Moving on from 

SAP R3 ?

If you are implementing SuccessFactors or leaving behind legacy SAP R3 in your cloud transformation strategy, there are a few things you will want to know.

As an SAP R3 customer you are familiar with the heavy install base and infrastructure requirements of the legacy ERP days.  However if you’re looking forward to streamlining your landscape in the cloud, you’re going to have to tackle the sensitive data history problem in front of you.

There are minimum requirements for most countries like the US where federal agencies have established norms for data and document record keeping purposes and now globally you also have to deal with competing maximum data retention laws as a result of GDPR, CCPA and the global trends towards data protection and data sovereignty (such as China’s latest Personal Information Protection Law).

The good news is Fuse can help and port your entire work history for all employee, applicant, contractor data and documents to the cloud with access directly from SuccessFactors to enable HR, Payroll and Legal to respond to ongoing requests for these and more:

  • Employment Verifications
  • Unemployment claims
  • EEO audits & subpoenas 
  • Federal and State department of labor subpoenas 
  • Wage hour law disputes
  • General Manager and Employee historical inquiries
  • Paystub, Tax form reprints and self service options
  • Data Privacy data subject requests

 

Pitfalls and lessons learned for SAP R3 customers:

SAP R3 is being phased out

Therefore, using the R3 archiving feature prevents eventual decommission of the infrastructure.  This is a loss of opportunity to remove the heavy maintenance and infrastructure expenses not only of licenses but also the backend databases, servers, IT resources needed to support and ticketing volume.  Look for an agnostic cloud solution.

Archiving personal data isn’t as easy as it used to be for HR and Payroll

In order to fully decommission R3 you need to balance both the local recordkeeping laws AND other needs typically associated with historical data for at least the next 5-7 years.  These days “data” isn’t often neatly packaged in tables either;  it typically includes semi structured information (like performance reviews, paystubs, timecards) and complete unstructured data (like onboarding documents, applications, CVs).

Security is a fast moving field and cannot forever be patched for R3 artifacts in a timely fashion
Raw data from SAP R3 follows a highly proprietary data model

Which isn’t necessarily future proof for HR and Payroll business function reporting and analytics.  SAP R3 experience and knowledge will be in shorter supply in years to come and therefore it’s critical to implement a system agnostic data model like HR Open Standards to reduce dependency on application specific knowledge in the context of HR and Payroll data and history.  For example, Employee group, subgroup, payroll area are concepts that exist only in SAP R3 and nowhere else in the context of compliance record keeping- and exactly why archiving needs to include some domain expert staging of data in a “flattened and denormalized” fashion.

Extracting data from SAP R3 requires technical expertise

Technical expertise is needed in the various modules of PA, OM, Payroll, Time and Benefits to be successful.  Many data objects in SAP are ‘unique’ and especially when it comes to customer developed programs, infotypes and features standard SAP archiving options won’t suffice.  Expect to need to leverage a mix of ad-hoc queries, standard reports, and custom ABAP to fully decommission an R3 system successfully.

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