Improving productivity using SAP-HR Performance Management

By Terisha Gooroocharan

 

What is SAP-HR Performance Management?

                The SAP Performance Management tool is a solution that enhances performance feedback processes. This solution supports end to end processes that provide organisations with transparency and helps them to align their business initiatives and goals throughout the organisation, communicate their organisation strategy, analyse employee performance and reward employees accordingly. The solution is extremely adaptable, allowing you to custom design both the performance feedback documents and reports. Not only will it simplify your business strategic outputs, but it will ensure that your employees are measured and rewarded appropriately for their contributions and performance within the organisation.

 

How can it benefit you?

                This tool enables organisations to strategically align their goals with their initiatives and resources, thus assisting in closing the gap between their strategy and their method of execution. In addition, it will improve visibility to ensure that the major stakeholders are able to identify the areas of performance that require attention. From a business perspective, this tool has increased agility which will improve your business processes to improve the cycles of performance management within the organisation. In terms of your employees, you can be guaranteed a satisfied workforce that can leverage off a consistent and trusted organisational performance system.   

  

Now that you have it, how to successfully train your employees?           

SAP-HR Performance Management like all other modules of SAP is a tool best used to simplify your business processes and assists in enhancing your business potential. Being a system or tool, for a technologically inclined person, working on this system would be a piece of cake. However, for the majority of the workforce who are not as inclined, adjusting to the system can be quite a daunting task. The most effective method of learning how to work with this tool is through face-to-face training sessions. Training sessions provide employees with the ability to use the system and understand its functionality.  It is important to remember that the sessions can also be used as a platform to communicate the importance of such a system as well as clarifying your organisations policies, values and philosophy regarding performance management.

 

 It is essential that the training is closely aligned with the business processes. This has a much more effective impact in terms of a user’s experience while training. This is of utmost importance as a good understanding of this system will give employees the confidence to work effectively on SAP Performance Management. The ability to achieve this will lead to a highly motivated workforce which will mean a happier, more productive workforce. Employees will not only feel motivated but they will feel a sense of belonging. Satisfying the essential need to belong is an act that goes far beyond personal growth. Fulfilling these needs will give an organisation the ability to assist its employees with growth within their careers but also result in growth for the organisation.          

 

How to ensure that your employees are using the solution to its full potential?                              

Employees should be educated on how the system functions and the benefits of such a system to ensure total buy-in. It is important to bear in mind that a performance management system cannot work effectively if employees cannot see the benefit of such a system.  SAP has developed a tool that can assist organisations in identifying how their employees react towards SAP solutions and whether or not they are managing them to their full potential. It is called the SAP User Experience Management Application Tool. This tool may be used to monitor whether employees utilise the SAP Performance Tool to its full potential. It does so by providing input to comprehensive reports, pinpointing training needs, adjusting business processes and it ensures that employees are delivering all the value that organisation’s expect from their SAP solutions.

Taken as a whole, SAP Performance Management holistically ensures that together with the correct face-to-face training, it would be an asset to any organisation, as management would have a clear overview as to how day-to-day employees utilise the resources supplied to them by the organisation’s investment. The tools provided, benefit both parties being the employee and employer, as the tasks that employees are required to complete are standardised and simplified. Thus this gives the employers a conclusive result. By allowing this to flow within the organisation with effective feedback processes, crossing all boundaries, organisations have the ability to capitalise on an increase in productivity and the smoothness of business operation.

SAP E-Recruiting: Your One Stop Talent Shop

By Nasmeetha Harriparsad and Christopher Williams

The SAP E-Recruiting application is a fully Web-enabled, end-to-end recruiting solution, delivering the recruiting management functions an organisation needs to find appropriate talent. SAP E-Recruiting accelerates and streamlines the recruiting process with a strategy that is much more comprehensive than traditional methods of applicant management. The solution lets applicants and candidates register in a talent warehouse.

 

It provides functions that help managers find the staff they need quickly and maintain long-term relationships with individuals registered in the warehouse. Full-fledged applicant tracking and reporting functions help organise the processing of job applications and monitor the effectiveness of the recruiting organisation. A collaboration platform links SAP E-Recruiting to external systems such as job boards, recruiting service providers, and the company’s internal systems. All these capabilities help align recruiting with corporate strategy, find top candidates, cut recruiting and sourcing costs, and improve employee retention.

 

Highlights of the SAP E-Recruit Module

• SAP E-Recruiting ensures that you drive up-to-date human resources management, by proactively maintaining contact with applicants, potential candidates, and consequently, with your employees.
• With a use of the talent pool, you ensure that you not only identify the best possible candidate for a position from all potential candidates, but also that you are in a position to staff critical key positions in the long term and thus safeguard the company’s success in the future.
• Job postings can be created for Internal as well as External candidates with overlapping time periods and can be published to multiple sources.
• The recruitment process can be tracked and administrator staff will know exactly what phase an application is in when queried.
• Trex provides powerful search capabilities and allows for the efficient “matching up” of candidate profiles to relevant Job Specifications in order to ensure the best possible fit.

