HR departments offer numerous services, and can be overwhelmed with queries and requests from internal employees and external sources; such as car leasing and pension providers. I’ve recently been involved with implementing an employee knowledge / self-service tool solution combined with central HR ‘ticketing’.
The solution combines SuccessFactors Employee Central, Hana Cloud Portal and SAP Cloud for Customer. These are packaged together as SuccessFactors ‘Employee Service Centre’.
Let’s take a closer look at the processes.
The Employee
Via an ‘Ask HR’ link within Employee Central (EC), employees can search policies, FAQs and other HR related information and also raise ’tickets’ to HR.
Tickets are essentially questions or issues, which are sent to the relevant HR team, individuals or service centre, depending on how your organisations HR department is set-up.
Employees can also view responses sent back to them from HR, view any attachments added by HR, update notes, statuses and search other tickets.
The HR Team
SAP Cloud for Customer is the place where the tickets are actually created and where HR advisors and managers, respond to, and manage, the tickets.
Tickets can be categorised and routed to the correct HR advisor or team (such as Payroll). Service Level Agreements (SLA) are setup in line with the agreed business service levels. SLA’s can be automatically determined, based on rules using ticket attributes, such as ticket categorisation and/or priority.
Standard response templates can be created, which are then used when replying to the employee, via email or a portal post to the ‘Ask HR’ application.
HR can also use MS Outlook to respond to tickets; a full trail of emails is then available as ‘Interactions’ against the HR ticket
Cloud for customer authorisations are setup to ensure that only relevant HR employees can view the data, and that sensitive HR data is not viewable by all.
Standard reporting is available, but not limited to, SLA compliance, ticket completion and creation rates
The Bit in the Middle
The ‘Ask HR’ application accessed from Employee Central, is actually a HANA Cloud Portal site containing OpenSocial widgets. These access ticket information from the Cloud for Customer tenant.
When the employee clicks on the ‘Ask HR’ link, the employee is authenticated – based on email address and via SAML2.0 – in Cloud for Customer. This authentication mechanism is standard, and set-up as part of the implementation.
That’s a short tour of the functionality. In my next blog, I’ll detail the HANA Cloud and Single Sign-On configuration required.
