Onboarding 2.0: What’s new with SuccessFactors Onboarding?

SAP has announced that its new and improved Onboarding 2.0 will be released together with the Q4 release updates for the SuccessFactors suite. Even though this is not a complete re-creation of the module, the update is so significant that you will have a hard time separating Onboarding 2.0 from the core foundation and Employee Central (EC).

Why is onboarding important?

Proper onboarding helps to reduce employee turnover and educate new hires quickly about the company and their new role in the workplace. Studies show that new hires decide within the first 6 months whether they are staying on the job. To protect your recruitment investment, you need a well-designed onboarding process that caters to the new generation of hires that expect speed and automation.

What’s new in Onboarding 2.0?

The new release contains significant improvements for the onboarding process, not only for the new hires joining the company but also for the HR managers and administrators who are managing the onboarding activities daily.
For example, configuration and the user interface are 100% aligned with what we are accustomed to from EC and other Fiori-based modules, which means greater usability and a smoother user interface.
Onboarding 2.0 shares core data structure and a database model with the entire SuccessFactors suite. This gives you direct access to use many of the same functionalities and objects from Foundation and EC. Most notable is the use of the Business Rule Engine for tailoring processes to client-specific needs as well as Meta-Data Framework (MDF) objects used to gather data directly in the core of the suite.

No more double maintenance

Because Onboarding 2.0 uses the same data model as EC, you do not have to worry about double maintenance between these two modules. Picklists and MDF objects are all the same between EC and Onboarding 2.0, which means that mapping data from Onboarding to EC is no longer necessary. The only mapping exercise left is from Recruiting to Onboarding.

Permission and group setup – Ad Hoc report is no longer needed for Permission sync

Onboarding 2.0 uses the well-known role-based permission approach to handle access permission and access groups for the onboarding process. This gives you much more transparency and makes it easier to align the permission setup across modules. Also, Ad Hoc reports do not need to be run to synchronize the permission groups, which simplifies the Onboarding-EC integration even more.

Manager new hire activities replaced by Onboarding tasks

The new Onboarding Tasks are much more flexible than before. With Onboarding 2.0, you can assign specific tasks to different Responsibility Groups pinpointing the people responsible for the individual tasks. We often hear from clients using the old version of Onboarding that this particular feature is a huge deficit in the module because company processes in which all tasks are handled by the same individual are very rare. This add-on of flexibility is again a big step forward for supporting businesses in their actual processes as well as making full use of the module capabilities.

How to get started?

Is your organization currently using Onboarding 1.0, and are you looking for the best strategy for your migration to Onboarding 2.0? Or perhaps you have been waiting for Onboarding 2.0 and want to implement the module as quickly as possible. Whichever situation your company is in with onboarding and the SuccessFactors HXM suite, Effective People can offer you expert guidance on SuccessFactors Onboarding.