, Financial Accounting (FI), Funds Management (FM) and Grants Management (GM). It is critical that what gets entered can be paid and charged without errors and within compliance (particularly for GM). The standard SAP integration really doesn't provide enough in this area.

Workflows: In standard SAP workflows we talk about the 'chief' of an org unit initiating and approving most of the items. In Public Sector and Higher Education, the chief of an org unit may not be the one to initiate a process; a Grant Principal Investigator (PI) might initiate or approve a workflow but is not a chief, or a department head might be the chief but their business administrator initiates workflows. Custom workflows and Org Management relationships will be needed to handle those cases.

Payroll: Integration with FI, FM and GM gets complex – fringe benefits calculations and expense allocations to funds and grants need special attention because the functionality SAP does deliver in those areas is pretty thin. This usually ends up being a combination of custom payroll calculation rules and custom payroll functions.

Deferred pay is not something that is really built-in to SAP HR or Payroll. There are a couple ways of getting it setup, and since it is not an 'out of the box' scenario it requires some time to analyze and design.

Summer: Managing the time between academic years can be challenging – do you make faculty 'inactive' and then reappoint them when they return? How does summer pay fit in with benefits and grants? Will HR initiate all that or will that be done via self-service in the departments?

Terminations: Knowing when to terminate (or, 'separate' for a friendlier term) part-time faculty and students can be challenging – how do you know when they simply stop working for a while, vs they left the university? Reporting can be done, but it is not always straightforward, particularly when an employee has multiple assignments.

Those are some of the more obvious points to be aware of when looking at SAP HR for Higher Education. Though there are some gaps and challenges, the product definitely does work. As SAP releases more enhancements for Higher Education, and as the customer base grows, we won't be talking about 'special' requirements for Higher Education.