SAP SuccessFactors Reviews

I have the longest experience with a module named SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting (RCM), which was five years ago. My company is currently in the process of implementing the rest of the modules of SAP SuccessFactors in our company.

Presently, the most valuable feature of the product is related to the recruitment module that the product offers since it is a module that I have recently started to use. I feel that the product has improved, and the tool has introduced AI to help with areas like job description. The tool is also integrated with Microsoft Teams, which helps with the scheduling of interviews. The most recent features introduced in the product have been very valuable.

Compared to the other tools in the market, I feel that SAP SuccessFactors should improve more in the area of employee experience (EX) in the cloud, where there are some shortcomings.

The product doesn't have a modernized look and is not very user-friendly like other products. In the future, the product needs to have a more modernized look, and it should be made more user-friendly.

I have been using SAP SuccessFactors for four years. My company is a customer of the product.

All my company employees, including around 2,000 people, will start using the product in April.

I have contacted the technical support for the solution. The response from the solution's technical support was fast. The solution's support team has been good so far.

My company chose SAP SuccessFactors over other products in the market, considering the system's capabilities to meet our company's requirements.

The solution was deployed over a period of six months.

The product is expensive. The product is worth the money you pay for it.

I recommend the product to those who plan to use it because it can be used in big companies with a lot of complexities since it is a flexible product that is scalable. For big companies or global organizations, SAP SuccessFactors is good.

Considering the flexibility of the system and its ability to accommodate complex business processes, the product is ready to be used in multiple industries.

I rate the tool a seven to eight out of ten.

Our company uses the solution for the entire administration of our workforce. Included are data management, employee and contingent worker management, integrations to our Tableau data visualization, and dashboard metrics. 

The functionality and user friendliness are constantly improving. We provide constant feedback and a lot of changes are addressed. Every six months, we get 300 changes in the system so that is quite a lot. The solution is continually changing for the better. 

The user interface is flexible and allows for custom fields. We can easily create fields or change things without needing to get the vendor involved. 

The flexibility for reporting is better than ADP.

The reporting tool is not as good as IBM Cognos which is very, very powerful. We used to do things with Cognos that we don't see in the current reporting tool. We are implementing the story report that will provide a data visualization tool within the solution. It looks valuable and powerful, but we haven't yet used it to compare it to the reporting in Cognos. 

The user interface could be modernized. We hear from users that the view is kind of old fashioned. The interface works perfectly fine so this is more of a personal user opinion. 

I have been using the solution for six years. 

Customer support needs improvement because it is a weakness. Support is offshore so you deal with people in other countries such as India. You have to adjust to their time zone to get support. They should do a better job because they are there to provide a service to customers, not the other way around. You have to bend to support's availability and it is difficult to get them to understand that they are actually there to help you. 

We are fortunate as partners because we have a dedicated account manager who is always available and responsive. We get direction and training materials at a VIP service level from our customer success account manager. We recommend this level of service because it really helps us. 

The solution offers better reporting flexibility than ADP but is not as powerful as IBM Cognos. 

I like the solution and rate it an eight out of ten. 

We use Performance and Goals Management and the Succession and Development modules.

The performance is okay. The reporting and analytics feature is very important for decision-making. The product helps with our company’s compliance and regulation needs. The tool has a unique talent management platform. It is responsive. It provides evaluation, recruiting, learning and development, and compensation processes. It is easy to navigate through the platform.

The Onboarding module must be improved. It doesn’t have many features.

I have been using the solution for three years.

The tool has good scalability. Our clients are medium-level businesses.

The technical support is slow. We generally have low and medium-level incidents. I rate the technical support a three or four out of ten.

Negative

The initial setup is easy. The deployment takes two weeks. The product is deployed on the cloud. We use a public cloud provider.

We do implementations. I will recommend the tool to others. Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for many things including performance management, Goal Management, Employee Central, Compensation Management, and SAP Jam, Recruitment, Onboarding.

SuccessFactors has a really solid process for talent management, starting with Goal Management which helps managers and employees build smart goals aligned with business goals. Unique Continues performance management provides another tool for managers to facilitate communication between employees and managers and ensure having high alignment between employees and managers. This helps to have effective performance and better optimize performance process. CPM helps managers to have an accurate picture of their employee's performance to evaluate employee performance all year daily.

From the moment you are evaluating the candidate through recruitment, the process related to review employee performance using Job profile builder will help to have a connecting process between Recruitment and performance.

Having an LMS and Compensation module helps you to have the complete process, where you can use LMS learning to improve weaknesses and reward top performers using compensation.

The performance management and learning management solutions are the product's most valuable features.

There are updates and new tools for measuring employees all the time. There's also a mobile application that can be used by anyone within the process.

