Over the past three years, SAP SuccessFactors has invested heavily to build comprehensive capabilities into our time management suite.
For any organization, hiring and onboarding employees as well as ensuring they are paid correctly and on time is mission critical. These processes introduce significant complexity due to variations in legislation and practices across different geographies and industries.
With our human-centered design philosophy, we have built a frictionless and intuitive employee experience that truly values everyone’s time. Core to this experience is built-in localization, compliance, and local language. The SAP Globalization Services team works side-by-side with SAP SuccessFactors to build and deliver these capabilities for all our products, including time management.*
I’m thrilled to say that this focus along with the investments we’ve made in time management are paying off, both in terms of customer adoption as well as positive feedback from the market.
In the past year, we’ve seen 122% growth in the number of timesheets created and a 163% increase in time off events created amongst more than 6.8 million active users. It’s great to see this product growth amongst our SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking customers in over 150 countries.
Ventana Research has just published its Workforce Management Value Index for 2022, naming SAP SuccessFactors as a leader overall as well as its top choice for Workforce Management Customer Experience.
Moreover, Brandon Toombs, veteran SAP SuccessFactors consultant, author, and distinguished SAP mentor, summarized his thoughts last month on Twitter, writing “The rate of innovation in SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Time Management and SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking has been very impressive over the past year. This is a space to watch for anyone in the SAP or SAP SuccessFactors ecosystem looking for time management. Kudos to the team.”
Let’s take a look at some of the specific enhancements that have contributed to this momentum and how the product is delivering even more value to our customers.
SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking
As with the entire SAP SuccessFactors Human Experience Management Suite, our focus on employee experience comes to the forefront with SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking, a solution launched in 2021. The solution addresses more advanced use cases for organizations, with a significant focus on deskless workers. Since then, we have invested in additional time recording channels, like mobile, to enable workers to quickly and easily log time events from their preferred device.
We’re making it easy for hourly employees to track time, regardless of how they prefer to do so. Time tracking can be done directly from the SAP SuccessFactors homepage, or through the mobile punch clock (released in 2021) available both on the Web with a fully responsive user interface (UI) and through the SAP SuccessFactors iOS and Android applications.
SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking can easily be integrated with time tracking hardware, such as clock-in/clock-out terminals, biometric scanners, and mobile devices, to confirm that time and event data is both received and checked for accuracy to ensure employees are properly paid for the time recorded. SAP SuccessFactors has developed certification for hardware vendors to help ensure these integrations are of the highest quality for our customers.
SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking can also receive data from shift planning systems that enable correct timesheet recording and calculations, including accruals. And, we’ve built direct integration for SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking with SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll (cloud) and SAP ERP Human Capital Management (on-premise) to deliver the fastest and most robust connection between these two systems, tightly integrating time and payroll.
Lastly, we’ve introduced anomaly detection with automated notifications so that alerts are created for events like a missed a clock-in/clock-out event. Mistakes are inevitable. This feature helps catch other anomalies such as when employees are late, have worked too many overtime hours, or when they work past flextime hours.
Workers interact with time tracking very frequently, sometimes multiple times in a single day. This is why our investments in time tracking innovation have been focused on delivering a best-in-class employee experience that’s available anytime, anywhere.
Time Off
Part of putting employees at the center of business means giving them the tools to easily use their time off, so they remain refreshed, rested, and ready to do their best work. SAP SuccessFactors has long had a robust solution for time off, and thus our incremental investments have been primarily focused on localization. As a result, we provide a feature-rich time off solution that is deployed in over 150 countries today.
As we invest in greater automation and the surfacing of contextually relevant content for employees, we have introduced time off engagement cards, which nudge employees with reminders to take time off when they have not done so in a while. We have also introduced the ability for employees to buy and sell leave within the platform, so that employees have additional flexibility based on their own work-life preferences.
Our investments in time off functionality ensure that our solution can be used by more customers in more geographies, while providing employees with greater work-life balance and flexibility.
Time Administration
Finally, I’d like to tell you a bit more about how we’ve been making managers’ lives easier with our investments in time administration. This begins with proactive workflows that present managers with contextually relevant content to help make approvals quick and simple. Approvals are now automatically sent to managers via interactive cards available on the SAP SuccessFactors homepage and mobile app, as well as SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone. These cards enable managers to quickly view all pending approvals, approving or denying them with a single click or tap, without leaving the homepage. In the future, we plan to make these interactive cards available in even more places for quick access and approvals, like Microsoft Teams.
We have also introduced a reporting dashboard available to managers and administrators for time management. The reporting dashboard is easily configurable to enable the quick creation of customized reporting as well as several predefined reports based on typical time management scenarios.
Our investments in time administration help make the job of managers and admins faster, easier, and better informed with easily accessible, real-time reporting data.
We’ve spent the past couple of years making strategic investments in our time management solution to ensure our customers have a simple, powerful, and connected set of time management tools. We’re so excited to see the momentum these efforts have netted in terms of customer adoption and sentiment. Customers who have adopted our cloud time management solution are benefiting from continuous and rapid software-as-a-service (SaaS) innovation that continues to grow over time. Lots more to come!
Amy Wilson is SVP of Product and Design at SAP SuccessFactors.
*Customers with specific or niche requirements can augment the standard product with solution extensions and partner applications available on the SAP store.