Working with Transactions

A transaction occurs when an employee, manager, or administrator changes the employment or personal information of an employee’s record. Events and Event Reasons are required for transactions involving Job and Compensation Information.

SAP SuccessFactors provides a predefined set of events representing key job milestones throughout an employee's life cycle. These events help track important changes, such as hiring, promotions, or terminations. To offer more detail, companies can customize event reasons, which are subcategories of these standard events. For example, while the system includes a general Hire event, an organization might create specific event reasons like New Hire for full-time employees and Contract Onboarding Hire for contractors. This customization allows businesses to better categorize for compliance and reporting.

An approval workflow can be initiated once a change is made to employee data. SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central allows your organization to create approval workflows and determine which transactions initiate workflows.

Some organizations may have permissions and business rules to trigger approval workflows. These may affect employee transactions, such as pay increases, job changes, job information imports, compensation imports, pay component imports, leave requests, and bonuses.

Your organization may choose different workflows for different transactions. The workflow is put in place to ensure everyone involved in the transaction knows that a change is occurring. Individuals involved in the workflow process are notified by email and system notification. The approvers can easily access the pending approvals from their SAP SuccessFactors Home page.

To view the request, the approver only needs to click the notification to see the approval request details. The Approval Request page includes much of the information the approver needs to make an informed decision, including:

• Request Information – The approver can view the event reason (Data Change) and the information change.
• View Workflow Participants – The approver can view the other participants in the workflow.
• Response – The approver can approve, delegate, and send back the request.
• Recent Activity – The approver can view actions taken on the request, including the initiator and other approvals.

An administrator can use a separate tool, Manage Workflow Requests, to manage all submitted requests.

Business rules are used to add application logic to the system. Business rules are used in different scenarios across all SAP SuccessFactors solutions. In Employee Central, business rules are used to automate HR processes, such as workflow and event reason derivations, alert notifications, and many others.

Business rules are comprised of the following:

• Condition (IF) – The logic that must be met before the system takes action. When you want the system to apply the action every time, set the IF statement to Always True .
• Action (THEN) – The logic that defines how the system reacts when the condition is met. Some application-specific scenarios do not require a THEN statement.
• Trigger or Rule Event – The event type that activates the rule processing.

Business rules can be applied to any application of SAP SuccessFactors.

To streamline HR processes, organizations should implement self-service tools that allow managers and employees to take direct action when needed. This ensures a smooth and timely handling of HR-related tasks.

Employees should be able to update their personal information, such as requesting leave or modifying personal details. Meanwhile, managers should oversee changes related to employment, compensation, and organizational data, such as creating new positions or handling promotions.

To maintain security and control, Role-Based Permissions should be used to define who can access and modify specific data. This ensures that employees and managers can only make changes relevant to their roles.

The HR Operations team plays a key role in reviewing and approving these changes. While employees and managers are responsible for keeping their data accurate, HR Operations serves as a backup in case they cannot make necessary updates. This approach promotes efficiency while maintaining oversight and support.

SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central using Role-Based Permissions (RBP) helps organizations empower employees to change their employee information. Employee Self-Service allows employees to initiate and complete transactions without HR assistance.

These self-service transactions are minor updates made to an employee record that do not affect the employee’s compensation or role.

This may include a change in contact information, gender, address, etc.

Manager Self-Service

Unlike employees, managers are not restricted to making changes only to themselves. Manager self-service allows supervisors to initiate data changes for their employees, such as promotions, transfers, etc.

To ensure the managers can initiate changes only for their direct report, you must follow the basic concept of Role-Based Permissions.

The granted population, the role, and the target population must be defined. Manager self-service transactions, especially those that affect job and compensation, are typically configured with additional approval.

The clock icon or history in the employment cards allows transactions to be executed without an approval workflow. Using Role-Based Permissions, administrators are typically granted this access to correct an employee’s record.

Employee Central Quick Actions feature allows the creation of templates for the most commonly used employee and manager self-service actions.

Using the templates, you can customize the fields displayed for each self-service action, unlike the standard All Actions menu, which displays all the visible fields in the card. The templates simplify the manager and employee self-service experience by displaying enough fields to meet the use-case-specific action.

The template must use a specific use case from a set list provided by SAP SuccessFactors. Here are the use cases that you can use for the Quick Actions template:

• Change Chosen Name, Addresses, Email Addresses, Phone numbers, Emergency Contacts
• Change Contract End Date, Cost Center
• Change Job, Job Relationships
• Change Legal Name, Pronouns, Location, Probation, Working Time
• Transfer, Promotion, Demotion, Furlough and Return, Suspension and Return
• View Cost Center, Job, Job Relationships, Location
• View Marital Status, Addresses, Email Addresses, Emergency Contacts, Phone numbers

Each use case includes predefined fields for that action. For example, the Change Location Quick Action defaults the Location and Time Zone fields from Job Information. Each Quick Action template allows a maximum of eight standard and custom fields including country-specific fields.