In a world where change is constant, organizations must rely on their people to stay competitive. Human resources (HR) leaders are at the forefront of shaping strategy that impacts all areas of the organization – for example, finding and retaining top talent, keeping up with changing regulations, and managing productivity. Myriad new HR tools and technologies on the market promise to use data and artificial intelligence (AI) to transform the role of HR into a strategic partner for the organization. In the race to evaluate and gain value from AI tools, some organizations are beginning – or preparing – transformations of their HR environments with the goal to accelerate productivity.
SAP SuccessFactors customers convened recently at SuccessConnect, SAP’s annual human resources customer event, held October 28-30 in Lisbon, Portugal, and on demand through SuccessConnect Virtual. Attendees learned more about how SAP – the world’s largest cloud HR tech vendor – is leading the market with unmatched investment in and delivery of new AI capabilities. As announced at the event, SAP is delivering new innovations and embedded AI, including 30 new AI use cases, across the SAP SuccessFactors HCM suite to help provide organizations with greater efficiencies and unparalleled experiences.
“Our mission is to make every employee a success story,” Dan Beck, president and chief product officer for SAP SuccessFactors, told customers at SuccessConnect. “We’re really at a special point in the arc of technology. This is why I truly believe the next two years of HR tech, the way we can impact the workforce, is going to be more interesting than the prior two decades….The world is moving very quickly. The world is not standing still. And as a trusted partner, SAP SuccessFactors can help you stay ahead in that always-changing world.”
AI Boosts SAP’s Core HR and Payroll
With the 2H 2024 release of SAP SuccessFactors, available in November, customers can benefit from SAP’s steadfast commitment and investment in AI and gain new generative AI capabilities that help improve the employee experience across the talent lifecycle. For example, managers can receive help in making AI-assisted 360-degree reviews. SAP’s AI copilot Joule can guide new hires through the onboarding process, nudging them to complete data review forms and e-signatures. AI-assisted writing capabilities can help employees complete tasks, with text translation available in the same window. Joule will be able to support 80% of the most-used business tasks across SAP’s portfolio by the end of the year.
SAP’s unique approach to business AI is founded on the principles that every AI use case must be relevant, reliable, and responsible to ensure that it is compliant with ethical, business, and privacy regulations around the world. SAP is deeply committed to the ethical development of AI, with its Global AI Ethics Policy, Steering Committee, Advisory Panel, and more.
Beyond infusing even more AI capabilities throughout the SAP SuccessFactors HCM suite, SAP continues to lead the market with a strong global HR core that combines the power of SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central, SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll, and SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking. SAP’s HR core is cloud native, AI-enabled, and can scale to meet any customer need. Differentiating it from other vendors, SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central is equipped to help handle diverse regulatory and compliance requirements, with localization for more than 100 countries for core HR and payroll supported in 52 countries. For HR teams, this can bring peace of mind regarding risk and compliance, avoidance of penalties, and the ability to focus on other strategic initiatives.
Customers that use SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll can look forward to updates in the first half of 2025, including a new user interface for unified user experience, a payroll control center to help manage all payroll process activities, and a position and budgeting control for compliance in the public sector. With the update, employees can use Joule to ask questions about their pay slip and receive answers in seconds – creating a better experience for employees while saving HR time addressing service tickets.
To ensure that HR doesn’t operate in a silo, it’s vitally important that it’s connected to everything the larger business is doing, as Beck explained. Together with the rest of the SAP cloud ERP offerings, customers can deliver a unified, consistent, and connected experience for employees no matter where they sit in the business. And SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) helps them connect it all.
Ahold Delhaize: Putting Associates in the Driver’s Seat
Netherlands-based Ahold Delhaize is one of the world’s largest food retail groups, with more than 402,000 associates globally serving 63 million shoppers each week. In 2018, it began an HR transformation to unify its complex and fragmented HR landscape. A lack of unified processes and a scattered tech stack was holding business leaders and their teams back from completing their people-related work and impacting the organization’s decision-making. Most associates are deskless, so building a mobile experience that gave them access to their data was an important goal for the project.
“This required consolidation and streamlining of our existing HR processes onto a single, secure platform – and for us that was [SAP] SuccessFactors,” said Barbara van der Zanden-Sandtke, global head of HR Tech, Data Innovation, and Associate Experience at Ahold Delhaize.
To achieve its goals, Ahold Delhaize took a phased approach to its implementation of SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central and SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll. By summer 2023, it had completed the implementation and began to focus on how an improved employee experience will benefit the future of its associates. As Tim Piepers, senior director HR Technology Platform at Ahold Delhaize, summarized, “We are putting our associates in the driver’s seat – of their data and information, learning and development, and career trajectories. And as a result, we are building a more strategic, agile, and future-forward company.”
Talent and Learning with AI-Based Career Recommendations
To address the skills gap, talent and learning is consistently one of the most critical areas of investment for HR leaders. “Ultimately you can’t hire yourself out of a skills gap,” said Beck, who noted that many HR leaders are looking for ways to reskill their workforces for the future needs of the organization. “SAP has been investing significantly to solve this problem and I’m excited to introduce a new solution for us, the SAP SuccessFactors Career and Talent Development solution. This combines the best of our talent products into a single guided experience, an all-new look and feel for data-driven career planning.”
