Moving to the cloud in the enterprise software world can mean many things. When upgrading to a product like SAP SuccessFactors from legacy SAP HCM or other on-premise tools, it’s not only a change in delivery model, but often a change in processes as well. That’s not the case currently for shifting to SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll (ECP) from traditional SAP Payroll—the delivery model changes, but the product itself stays the same.
That’s where the “Lift and Shift” methodology comes into play. This allows an organization to move payroll into the cloud to offload that infrastructure burden without changing a payroll system that works for them—if there is one thing a company needs to do right to keep things running smoothly, it is keeping those paychecks flowing on time. The trick for Lift and Shift is transitioning the data from the on-premise system to the cloud-based module.
Some companies have opted to reimplement payroll when moving to ECP. This can prove to be a longer process than Lift and Shift. This is more likely an option if an organization wants to completely overhaul their payroll system, while Lift and Shift is a process for those that primarily want to keep their payroll process while moving to the cloud.
A Nexus for Payroll Transition
Data replication is a key driver in the length and cost of moving payroll from SAP on-premise to ECP in the cloud. At a large Australian beverage company with 10 years of history on-premise and with 279 configuration tables and over 664,000 records, TIK Consulting found that data replication alone for configuration would take six to nine months through traditional SAP functional resources.
However, TIK offers a Nexus Suite package for Lift and Shift ECP migrations. With the help of that, the customer was able to trim down its data replication for configuration considerably. That part of went from months to less than half a day.
It will also take less than two seconds per employee to replicate employee data. For 9,000 employees at the beverage company, that will take approximately six hours. Loading employee data that quickly allows the company to move into the test system for immediate and accurate investigation of records.
Additionally, the beverage company was able to run payroll with ECP and compare results to the on-premise production environment for a 400-employee subset the day after the configuration shift.
Enabling Faster Employee Central Payroll Transitions
For customers that want to get out of the business of managing on-premise hardware, but don’t need to make major changes to their payroll when shifting to the cloud, there are tools that provide faster, more cost-effective options.
If your organization does need to make changes to payroll, but can’t wait to move to the cloud, the ability to transition and keep all historical data will enable you to move away from on-premise and set the stage for adjustments to your payroll system later. Lifting and Shifting will allow you to first validate payroll in the cloud without impacting your existing payroll processes and functionality.
Rizing HCM and its partners can offer methods and tools for you to quickly move payroll data and validate payroll in the cloud.