Introduction
Recently I attended the SuccessConnect 2017 conference at the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas. The conference was a sell out with 3,414 attendees and 8,000 more participating virtually. This was SAP SuccessFactors’ best attendance to date and they plan on doubling it for 2018 as they move over to the Aria.

The tagline of the conference – “On the Pulse” – was spot on. SAP’s mission is to “Help the world run better and improve people’s lives,” according to Robert Enslin, Executive Board Member and President of the Cloud Business Group at SAP, who opened the event. I like to think of this as they’re not only creating technology to help the world run better but also that they are in tune with what will help people in their day-to-day lives to make them better. This is what I feel they conveyed in their messages throughout, be it thought-provoking keynote speakers who provided the audience with inspiration, to their humanitarian efforts, to innovations in their product.

One thing that stuck in my mind is what Oprah said, which really was the recurring theme of this event, “You have to fully develop yourself before you can develop others.” And everything they did focused on this idea of self and team development in every aspect. Building a company around the pulse of your organization, your people’s needs and your industry’s changing shape is what SAP wants to help you do.


 
Clearly, they have a vision of how to cohesively achieve these goals and I left thinking that they are far along in this vision. As I always say – your decision about who to partner with in this cloud-based world is way more about feeling that your vendor of choice has a vision about people, and they can be a true trusted advisor – one who can help you discover how you can move your HR business ahead. Because cloud releases tend to come anywhere from 2 to 4 times per year, features will always be updated so focusing on the vision and relationship side is where I would put my focus.
SAP has a lot of smart people working for them including a number of Ph.D.’s (Industrial/Organizational Psychologists) who help guide the product development. That is very different than a bunch of smart programmers and something that will continue to contribute to the innovative initiatives and capabilities of their offering.

SAP doesn’t just talk this story – they live it. Their Diversity and Inclusion efforts have been exceptional – they have already achieved their goal of 25% women in leadership, but their efforts go well past this. Autism at Work is something that they have been focused on and SAP now employs 150 autistic people across the globe. Their LGBT efforts have also been exceptionally executed. This is important because according to McKinsey, companies in the top quartile for gender diversity are 15 percent more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians, and the number jumps to 35 percent for racial and ethnic diversity.



About SuccessConnect
This conference was all about people; how to make them better, how to include them, how to make them healthier – hey – it even had Oprah. Who gets Oprah to speak? Last I checked she doesn’t do speaking engagements for companies and as she said, she doesn’t do anything she doesn’t want to do. Yet there she was telling stories about the moments that have shaped her approach to leadership, and how she’s applied those lessons in her work. This says something special about what SAP is up to and I tend to agree.

When registering for their badges, SuccessConnect attendees were given a free Virgin Pulse activity tracker, along with a challenge to be the attendee with the highest level of tracked activity – always a good way to foster fun and healthy living at an event.

Opening Keynote Speakers
The event was opened by Robert Enslin where he discussed a number of SAP initiatives around diversity, humanitarian efforts, leadership, product updates and more. He highlighted their Mission: Help the world run better and improve people’s lives.

Of note were a few humanitarian efforts that SAP are involved with:

• Hurricane Harvey: Given the timing and vast amount of destruction and damage from Hurricane Harvey in the US, SAP made a commitment to match donations made during the week from attendees at SuccessConnect, in addition to matching employee donations. Over $30,000 in donations were raised to provide relief from the devastation that has touched many, many lives.
• Africa Code Week: SAP pledged €1 for every tweet with both #SConnect17 and #AfricaCodeWeek to help digital literacy in Africa with a goal of empowering 500,000 young Africans aged 8–24 years across 35 countries with basic coding skills. Last year SAP sponsored Africa Code Week, which helped over 426,000 youth across 30 African countries either write their first lines of code or simply touch a computer for the first time. Their hope is to eventually get all African youth fluent with technology. This is a major initiative and one that will make Africa a more competitive place in the future so I say, “Well done".

