Daire O’Mochain provides an update on the way ahead for the SAP HCM solution.
Earlier in the year, I attended a partner briefing at SAP Australia’s North Sydney office. The core presentation was given by David Ludlow, SAP’s VP of Line of Business Solutions – HR. David covered a lot of ground in the available time, but the standout takeaways for me were as follows:
- The SAP HCM solution is leapfrogging into the next wave of IT ‘consumerism’ underpinned by Web 2.0 and the Sybase mobility platform.
- The employee is at the centre of everything: usability and ‘look and feel’ match the experience we are used to from the internet such as Facebook. This is being rolled out in three waves:
– Wave 1 includes the updates of EHP4 and EHP5
– Wave 2 due in EHP6 (Q1 2012), essentially this brings the concept of a ‘theme’ to the GUI
– Wave 3 focuses on quick access to data leveraging HTML5 for a more pleasing look; ‘push’ of information to the user and ease of navigation. - We were given a preview of some of the screens and the difference from what we are used to in EHP4 is substantial. This really is the ‘look and feel’ that we needed to address the often heard feedback from HR specialist users that SAP was not as easy to use or as attractive when compared with competitive offerings.
- Rapid Deployment Solutions (RDS): More information on these as they come to market, but the ESS/MSS RDS is already available… A key point here is that the next RDS in this area will contain ESS/MSS for SharePoint!! Music to everyone’s ears in the room.
- MSS updates: There are quite a few here, but of note was the integration of a Nakisa/SAP co-developed Org Chart viewer that doesn’t require additional Nakisa license. This is a great introduction for customers to the power of the Nakisa toolkit and a big improvement in the functionality for managers.
- There has been a large investment in Talent Analytics. These look great – I actually presented a number of screenshots on this topic to ASHRR that were very well received. The upside – the extractors and cubes are provided gratis, but on the downside, if the customer wants to render the report via a dashboard they need to buy the appropriate SAP licence unless they have another reporting tool that they want to use. It also enables customers who are running non SAP talent management systems to report on that data as long as they can get that data into SAP – though to my mind, if you are going to do that, why not just look at expanding the SAP footprint and reducing your TCO by getting rid of another vendor solution in your HRIS landscape?
- New country versions are available for Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates – not of huge interest to anybody in Australia unless you have worked there. I have, and as I also have a number of my colleagues now working in various SAP houses in Australia, I thought I’d mention it.
- Mobile: Obviously SAP is having a huge play in this area across all areas. In HCM, they are focused on four key users and will bring out the high-impact quick ROI functions first and build on those later. The users who will be getting ‘consumer grade user experience’ are below. Also worth quoting is that 20 per cent of all mobility apps being released by SAP are for HCM – nice that HCM is front of mind for a change:
– Executive
– HR user
– Manager
– Employee. - Still on mobility, David gave us a quick demo on a Manager Insight application for iPad. I want one and any manager I’ve ever demonstrated SAP to will want one too.
There were other topics covered (Analytics, Strategic Workforce Planning on SAP HANA), but more on those later.
All in all, a very inspiring partner update and one that will put a spring in the step of all of SAP’s HCM customers as they start to implement over the coming year or two.
Daire O’Mochain is HCM practice manager at Extend Technologies.