Analytic reports are also provided, so you don't need another tool to handle reporting. It has its own dashboard and reporting tools that give you a good overview of everything.

The solution is losing a lot of utilization capabilities because most companies don't function in just one country; they operate in many around the world. It seems to have issues with handling the master data. One module is not the same across all countries. For example, in one case you will see the coverage of all of the localization processes related to the USA, but when it comes to the UK, it's covering maybe 50%. It's worse in other countries. In the Middle East, you might only get 10% coverage, for example. We were surprised at the level of variance from country to country.

The solution needs more localization, especially for the Middle East and Russia and Germany. 

There needs to be more end-user training.

I've been using the solution since 2012.

The stability of the solution is good, but I would not say it's perfect. Sometimes it's not 100%. There are occasions when you want to do some technical updates and it will shut down the server for eight to ten hours. Usually, there will be an agreement between SAP and the customer and we try to shut down the server during off-hours. This means, however, that the availability is not 100%. Still, it is, on average, quite stable.  

The scalability of the solution is good but not perfect. In our company, we have around 200 users and we use it for 16,000 employees. We plan to increase usage to cover 20,000 employees and have plans to roll out the solution to some of our countries in Europe.

The solution's technical support is weak. 

They have not taken care to put in place any certified consultants that understand the system very well to support you when there are incidents. They seem to just add people that are new, fresh, and don't have a lot of information about the system. They don't have the real capability to solve technical issues. It makes the customers suffer.

We previously used Microsoft Dynamics.

The initial setup was straightforward. Deployment times will vary from country to country according to the numbers, but most companies can implement it within three to six months.

You need to have some technical people on your team with you. You need one or two just to hand you each module and to help you understand the standard process so you can deploy and not forget any important features. From the business side, you also need from one to two people to be available during the implementation just to ensure that the user acceptance testing is done very well. It's a good idea to have a consultant visit with your team during implementation to check what was implemented inside of the business processes. They will help you understand the limitation of the space.

You need to have a consultant for deployment. Maybe later on in the process, if you are expanding, you don't need help, but you certainly need a consultant at the beginning.

Without having consultants and partners you will not be able to implement it. There is special access required to get to the backend of the system. We call it the low vision indexes. It's only provided to select consultants. Some features that you want to update also may require access to the provisioning. 

You will probably see an ROI after a year or two. It's great for auditing and there's a lot of reporting built-in so that you can really focus on processes. It will help you reduce manpower which saves money. And, because it can cover and support many companies and countries, it's perfect for multinationals that can now have one overarching system that covers basically everything.

The solution is subscription-based but companies do need to consider other ancillary costs, including upgrades, training, and general implementation costs.

We evaluated Origin and Workday before ultimately choosing this solution. In 2012, Origin was more on the cloud and Workday mostly just covered America rather than the rest of the world. They also didn't have any classes at the time.

We use the public cloud deployment model with SAP as the provider.

I'd advise others to schedule training for the team that will be handling implementation. It's important to have a reference case and go to other companies familiar with your business to check how it was implemented for them and to see how successful they have been overall. They may have good best practices you can learn from. 

Look for a good implementation partner who can take the time to work with you and choose wisely. Some may charge a lot of money and provide low-quality assistance.

You have to know the process before implementation. 

It's important to not purchase the license until you decide what you will use the system for and when you will implement it. It will help you avoid paying for a subscription without yet being able to use it or purchasing too large of a license.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

We implement our employee centers with core employee data using the solution. It integrates and stores employee profiles, and our foundation objectives.

The solution's most valuable feature is the metadata framework. It's a good idea to implement such a powerful tool. It is better, easier, and more flexible.

Whenever I have to enable a feature fully, finding the document for guidance to know about that specific feature becomes difficult. Sometimes to activate or enable a particular feature in my instance, I have to enable more than one feature in provisioning. I always face issues in getting the documents or references from SAP itself.

They should include professional documentation. They keep making changes, and incorporating them into documentation needs some time. They should work on a faster way of locating a proper documentation as well. 

Last year, we went for the solution's learning hub professional and support edition training. We gained basic knowledge of the solution and transferred it to our internal team. We have been accelerating the learning internally for SuccessFactors integration since then. We also have a testing environment where we are already testing our cycles and succeeding in the initial data migration.

It is a scalable solution.

The setup was straightforward. Also, SaaS has made a lot of things easier. I rate their implementations as eight out of ten. They have a powerful learning hub. I respect the way they clarify their system and explain their processes.

I do recommend SAP as a solution. I studied SAP in college and have ten years of accumulating knowledge in the ERP field. SAP has succeeded in being number one in the whole world. They have their philosophy about business. They have standardized a lot of business processes and business terminologies. They have succeeded in sustaining a powerful system supporting their philosophy. I rate it as a ten out of ten.

