Is SuccessFactors HR-platform relevant for small and medium size companies

Understanding how small and medium size companies differ from typical best practice (larger enterprises) customer in their HR-operations.

For some years now 2BM has worked with a template for our SuccessFactors customers. This template provides a strong Best Practice point of departure, and it facilitates an accelerated project. During 2021, we saw more and more smaller and medium size companies looking into new HR-Systems, exploring SuccessFactors and others. Therefore, we decided to develop and deploy a strong SuccessFactors template, and a project methodology specified for organizations with 350-1.500 employees.

We are proud to say that although this is work that will never stop, we are now live with our SuccessFactors template for small and medium size customers.

Before exploring the template solution, let’s take a step back and see how HR operations in organizations with 350-1.500 employees are different from organizations with 2.500 plus employees. For us to be able to answer this question we launched a small project asking both potential and existing customers, to understand what an everyday at work looks like in HR, and what the top priorities are when exploring the digitalization of HR.

Understanding HR in small and medium size companies

Some highlight characteristics of HR in this type of organization based on our interviews:

• Working with HR master data is heavy – entering the same data many times – redundant data
• A wide range of applications are used to keep track of data. It is time consuming, flawed and difficult to form an overview and make reports
• HR is often burdened by a large degree of administration / transactions, and it is difficult to get out of this somewhat stuck situation because you do not have the tools to do so.
• The HR role is often very broad – generalist approach to HR
• Difficult to work strategically with HR, they lack data (and even more so valid data) and verifiable insight, and efficiency in HR administration
• On-boarding and recruitment are often very time consuming and are handled by a large number of Excel sheets and the like. These are very manual workflows, require a high degree of redundant data (typing data that already exist in another Excel sheet) and often provide HR with little insight as to how Managers use templates etc.
• Focus on employee performance often does not take up much space in HR – often because it is difficult to say anything in general based on the data available
• You often have all the right processes, but they are not tied together – HR sometimes experience coherence in HR processes, but the business rarely does
• The leadership role, like the HR role, is often very broad. It is difficult to get managers to work with HR – they lack the tools to do so.
• It’s difficult to provide Managers with data that will lead to wise or at least informed people decisions
• GDPR often does not take up so much space – it is difficult to do so much about it with the tools available.

Exploring the 2BM SuccessFactors template.

Our SuccessFactors template solution for small- and medium size companies cover the full SuccessFactors suite, and all module templates are based on 4-7 module specific critical performance indicators that we believe are most important for the process area. We are happy to share module specific demos and insights. However, in this blog we will list some of the things that has a more general flavor across the platform.

Project, operation and methodology characteristics:

• Intuitive solutions mean simple solutions that are easy to use.
• Fast implementation – solutions that can be implemented in weeks to keep the implementation cost per employee down
• Solutions must be secure and future proof – proving safe storage of data and compatible with future SuccessFactors releases, for customers to easily take advantage of new functionalities and opportunities in the platform
• Easy to operate and maintain post implementation – resources are often scarce
• And of cause very transparent as to understanding the Total Cost of Owner Ship

Usability characteristics of the template:

• Effectiveness and Efficiency is amongst our primary ambition. We need to provide tools that make HR-People, Managers and Employees HR-process interactions coherent, fast and effective. We need to make the business focus on the right things, at the right time and then executing effectively.
  • More time for Managers to be Managers. We realize broad roles and many hats to where for Managers in this type of organization, and therefore once Managers engage in HR processes or HR administration, they need to be able to perform their part easily accessible and efficiently
  • More time to HR to be Strategic in the organization, reducing time spent on non-value contributing work such as administration and transactional HR
• The HR department in control of HR data – provide overview and valid data on employees.
• Provide Managers and Employees with easy access to people data, organization chart etc. that can improve insight and decision making on people matters
• Reporting on HR data – reporting provide transparency and can lead to better decision making. In addition, we are adding reports and dashboards on Corporate Social Responsibility, United Nations Sustainable Development Goals themes, that we believe will be tomorrows agenda and in time a critical factor for companies’ competitiveness, because our customers and partners will require a certain behavior from us to be considered as partners, suppliers etc.
• GDPR-compliance – provide the tools that make GDPR compliance easy
• Safe and secure – moving data into the cloud you must be safe and secure. We do not take this responsibility lightly and we work with SAP SuccessFactors to ensure the safety of your data
• HR-mobile – finally taking HR-processes mobile makes it attractive for future workforce and make the interaction with HR-processes flexible and effective.
• Role-based permissions – autorizations can be a nightmare, but with the set of role-based-permissions provide with the SuccessFactors template by 2BM you get a best practice point of departure and can then easily and flexibly adjust if necessary.
• For global companies it’s important to leverage the benefits from the SuccessFactors built-in localizations. This makes life easy when dealing with various types of data in different parts of the world (Social security number, time- and postal code format just to mention a few).

Finally, we have worked with the business case, because we recognize, that at the end-of-the-day ROI will always play a central part of any investment. We can show a very strong business case, and an investment payback time, that makes this your best investment of the year 😊. Therefore, we have dedicated a separate blog on this theme. Please read it here.

Thank you for reading this point of the blog, all the way to the end, your time an effort is highly appreciated, thank you for your attention.