Employee Centra (EC) is a full-blown global HCM solution that enables maintaining an organizational structure and all kinds of employee data. Data is structured according to type and global vs. country specific data. Validation rules for personal data in Denmark is included and it is possible to operate the solution in multiple languages, incl. Danish. 

The system is configurable to support company specific requirements – i.e. storage of additional information or dependencies between different types of data.  

EC is the backbone of the SuccessFactors solution. EC supports your administrative processes regarding data maintenance for employees and it helps keep track of your organizational structures. It gives you a clear vision of the associations between different levels in the organization and ensures that data quality is very high via built-in validations at the time of data maintenance. 

EC is more than than just a personnel administration solution – the data and the organizational structures is automatically available for all the other processes within Human Capital Management. 

Using EC as your Employee Management Solution enables delegation of data collection and process execution to managers and employees which will provide the opportunity for the HR department to focus on value-adding activities instead of data maintenance.  

With a traditional HR solution, managers and employees collect and send information to HR employees who update the information in the IT solution.  

Using EC, the data registration is made simple so that managers and employees can update the information directly in the IT solution. Additionally, relevant data registrations are sent for approval and possible follow up with managers and HR, and data registration is simplified by reducing the content in drop-down lists to only contain the entries that are relevant for the specific employee. This ensures the high quality and an effective delegation of duties. 

The quality of any other HCM processes depends on correct and valid data. This is best ensured when business logic is used to validate data at the source. This you can achieve with EC. When dependences exist between different pieces of data, it is possible to reduce the possible choices from pick lists or even update certain pieces of information automatically when other data is updated. 

The data that is maintained in EC is automatically available for the other HCM processes that run in SuccessFactors, such as compensation management and learning management. Likewise, the time management processes are based on the same data, and the combined results from EC and time management are used for the payroll calculations in SAP Payroll Cloud. 

Data is organized into separate windows and a large number of fields are pre-defined regarding both organizational and personal data – and data is defined as either global or country specific data. It is a natural part of the implementation to enhance the solution with additional fields in some of the standard windows, and even creating customer specific windows to support collection of data that is special for your industry or company. 

2BM has assisted a large number of customers and we will use our experience to provide advice on not only what to do, but also what NOT to do. We have seen solutions where the consultants included all enhancements that the customers requested – but this is not the way we work. We will provide feedback and tell you if we believe you are doing things wrong. If you insist, of course we will adhere to your requests but we ask you to argue for the change first and we will try to ensure that you understand the consequences of your desired changes. 

EC supports all processes regarding master data maintenance for employees, organizational structures, and position management. The solution is event driven which assists in keeping an overview of the status of an employee. Standard events are delivered by SuccessFactors and event reasons are created for each customer. 2BM delivers a set of event reasons as a starting point, but it is a natural part of the implementation project to define the reasons that are relevant for you for each of the events. 

The approval workflows are typically defined per event reason – and it normally also depends on the role of the person who starts the process – if the employee updates data, it may require the approval of the manager and HR, processes that are started by the manager may require approval from HR and information sent to the employee, whereas processes that are started by HR often only inform the manager and the employee of the changes. 

During the implementation we will discuss your data requirements in detail and we will provide guidance on how to best structure your data – taking usability and dependencies to other functional areas into consideration. 

Historical data is often a matter of discussion because organizations see a need to import data from legacy solutions. In general, this is not advisable because the data structures and data definitions from past solutions don’t necessarily match SuccessFactors – and we often see substantial data quality issues. 

Therefore, our recommendation is to keep employees historical hire date in the new solution but to record all other data as of a recent date. 

We provide the migration tools to ensure that data is imported correctly following a data cleansing process – which we can facilitate but it requires active participation from you. 

SuccessFactors delivers standard integration between the various functional areas. Standard tools are also delivered by SAP for integration between SuccessFactors and SAP HCM, but this requires complex analysis to determine how to cater for special customer content. 2BM has a strong track record in this area so we can guide you through the process in the most effective way. 

We also have experience from many customers regarding integration of SuccessFactors with other IT systems. 

Even though we don’t expect that any company will benefit from a fixed pre-defined template, we do have a template for EC.  

The purpose is to ensure easy communication and progress during the project start because it is much easier for our customers to identify changes to a running solution than to design a solution from scratch. In addition, there is no need to configure items that are common for all companies separately – this is more easily done in the template. 

But, it is important to understand that the template is only a starting point – the solution needs to be tailored to your specific needs – both process wise and according to your company culture. 

2BM has reworked and enhanced the standard SAP template to fit the Danish customers based on our experience from numerous implementations of the solution at different Danish and international companies – we call this 2BM SF Package of Employee Central – an SAP SuccessFactors Partner Packaged solution.  

This packaged solution is the starting point for the implementation – we show you a full solution that works out of the box and afterwards we make the changes that are necessary to fulfill your special requirements. 

The following table displays the standard SAP package, the enhancements provided by 2BM and the functionality where no special configuration has been performed. The fact that some items are not included in the 2BM SF Package of Employee Central only means that these areas typically require company specific discussion for the function area to support company requirements – and therefore that any pre-configuration is of little importance – and not that you should avoid taking advantage of this functionality.