Introduction

In an era where digital transformation has permeated every facet of business operations, the human element remains the cornerstone of organizational success. The accelerated evolution of the Chief Human Resources Officer’s (CHRO) role, from traditional record-keeping and compliance to strategic organizational influencers, underscores the importance of people-centricity in the digital age. As organizations grapple with the challenges and opportunities presented by rapid technological advancements and unexpected global events like the pandemic, the emphasis on Human Experience Management (HXM) has surged. HXM, with its intrinsic focus on omni-connected employee experiences, mental wellness, inclusion, and diversity, has redefined the narrative, positioning HR as a strategic business enabler. Topics such as the future of work, hybrid work models, and the imperative for reskilling and upskilling to ensure long-term employability are now central to the CHRO’s agenda. Amidst these dynamic shifts, an SAP DWC dashboard for Talent Insights emerges as a critical tool. It provides real-time, actionable insights that enable CHROs and organizational leaders to make informed decisions and drive meaningful change.

This blog post explores a proof of concept of creating insights into employee workplace activities around collaboration and communication patterns with data that is available as part of collaboration platform used in the organization, business context information available from SAP Success Factors, SAP Concur along with data from feedback management system. The data collected from these multiple sources can provide a good insight for measuring the productivity, growth, wellbeing, and commitment of the employees.

Engagement Overview

As part of collaboration program, SAP and Accenture has built reference architecture for SAP Datasphere around Talent Insights with data integration from SAP and non-SAP sources. This work has been jointly defined and executed by the teams of PVN PavanKumar (Chief Expert & Head of APJ, SAP Labs India), Nipun Dev (Managing Director, SAP Business Group at Accenture) and Sejal Parikh (Managing Director, Global Solution Modernization lead for SAP transformations at Accenture)

Thanks to Bhagya Subbareddy (Global Vice President, Strategic Partnerships at SAP), Steve Delien (Chief Technology Architect for SAP Business Group at Accenture) for anchoring this strategic partnership between SAP and Accenture.

Thanks to Rekha Shukla for curating this business scenario and co-innovating this solution along with SAP.

Business Scenario and Use Case

Business Case 1: Analyzing Employee Productivity, Growth, and Well-being with Respect to Pay Parity and Inclusivity

In today’s dynamic business landscape, organizations recognize the paramount importance of nurturing and maximizing the potential of their workforce. This entails a multifaceted approach, combining data-driven insights from various aspects of employee engagement and performance. Let’s delve into a comprehensive business scenario that highlights how this can be achieved, culminating in improved employee growth and productivity.

Data Sources and Insights: Integration of SuccessFactors with Microsoft Viva Insights

• Workplace Activities, Communication Behaviors, Collaboration Patterns: By meticulously tracking workplace activities, communication behaviors, and collaboration patterns within the organization, valuable insights are gleaned. This data helps in measuring and optimizing productivity, growth, wellbeing, and commitment among employees.
• Moods, Sentiments, Engagement Patterns: Reflections on various moods, sentiments, engagement patterns, as well as stress and satisfaction levels of employees offer a deep understanding of their emotional well-being and overall job satisfaction.
• Work Patterns and Metrics: Keeping a close eye on work patterns and metrics, such as active working hours and response times to emails, enables organizations to fine-tune their operational efficiency.

Business Case 2: Gauging the Overall Employee Sentiment in the Workplace

Data Source and Insights: Powered by Qualtrics

Gathering feedback and assessing the overall sentiment of employees regarding their engagements and workplace environment is vital. It provides insights into how employees perceive their roles, the organization, and their work environment.

By harnessing tools and methods to capture these sentiments, organizations can be more proactive in addressing concerns, bolstering positive sentiments, and ensuring an environment where employees feel heard, valued, and integral to the organization’s success.

Business Case 3: Advancing Diversity and Skill Development while Monitoring Training Expenses

Data Source and Insights: Integration with SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Concur

• Gender Diversity Analysis: Organizations can assess gender diversity across different categories of performers and evaluate salary distributions to ensure pay parity.
• Skill Gap Analysis: By analysing skill gaps and mandatory/compliance gaps through Training Needs Analysis (TNA), organizations can identify areas where employees require additional training. These insights enable organizations to assign relevant training programs to employees, closing skill gaps effectively.
• Expense Analysis: Tracking the expense associated with training initiatives across various business units and departments is essential. This enables organizations to measure budget versus actual spending, ensuring cost-effectiveness.

Collectively, these business cases underscore the pivotal role of data-driven insights in shaping organizational strategies, ensuring employee well-being, fostering diversity, and driving continual growth in today’s dynamic corporate landscape.

Solution Overview and Technical Architecture

Let us look at information that resides in different system, and the need to consolidate and bring together all the information to derive insights on employee talent.

In the below diagram, to get an overall insight on employee wellness in terms of wellness and productivity in an organization, it is important to be able to understand their workplace activities, communication and collaboration behaviours based on the interactions on Microsoft collaboration tools like MS Outlook or MS Teams for example. Also, organizations request for survey from employees on different aspects for example, it could be on job satisfaction, trainings, applications and systems usage, internal helpdesks, policies etc to evaluate and understand the adaptability of employees to the organization’s change from time to time. Apart from these, organizations have forums, discussions etc to be able to capture feedback and thoughts from employees.

