What is SAP SuccessFactors HCM?
SuccessFactors (‘SF’) is one of the commonly used Human Capital Management (‘HCM’) solutions. It is a Human Resource Management System (‘HRMS’), that connect core HR and payroll, talent management, sales performance management, people analytics, and workforce planning. This helps organizations create consistent and standardised HR processes and enable process harmonisation across the business. The objective is to increase productivity, simplify everyday transactions and reduce risk by leveraging best practices.
Sounds familiar? That’s also typically the objectives of Identity Governance & Administration (‘IGA’) deployment (refer https://www.hexadius.com/blog/understanding-iam if are unsure what various IAM terms mean). Infact, we also strongly believe in this IAM trifecta:
‘Source of Truth’ or ‘Authoritative Source’
An IGA system like SailPoint need tight integrated with HCM solution like SF to deliver these objectives. In fact, in IGA world, HCM solution is often referred to as ‘Source of Truth’ or ‘Authoritative Source’. The reason being that HCM solution provides the information required to build ‘Identities’, the building block of any IGA system. It is also the trigger based on which various automated provisioning activities are performed by IGA.
Therefore, one of the first activities in any IGA deployment is onboarding of the authoritative source. This blog covers various consideration if the SF is the authoritative source and therefore, you need to onboard SF into Sailpoint.
SuccessFactors – Onboarding vs Employee Central
The first thing is to understand that SF is not a simple solution. SF consists of multiple solutions and there are at least two (2), which may be the authoritative source: Onboarding (‘ONB’) and Employee Central (‘EC’).
- ONB: to engage internal and external new hires to onboard them to the organization. This essentially leverages an onboarding portal with paperless new hire paperwork.
- EC: to manage employee master data. This is a flexible Human Resource (‘HR’) information system to manage changes to employee data.
Before starting the onboarding SF into SailPoint, we need to check which SF solutions are used by organization and how. If the organization is not using ONB, EC is essentially the only source of truth and therefore, only EC needs to be onboarded into SailPoint. However, if organization also uses ONB, a detailed understanding of the HR process flow and IGA functional requirements around user Lifecycle Management (‘LCM’) is required to determine whether both ONB and EC needs to be onboarded as authoritative source for SailPoint (it possible to have multiple authoritative sources for the same identity). Of course, this adds complexity to the SailPoint deployment. Please note the following:
- ONB: SailPoint doesn’t provide an Out of the Box (‘OOTB’) connector for SF ONB. However, SAP provides web services APIs that can be used to integrate ONB with SailPoint.
- EC: SailPoint provides OOTB connector for SF EC. This provides an easier and efficient integration approach.
System Onboarding Process
Let’s now look at the actual process for onboarding SF into SailPoint.
- Determine whether EC integration is sufficient or both ONB and EC needs to be onboarded. This is typically dependent on the business requirements for the IGA solution.
- Gather required information for onboarding EC/ ONB using documented questionnaire and workshops with system owners.
- Understand the current processes and define to-be processes covering the IGA deployment scope.
- Develop system design to address the to-be processes. This may include setting up multiple authoritative sources (ONB and EC) for the same identity.
Rest of the onboarding process is similar to any other authoritative source onboarding and includes system development, testing, ensuring data quality and finally deployment.
It is also very important to ensure that the HR team is extensively involved in the process. The solution design needs to be aligned with the way data is processed in SF. There are complex scenarios such as rehire, long leaves, and inter-company transfer, which are processed in EC in different ways. It is important that the IGA deployment team understand the way it is processed in SF and design SailPoint to manage these correctly.
Notes:
- ‘Identity’ refers to multi-dimensional data models of identity information that offer a single, logical representation of each managed user. An IGA solution typically automatically builds, manages and securely stores Identities. This includes both current and historical views. Identity also contains information about entitlements, activity, and associated business context.
- OOTB connectors are developed by SailPoint engineering team and certified by Sailpoint. Such connectors are supported by Sailpoint as part of their support agreement.
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