SAP SuccessFactors Core HR and Payroll Software review

SAP can trace its founding back to 1972, under the original name “System Analysis Program Development,” which later got shortened to the current name, which gets pronounced as the individual letters S-A-P. Along the way it grew from its five person origins to its current 105K strong workforce. From its global headquarters in Waldorf, Germany, SAP offers a cloud portfolio of over 100 business solutions, and has over 230 million users. SAP has a number of large enterprise customers that include 3M, BMW, Coca-Cola and Ford Motor Company.

Plans and pricing

The SAP SuccessFactors Core HR and Payroll Software unfortunately has opaque pricing as there is no indication of the possible tiers, or the available options making this a challenge to figure out if this software is a good fit for the company. Rather, the potential buyer needs to contact SAP with appropriate business credentials, and then interact for a custom quote. While this approach is fairly common when purchasing online software, it does act as a barrier to getting many quotes when acquiring this type of product.

Furthermore, the website can get confusing as SAP has about 100 cloud-based software products available. Looking elsewhere, we did find an approximate price of about $85 per employee to subscribe to this product. While SAP has free trials for many of its products, we found only a Free Demo for the Core HR and Payroll Software.

Features

SAP offers an HR and payroll system with a global perspective under the SuccessFactors Core HR and Payroll Software umbrella. The overall themes of the software are to increase compliance, for employees to be able to self-service, and for automation of all types of HR processes both simple and complex. This overall improves the employee experience with engagement and empowerment, which is an overall value add to the business.

Taking a closer look at one of the areas, takes us to Time Tracking, the module that concerns itself with time and attendance. SAP gives control to employees as rather than outdated, paper timesheets, time is tracked in the cloud. Employees access the electronic timesheets, via desktop access or via a mobile app, and can enter in the hours worked, including any breaks. Entries get evaluated in real-time, against the employee’s profile, as an initial check so that the hours worked gets submitted cleanly on the initial attempt. 

Management and administration, each with appropriate rules based access can then easily aggregate the data for analysis, for insights into areas such as labor costs. Compliance with labor laws, and collective agreements also is maintained in areas such as “Break rules, premiums, on-call time, and overtime rules.” 

The SuccessFactors Core HR and Payroll software piece fully integrates into the SAP ecosystem. This makes it simple for the timesheet data to be communicated to the SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll for accurate payment of the hours. For those that use a third-party shift-planning tools, there are no worries as SAP can import the working time data that is planned out and work with that as well.

Time administration gets automated, and streamlined as well. There are options for “Auto-approvals, mass approvals, alerts, automatic recalculations, and embedded reporting.” Time management can be easily configured, and then use of time is monitored, and updated.

Support

SAP provides a wide array of support options to get help for its product. We like to see that there is a range of direct support options available, including country specific phone numbers, along with expert chat, and email via the SAP support portal.

There are also plenty of resources available, as might be expected from such a software veteran in this space. This includes maintenance notifications to give updates for downtime. There is also a SAP Help Portal with content available for each product. In addition to the knowledge articles, there are also webinars such as “Incident Report” in separate sessions for both English and Korean, along with whitepapers, and ‘Learning Journeys’ for those that wish to enhance their mastery of this content. 

For those that want to interact with fellow users there is the SAP Community where users can post questions and also help fellow users, along with SAP Training and Certifications that want to have certified training. However, even given all of the previously detailed support options, it was a bit of a disappointment to see that the SAP “Event Finder” web page had absolutely no upcoming events. 

Final verdict

The SAP SuccessFactors Core HR and Payroll certainly has a number of strengths, from the tight integration into the larger group of SAP software products, to the streamlining of HR processes such as management of timesheets and time off, and to the large number of support options, it makes this product more than worthy of a closer look when shopping for this type of software product. However, we are frustrated by the lack of some upfront pricing, that there is no free trial, and that the site overall we found somewhat more difficult to navigate than some competitors. In balance, this product still has its merits, but keep in mind these areas of improvement identified.

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