The enterprise data like employee information, skill transformation details, career growth in the organization, preferences in terms of work, travel, training etc. resides in SAP systems of SAP Success Factors, SAP Concur and SAP S/4HANA. With multiple data sources in the landscape, let us look at how to leverage SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud to be able to federate all the data and convert them into insights. With these insights, organization can look at how to effectively manage and encourage employee and employment for themselves.

Below is a high-level technical reference architecture:

High Level Architecture

With standard out of the box connectors offered in SAP Datasphere for Microsoft Azure Data Lake Storage, SAP Success Factors and SAP S/4HANA, data from these platforms and systems can be federated into SAP Datasphere.  For integration approach for data from SAP Concur and Qualtrics, it is recommended to use SAP Integration Suite – SAP Cloud Integration. With these different approaches of bringing data into SAP Datasphere, actionable insights and dashboards can be developed in SAP Analytics Cloud.

They key benefits of bringing together data and information into SAP Datasphere provides us approach for seamless integration, single point of access for the data in heterogenous landscape, helps us combine data silos and build effective dashboards in SAP Analytics Cloud.

Maintaining data and leveraging multiple systems for capturing information is important, however combining data from different sources to be able to derive intelligent understanding of what actions to be taken is achieved with SAP Datasphere.

Benefits

Here are the key benefits of HXM analytics with SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud:

1. Business-Centric Data Delivery: SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud deliver business data within its relevant context. This empowers organizations to make data-driven decisions based on a deep understanding of how data relates to their specific business goals and objectives.
2. Efficient Data Modeling and Integration: These platforms provide effective and efficient tools for modeling and integrating business data from diverse sources. This streamlines the process of bringing together data from various systems, ensuring a unified view of the workforce.
3. Data Governance Throughout the Lifecycle: Ensuring data governance is critical, and SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud help maintain governance across the entire data lifecycle. This includes data quality, security, compliance, and data lineage, which are essential for maintaining data integrity.
4. Simplified Modeling with SAP Datasphere Analytic Model: Complex modeling requirements are effortlessly addressed with the ability to reuse semantical definitions from SAP applications through the innovative SAP Datasphere Analytic Model. This simplifies and accelerates the modeling process, reducing the time and effort required.
5. Innovation in Hybrid Architectures: Organizations can drive innovation by leveraging existing SAP models across hybrid architectures. This means that regardless of whether data resides on-premises or in the cloud, you can harness the full potential of your SAP solutions.
6. Access Business Data with APIs: SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud offer the advantage of readily available APIs, making it easy to access business data. This accessibility enables the creation of data projects, fostering agility and enabling teams to extract meaningful insights from the data quickly.

In conclusion, the combination of SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud offers a powerful suite of tools for Human Experience Management (HXM) analytics. These solutions enable organizations to extract value from their data, improve decision-making, and foster innovation, all while maintaining data governance and ensuring data quality. With these benefits, businesses can enhance their workforce management and employee experience, ultimately driving success in the modern HR landscape.

How to get started

In the below blog posts, Lalit Mohan Sharma and Navya Khurana have described the technical steps of how-to setup the connections and configure the data federation from SAP Success Factors into SAP Datasphere.

Connecting SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Datasphere | SAP Blogs

Now, let’s deep dive to see how SAP Cloud Integration can be leveraged to integrate data from SAP Concur to SAP Datasphere.

Bring SAP Concur Data to SAP Datasphere (Part-1) | SAP Blogs

Lastly, below blog post captures details of integrating Qualtrics Survey results into SAP Datasphere.

Bring Qualtrics Data to SAP Datasphere | SAP Blogs

Demo

Below screenshots depict the dashboards for HR Managers to look at employee growth, productivity and spend analysis for skill transformation in organizations.

Employee Growth and Productivity

Spend Analysis for Employee Skill Transformation

You can watch a demo here that showcases dashboards capturing employee growth and productivity and spend analysis for employee skills transformation.

Additional Reading

To learn more about SAP Business Technology Platform, see the learning journey on SAP Learning called Discover SAP Business Technology Platform (a great, free introduction to BTP and the Intelligent Enterprise strategy to see what it’s all about) or check out Develop Advanced Extensions with SAP Cloud SDK plus much more free learning at the SAP Learning site.

Summary

We hope this has given you a brief idea of leveraging SAP Datasphere to create business-focused and insightful dashboard to extend data from SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Concur and Qualtrics into SAP BTP ecosystem. This scenario discussed not only offers a comprehensive view of talent metrics and KPIs but also acts as a compass, guiding HR functions in their journey to be agile, proactive, and adaptive. In essence, as businesses navigate the intricacies of a digital world, this dashboard anchors them in the understanding that their greatest asset remains – their people.

Special thanks to Lalit Mohan Sharma, Navya Khurana from SAP and Rekha Shukla for driving this engagement from Accenture along with Neeti Singh, Arpit Srivastava, Vivek Agarwal, Sanatan Gupta and Amit Kumar for collaboration in building the solution.

To learn more about SAP BTP, see the learning journey on SAP Learning called Discover SAP Business Technology Platform, a great introduction to BTP and the Intelligent Enterprise strategy to see what it’s all about for free or checkout Develop Advanced Extensions with SAP Cloud SDK plus much more free learning at SAP Learning site.