On November 17th, the 2H-2023 version of SAP SuccessFactors will be released to all customers. Same as for the 1H release, I will show the most significant changes that affect the integration.

Changes for PA_SE_IN and ECS4HCM

Compared to the 1H release, a large part of the changes are not only reserved for the newer S/4HANA component ECS4HCM. Most of them actually come into PA_SE_IN as well. Thus they will also be benefitting customers who couldn’t create the technical requirements for ECS4HCM. Accordingly, customers can definitely benefit from an upgrade to SP36 of the PA_SE_IN component!

But now to the highlights of the release changes:

Support Migration of Employees Having Prehire Action Types in ERP

Whenever you have a prehire record for your employees, a specific issue arises. Namaley, when migrating an employee from SAP-HCM or S/4HANA to EC you had to “clean up” your Infotype 0000 (Actions). This is because Employee Central (EC) and the migration report ECPAO_EMPL_EXTRACTION did not support a prehire record. 

For this release, the Report was adjusted to identify your prehire records. Accordingly, it will filter them out so you get the correct hiring event into the employee’s job information. Also, it sets a personal FTSD in Table PAOCFEC_PN_FTSD to ensure that the replication won’t delete the prehire record.

Components: PA_SE_IN, ECS4HCM

Enhancing BIB Replication from Different EC Entity to Infotype

When you map data from different EC-Entities to the same infotype with subtype having a different time constraint in the S/4HANA or SAP HCM system, the replication fails. 

With the upcoming support package this will be improved upon. You will now be able to map different EC entities with different processing modes to the same infotype but different subtypes. That enables you to process different time constraint data at subtype level. 

For example, a replication of the national ID portlet to infotype 0185. Also, the data from the work-permit portlet to infotype 0185 but into a different subtype is now possible.

Components: PA_SE_IN, ECS4HCM

Identifying Employees for Temporary Exclusion from Data Processing in the ERP System

As I wrote for the last release notes SAP released a tool to exclude employees from data processing temporarily. It was quite tricky to identify the responsible employees that caused a full stop of a replication. To make it easier for the customers, SAP released a tool to identify the corresponding employee data sets.  

This report will show you the employee ID for which the error occurred in the corresponding inbound message. You select the inbound message and choose “Exclude from Processing” to add the person GUID to the table ECPAO_IN_QUAR. Then it is excluded from replication.

Components: PA_SE_IN 

Importing Picklists from Employee Central Using Web Service

Currently, picklists are imported to S/4HANA or SAP-HCM manually. More precisely, by exporting them from EC and uploading them to the SAP system. With the new update, it will be possible to retrieve them directly via web service without this manual effort. 

To achieve this you have to deploy the following integration package for SAP Cloud Integration:
„SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Integration with SAP ERP or SAP S/4HANA: Generic Data“ 

This integration package could be helpful in the future if you’d like to replicate other data to your S/4HANA system. Specifically, any data besides organizational and employee data from EC. For now, this is only supported for picklists, which reduces already manual effort in your integration configuration.

Components: ECS4HCM

What Else?

Besides the changes to the on-premise components PA_SE_IN and ECS4HCM, there are other changes coming as well. These are some minor and major changes for other integration components. For example, there is a new “Select All” option in the filters of the data replication monitor. Another change for the SAP Master Data Integration is coming. Because now, you can add field extensibility for cost center integration. But those changes would go way beyond the scope of this blog post.

For all changes, you can take a look into the SAP SuccessFactors What’s New Viewer.