What needs improvement with SAP HCM?

The organizational management (OM) side needs improvement due to frequent reorganization which makes it tedious to make all the movement changes and combinations.

There's still room for improvement. We need end-to-end systems. Only the HR team uses HCM, but employees don't have access to their data. With Employee Central, employees can see their ratings, increment cycles, and other details, making things more transparent. SAP's technical support is okay. In my last job, when we had a P1 issue, just raising a ticket wasn't enough. You need to follow up every ten minutes and call them for updates. It depends on the person handling it. I don't just rely on SAP's support system. Even though it's automated, it's about the people who want to solve the problem quickly. I don't think the support team understands how serious production downtime is. I want SAP HCM to adopt new changes faster, like AI and analytics, for future releases. SAP HCM is slow compared to Tableau or Power BI. In Fiori, we faced challenges creating dashboards. It should work fast to compete with startups in areas like AI-powered queries and instant dashboards.

The product could be improved in terms of cost. Additionally, having a reliable support partner who thoroughly understands our needs and can promptly address issues would enhance the overall user experience.

What can be improved in SAP HCM depends on the industry it serves. The system's navigation could be simplified for users. The flow and integration between parts, like core HR, payroll, and recruiting, must be communicated properly. Users should focus on how doing things correctly from the start will improve things in the long run rather than feeling overwhelmed by tasks.

When performing reconciliation, manual entry is sometimes required, and barcode scanning isn't always available. Integration with barcodes would make reconciliation smoother and track every product. If I enter data for many products and need to go back, I want the process saved so I can resume without starting over. Integration would help. For HR processes, SAP HCM is very effective. It handles large employee data sets, making onboarding, paperwork, and document storage easy. It also manages tickets and other HR tasks efficiently. Overall, I find it excellent for HR.

HCM could improve compatibility, making it more accessible via web applications and graphical interfaces. Additionally, pricing could be more competitive compared to SuccessFactors.

SAP HCM cannot integrate with other third-party applications. One of the drawbacks we encounter with SAP HCM, specifically in payroll management, is the limitation regarding changing payroll areas within the same month. For instance, if an employee transitions from staff to non-staff status during the month, we face difficulties because the system doesn't allow us to change the payroll. We encounter issues related to employee repatriation, especially when individuals return within a two-year timeframe. The system sometimes picks up previously processed data, complicating the repatriation process. As a result, we often have to find workarounds to address these issues. These challenges may stem from our system configuration, but we're still investigating to determine the exact cause.

We find some challenges in the integration between SAP HCM and SAP SuccessFactors.

A better user interface and greater AI integration are crucial. Which is now a part of the road map ahead. Integration isn't an issue anymore; they've solved that. The current integration is fairly seamless.

SAP HCM needs to improve its UI.

What cannot be facilitated through the product's standard functions can be done through development. Success factors also come into the picture in the new cloud management aspect and integrations. For instance, S/4HANA. The two aspects are development, with reports, interfaces, conversion, enhancement, prompts, and smart forms. The reporting aspect covers employee and manager self-service, anything the employee can do. Then there are already success factors for the cloud solution which cannot be integrated into S/4 HANA.

Some reports need to be added on the time management side.

There are several issues with GuI, and it's not easy to use. Additionally, it requires a significant amount of configuration, and we haven't been able to find anyone who can meet our specific data configuration needs. But the major issue it's a really old fashion app. We are in 2023, there is no need to use an app that looks like this.

I think that with the cloud's introduction and because of the new changes, SAP HCM will become dormant. The talent components in SAP HCM are not really viable anymore. One thing that I know is that SAP HCM has no workforce planning. But in the olden days, we had personnel planning, which worked very well for finance or budgeting. So if there was something similar to it in the solution, I'm not too sure about it since I haven't had all the exposure to workforce planning to see how different it works from personnel planning.

We aim to keep business and business scenarios updated and customized within the system. Thus, we want to receive frequent updates.

The talent modules are lacking in HCM, so I would recommend switching to SuccessFactors for talent management, but HCM excels at time management and payroll.

We input all of our workflows into SAP to make our work environment better. All of our new projects and new policies will be implemented in SAP. It would be very helpful for our company if a new version was released with the ability to contain all of the things that we have newly introduced in our company.

SAP needs a total upgrade to the user interface. I've worked with the performance module and the objectives and goals module in HCM and they're far from being satisfying to any customer compared to what exists now with SuccessFactors. SAP also needs to apply better practices to the talent management modules. There needs to be a renovation of the interface and functionalities of the talent management modules.

SAP HCM could improve by having more resources and making it more user-friendly. It is complex.

HCM is actually moving over to the cloud, which is Success Factors or S/4HANA. It's a better solution than the current platform because the current platform is quite rigid and not as flexible and end-user friendly as other HR solutions. This is a transaction driven type of system, whereby a user actually has to know or understand a certain transaction code. If they have no idea, they will not be able to do anything. From that perspective, there are a couple of drawbacks. The solution is of course not as flexible. It's more than an application. It was the best back then, but things have evolved and technology has evolved significantly. People want easier to work with applications. The graphic user interface could be improved. It's not for a use of 20. I think the most improvement will be on the front-end than the back-end.

