Com­pa­nies have to think about much more than prod­ucts and ser­vices to stay com­pet­i­tive. As the tal­ent short­age con­tin­ues to grow across all indus­tries and on a glob­al scale, meet­ing the needs of employ­ees requires as much atten­tion from an orga­ni­za­tion as meet­ing the needs of its customers. 

Greg Tomb has been the pres­i­dent of SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors for the last two years, and he over­sees the end-to-end busi­ness for SAP’s human cap­i­tal man­age­ment (HCM) solu­tions. He’s respon­si­ble for help­ing Suc­cess­Fac­tors cus­tomers ensure that peo­ple are at the heart of dig­i­tal HR trans­for­ma­tion efforts and max­i­mize each of their employee’s potential. 

He sat down with ASUG News dur­ing SAP­PHIRE NOW and ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence to dis­cuss the human rev­o­lu­tion, the impor­tance of the employ­ee expe­ri­ence to busi­ness results, and how com­pa­nies can posi­tion them­selves to be a step ahead in the race for talent. 

ASUG News: What trends in the work­force are you watch­ing right now? 

Greg: The dynam­ics of a chang­ing work­force right now are so far beyond what we’ve ever seen in the past that it’s forc­ing com­pa­nies to real­ly think about how to deal with tal­ent differently. 

Let’s first talk about the mas­sive tal­ent short­age, which is a glob­al issue. There is an aging pop­u­la­tion with not enough peo­ple enter­ing the work­force with skillsets need­ed, and this tal­ent short­age is pre­dict­ed to grow over the next few years. In addi­tion to that, we’re ush­er­ing in a dif­fer­ent type of employ­ee with mil­len­ni­als and Gen­er­a­tion Z, which rep­re­sent 40% to 50% of the work­force in many coun­tries. Last, but not least, com­pa­nies are now required to be much more global. 

All these fac­tors are hit­ting com­pa­nies big and small. Expec­ta­tions are much dif­fer­ent today than they were 10 or 20 years ago, and employ­ers are faced with try­ing to fig­ure out how to bring it all together. 

If you want to have the best peo­ple, keep the best peo­ple, and train the best peo­ple, then you’ve got to have tech­nol­o­gy to do it.

We have nev­er seen as much demand around HCM tech­nol­o­gy glob­al­ly like we’re see­ing today. If I rolled back the clock, HCM tech­nol­o­gy has his­tor­i­cal­ly been an on-premise solu­tion, which ran as a trans­ac­tion­al sys­tem. It pro­vid­ed infor­ma­tion on who worked for you, how much you were pay­ing them, and it ran reports that let you know what you need­ed to give some­one if they left the com­pa­ny. But now, it’s a com­plete end-to-end process with for­ward-think­ing tools to help you find the right tal­ent, onboard them, treat them right, and then tie them back to the pur­pose of the com­pa­ny. You need this tech­nol­o­gy, or your com­peti­tor that does have it will swoop in and steal your talent. 

We know this because we’ve seen our user base in SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors dou­ble in the last two-and-a-half years. We’re cur­rent­ly at 125 mil­lion users, and we’re very hap­py about that. 

ASUG News: There was plen­ty of dis­cus­sion at SAP­PHIRE NOW and ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence about Expe­ri­ence Man­age­ment (XM). How does the employ­ee expe­ri­ence con­cept fit with­in the capa­bil­i­ties of SAP SuccessFactors? 

Greg: To start, cus­tomers can pur­chase Employ­ee Expe­ri­ence (EX) prod­ucts as part of Qualtrics XM through SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors. These prod­ucts allow an employ­er to track and mea­sure an employ­ee expe­ri­ence from the ini­tial touch point before they’re an employ­ee to when they’re hired, onboard­ed, and to their whole life­cy­cle through the com­pa­ny. You can see every touch­point that an employ­ee has with SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors, and ask, ​“Are we doing the right thing?” 

It’s not just about doing a sur­vey once a year. It’s col­lect­ing the data at the time when the employ­ee is going through what­ev­er that event is in real time. It’s moments that mat­ter with data that’s now so impact­ful that it allows you as a com­pa­ny to make the right deci­sions for your people.

ASUG News: We talked last year about the evo­lu­tion of the SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors mobile user inter­face. Are there any new updates or enhance­ments to the UI in the past 12 months that cus­tomers should know about?

Greg: In the last year, there have been three things that we focused on. 

One was mov­ing all 6,700 of our cus­tomers to SAP HANA. The imme­di­ate ben­e­fit is the increased speed of our tech­nol­o­gy, and now our cus­tomers can take advan­tage of many oth­er SAP solu­tions that are on top of SAP HANA, such as SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud, SAP S/4HANA, and SAP Field­glass. Now, we can start talk­ing about an intel­li­gent enter­prise as we bring those process­es and data togeth­er, all while using the same tools. 

The sec­ond thing we focused on was to embed SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud with­in our SAP Suuc­cess­Fac­tors Peo­ple Ana­lyt­ics solu­tion. We rolled out new func­tion­al­i­ty for report­ing in the cur­rent release, and now we’re doing all the pre-release around ana­lyt­ics for cus­tomers with beta pro­gram­ming due in Q3. 

The third thing we con­tin­ue to focus on is our user expe­ri­ence (UX). We’ve invest­ed sig­nif­i­cant­ly in the past, but now we have an oppor­tu­ni­ty in front of us to help fun­da­men­tal­ly change how peo­ple engage with our prod­ucts. We’ve got a mas­sive team is redesign­ing our HCM suite to lever­age con­ver­sa­tion­al AI to cre­ate a nat­ur­al, enjoy­able expe­ri­ence and machine learn­ing and peo­ple data to cre­ate a tru­ly indi­vid­u­al­ized experience. 

ASUG News: What do you want ASUG mem­bers to know about SAP SuccessFactors? 

Greg: The most impor­tant thing to con­sid­er is that from an HCM per­spec­tive, the tech­nol­o­gy of today is light-years ahead and dif­fer­ent than the tech­nol­o­gy 10 — or even five — years ago. What we have today is so impor­tant for cus­tomers to lever­age as they change the game for their com­pa­nies. If they don’t invest in a new world of HCM, they’re going to fall behind competition.

ASUG News: With the work­force short­age and demand for tal­ent on the rise, Greg’s role will become even more crit­i­cal as HCM tech­nol­o­gy will be a neces­si­ty for orga­ni­za­tions look­ing to stay ahead of the curve. Com­pa­nies must think about the employ­ee expe­ri­ence as part of the over­all busi­ness strat­e­gy, and Greg and his team will need to focus on bring­ing it all togeth­er through SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors and the intel­li­gent enterprise. 

Inter­est­ed in learn­ing more about the newest tech­nolo­gies in HR? Reg­is­ter for the ASUG Expe­ri­ence for Human Resources & Pay­roll on Oct. 16 – 18 in Toronto.