• ​​​​​​Autism – giving people with autism a great place to work and make use of their unique skills: SAP’s Autism to Work program is an amazing initiative, and it’s great to see that SAP actually employs 150 workers with autism.New Leadership Team

There is a brand new leadership team headed by Robert Enslin that includes Greg Tomb as SAP SuccessFactors President and industry experts Amy Wilson as Head of Product and James Harvey as Head of Engineering. Together they presented an optimistic view of where SAP SuccessFactors is headed.

This new team has fresh ideas from their vast experience in the industry over the years but the really interesting thing is how they will bring a different vision to how SuccessFactors can seamlessly integrate into the broader SAP suite.

Greg Tomb

• The SAP SuccessFactors solution is global and built to scale with 84 country localizations, delivered in 42 different languages and payroll in 42 countries.
• Although it has unsurpassed breadth and depth of product – they don't force you to buy all of it.
• The power of WE – they want to enable the best partners to provide you with the best applications with their fully open platform. Through the use of extension apps, you can take the product further to create a total solution for your company. Over 150 apps have been developed to date. In addition to partners, SAP spends billions of dollars per year on development.
• Greg aims to cut SAP SuccessFactors’ implementation time in half by boosting its own capacity while relying more on partners.

Amy Wilson and James Harvey

• Amy and James provided their views on product framework moving forward – Do less, deliver more – Create awesome experiences – Fuel phenomenal results – all powered by S4/HANA.
• Extensibility consists of native configuration plus SAP Cloud Platform PaaS app extensions. There are over 150 apps offered via an ecosystem with 50+ partners signed up to build more.
• Mobile is the backbone of SAP SuccessFactors’ future and James and Amy demonstrated a new intuitive mobile UX that was co-developed with Apple. This intuitive interface mirrors a typical Apple iPhone type of navigation which makes the user experience familiar and will no doubt drive more end user adoption to the HR system.
• James Harvey showcased a Wordpress-like Career Site Builder. The idea is that building/changing career websites is usually long and tedious as it involves coders. This is easy and quick so users can make changes on the fly without relying on coders.
• New Analytics offering – Digital Boardroom for HR provides real time data using SAP HANA. This is available now.

Penny Stoker – EY’s “workplace buddy”

• There was an interesting demo of a helpful chatbot for onboarding and beyond named “workplace buddy.” It demonstrated how Machine Learning, AI, language recognition and speech recognition can be used to help new employees orient themselves even before their first day on the job. It was a very interesting demonstration of how modern technology can create great work experiences.

Customer panel – It’s always great to hear from customers about their journey

• Corning recently went big bang in the cloud globally; previously, they were on premise. To do this implementation they worked with IBM Global Services and SAP to go live on the full HCM suite. They implemented mostly out of the box unless there was a legal requirement and have been very happy so far. Corning actually got thank-you letters from potential and new employees about the ease of use of the recruiting/onboarding experience with SAP SuccessFactors. Christy Pambianchi’s main message was you get out of it what you put into it. They made HR transformation a top priority for the company. As far as AI they see strong opportunities in the recruiting area for screening candidate pools, etc.
• Mohawk was described as a cloud-hopping implementation. According to Jana Kanyadan, they were working with a different cloud vendor trying to implement for 5 years. They switched to SAP SuccessFactors after the initial implementation failed because the old vendor couldn't get the modules implemented. In the end, they went live with SAP SuccessFactors in 18 months. The new implementation delivered $1.2M per year in cost savings as soon as they went live and user adoption went through the roof. Their vision is to implement S/4HANA to the get predictive analytics, and they are currently brainstorming ideas of how they can use them.

 
 
Product
As much as I think features aren’t everything, standout differentiators are important and there were a number of interesting items in the SAP SuccessFactors HCM Suite.

