Blog

In this week’s blog, we chat with Sapnesh Koka, a highly experienced SAP HCM (SAP Human Capital Management) and SuccessFactors consultant. Speller International appreciates having such a great candidate on our books and have placed Sapnesh in key roles with South Australian Power Networks and more recently with Sodexo.  

Tell us a bit about yourself and your SAP experience 

I have been consulting in the SAP HCM space for more than 15 years now and my focus these days is helping clients in their HR transformation journey to the cloud. This covers a wide range of SF modules such as EC, PMGM, Succession and Calibration and ECP. 

 How did you get into SAP? 

Getting into SAP was completely by accident – yes, devoid of any planning or forethought.  I was in a group of about 120 consultants who were hired straight out of university to work on different SAP projects after the initial training.  

What was the biggest learning curve for you personally going from on-premise SAP HR to cloud-based SAP SuccessFactors? 

You must move from a configuration-centric approach to an employee-centric mindset. This meant a strong focus on the user experience and building processes that were intuitive and allowed for scale, as well as adapt to changing business trends. Heavily customised processes have their own challenges. 

What do you believe are the biggest advantages for a company looking to implement SAP SuccessFactors? 

There are three key advantages.  

The first is lower maintenance costs as opposed to a traditional application of support packs in an on-premise scenario where additional effort is required during the deployment cycle of testing, cost, and resources having to spend time outside of BAU activities. 

Secondly, shorter implementation times are a plus. 

Thirdly, the product is intuitive and comes pre-packaged with best-in-class HR practices that could be referenced. For example, the positions and job definition framework.

How do you think SAP SuccessFactors compares to its main competitor Workday?  

Obviously SAP SuccessFactors is what I do. SuccessFactors is great product for organisations of all different level and you can pick and choose functionality based on your specific business requirements  

Workday however has been developed as a ground-up cloud solution which makes it superior in terms of integration capabilities, with the data structures being similar across the various modules creates for a seamless experience across different HR modules. The data transfer is more seamless and typically known to have fewer problems. 

If you had the power to change, update or improved with SAP SuccessFactors what would it be and why? 

Replication of data across modules still has its problem areas. 

Any final advice for someone looking to upskill or cross-skill with SAP SuccessFactors? 

I would say the foundation is very important and thus a natural progression would be to start with EC (Enterprise Controlling) and then branch into areas that you are passionate about, be it Talent management, payroll, or time.  This will make the journey a lot more enjoyable.