Weekly Insight

February 15, 2012

HR and IT Insight

With Oracle's proposed purchase of Taleo the consolidation of HR software vendors continues. Many SAP HCM customers use Taleo, and as Oracle and SAP compete with these 'cloud' acquisitions, there are many unanswered questions. What is the timeline and what does the integration of the SuccessFactors and SAP HCM product lines look like? What influence will Oracle have on the existing Taleo implementations? Questions like these drive investment decisions for SAP HCM customers. We advise customers to actively communicate with SAP and their other HCM vendors to determine what the impact will be and work that information into their planning. This is a good practice, regardless, but particularly valuable when there is so much activity in the HCM software market.

 

Food for Thought

Teddy Roosevelt said 'The best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing.' This holds true for many things, even for your SAP HCM implementation. When you do nothing with it, there is no improvement, you don't benefit from the latest software features, and you live with poor fits between business and technical processes. The right thing to do is to keep improving on what you have, and taking advantage of all that SAP HCM has to offer. This is not a complicated thing to do, but it does require intentional efforts in resourcing, education, and planning. What are the right things you are doing with your SAP HCM system and the business processes around it? In what areas are you essentially doing nothing?

Steve Bogner will be presenting at two upcoming conferences: Mastering SAP HR/Payroll in Sydney (Feb 27-29) and HR2012 in Las Vegas (March 13-15). If you are attending, send us a note and let us know!

Our latest SAP HCM Insights podcast is available! This edition is with special guest Sherry Meyer, the ASUG HCM chairperson. We talk with Sherry about how ASUG collaborates with and influences SAP, as well as how ASUG is growing developing, and helping SAP HCM customers. ASUG has much to offer SAP HCM customers - it's a great organization and well worth the membership.

 

Steve Bogner, Managing Partner
www.insightcp.com
Follow me on Twitter at @SteveBogner

The SAP HCM Insights podcast is at www.insightcp.com/insights; it's also available on iTunes and via RSS. Insight Consulting Partners is on Facebook at www.facebook.com/insightcp. Steve Bogner's SAP podcast is available on the blog or iTunes.

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December 21, 2011

HR and IT Insight

The SAP app store is a central place to find and learn about mobile applications that are designed to work with the SAP Business Suite (R3) software. A few of the apps are free to download but most require a license fee. The free apps include ‘lite’ versions of the timesheet, leave request, travel & expense and approvals for HR - so that is a convenient and low-cost way to give them a test drive. Most of the free apps can also be found on your mobile device provider’s app store, but not all of the free apps are available on all the platforms (iOS, Android, Blackberry).

The SAP HCM Insights podcast team’s latest podcast is a Holiday Edition - we talk about SAP’s proposed acquisition of SuccessFactors and how that might impact the HCM software and SAP overall, and we present our wish-list for SAP HCM. We’ve also decided to support UNICEF during the holidays by establishing our own fund to help children in need - we’ve contributed to it and we invite our listeners and readers to do so also. We hope you enjoy the podcast!

 

Food for Thought

Software has become an integrated part of how we do business. Email is a good example - can we imagine working without it? Maybe we dream about having no email, but it’s a critical business tool. Our HR software is similar - can we imagine recruiting, managing, developing and paying employees without some sort of HR software? HR software is a central part of how companies operate.

Organizations are also dynamic, ever-changing and evolving. So when an organization changes, but the supporting software doesn’t or can’t, bad things happen. We become less efficient, we develop work-arounds that require extra time and effort. We simply say that we can’t support the organization, holding it back from its true potential. It’s clear that HR software has to grow, change and adapt alongside the organization. Organizations that acknowledge that relationship between software and how work gets done, and then plan and provide resources for it, will be more successful.

 

Steve Bogner, Managing Partner
www.insightcp.com
Follow me on Twitter at @SteveBogner

The SAP HCM Insights podcast is at www.insightcp.com/insights; it's also available on iTunes and via RSS. Insight Consulting Partners is on Facebook at www.facebook.com/insightcp. Steve Bogner's SAP podcast is available on the blog or iTunes.

This newsletter can also be viewed online.

You are subscribed to the Weekly Insight newsletter by Insight Consulting Partners (http://www.insightcp.com/)

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December 14, 2011

HR and IT Insight

The big news in SAP is their proposed $3.4 bn acquisition of SuccessFactors - a leading SaaS HCM company. Just as their earlier purchase of BusinessObjects had a dramatic impact on SAP’s product line and direction, SuccessFactors will impact the company, its software and clients for years to come. There are all sorts of questions on how the two companies will integrate and rationalize their software since there are some significant overlaps and differences. The way SAP works through this and communicates their plan is critical for clients as it will impact their software landscape for years to come. One thing is sure though, SAP is going SaaS in a big ($3.4 bn big) way. 

If you haven't yet found our SAP HCM Insights podcast, feel free to enjoy the 30-40 minute podcasts at www.insightcp.com/insights or on iTunes (use this link or simply search for SAP HCM Insights). We've talked about all sorts of SAP HCM topics, and next week we will have our latest podcast to share our holiday wish-list for SAP HCM.