The extensibility that SuccessFactors talks about is when we are required to create an add-on solution or a small application, that could be developed within the ecosystem of the Oracle HCM itself, and then integrate it easily. This is a feature that we can look forward to seeing in SAP as well. The extensibility of the integration could be improved.

It would be nice if the solution migrated to S/4HANA, although this is not an immediate need of ours.

The solution is rather expensive. I'd like to see the solution offer even more stability in future releases.

I'm currently working for a state-owned government company, and we need to follow some standards and regulations. We also have a strategy to be followed. Sometimes the template and the format are not available in the SAP HCM, so we have to work around this limitation. The tax also sometimes changes in my country, and we have to redo everything to change the payroll calculations, benefits, and things like that. The talent management feature can be improved. It is currently very simple in SAP HCM. SAP is also very hard to integrate. In terms of monitoring, there are no monitoring tools, but as long as we take care of the disk capacity, there is no problem.

The Time Management feature is not very user-friendly. The speed of technical support can be improved. The configuration requires somebody with technical know-how, and it would be better if it were easier to do.

I would like it to move more towards a single data space or a single data source. SAP as a platform relies on multiple data sources because traditionally, it has been bolted together by the acquisition of other products rather than a single database. That's why there are a lot of points of failure and a lot of required points of integration. They need a single integration point.

This solution needs to be more configurable and user-friendly. People who work with HCM need to have the proper knowledge of coding.

This product has a lot of features that are much improved and more advanced than other solutions. In our area of the Gulf region and the Middle East, a lot of organizations depend on it because it meets with regulation compliance and security concerns. So government and banking depend on the SAP HCM solution for administration on-premises. SAP had developed new screens for the latest release of SAP HANA for HR on the cloud. They are doing the most innovation for HR on the cloud. So, there are some screens right now for both on-premises and cloud but the company is focused mostly on cloud development. A lot of the clients who deal with regulations must currently stay with on-premises solutions for critical data. SAP needs to continue trying from time-to-time to develop and release some new screens and new tools for HR on-premise that facilitate the working and interaction with the interface. They should do this in parallel with the cloud. Instead, they are leaving the on-premises customers behind. For the next release of HCM, I would like to see more interactive screens and parallel development for on-prem and cloud. SAP now does the most innovation for the cloud solution and less innovation for the on-premises client. In our experience and with our clients almost all customers depend on the on-premises solution for sensitive data — either by choice or regulation. It would be nice to see a mobile interface as well.

The implementation of the solution can be a bit difficult. They should make it easier. If it could be as simple as the SuccessFactors implementation that would be ideal. There should be integration with iOS products. It would be nice if we could integrate it into the field currently, but it's not active.

SAP is not ready to sell any licenses in the Middle East. SAP is not ready to sell the license on time and delays the progress of projects. It's better to work with a competitor like Oracle. Those that are selling the product just go through powerpoints and don't have the knowledge necessary to sell. They can't answer any questions.

The organizational structure visualization could be improved in future releases. The solution has a very poor interface.

It is a bit tedious and manual to work with. At first, it was impossible for us to pull up a report of employees by status and region, though this was eventually fixed. Going forward, they should fix more things in the reports. E.g., I want to see on the reports the age of the employees, their position, their salary with their salary scales, and any promotions that they have had. People want to see these reports.

The interface is data-based and outdated, without many features, so it could be modernized. This solution is sufficiently complex that many end-users do not know how to operate it. It takes a long time to apply an update patch to the system. It is a headache for any functional users because it requires a lot of IT involvement. This is unlike other solutions where either I can do it, or for cloud-based deployments, the vendor can do it online. With the time required for patching and testing, the internal IT teams sometimes try to avoid it and then perform patching only once or twice a year. In the meantime, the business is doing things manually. I recall that SAP was not that flexible when it came to creating the interface, or new tables, because there were limitations when we were developing one of the new pension schemes. I remember that they were struggling to get things done. Also, when you do this, the internal business has to manually connect and configure whatever they've developed. This is a very costly solution.

The management side needs improvement. To me, I think people have underestimated this solution because we know what consists of all the objects in regards to the organizational structures, positions, departments, training, there could be better improvement on that. On the personnel administration side, it's very difficult to do custom development. You're always dependent on your editors to do that. And now again, I'm comparing it to SuccessFactors because on SuccessFactors it's very easy to do. Any additional fields or stuff you want, they have the ability to apply all those changes. I would say that's where this solution really falls short. It makes the maintenance and the support of the system very complicated as well. There needs to be more support for the HCM solution.

* System usability is a challenge. * It needs a lot of end user training as it is not intuitive at all.