October, the spooky season begins. And as every year, I’m surprised that every supermarket wants us to buy Christmas candy and decorations so early. But before we start decorating our homes for the holiday season SAP presents us with a lot of pre-christmas gifts! I will unveil the SuccessFactors 2H 2025 Release Integration Changes and present you my highlights of this great present.

Changes for PA_SE_IN and ECS4HCM

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I checked the release notes. SAP has made so many changes this time that it is quite hard to pick a few highlights. But here are some of my personal highlights that hopefully seem as helpful to you as they do to me.

Support Partial Replication with Field-Level Infotype Update

Currently, you must decide whether to replicate an infotype and maintain it in Employee Central or maintain the infotype directly in your SAP payroll system. Sometimes, when only one field can be maintained in your payroll system and not in Employee Central, you may decide to maintain the entire infotype locally to prevent the integration from overriding your previous changes. 

This will change in the next release. For infotype 0001, 0016, and its corresponding secondary infotypes, replication will preserve existing payroll-related data. It will then merge this data with the incoming data from Employee Central and update the infotype with the combined details.

Requirements:

• PA_SE_IN SP: 40 or ECS4HCM SP: 06
• Enable the EC to ERP: Don’t overwrite Payroll related Infotypes fields option in the ECPAO_CONSTANTS view
• Define the payroll-relevant infotype fields that should be protected during replication in view ECPAO_INFTY_FLD

Enhancement for Country/Region-Specific Full Transmission Start Date

Until now, a mapping between country grouping (MOLGA) and determining parameters, such as personnel area, was required in the SAP S/4 HANA system, even for periods preceding the corresponding country-specific FTSD. This would lead to issues when restructuring your personnel area/company code structure (e.g., when migrating from SAP ECC to S/4HANA) if the determining parameter did not exist.

Previously, you had to create dummy customizing for each country/region and map it accordingly. This enhancement simplifies the setup by allowing the country/region derivation to be entirely from EC Job Information records, as included in the country/region FTSD.

Requirements: 

• ECS4HCM SP: 06

Infotype-Specific Full Transmission Start Date

When adjusting your replication today to include a new infotype, you either adjusted the FTSD for all infotypes or did not adjust it at all. Including an existing infotype in the replication required maintaining the data in EC back to the FTSD or doing a complicated BAdi implementation that modified the replicated data. 

SAP now gives you the option to define a full transmission start date for infotypes, designating Employee Central as the leading system for that infotype. You can select an FTSD date for the replication to consider when updating the infotype. This date may differ by country or region if you opt for phase-wise adoption. 

If you want to use partial replication with field-level infotype update (as described above), it is strongly recommended that you define an infotype-specific FTSD to safeguard your historical data.

Requirements: 

• PA_SE_IN SP: 40 or ECS4HCM SP: 06
• Configure the Earliest Transfer Date for an infotype in the new customizing

What Else?

Here are some more changes that SAP provides us with in this release.

• Now there is a selective picklist import and a picklist value delta importer available
• Support for multiple National IDs for Dependents
• New Compensation Methods for Time Account Payouts
• Replication of Permanent Time Accounts supported in an SAP Payroll System
• Replication of Employee Central Time Unit Weeks to SAP Payroll Infotypes

For a complete overview of all updates, check out the SAP SuccessFactors What’s New Viewer. And if you want to review the changes for the 1H-2025 release, you can check them out here.

We are happy to support you in implementing release changes in your interfaces or SuccessFactors systems. Feel free to get in touch with us – we look forward to exchanging ideas and working together.