Employees will be able to access new insights about their growth and career development. They will be able to receive AI-assisted recommendations for career growth, such as skills, roles, and learning opportunities. The new solution helps empower employees and managers for better strategic workforce planning.
To support customers in becoming skills-based organizations, SAP is enhancing the talent intelligence hub, which can enable customers to automate the creation of a skills library based on job roles, continuously build employee’s skills profiles as they grow, and enrich job profiles. “The objective behind the talent intelligence hub is to infuse skills throughout the entire talent journey, associated with your profile, directly from recruiting,” Beck said. “All of this is built on top of SAP Business Technology Platform.”
The talent intelligence hub – available to all SAP SuccessFactors customers – helps enable customers to move from being reactive to proactive on skills while offering a personalized employee experience. As announced at SuccessConnect, the talent intelligence hub is now an open, extensible platform that can integrate skills data from SAP partners. This helps customers by consolidating and standardizing skills data on one platform for better visibility. The first SAP partners to integrate with the talent intelligence hub include Beamery, Degreed, IMOCHA INC, Korn Ferry, Lightcast, Phenom, TalenTeam, and Techwolf.
Capgemini Empowers Employees with Skills-First People Management
Capgemini is a leading strategic partner that helps organizations unlock the value of technology for business transformation. Headquartered in Paris, France, Capgemini has 340,000 employees working in 50 countries. It fosters a culture of growth and continuous learning, empowering clients and employees with its promise: “Get the future you want.”
“This promise is at the heart of everything we do and really drives our people strategy,” said Jihane Baciocchini, head of Global Talent Acquisition, Capgemini. “One of the main pillars of making this promise a reality is skills. Investing in skills means investing in people, which is really driving our HR strategy.”
Capgemini’s approach is determined largely by the needs of its clients to drive their sustainable and digital transformations, Baciocchini explained: “The reality is our clients are now expecting us to anticipate the skills they will need in the future. The same goes for our people.” Its emphasis on skills makes Capgemini a valued partner to its clients and an employer of choice for top talent.
Capgemini uses SAP SuccessFactors solutions to power the entire employee lifecycle, from hire to retire. With the talent intelligence hub, employees will receive personalized career path recommendations linked to their skills and aspirations within the SAP SuccessFactors Opportunity Marketplace.
Strategic Partnerships and Extensibility That Accelerate Value
SAP SuccessFactors has more than 350 partner apps in SAP Store to help provide trusted and integrated solutions for unmatched flexibility on a wide range of business needs, including wellness, benefits, learning, and time tracking. As the needs of the workforce and business change, customers can use these certified solutions to extend SAP SuccessFactors technology in a consistent, reliable way.
The newest solution extension partners include Legion, which extends SAP SuccessFactors time capabilities with shift management and integrates with the SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking solution; and Degreed, which orchestrates learning across the entire talent lifecycle and integrates with the SAP SuccessFactors Learning solution.
WalkMe helps organizations adopt technology faster, reduce training costs, and increase value on investments, with some early adopters reporting a 200% improvement of task completion. At SuccessConnect, SAP also announced its intent to add pre-built WalkMe content into SAP SuccessFactors solutions, which will be commercially available in the first half of 2025, allowing customers to improve employee experience and adoption across common workflows.
“As our ecosystem continues to grow, keep in mind that we are part of SAP, which means, among other things, we benefit from that robust technology layer, SAP Business Technology Platform,” said Beck, addressing customers that may be working with many third-party HR applications and are interested in extensibility of SAP SuccessFactors solutions. “Good news: you can build that with SAP Business Technology Platform. We have low-code no-code technology to allow you to build your own application, integrate it, build a workflow, and secure it, with a custom card coming off the SAP SuccessFactors homepage. We have the most robust technology platform in the world.”
Frit Ravich Leads with People and Culture at Its Core for a New Era of Technology
Frit Ravich, a family business founded in 1963 in Girona, Spain, manufactures and distributes chips, snacks, and nuts. With a team of 1,100 employees and presence in 25 countries, Frit Ravich is a company that has people and culture at its core.
In 2017, the company adopted SAP SuccessFactors to drive its transformation. Today it is taking its business to the next level with SAP Business AI to ensure no one is left behind. Maria Saló, Frit Ravich’s chief people and culture officer, summarized the organization’s approach to its people strategy: “Not to change people, but to help them make the most of changes by unlocking their full potential.” For Frit Ravich, that meant carrying out its HR transformation – a project the team named “Butterfly” – with company culture “Feel Frit” at the center and in sync with its business objectives.
Frit Ravich Talent Manager Rebeca Montilla explained: “At Frit Ravich, SAP SuccessFactors isn’t just a tool. It is the core of every process. Our entire strategy is supported by the SAP SuccessFactors portfolio, fully integrated into the day-to-day lives of every employee. The tool usability is very high, with 96% of our employees using it. Our organization is making adoption part of every employee’s development.”
Based on the success of the Butterfly project, Saló looked ahead optimistically: “The disruption of AI reminds us that transformation isn’t about facing changes, it’s about making the most of them. We aim for a more flexible organizational structure, moving beyond a purely functional vision to a skill-based organization. We’ve already shown that Frit Ravich doesn’t leave anyone behind. And that’s still true in this new era of AI.”
Watch SuccessConnect Virtual on demand.