Summarizing the SuccessFactors History and Modules

SuccessFactors was founded in 2001 by Lars Dalgaard. It started as an SaaS performance management software, but eventually expanded its offerings by providing business execution software to customers. In February 2012, SAP acquired SuccessFactors, which it renamed to SAP SuccessFactors. The acquisition was largely considered an opportunity to bring existing cloud expertise to SAP’s expanding portfolio and allowed SAP to offer a full, cloud-based HCM suite.

A social collaboration solution, called SAP Jam, was introduced as an integration option in 2012 to help improve the way employees engage with each other and make decisions in the cloud. The tool allowed team members to share ideas, find solutions to shared business problems, align their goals, and more.

SAP SuccessFactors again expanded its offerings to include recruitment marketing and posting, onboarding, and workforce analytics. As of 2019, the latest release of SAP SuccessFactors included functionality updates for the mobile app, SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Service Center, and the recruiting solution, just to name a few. Architectural enhancements and a new SAP Fiori-based user interface have also been implemented.

The SuccessFactors suite includes a variety of talent tools divided into modules. The capabilities included in the suite cover the traditional four pillars of human resource management: recruiting, learning and development, performance management and compensation management. The suite also has onboarding and time and attendance software, as well as modules for workforce planning and people analytics.

Throughout this course, you'll learn how to configure important aspects of the SAP SuccessFactors solution. Here are some best practices to help you be successful:

• Start with pre-configuration in the customer’s testing environment to accelerate customer understanding of the tool

• Approach decisions as "fit-to-standard" with gap-fit analysis instead of pure discovery and ground-up business process design

• Change only what must be changed in order to bridge perceived gaps

• Leverage iterations which include gap-fit (evaluation), design, documentation, configuration, testing and validation

• Coordinate gap-fit solution design, configuration and testing across workstreams to identify potential integration impacts within the suite

• Create, maintain and share effective project- and configuration-related documentation

• Provide the customer with system administrator training as early in the project as possible and assign the customer the system administrator-level configuration responsibilities to accelerate knowledge transfer

• Prepare and distribute highly detailed cutover to production documentation that is customer-specific, assigning customers the responsibility for system administrator-level tasks (resource dependent – consultant may act as staff augmentation during cutover)

• Save and share all project and configuration documentation on the customer’s Jam site before the project is closed so that Customer Support will be able to access those documents after go live (This is relevant only for SAP Internal Consultants).

Now that you know the basics of how your project will run, we will dive into the technical aspects of implementing SAP SuccessFactors.