HR Technology Vendor News by HRchitect

Updates to Employee Central and addition of Social Learning to Business Execution Suite address demands for faster, more accurate business results

HRchitect featured SuccessFactors in our release of The Suite Life of Integrated Talent Management and also includes them in our list of top Talent Management Systems vendors that businesses should consider. HRchitect is proud to sponsor the 2011 SuccessConnect event in San Francisco.

If you are looking for a new Talent Management System, or any HR system, don’t rely solely on “recommendations” or published reports. Do yourself a huge favor and talk to HRchitect first. After 14 years, HRchitect has unparalleled knowledge of the HR and Talent Management vendor community and can save you time and money in selection and implementation. Simply put, do not invest in any kind of HR technology without consulting with the experts first. HRchitect is always available to help!

Today SuccessFactors, Inc. (NASDAQ: SFSF), the leader in cloud-based business execution software, announced new global survey results, and the latest release of the Business Execution (BizX) Suite, including Employee Central 2.0, social learning and new features across the Suite that drive real business results for companies around the world.

“For years HR leaders and CIOs have been forced to cobble together various solutions from different vendors to meet their business results,” said Brad Mattick, head of worldwide product marketing, SuccessFactors. “Adding Employee Central 2.0 and SuccessFactors Social Learning to our BizX suite makes us the only solution provider offering all pillars of talent management, built on a foundation of core HR and analytics, in one place. This gives our customers a clear advantage.”

In a global survey of CIOs and CHROs commissioned by SuccessFactors, nearly 9 in 10 respondents believe that the HR team in their organization is accountable for helping deliver business results. However, only a third of respondents feel that the HR department is closely aligned with their company’s business needs. Additionally, the survey found: 

• HR’s insight and recommendations do often influence business performance according to 61 percent of respondents, but only 27 percent of companies have a single system to manage their workforce. This impacts HR’s ability to consistently have compelling recommendations and insights to impact on the business and strategy, supported by the fact that only 30 percent of organizations consistently feel that the systems they use provide accurate, useful analytics. One would assume that HR’s impact in this way is still consistently behind other functional groups such as IT, or Finance.
• HR is advocating to put the power of workforce changes into the hands of managers, but most companies still have a long way to go, as their systems are not truly “self-service” and efficient. In only 19 percent of organizations do managers and employees implement workforce changes themselves, relying on the expertise of IT and analytics professionals to do that work.
• Nearly three quarters of survey respondents indicated that their company spends a significant amount of time and effort to integrate HR-related systems, suggesting that their systems are inflexible or unresponsive.
• More than 80 percent of respondents are expecting to upgrade their core HR system in the near future, and in conjunction, the vast majority are actively seeking cloud-based options (69 percent of organizations surveyed).

Companies in China believe they are ahead of the rest when it comes to collaboration. More than 70 percent of respondents in China reported having collaboration (e.g. CubeTree) in place, compared to less than 50 percent of global respondents.

Companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year on legacy, on-premise HR systems that provide little more than a filing cabinet for employee information. According to respondents an overwhelming 82 percent are expecting an upgrade in the near future. As companies decide whether to invest even more money in upgrading their legacy systems, SuccessFactors offers a stark alternative: a BizX Suite that includes both strategic talent management and core HR functionality in one comprehensive, cloud-based solution. The following product updates offer a radically different approach that redefines core HR and introduces an enterprise-ready social learning platform.

Understanding Your Workforce

At the heart of all strategic workforce decisions is the need for accurate and comprehensive employee data. Until now, this has been difficult to get because typical core HR solutions are not designed with business results in mind, but instead, function mostly as static data repositories. SuccessFactors’ solution provides a flexible, dynamic, way to connect who employees are, with what they are working on and how they connect to each other and the company strategy. SuccessFactors does this by combining foundational workforce data and powerful analytics on a single,flexible platform. 

• NEW – A totally different user experience for Employees and Managers: SuccessFactors has over-hauled the user experience – building it from the outside in, so that the expanded employee profile becomes more than the system of record for HR – it’s now the way for every employee to stay in touch and get more done. Employees will use the public profile to share their background, their projects and contact information, and even give kudos to each other. The new interface is a complete departure from traditional HR software, which was designed for administrators and power users and has remained largely unchanged for more than a decade.
• ENHANCED – Guided workflow: The system guides managers and employees to the right outcome, automatically deriving the appropriate workflow and event reason for reporting purposes – ensuring data stays current and accurate so it can be trusted for business decisions.
• NEW – A Single Source of Truth for Employee Information + Powerful Analytics: The next-generation thinking built into Employee Central includes a contemporary, robust data model, which provides an ideal foundation for analytics and reporting – now across both core HR and talent management data. SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics pulls insight from across the BizX Suite, allowing managers to answer questions such as “What is the turn-over ratio for high performing employees?” SuccessFactors’ analytics platform incorporates more than thirty years of development, built from real-world experience with enterprises and their systems around the globe. The result is a solution that’s scalable and easy to use, and comes with powerful predictive insights, comparative benchmarking, metrics, analyses and reports, all supported by renowned specialists in the field.

Streamlining Administration: Introducing Payroll Partnerships

In addition to providing deeper insight into the workforce and a fresh and engaging user experience, SuccessFactors is also streamlining complex, and critical personnel administrative processes, such as payroll.

Payroll is an intensive process, with laws and practices in various markets that require constant monitoring to be compliant. SuccessFactors has built an ecosystem of leading payroll providers that will offer customers global coverage based on deep in-country payroll expertise. Partners that have joined to provide an integrated payroll solution include: Ceridian, Meta4 and Patersons. SuccessFactors’ integration platform will allow customers to easily integrate data from Employee Central as the Human Resource (HR) system of record with partner’s payroll solution to provide a centralized and global system supported by localized payroll processes.

Planning for the Future: Introducing SuccessFactors Social Learning

One of the strongest advantages a company can have over its competition is to have a better-prepared, skilled workforce. Currently, according to the American Society of Training & Development, an estimated 70 percent of actual learning in organizations happens on an informal basis. What’s more, according to the US Census, by 2014 more than 47 percent of the US workforce will be people born after 1977. These employees are increasingly comfortable with social technologies and are used to turning to YouTube or their favorite search engine to learn new skills.

While the corporate learning department has traditionally been tasked with keeping the workforce trained and ready, the fact is that it simply cannot keep up with the pace of change in the world today. In terms of resources and budget, it’s a significant challenge for companies both large and small. SuccessFactors now offers a simple solution called SuccessFactors Social Learning.

SuccessFactors has now added social learning technology into the BizX Suite for a faster, easier way to exchange knowledge. SuccessFactors Social Learning is a corporate-ready tool that allows subject matter experts (SMEs) to create and share content with colleagues with minimal training and effort. Just in time, just enough, just for me content that keeps your team informed and ready to go.

SuccessFactors Social Learning has discussion forums, blogs, and activity feeds that are all mobile-ready and supported by rich social searching and analytics within SuccessFactors’ secure, scalable, enterprise-ready platform.

SuccessFactors offers a cloud-based system built for business execution, and designed to support an agile environment. This allows SuccessFactors to update the Business Execution Suite five times a year.

For more information on SuccessFactors, please visit www.successfactors.com
Matt Lafata, HRchitect