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SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding is a convenient solution that ensures that new employees become productive in record time. The solution includes several smart tools that strengthen training and make new employees comfortable even before they have started their new job.
SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding guides both the HR department, managers and the new employees quickly through all the steps of the onboarding process, so the company can shorten the start-up phase. In fact, the solution allows you to start onboarding your newly hired colleague as soon as the contract is signed.
Onboarding 1.0 customers looking to try out “Onboarding” (previously known as Onboarding 2.0) to support their business needs and begin adopting the new solution.
The main difference between Onboarding 1.0 and Onboarding 2.0 is the user interface. Multiple activities in ONB 1.0 processes are carried out in KMS system but for ONB 2.0 it’s all in BizX and the client is happy about the uniformity.
Though the main intention looks like matching the offering in ONB 1.0 at this initial phase, but with ONB 2.0 activities built on Meta Data framework it gives an edge over ONB 1.0. Some of these are outlined as below:
The most efficient change is the use of Business Rules compared to advance conditions with limitations.
The combination of Meta Data Framework and Business Rules empowers us to build complex requirements.
Candidates will have a better user interface, which will be BizX compared to ONB1.0 interface or the Employee Portal view.
BizX Document management will be the central place to look for any document now, especially if we use Employee Central, rather than looking for Document Center separately for ONB 1.0
Reporting for ONB 2.0 is with People Analytics, which is much more mature and gives us more flexibility in terms of creating analytics compared to the basic reporting in ONB 1.0
Then there is the email notification enhancement where we can work on the layout of the email notification.
There was also a limitation on process rearrangement in ONB 1.0 but with ONB 2.0 Process Variant Manager allows us to create custom processes.
And finally, integration between modules is made simple with just one tool ‘Recruit to Hire’ Data mapping with ONB 2.0
Onboarding is built natively into the SuccessFactors platform, and because it is built within the SuccessFactors framework, it has the same look and feel as the rest of the HXM Suite. Integration with external vendors have more flexibility due to the use of common data structures making it more streamlined to accomplish integrations. The administration is done within SuccessFactors; unlike Onboarding 1.0 which is a separate product (previously KMS) so the user experience and tools to administer the solution are different. Onboarding 1.0 also has a separate “Super Admin” provisioning tool making it a little more complex to manage.
Another benefit to being built on the SuccessFactors Framework is that Onboarding uses the role-based permission (RBP) approach so there’s no longer a need for the extra step to run a permissions sync report as is required for Onboarding 1.0.
Fully Integrated with Employee Central (EC)
Because Onboarding is built-in SuccessFactors, it is also fully integrated with EC. What does this mean? First, it’s important to note that EC is now a prerequisite to implementing Onboarding. However, with that, there is no need to map data for each field in Onboarding to EC using the field mapping tool as required today with Onboarding 1.0. This helps in the setup and maintenance process for the system administrator and eliminates mapping issues and errors.
Analytics
Onboarding also leverages Report Stories for reporting and analytics (IAS/IPS is a pre-requisite) allowing an opportunity to gain valuable analytics not available in Onboarding 1.0. For example, do we have a way of knowing if onboarding activities are being completed on time? This is an example of one insight that can be gained through the People Analytics/Report Story tool to improve the onboarding experience. Onboarding 1.0 does have reporting capabilities but is basically a data dump of information and any analytics would have to be created manually based on the field level data exported from the system.
Onboarding Dashboard (New)
The Onboarding Dashboard landing page provides a view of the overall status of data collection, new hire, and compliance tasks and offers the flexibility to configure the dashboard view for various participants. This gives the “personalization” feature that users have come to expect in today’s technology. For example, a manager view might show tasks like writing a welcome message or setting goals for the new hire while another participant may need to view signature tasks or additional data collection tasks. As of the 2H2021 release, there are also new filtering options available like Start Date, Hiring Manager, New Hire Type (Internal or External), and Process Tasks, Start Date, New Hire Type, and Hiring Manager are also available as sorting options.
