Automated HR Data Maintenance

SuccessFactors: Get two days' work done in just ten minutes

Mainova supplies around one million people in and around Hesse with electricity, gas, heat and water. At the same time, the company, which is headquartered in Frankfurt am Main, is a major employer for around 2800 employees in the region. Since its implementation in 2020, SAP SuccessFactors has become an important driver of HR work: On the one hand, Mainova maps its entire talent management with the corresponding modules of the cloud-based software. On the other, SuccessFactors Employee Central serves as a valuable data hub for employee master data, as Jonas Brauburger, specialist for Mainova's HR IT systems, explains. 

“When the cost centers are changed, SuccessFactors does not automatically pass this on to the assigned positions.“

Jonas Brauburger is the HR IT systems specialist at Mainova and was closely involved in the implementation of Ingentis.

Data inheritance and evaluation

However, the lack of a function for data inheritance and evaluation paths presented the company with major challenges when transferring organizational management to the cloud. Due to the lack of structure rules in SuccessFactors Employee Central, organizationally subordinate objects have to be adapted manually when the parent element is adapted. Jonas Brauburger illustrates this with an example: "If, for example, the cost center is to be changed for a department, this is not automatically passed on to the assigned positions and employees in SAP SuccessFactors. The data adjustment must therefore be triggered manually in each case in order to ensure the correct account assignment later during payroll. This is very time-consuming and simply not an option in the course of major restructuring! Even for operational, smaller changes, ongoing data corrections to subordinate objects are difficult to track."

In order to be able to update the large number of data records efficiently and without errors, those responsible at Mainova tested quite a few scenarios. "Unfortunately, none of this was satisfactory if you want to run organizational management in the cloud," Brauburger looks back. "Through online research, however, we then discovered Ingentis Business Rule Trigger - a tool that addressed our exact problem and offered a solution to it."

Trigger and update

Business Rule Trigger detects changes and then causes all subordinate objects within a freely configurable evaluation path to retrieve the new information. In this way, the entire organizational structure is updated across all hierarchies. In addition to the cost centers, this also affected the change of manager use case in particular at Mainova as part of the restructuring. "Since then, however, the topic has grown quite a bit at our company! We now inherit significantly more - all structure-relevant changes in the organizational hierarchy as well as changes to HR responsibilities at our HR business partners, for example. The solution also benefits us in terms of cross portlet rules, which are only offered to a very limited extent in the SuccessFactors environment. Ingentis Business Rule Trigger allows us to freely write from one object to another and even trigger workflows here." 

The IT specialist illustrates the huge time savings with concrete figures: "Work that would previously have taken us one or even two working days to do manually or by mass update can now be done in just ten minutes! That really saves us quite a bit of manpower!" The process can either be triggered on demand or carried out automatically at individually defined, regular intervals - at Mainova, for example, very closely every five minutes. By eliminating all manual effort, the error-proneness of the update process can also be reduced to a minimum. In addition to time, Mainova therefore also gains a noticeably higher quality of HR data by using Ingentis, as Jonas Brauburger emphasizes. "The added value of this tool is unfortunately still underestimated in many cases - although it is really great!"