What is Fieldglass?

Fieldglass was acquired by SAP in 2014 and is now a subsidiary. We are in the process of integrating Fieldglass products with Ariba procurement, SAP ERP HCM and SuccessFactors Employee Central. I believe this integration is important because a significant percentage of today's workers are contingent workers (independent contractors).

American businesses spend more than $425 billion per year on contingent labor, according to a 2009 Staffing Industry Analysts Contingent Workforce Estimate. The strong contingent workforce is evidence of a shift in current employment models.  Businesses are pulling resources from the labor force when and where needed, creating a new, more fluid dynamic in the overall workforce. [Source]

This is how Wikipedia describes Fieldglass
Fieldglass provides a vendor management system (VMS) called Fieldglass VMS, a cloud-based technology used to manage the non-employee workforce of contingent workers (independent contractors). The various business processes that such management comprises include procurement, statements of work, project management, and payment. In 2014, Fieldglass was recognized in The Forrester Wave: VMS, Q1 2014 by Forrester Research, Inc., as the highest-scoring VMS provider in Contingent Workforce Management/Vendor Management System (CWM/VMS) functionality and market presence.

If you are HR Technology professional, this is an area where you may have to develop knowledge and expertise. At the very least you should know what is Fieldglass and how it is integrated with SAP ERP HCM and SuccessFactors. My colleagues have already started the integration plan. We will be outlining them soon at upcoming events and communications. Here are some resources to get started.

1. A report on the contingent workforce by Deloitte Consulting
2. An infographic on the independent workforce from hireright.

The Art Of Thinking Clearly

The Art Of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli talks about the many biases we have and how they influence us in our life and work. It is very popular in Germany, I found out. He mostly refers to writings by other famous authors such as Nassim Nicolas Taleb and Daniel Kahneman.

Let us make the world run better

I get up every day and go to work not to create a feature, not to make a screen look better, not to answer a customer question, not to fix a bug or to market a product. I go to work because, what I do touches and improves the lives of most people alive today.

A Quick Overview of SuccessFactors August 2014 Release

Highlights of the August 2014 release:

NEW! “QuickGuides” feature in SuccessFactors Learning: Enable everyone in your organization to easily
create and share content with our new QuickGuides feature.

NEW! Programs feature in SuccessFactors Learning: Create and deliver academic-style, interval-based learning with the new programs feature.

NEW! Concurrent employment functionality in SuccessFactors Employee Central: Record multiple assignments associated with an employee record.

NEW! SuccessFactors Employee Central Service Center: Improve the efficiency and quality of HR services to help raise the level of employee satisfaction by leveraging call center and help desk capabilities
Global benefits capabilities: Configure and maintain benefits and enable employees to enroll in benefits, file claims, and track status updates.

Side-by-side HCM Cloud deployment capabilities: Use productized integrations to deliver a consolidated view and management of employee data across parallel deployments of the SuccessFactors Employee Central and SAP ERP Human Capital Management (SAP ERP HCM) solutions.

Integration add-on for SAP ERP HCM and SuccessFactors HCM Suite Side-by-side deployment capabilities:  The first set of packaged integrations to support our side-by-side HCM cloud deployment model is now available. This model provides a consolidated view and management of employee data in SuccessFactors Employee Central in the cloud and existing SAP ERP HCM deployments.

Talent Hybrid deployment model. We are also introducing SAP Process Integration technology support for the packaged integrations that connect SuccessFactors competencies and SuccessFactors Learning curricula to SAP ERP HCM qualifications.

SuccessFactors Recruiting and Recruiting Integration Learning Material

For many months now independent SAP consultants and SAP HCM consultants have reached out to me asking me how they can start learning SuccessFactors implementation. They ask me about learning to configuring the appropriate SuccessFactors product and in some cases integrating the product with SAP ERP HCM or SAP ERP. Some even complained to me about the lack of publicly available paid training material.

We always had implementation content. But such content was available only for SuccessFactors consultants and partners. That is starting to change. My colleagues in the SAP best practices team are starting to make such detailed step by step implementation content available publicly to everyone for free. This is good news for SAP HCM partner organizations who want to make the move to SuccessFactors, independent SAP HCM consultants and even fresh graduates who want to understand the basics of implementing SuccessFactors.

SAP best practice package for SuccessFactors Recruiting
My colleagues are starting with a best practice package for SuccessFactors Recruiting and SuccessFactors Recruiting integration with SAP ERP HCM. You can access the package from http://bit.ly/sapbestpracticesforsuccessfactors

This package is not only a step by step implementation guide for recruiting, but also good learning material for beginners. It is free for download for anyone.

The next SAP Best Practice package for SuccessFactors will be for SuccessFactors Compensation including the integration of Compensation with SAP ERP HCM. More will follow.