 

Food for Thought

About this time last year I wrote a blog titled Five New Year's Principle for SAP HR. It held up pretty well through 2011, and I will revisit it and get it refreshed for 2012. One thing that will remain is the principle of focusing on process quality. Process quality doesn't increase until we put some focus and effort on it, and when we are already short-staffed and busy it's hard to free up much time to do it. So - start small. Choose some small improvements that you can get done with a small amount of time, a small amount of risk, and a small amount of disruption. Learn from it, and show yourself and everyone else that yes, things can improve. Simply getting started makes all the difference.

 

Steve Bogner, Managing Partner
www.insightcp.com
Follow me on Twitter at @SteveBogner

The SAP HCM Insights podcast is at www.insightcp.com/insights; it's also available on iTunes and via RSS. Insight Consulting Partners is on Facebook at www.facebook.com/insightcp. Steve Bogner's SAP podcast is available on the blog or iTunes.

This newsletter can also be viewed online.

You are subscribed to the Weekly Insight newsletter by Insight Consulting Partners (http://www.insightcp.com/)

We respect your privacy - our privacy policy is at (http://www.insightcp.com/content/privacy-statement)

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November 16, 2011

HR and IT Insight

US Payroll clients need to review SAP’s note 1639030 to learn about the implementation of Pennsylvania’s Act 32 which has sweeping changes to how local taxes are processed. The SAP functionality is delivered via CLC or HRSP, and while SAP will provide support for the technical processes, payroll departments also need to adjust their business process for local taxes in PA. The Commonwealth of PA also has a web site that provides more information.

Every year we get questions such as ‘Do we really have to apply the year-end support packs?’ The short answer is yes, particularly for each country in which you use SAP payroll. Even if you don’t use SAP Tax Reporter for producing W-2 forms in the US, it’s not a good idea to skip the year-end support packages. We have consistently found that the longer a client goes without applying HR support packages, the more difficult it is to catch up when they really need to.

 

Food for Thought

Alignment - it’s one of the basic requirements for projects and support organizations. Alignment on what we are trying to achieve and how we are working towards it is critical. When we start a project it’s common to get that alignment and communicate throughout the team. But as people come and go from the project, it pays to make sure that the same message of alignment is communicated to them. When new team members are not educated on the project’s goals and processes, they fill in the gaps with their own understanding - which might be contrary and lead to confusion, particularly when they control resources.

Does your project team or organization have documented goals and processes? Is there something you can provide new team members that gives them an idea of what the goals are and how work gets done? Do you provide mentors for new team members who can help them be successful? 

 

Steve Bogner, Managing Partner
www.insightcp.com
Follow me on Twitter at @SteveBogner

The SAP HCM Insights podcast is at www.insightcp.com/insights; it's also available on iTunes and via RSS. Insight Consulting Partners is on Facebook at http://on.fb.me/insightcp. Steve Bogner's SAP podcast is available on the blog or iTunes.

This newsletter can also be viewed online.

You are subscribed to the Weekly Insight newsletter by Insight Consulting Partners (http://www.insightcp.com/)

We respect your privacy - our privacy policy is at (http://www.insightcp.com/content/privacy-statement)

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November 2, 2011

HR and IT Insight

As many SAP HCM clients are now going through their year-end testing, this is a good time to also think about improving that process. SAP has published a paper on their recommended approach to regression testing and it is a good start. There are a lot of tools provided by SAP to make the process easier, and there are also a number of third-party testing tools clients can use. As long as software changes, we will have regression testing so it will pay to get good at it.

If you are an ABAP programmer be sure to check out SAP’s ABAP home page for all the latest news around that language.

 

Food for Thought

Mark your calendars - the next SAPPHIRE Now is May 14-16, 2012. The largest and, in my opinion, most important SAP HCM conference in the US is SAP insider’s HR 2012 conference, from March 13-16, 2012 in Las Vegas. And for SAP clients in the Australia/New-Zealand or South African regions, be sure to check out Mastering SAP HR/Payroll in Sydney from February 27-29, 2012 and Johannesburg from April 16-18, 2012. I’m looking forward to presenting at the conferences in Las Vegas and Sydney. Conferences are great tools for helping clients get more value from their SAP HCM implementations.

 

Steve Bogner, Managing Partner
www.insightcp.com
Follow me on Twitter at @SteveBogner

The SAP HCM Insights podcast is at www.insightcp.com/insights; it's also available on iTunes and via RSS. Insight Consulting Partners is on Facebook at http://on.fb.me/insightcp. Steve Bogner's SAP podcast is available on the blog or iTunes.

This newsletter can also be viewed online.

You are subscribed to the Weekly Insight newsletter by Insight Consulting Partners (http://www.insightcp.com/)

We respect your privacy - our privacy policy is at (http://www.insightcp.com/content/privacy-statement)

To subscribe to this newsletter use the following link: Subscribe
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