For those who have adopted the newest home page (soon to be a universal upgrade with the 1H2022 release), we can take advantage of the new enhanced new hire experience. The newest experience guides new employees through prioritized tasks. They can quickly see what’s required or complete and by leveraging the Onboarding Engagement cards, our onboarding tasks are grouped into categories based on our configuration. This provides a nice experience for new hires and shows them clearly what is upcoming for them.
ONB2.0 heavily uses the Employee Central data model and tools, it is especially important that customers have the right people from their EC/Master Data team participate in ONB2.0 implementation. Data models and business rules must be updated, and special care must be taken to ensure that these changes in EC do not impact downstream systems.
Consultants working in ONB2.0 are required to have EC knowledge. SAP has recently also made it mandatory for consultants working on an ONB2.0 project to be certified in EC
If EC is live and hire/rehire criteria is defined in Manage Data, then the rehire process in onboarding must be configured. If not, we risk losing the hire record in the Onboarding module.
Since its original release in 2019, innovations to Onboarding have significantly closed the original gaps, so if you haven’t looked at it since its original release, it’s worth reviewing again. Compared to Onboarding 1.0, the user experience and admin experience are better, and we expect those will continue to be priorities going forward.
As of today, there are no migration tools available to assist with the change from Onboarding 1.0, but they are on the roadmap for future enhancements.
While there is no end of maintenance or support timeframe mentioned yet for Onboarding 1.0 and it continues to meet the needs of many organizations, we should continue to monitor the development of Onboarding so that we can plan for the inevitable migration.
Onboarding 2.0 is built natively into the SuccessFactors platform, and because it is built within the SuccessFactors framework, it has the same look and feels as the rest of the HXM Suite. Integration with external vendors have more flexibility due to the use of common data structures making it more streamlined to accomplish integrations. The administration is done within SuccessFactors; unlike Onboarding 1.0 which is a separate product (previously KMS) so the user experience and tools to administer the solution are different. Onboarding 1.0 also has a separate “Super Admin” provisioning tool making it a little more clunky to manage.
Another benefit to being built on the SuccessFactors Framework is that Onboarding uses the role-based permission (RBP) approach so there’s no longer a need for the extra step to run a permissions sync report as is required for Onboarding 1.0.
With Onboarding 1.0 we configure data mapping from Recruiting to Onboarding, then Onboarding to Employee Central, making the data flow slightly more complex and with more effort involved.
In Onboarding 2.0 we map directly from Recruiting to Employee Central, but with the simplification comes less flexibility. The Onboarding data model is configured using the same system functionality as adding contingent worker, apprentice, or other types of employees. But it’s ONE data model for ALL onboardees.
While Onboarding 1.0 doesn’t support hire of contingent workers either, it did provide more flexibility to define separate onboarding workflows for each type of employee - the limitation being that they all end up in Manage Pending Recruits to be hired as employees.
Here’s a quick comparison of the most frequently asked about features and as you can see there aren’t many gaps.
The dashboard is a Unified User Interface (same as used in Employee Central and all other HXM modules).
More flexibility in task assignment via Role Based Permissions (RBP) is available.
Track all activities via a single dashboard.
A new, integrated mapping tool will be provided.
The Email Services framework enables timely engagement.
The new UI framework is also based on Fiori, meaning it is the same as the whole HXM platform solution.
A Default Onboarding Process is given.
Users can copy existing processes and adjust to business needs.
Onboarding processes come with predefined steps that we can use but does not allow custom additional steps. For example, if we want a step for a hiring manger to review the data and another step for a recruiter to add further information, then it is currently not supported.
While the Schedule Meeting feature allows managers to schedule some important onboarding meetings, there is no direct integration to a calendar tool like Outlook.
No approval workflow can be associated with equipment tasks, unlike in ONB1.0.
No support is available for delegating tasks to someone other than the preconfigured responsible participants. Even when the Checklist tasks allow us to specify a delegate, the task does not actually notify the delegated user or appear in their To-do task list.
