SAP Payroll: Past, Present and Future with Steve Bogner

Описание: A SAP Payroll talk with Steve Bogner on SAP Payroll hosted by Sven Ringling.
With over 30 years experience in SAP Payroll, Steve is one of the leading SAP Payroll experts globally.

The conversation takes us through the trajectory of SAP's Payroll solution from its early days to current state into the future.

It starts in the early 90s, when Steve helped SAP to localise their payroll product for the US. Back then SAP R/2 and R/3 where seen as huge progress, as they included not just HR, Time and Payroll in a single system, but also expense management, finance, logistics, etc. This is interesting considering that modern enterprise architectures go away from the unified approach.

SAP has always been great at getting the basics right. Enormous flexibility and reliability made it a first choice payroll system in many of the 70+ countries it is available for. However, it was never known for having the fanciest user interfaces.

SAP HR incuding payroll was originally designed as a solution for HR and Payroll professionals. Employees or Line Managers accessing it directly was not on the agenda. But when the World Wide Web came around, SAP wrapped a web-layer around their solution to allow ESS and MSS (Employee and Manager Self Services). This is an interesting part of history to understand why the eventual architecture.

Much later, SAP also provided more modern and user frieldly UIs for payroll practictioners, especially the Payroll Control Center, which became a standard for managing payroll processes when Payroll was integrated with SuccessFactors Employee Central.

Steve points out that there is still room for improvement in Payroll user experience. Technology like PCC is already helping to identify and manage issues with validations and guidance, but there is more to come especially with AI.

Important point: "payroll errors" are rarely actual errors in payroll but usually the result of data errors. Whilst technology can help spotting them, process is still more important that tech. Based on Steve's broad experience, understanding the processes and players involved to provide the data payroll needs and then improving and stabilising them is paramount for high quality payroll.

Steve also shares one of the secrets of his success: stick around after implementation! Staying with your customer to support ongoing payroll operations and improvements is an important feedback loop to learn and get better over time. This is matching our approach at ORBIS People very well: we do not split our team into implementation and support cosultants, but make sure every consultant sees both worlds in order to improve learning and customer outcomes.

As mentioned above, SuccessFactors Employee Central is now SAP's state of the art core HR solution. Time and Attendance can be SuccessFactors Time Tracking or a 3rd party software, expenses come from SAP Concur,... It could seem we've gone full circle back into the 80s, when we had lots of separate systems before getting to the fully integrated R/3.

However, there is a difference now, as technology provides powerful integration platforms (especially SAP BTP-IS). They make it easer to manage a complex system landscape. One reason for this switch is the speed of change that is difficut to manage in a monolythic system. Another reason is the agility of being able to swap individual components of the archtecture.

It's still a challenge to manage such complex architectures. A particular risk is that teams focussing on their own "boxes" are even more likely to forget that Payroll is waiting at the end of the foodchain and depends on their output.

The immediate future is in EC-Payroll, complex integration landscapes, and fast change.

What we've all been waiting for for a while is SAP's new Cloud (native) Payroll (often called "Next Generation Payroll"). Whilst it is not clear when it may be available for most countries and for all levels of complexity, we agreed that a clean start with cutting edge technology will benefit most customers. However, we can't plan with it as there isn't a roadmap yet. After all, it is a huge investment for SAP competing with other topics, most notably AI.

There is no doubt AI will have a big impact on SAP Payroll - it has already started with features like "Explain my Payslip". There are 3 aspects:
AI helping implementation projects with configuration, data cleansing etc
AI supporting payroll practitioners, e.g. in identifying issues (using classic Machine Learning rather than genAI) and automation of processes
AI supportig employees e.g. by answering questions
With all decisions and data changes, it's important to adhere to the "human in the loop" principle. For this to make sense, AI needs to "show its work", as Steve points out.
We are both excited about the changes AI will bring to payroll, but we also know there will be many stumbling blocks.