SAP HCM and SuccessFactors in comparison

For example, employees want to apply for vacation and training themselves without too much effort. Providing such services is a new challenge for many HR departments.

In addition, HR is challenged more than ever to recruit the right employees, retain them permanently and develop them in a targeted manner. HR is no longer primarily concerned with operational tasks, but increasingly with strategic aspects.

Against this background, support from HR software is becoming increasingly important. SAP offers two solutions for digitizing HR processes:

Human Capital Management (SAP HCM) and SuccessFactors. Both are intended to cover the entire HR spectrum. But there are still differences. It is therefore worth taking a close look at how they can interact.

Functional differences

SAP HCM has been an integral part of SAP ERP (or its ERP predecessors) for more than 30 years. The on-premises solution optimally maps and automates all core HR processes.

This primarily includes personnel administration, payroll accounting, personnel time management, personnel cost planning, and employee and organizational management.

This all works smoothly even in complex contexts - for example, with very differentiated collective agreements in the public sector or in the metal and chemical industries.

SAP HCM also provides support for other tasks: For example, the Learning Solution (LSO) can be used to organize knowledge transfer within the company.

SuccessFactors, on the other hand, is a newcomer. In 2011, SAP acquired the US company SuccessFactors, which launched its cloud-based HR solution in 2001. SuccessFactors' American origins are particularly noticeable in the core administrative processes.

As a human resources information system (HRIS), the cloud solution can excellently map personnel data worldwide. It also supports simple payroll processes.

However, SuccessFactors reaches its limits when it comes to complex social insurance or tariff models, which are common in Europe. In addition, complicated shift models can hardly be mapped.

In contrast, the solution is strong for strategic HR tasks, especially if they are globally oriented. For example, the application enables cross-border master data management combined with global reporting.

In talent management - i.e., topics such as recruiting and onboarding - as well as in the area of goals and performance, the solution offers numerous interesting functions for modern HR work.

By automating the many administrative core processes in HR, SAP HCM on the one hand relieves HR employees of their operational tasks. On the other hand, many jobs are accelerated enormously.

Both of these factors mean that HR managers can focus more intensively on strategic aspects - for example, employee recruitment or onboarding. When it comes to digitizing strategic tasks such as recruiting or onboarding, SAP SuccessFactors plays to its strengths.

Because SAP HCM and SuccessFactors cover different areas of responsibility particularly well, we believe that combining the solutions is ideal. Companies thus obtain efficient processes and free up time for the HR department for strategic tasks.

However, this ideal presupposes that two solutions are operated in parallel. There are two main models for integration. In the side-by-side model, talent management processes are mapped with SuccessFactors in the cloud, while SAP HCM is used for core processes.

In the core hybrid model, these processes also run in SAP SuccessFactors. Only data relevant to payroll and time management is kept in SAP HCM.