We use most of the modules for performance goals, recruitment, employed central succession planning, and salary review STI. We'll be using additional features going forward. We are customers of SAP and I'm head of HR tech and operations. 

The best feature is that the solution has an open architecture and provides an open platform so it can coexist with other systems. It allows for a different goal setting system, but still integrates well. SuccessFactors also integrates well at the backend with your core SAP which is also a benefit. My sense is that in the future the solution will evolve into a model similar to Salesforce where you have the core platform from SuccessFactors and plugins for everything else. 

The downside is that SAP resources are expensive and not very common from a tech stack point of view. Anything you want to change or any customization is expensive. Our user experience is not great and we're looking at building a privileged user experience layer on top of what exists.

I've been using this solution for four years. 

In terms of system stability, data integrity is good.

The solution is scalable. 

The technology is changing quickly and the solution requires support but it's not forthcoming. They say, "This is the product, now you figure out what to do with it." Every time we upgrade or implement something, we have to rely on our internal resources, even if we're willing to pay for support. AWS and Microsoft have advisory units that invest in employee-customer success but SF has nothing like that.

It's a good setup but with emerging solutions like Darwinbox, I think there might be challenges ahead because of the user experience and that will dominate things in the next few years. 

ROI depends on your business case. If you're coming from an SAP SCM or IBM implementation, then the return on investment is very low. You won't have a strong business case to move from platform A to platform B because transition costs are three to four times the license fee.

It's important to be clear about how you want to spend your money. No more than 60% should go to the licensing fee because there's a lot of additional work required to get a great user experience and have good infrastructure. You will need interfaces, integration with third-party tools, enhancements, and the like. I would also recommend building some in-house capabilities for platform administration and small modifications. Figure out how you'll interface with local platforms, payroll, time management, etc. They're going to decommission the on-premise version soon so explore their future plans. It may take a couple of years to complete implementation and you need to know where they'll be at that point. 

I would give a higher rating if the user experience was better but for now I rate this product eight out of 10. 

We use the solution for everything except payroll and time off. The solution is deployed on cloud.

The performance and goal management is good, and it has a fairly detailed employee central.

The integration between the recruitment module and employee central is a big problem.

With WFA, People Analytic, and SAC, the confusion that we have now is regarding  what should be used and what should not be used, which is a big problem.

For me, analytics is a big gray area in SuccessFactors. A person like me would want a tool like Power BI to be integrable to SuccessFactors in a way that I'm able to derive analytics and reporting the way I want to, and not get enrolled into three or four solutions.

I would rather have a direct connector into a good BI tool, like Power BI, and derive whatever I want from there, which of course, is not there. There are no inbuilt connectors for that.

The different ways people use analytics shouldn't be guided by the way the software is structured, or the way an ERP is structured.

I have been using this solution for three and a half years.

The solution is stable and predictable.

I have never had a problem with scalability. We have more than 3,000 users in our organization. Internally, we have a couple of people who manage the solution and do maintenance. For anything major, we use the integrator.

On a scale of 1 to 5, I would give technical support a 4.

Initial setup was not very complex. If you're looking at an ERP sort of a solution, there is complexity with the way you want to define your organization. If the organization is clear about that, in terms of business unit, division, function, departments, the way you want to structure your organization, then it is not a problem. But if that is not clear, then of course, it is an issue.

We used an integrator.

We have a yearly license. There are no additional costs.

I have also used Workday and Darwinbox. I prefer Workday because I found it to be better in terms of integration, data integration, management of data, and workflows.

I would rate this solution 7 out of 10.

The next version takes care of lots of things that I have mentioned, but since I haven't used the next version, I would rate it a seven.

SAP SuccessFactors functionality doesn't meet the expectation of our end users. There are other solutions that have better functionality, such as Workday, which is one of the top applications. Additionally, the solution could be easier to use.

I have used SAP SuccessFactors within the last 12 months.

SAP SuccessFactors is a stable solution.

We have approximately 40,000 to 60,000 users using this solution, it was installed by our corporation. One can conclude it is a scalable solution, they have done a good job.

When we have an issue with Our SAP SuccessFactors we have our corporate team that handles it. We only need to open a ticket with them.

My corporation has done the implementation of SAP SuccessFactors.

Our costs for the solution are subsidized by our parent company, I am not aware of the exact cost because of this. However, we pay $50,000 annually. If we move to another solution it will be more expensive.

We have been evaluating other solutions, such as UKG and Workday. We are thinking of moving away from SAP SuccessFactors.

I rate SAP SuccessFactors a five out of ten.