1. Mobile is integral in the reinvention of SAP SuccessFactors. There was a demo showing a brand new UX design that SAP worked with Apple on and it was quite impressive. Amy Wilson indicated that Apple-assisted redesign of its signature SAP SuccessFactors platform will be integral to SAP’s efforts to digitally transform human resources going forward.
2. Cloud application extensions to SAP SuccessFactors solutions. As a way to offer even more functionality, SAP now has a number of extension apps available on the SAP App Center, with much more coming from partners.
3. SAP SuccessFactors-on-HANA commitment. This is going to be a game changer for SuccessFactors with in-memory computing giving real-time insights with analytics.
4. SAP SuccessFactors payroll in the cloud will receive additional investment.There is more to come on this.
5. Connecting their new digital assistant to their intelligent services with Leonardo becomes a truly cognitive system. A good example of this could be an onboarding exercise where a new hire in India triggers a connection with Ariba (SAP’s procurement platform) to order a new laptop, cell phone, etc. – and also connects to Concur to create travel authorizations. Another area where these integrations will be a big advantage is in vertical markets (such as Oil and Gas) where there is a large contingent workforce – SuccessFactors can integrate with Fieldglass to assist in talent acquisition.
6. Career Site Builder is easy and quick so users can make changes on the fly without relying on coders.
7. Business Beyond Bias: "Diversity is not in addition to HR. It's HOW you HR." said Dr. Patti Fletcher.  Watch this video to see how SAP sees the world of Diversity and Inclusion and how their tools are helping companies just like yours to tackle the issue.

Celebrity Keynotes – and notable quotes
These keynotes were the real deal. All of them have been ALL IN during their entire life and they were welcome additions to the conference:

1: Oprah, no need for introduction:

• "Leadership isn't what we do, it's who we are. You cannot be a full leader if you are not a full person."
• “Understand how to be authentic. Be true to yourself so others around you can align with you.”
• “Your internal GPS is your greatest leadership tool.”
• "Life is always speaking to you. Whispering to you when you need an ego check. So, pay attention to the whispers."
• “Love yourself. Know yourself. Be true to yourself.”
• "'What do you want?' That's the only question that matters in your conversation with anyone."
• "Everybody that you've ever encountered wants to know - Do you hear me and did what I say matter to you?"
•  “Shut your ego down and put yourself in the space of the other person.”

 
2: Frances Frei, Harvard Business School Professor and now  Senior Vice President of Leadership and Strategy at troubled Uber – she is a well-regarded academic, who has focused on gender and diversity problems in the workplace:

• “The fate of our economy is in your hands! “
• “People are the most important asset at every organization.”
• “We need to build and rebuild trust!”
• “The foundation of trust is authenticity, empathy and logic.”

3: Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage:

• Greatest competitive advantage - getting someone's brain to positive
• Research linking Happiness and Success shows the following:
  
  • 37% greater sales
  • 3x more creative
  • 31% more productive
  • 40% more likely to receive a promotion
  • 23% fewer fatigue symptoms
  • Up to 10x more engaged
  • 39% more likely to live to age 94
• “Happiness is the joy you feel moving towards your potential.”
• “You don't delete the weirdo. You hone in on the weirdo.”
• “Happiness is a choice.”
• “Happiness spreads.”
• “Happiness is one of the greatest advantages of the modern economy.”
• “Smiling is contagious, but so is negativity, stress and anxiety.”
• “True happiness isn't measured by pleasure. Happiness is the joy you feel as you move towards your potential."

4: Cake Boss Buddy Valastro

• “The most important thing is love what you do... then the dream comes true.”
• “Failure is not an option when you believe in what you do.”

Final Thoughts
I left having many feelings but the overwhelming feeling was that SAP SuccessFactors truly got inside of the issues that are troubling all companies and offered sound advice by bringing truly inspirational keynotes and software solutions that hit the issues of Diversity and Inclusion, Health and Well-Being, Self-Worth, Leadership and Personal Development. They get how to “Help the world run better and improve people’s lives.”

I see integration between SAP SuccessFactors and SAP S/4HANA Finance as one of the highest priorities; this as a major differentiator providing a truly deep integration for HR into all areas of the business, from finance to procurement and beyond.  

Their focus on building a platform that included extensions outside of the core product was also a welcome addition as, hey, who can build a complete product that satisfies every need of every business?

On top of that their focus on Diversity and Inclusion is second to none.


If you value these things then I believe they showed that they can be an exceptional trusted partner
in your HR transformation journey