When your organization is looking to implement SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central in multiple countries, there are special considerations and important functionality on top of typical key implementation resources that need to be utilized to ensure seamless employment tracking no matter where they may be working.

Sometimes employees work in multiple countries and sometimes they hold multiple roles. A global Employee Central implementation must ensure that however that employee is being viewed in the system—by certain jobs or locations—the information can tell a story about the employee’s lifecycle with the organization.

There are three things that you can do to ensure that employee data is telling that story. We’ll start with functionalities within Employee Central that help with global scenarios before diving into data migration and employee IDs.

Related: 4 Tips from Sabre’s SAP SuccessFactors Implementation

Identify Cross-Company & Cross-Country Scenarios

With global Employee Central implementations, there are employee movement scenarios that occur which do not normally exist in non-global Employee Central implementations. Employees within organizations that have a global footprint have choices to work temporarily or permanently in other countries outside of their home country.

Within Employee Central, there are features that allow organizations to manage such employee movements:

  • Global Assignment
  • Rehire with New Employment
  • Concurrent Employment

Global Assignment is normally used when an employee moves on a temporary assignment in another country within their organization with the intention of moving back to their home country with a definitive return date.  Example: Employee located in Europe goes to work on a special project for 6 months at a location in New Zealand.

Rehire with New Employment is used when an employee moves permanently to another Company or Country within their organization. Example: Employee located in Europe goes to work permanently at a location in New Zealand.

Concurrent Employment is used when an employee occupies two or more jobs/positions within their organization within the same country. Example: Employee located in Canada working for a school board who is a bus driver and a custodian within a school.

Although these functionalities could be used for non-global organizations, we normally see these scenarios for global Employee Central implementations. Some organizations/countries have policies or legalities that require employees to receive a new employee number when moving legal entities even within the same country. Rehire with New Employment would also be used in these scenarios even for non-global organizations.

It is very important to vet these scenarios, especially during global implementations, so that the appropriate Employee Central functionalities are including as part of the project scope. These capabilities allow organizations to manage these scenarios while keeping a global linkage between multiple employments that exist for the same employee. Organizations should take advantage of these Global Assignment, Rehire with New Employment, and Concurrent Employment functionalities as they will provide a seamless historical view, reporting capability, and integration to downstream systems for global scenarios.

Identify Data Migration Impacts for Global Scenarios and Rollout

Although Global Assignment, Rehire with New Employment and Concurrent Employment functionalities are very useful in Employee Central, there are also some challenges that need to be considered when migrating employee populations to Employee Central.

Currently, there is a limitation in Employee Central where we cannot migrate multiple employments an employee may have using standard import templates unless they are global assignment or concurrent employment scenarios. This also gets a bit trickier when we are dealing with phased deployments by country where some countries already use SuccessFactors for talent processes.

With that being said, there are ways to ensure these linkages are kept by using a manual process and employee number assignment as part of the Rehire with New Employment functionality. It will be important for your data migration team to evaluate the impact that multiple employments will have on the data migration process and testing.

Identify your employee ID strategy

It is very important to identify your employee ID strategy to ensure alignment with the standard Employee Central best practices for ID assignment.

 Employee Central

  • User ID should reference an employee’s personnel number.
  • Username should reference an employee’s username that is used as part of their internal identity management solution which will identify them in SuccessFactors. It is also possible that some customers will log into SuccessFactors directly using this username.
  • Person ID External should be a global ID that never changes for an employee and is used to link different employments an employee may have between countries or companies within their organization. These scenarios include global assignments, concurrent employment, and rehire with new employment. This ID is usually set to the first personnel number an employee is assigned when entering an organization.

Relation to SAP HCM or Employee Central Payroll 

  • User ID should reference an employee’s personnel number in SAP HCM or Employee Central Payroll.
  • Username should reference an employee’s username in SAP HCM or Employee Central Payroll which is linked to info type 0105—Subtype 0001.
  • Person ID External should be a global ID that never changes for an employee and is used to link different employments an employee may have between countries or companies within their organization. These scenarios include global assignments, concurrent employment and rehire with new employment. This ID is linked to info type 0709 as the person ID in SAP HCM or Employee Central Payroll which links all employments.

It is very important to map out your employee ID strategy to ensure it will work for Employee Central and integration to other SAP and non-SAP systems.  For some customers, this becomes more of a challenge if they use SuccessFactors for Talent processes prior to Implementing Employee Central and decisions that were already made for SuccessFactors User ID and Username do not align with best practice.  There are mechanisms in place to control this mapping between Employee Central and SAP HCM/Employee Central Payroll, but this will add further complexity for integration points to systems outside of this scope.

By keeping these three topics in mind, customers can ensure a more successful global Employee Central implementation. Ensuring employee data is seamless and linked across countries and across roles will make it easier for reporting and planning on an HR level.

Up Next: 4 Best Practices a Global SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Implementation