Tips of the trade

During a recent client engagement the following challenges and tips were identified:

• You can use ALE distribution (Application Link Enabling) to import an organisation’s live org structure into E-Recruiting. This enables you to provide a complete organisational structure in E-Recruiting consisting of organisational units, positions, and jobs. Employees’ data is stored in the SAP Business Partner, which is created for each employee in E-Recruiting. The employee’s personal data, address data, contact data, employee number and relationship to the relevant user is stored here. If there is no user available, the system automatically generates a user for E-Recruiting.

 

• When trying to distribute qualifications the relationships were not saved. There are two OSS notes available to enable the distribution of qualifications. The notes available are:

0001049047 – Qualifications for ALE distribution into E-recruiting and
0001008056 – HRALX & Qualification: relationships not saved

• It’s of critical importance that an experienced Basis team takes ownership of the technical implementation of the Trex search engine and the Python enhancement “XML Attribute Extractor”. Depending on client requirements, if a standalone instance is needed (For security purposes and external recruiting) it is recommended that only Basis and E-recruit be installed on the separate box.

• It is recommended to use E-recruit 6. If a client is on ECC5, the system can still interface with E-recruit 6.

 

• The standard roles for E-recruit are quite broad with regards to access and need to be defined. This can be accomplished quite easily using a trace on a user assigned to a specific role e.g. A recruiter Role may be allowed to create requisitions and manage applicants throughout the recruitment processes.

• It is recommended that the E-recruit development team comprises of a Basis consultant, a Portal consultant (with BSP and Web dynpro knowledge), an Abap consultant, Authorisations consultant and an E-recruit functional consultant, should the client not have internal capacity in these resources.

 

Frequently asked Questions: Part 1

While preparing a recent proposal, the client provided us with a list of questions on the capabilities of the system. Through teamwork and some assistance from our colleagues in the USA, we were able to address all of their queries. We take pleasure in sharing these insights with you as a series of posts on our new blog!

 

Provide an overview of the system’s main functionality.	This powerful part of SAP’s comprehensive talent management system provides sourcing processes and technologies to facilitate job posting, talent relationship management, applicant tracking, requisition workflows and comprehensive analytics to complement all recruitment functions.
State if the system is a standalone database or ASP (hosted solution).	The SAP E-Recruitment application operates as a standalone database that requires separate installation. The software is usually installed on separate servers from the SAP HCM solution & includes the primary application, TREX (a proprietary search engine) and SAP’s Portal product. Although this is a standalone solution, it is fully integrated to SAP HCM.
What database is used?	SAP E-Recruitment can be installed on the traditional databases used by SAP, i.e. Oracle
Explain the management and ownership of data; i.e. data belonging to Client X should be accessible and remain Client X property.	Even in a hosted E-Recruitment solution, data will be owned by Client X. The external candidates’ information will also be accessible to Client X once they register and their data is released.
Can the system integrate to SAP via XI (Client X standard) as a minimum to Portal, Business Intelligence, Organisational Management, Recruitment, Personnel Administration?	An XI interface is necessary as the E-Recruitment component will reside within the current SAP environment but on another instance. Integration with other SAP HCM modules/components will take place on an asynchronous basis given your current SAP system configuration (ECC 6) and the implementation of E-Recruitment 6.0.
Explain how the system will handle applications from internal candidates (i.e. how employee’s master data is managed and maintained on SAP).	Employees are automatically integrated to, and hence can access the E-Recruitment module to search and apply for jobs. Internal employees will not be required to register all their data when applying for jobs, as the ERP system and SAP E-Recruitment modules are integrated. As a result, information including personal data, addresses, communication channels and relationships to qualifications will be transferred upon entering the candidate’s profile and selecting the appropriate employment opportunities.
List all available tools and identify if there is a part of the application, an extra module or an external application, which requires integration for Assessment tools (skills and self assessment) available (e.g. Drotter, Targeted Selection, Psychometric tests, TEBA, Client X Health System, etc.)	The SAP E-Recruitment module does not allow for psychometric testing in its standard implementation. The results of such interventions can however be stored on the system against an applicant or employee via the SAP DMS or a custom developed infotype to store assessment results. Custom workflow can be designed to support this functionality on the system.
Does the system have the ability to track and report on each step in the process?	Yes. The E-Recruitment component allows for the configuration of scales, application sources, activity types (i.e. screening, shortlist, invite for applicant etc.) for use in reporting. Standard reports allow for the querying of applications, candidates and requisitions. As the E-Recruitment component is a SAP component, it also allows for all steps in the process to be audited using audit trails.