What’s Next for SAP SuccessFactors Time and Attendance Management and Our New Partnership with Kronos

SAP SuccessFactors and Kronos have announced a global reseller agreement where SAP SuccessFactors will sell Kronos’ Workforce Dimensions solution as the SAP Time Management application by Kronos.

Here I will outline SAP SuccessFactors’ time and attendance strategy, explain the reasoning behind the partnership and how it fits in the overall SAP SuccessFactors portfolio, and describe some of the details behind the solution, such as how it seamlessly connects to SAP SuccessFactors and how the various options are available to address specific business problems.

What is SAP SuccessFactors’ Time and Attendance Strategy?

SAP SuccessFactors’ strategy for time and attendance management is to deliver solutions that support the needs of the workforce in organizations of all sizes and in all industries around the globe. More specifically, we are working not only to ensure time and payroll accuracy, but improved work-life balance for your people, with advanced, innovative features that simplify and expedite time and attendance management as a part of an intelligent enterprise.

In delivering this strategy, our product investment and development objectives are to ensure that our customers will be successful, both today and tomorrow. This means that we will continue to invest and develop the SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Time Management application to support and grow our existing user base of more than 1.7 million users globally and invest in partnerships with leaders in workforce management, such as Kronos, that help us accelerate and deliver innovative key solutions.

Why Kronos?

Kronos is a leading provider of workforce management and human capital management (HCM) solutions. Thirty-five thousand organizations in more than 100 countries – including approximately 4,000 large enterprise customers and more than half of the Fortune 1000® — use Kronos applications that are purpose-built for their industry to control labor costs, minimize compliance risk, and deliver a world-class employee experience. SAP and Kronos share the same view that the future of work belongs to intelligent enterprises that leverage technology to create, innovate, and deliver great outcomes for their employees and customers.

Bringing together two global industry leaders, pooling our vast resources, and creating new ideas will enable us to deliver innovation and value to enterprises around the world. Our customers in industries such as, but not limited to, manufacturing, distribution, healthcare, banking, higher education, and government, with hourly paid workers and/or with highly unionized workforces will benefit from connected and localized HR processes and an engaging employee experience across workforce management, core HR, talent management, and payroll.

Why Workforce Dimensions by Kronos™?

Kronos recently launched Workforce Dimensions, which is highly regarded by Gartner* and IDC** as the future workforce management platform. Workforce Dimensions is uniquely positioned to support our strategy because it is a native cloud platform and it is built to support all worker types, regardless of their rules and regulations, for large enterprises around the world. Workforce Dimensions has been built from the ground up for unprecedented levels of operational insight and workforce processes.

Workforce Dimensions is unique in the following aspects:

• Manager Experience: Reduces time spent on administrative tasks with guidance, recommendations, and alerts based on patterns detected across workforce data — punches, schedules, accruals, coverage, etc.
• Employee Experience: All processes via mobile devices allows employees to start their shift, check their accrual balance, or swap shifts with a colleague based on collaborative scheduling processes. Smart technologies will also help the employee by proposing only best-fit schedules, based on employee preferences.
• Data-Driven Automation: Data interaction and delivery is reimagined through embedded analytics and personalized visualizations. Get real-time visibility into compliance issues or employee well-being — actionable insights when it matters most.
• Intelligent Systems: Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning analyze workforce data providing guidance and best-fit recommendations — improving volume forecasting accuracy, shift swap recommendations, and self-service capabilities for employees.
• Architecture and Platform: Designed as a multi-tenant platform, which dramatically reduces time to implement and allows easy integration with other applications, significantly increases the customer’s time to value. Capable of automating routine tasks by using AI and machine learning, and enhancing self-service, allows people to work anywhere and on any device.
• Platform Extensibility: A modern technology infrastructure, seamlessly integrated with foundational applications employees use every day. Cloud-native, with open APIs, and extensible — mold to your business and easily adapt as it evolves.

What are the Benefits of using SAP Time Management by Kronos?

Your organization benefits from harmonized processes and increased workforce productivity, resulting in:

• Uniform time and attendance processes on a single platform with built-in capabilities to meet complex industry-specific requirements
• Dedicated capabilities for hourly and salaried employees to meet business expectations
• Embedded basic scheduling and optional advanced capabilities to forecast workforce needs based on machine learning technology
• Embedded absence management and optional advanced capabilities to solve deep country-specific cases, such as FMLA eligibility.

Your entire workforce benefits from personal, role-based experiences across all devices resulting in:

• Improved employee engagement with simple, yet powerful (mobile) solutions
• Better workforce scheduling based on AI recommendations and collaborative scheduling
• Reduction of timecard issues because they can be solved before they become exceptions based on proactive alerts and actionable reminders
• Increased adoption by integrating with popular applications and technologies such as Microsoft Outlook.

Your bottom line benefits through reduced risk using workforce management best-practices, because of:

• Localization and global capabilities serving multinational enterprises in over 150 countries
• Your ability to ensure compliance by centrally enforcing regulatory guidelines on various leave and mandatory requirements
• Automated software updates for compliance and feature updates
• An established leader with 40 years’ experience managing time for over 40M people worldwide, across all industries and organizational sizes.

What about Integration Between SAP and SAP Time Management by Kronos?

Firstly, the user interface integrates seamlessly with SAP to create a uniform user experience. Secondly, everything required for integration is made available via the API layer of the Kronos D5 platform, which is the foundation of Workforce Dimensions and is accessible to partners, developers, and customers.

Integrations are seamless and automated, meaning that:

• Changes to employee data, cost center assignments and transfers, or organizational hierarchies in SAP SuccessFactors automatically triggers an update in SAP Time Management by Kronos.
• You can schedule when your data is integrated.
• You can minimize the risk of human input error, increasing payroll and accruals accuracy..

This benefits your organization by removing silos through a flexible, connected platform with:

• Practical productized, pre-packaged integrations to connect core HR, workforce management, and payroll
• Connections to Kronos InTouch and 4,500 terminals via universal device manager
• Embedded integration tools and open APIs to easily connect to other third-party applications
• Multi-tenant application offered exclusively via Google Cloud in the U.S., Australia, and Europe.

Which Product is Right for Me: SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Time Management or SAP Time Management by Kronos?

SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Time Management is for organizations that need global absence management capabilities with support for time tracking and overtime calculations.

If you have a more complex environment, SAP Time Management by Kronos supports workforce scheduling, time tracking for hourly workers, and advanced leave management capabilities, such as military service time.

Find Out More

Start exploring the benefits of this partnership for your organization on the Time and Attendance Management area of sap.com, contact your SAP SuccessFactors account representative, or contact me directly.

Paul Meredith is director of Solution Management for SAP SuccessFactors

*Gartner Analyst Report: Prepare Yourself for the Future of Workforce Management
**Transforming the Public Sector Workforce