Item: SAP SuccessFactors
Rating: 5
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SuccessFactors manages multiple HR functions for us including maintaining a basic employee profile, setting and cascading objectives, reviewing performance, managing learning and setting up learning assignments and plans, and some basic managerial reporting. SuccessFactors Employee Central is probably best at providing a reasonably robust learning management solution, but similarly, its objectives management is weak and leaves substantial room for improvement.

Pros and Cons

Learning Management - SuccessFactors enables me to see where my employees are with conforming to their mandated training.
Learning Plans - SuccessFactors makes it easy to push out required training plans and assignments to my reports with minimal effort on my part.
Performance Reviews - SuccessFactors makes it relatively easy to write performance reviews within the application by adhering to an HR established template for our performance reviews.

SuccessFactors execution on Objectives leaves me wanting. It is challenging to cascade objectives and have the end result be what you intended.
SuccessFactors does not offer a robust solution for saving your work. At times, the web app will crash, and you'll lose data if you haven't recently saved.
SuccessFactors navigation of its reporting options is rarely clear. I often find myself needing to run a report just to see what the expected output is.

Return on Investment

SuccessFactors Employee Central offers a one-stop-shop for many of the HR activities we need for daily management of our direct reports. This has saved me substantial time over visiting multiple 3rd party applications for my people management.
It seems SuccessFactors Employee Central could be doing more for me, but for whatever reason, HR has not decided to implement those tools and instead uses 3rd party tools. Perhaps SuccessFactors needs to offer better integration options or easier setup for some of its other features.
SuccessFactors Employee Central has really made it easy for my employees to search and find internal training courses that my company offers. This is a huge set up from our old system.

Alternatives Considered

iCIMS Talent Acquisition Software Suite

Unfortunately, my HR department has opted not to activate our recruiting tools within SuccessFactors. Instead, we use a 3rd party utility called iCIMS to take care of that. As a manager with too many tools in too many places, I'd welcome a single unified solution, but it seems iCIMS offers a more complete and robust solution for Talent Acquisition.

Support Rating

SuccessFactors Employee Central gets a middle of the road rating from me because of the things it does really well - Training. It falls short with the objectives cascade and visibility amongst my reports. That's what brings it down to a 5. Objectives need to be clear and concise in order to gain buy-in from your reports, and SuccessFactors muddies that by poor delineation between cascaded attributes and my report's objectives. The whole objectives cascade can be reworked.

Key Insights

Do you think SAP SuccessFactors delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with SAP SuccessFactors's feature set?

Did SAP SuccessFactors live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of SAP SuccessFactors go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy SAP SuccessFactors again?

Other Software Used

Workhuman (formerly Globoforce), Apple iCloud, Microsoft Visual Studio Code

Likelihood to Recommend

Success Factors is really well suited to handling needs of my organization. They've done a good job integrating with our course catalog and making it easy to book courses right from within the application. It falls short in letting managers cascade their objectives easily. When I cascade an objective, the cascaded objective will often inherit comments from my own objective and share them down to my reports - not ideal behavior.

SuccessFactors Employee Central - a one-stop shop if you can deal with frustrations.

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with SuccessFactors Employee Central