Tim Newnham

Fall is a busy time in the HR conference world, especially when two big conferences happen at the same time. Yes, I was in Las Vegas where both HR Tech and SAP SuccessConnect were happening concurrently. Last year SuccessConnect was held at the Cosmopolitan and you can read my recap “SuccessConnect 2017 Review – A Serious Business Partner” here.

Well, I can say that one year on, SAP SuccessFactors is delivering on its promise of working with you to help solve real world people issues that are important if you want to focus on the H in HR. This year, they moved SuccessConnect to the Aria as the demand was just too much for the previous location (2018 saw more than 4,000 live attendees and thousands more on the virtual platform, which is a whopping increase that speaks to the quality of the event). If you missed the broadcast, you can view the archive here.

The conference itself offered an opportunity to chat with customers, partners and SAP executives, which is always great and this year’s theme, The Human Revolution, was a great topic to do a deep dive and they didn’t disappoint. Below is my list of the top highlights from the event.

Keynotes– Be Human. Be Revolutionary. #HumanRevolution

Greg Tomb – SAP SuccessFactors President
The event was kicked off by SAP SuccessFactors President Greg Tomb, who introduced the notion that there is a major movement happening in the workforce today that they call a “Human Revolution.” This revolution makes the voice of your employees heard loud and powerful. This revolution makes sure that your employees are motivated, skilled and equipped to make their biggest impact. Greg wanted everyone to understand that SAP SuccessFactors is focused on the issues at hand and diligently working on solutions that will equip HR practitioners with the tools to address their critical people issues.

He took some time to speak about why it is so hard for companies to compete for talent if they are rooted in the old ways of working. “The heart of the human revolution beats to the speed of business and speed is radically changing today’s workforce,” he said. Here are some interesting statistics that bear this out:

1. Millennials are now the largest part of the workforce. If you take millennials (born 1981-1995) and Generation Z (born 1995-2010), they will account for 50% of the workforce by 2020. The fact is this large percentage of the workforce is already used to having technology integrated into their personal lives every single day. They also expect to have that in the workplace and most businesses are behind. To attract and retain these people, businesses have to give them the modern, consumer-grade technology they are used to in their personal lives.
2. 44% of the spend of the average workforce is now directed outside of the employee base and this number continues to grow. A company’s ability to harness this external workforce (contract workers) is paramount if your company is to grow.
3. 35% of employees say that their jobs are harming their physical or emotional health. Your company’s productivity can increase if you can positively improve the physical and mental well-being of your employees.
4. Korn Ferry recently did a study that found by 2030 the global talent deficit could surpass 85.2 million workers costing $8.5 trillion in lost revenue potential. If you think it’s hard to compete for talent now, think about what it will be like in 5 or 10 years.

The net of all of this is that there is a war on talent that will force those companies that want to compete to focus on and invest in attracting and retaining – and re-tooling – their talent.

Next, he spoke about the perspective of the CEO and HR’s relationship with them. A CEO has a really difficult job and HR is the secret weapon that can help them and their company succeed. McKinsey did their annual CEO study where they interviewed 600 CEOs globally across all industries and sizes and found that the number one concern was (over 70%) having the right talent to succeed. As HR leaders, you are the key to helping the CEO and your company succeed.

Bill McDermott – SAP CEO
It was great to hear a one on one discussion with SAP CEO Bill McDermott and SAP CMO Alicia Tillman about how he sees the value of SuccessFactors to the SAP family as a whole. Bill said that one of the goals of the SuccessFactors acquisition back in 2012 was to put the heart into SAP. Bill also said that trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets. He wants to build that trust by fully investing in the vision that HR is not a back office function anymore. Rather, HR should be focused on transforming itself and adopting intelligent technology that enables the workforce to drive performance and deliver exponential growth.

SAP is walking the walk. This is clearly demonstrated in a couple of important ways:

1. SAP has implemented the SAP SuccessFactors HCM Suite across the entire company of over 95,000 employees globally. This gives them first-hand experience of how the product is working to help solve people issues and will no doubt lead to further enhancements over time based on their experience.
2. Secondly, one area that stood out for me was seeing the move of Brigette McInnis-Day into the role of COO for SuccessFactors. In case you weren’t aware, Brigette was an EVP of HR for SAP as well as Chief HR Strategy & Digital Transformation Executive. This is important because she understands intimately the full process of a companywide implementation. This really demonstrates SAP’s vision and commitment to positioning HR as a pivotal player in business transformation and driving performance and growth.

Stefan Ries – SAP CHRO
Stefan Ries delivered an outstanding talk on the Human Revolution and how to bring new life to HR. According to Stefan, “This is not a back office function – this is Human Resources. The heart of human revolution is us – the old days of HR are over, from today onwards. We need to revolutionize and the best people to do that are HR Punks. HR Punk means disruption, it means ‘I do not conform,’ it means innovation and challenging the status quo. It doesn’t mean no future just to be very clear on that.”

Stefan spoke on a few important topics:
#1 – End Consumer Experiences – According to their study with MIT Sloan 78% of today’s employees want to live and work digitally. Stefan said, “The work in the office and the private life at home will come together and that will only happen through amazing technology that is designed to help you get out of a back office function and position HR where it should belong – at the heart of the company. HR owns so many important topics so that means HR has a clear obligation for their customers who consist of applicants, managers, employees and even alumni to create and deliver a very positive end consumer experience and focus. That means it needs to be intuitive, simple and as important it needs to be fun. If you were to listen to your millennials at home or at work, that is the only thing that is going to matter to them in the future.” He went on to speak about a conversation he had with his teenage son. He said his son saw him busy typing up emails and said, “I see you typing all of the time – I just use voice – you are so old school. When I graduate from University, my choice of an employer will be solely based on if the company can match my experiences of mobile technology in my business and personal life.”

#2 – Formula One Test Driver – Stefan spoke about a 2017 Accenture study that said only 5% of HR has mastered the art of digitalization. This made him realize that he needed to be the Formula One test driver for modern HR technology.  
In a recent blog he explained. “If you like to watch Formula 1 car racing as much as I do, you will be familiar with the concept of a test driver. When you put new, powerful technology under the hood of a fast car, you want to make sure an experienced driver has tested it before racing it. Well, the same is true for software.”

“This is why at SAP; the HR department has become the Formula 1 test driver for every HR solution you can buy from us.”

“This is how it works: our developers build a new feature or function or we team up with them for co-innovation. Of course, they test the new features from a technical perspective. Then we have our HR department test it in practice as well. HR colleagues ask critical questions: Do the features make sense? Do they make our lives easier? Are they intuitive, simple, and fun? Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t – yet. So, we give the developers feedback, and they get back to work on the features. This is an example of our proven Design Thinking approach: we work on improving the software together until everybody is not just happy, but simply blown away by the experience. The new features then become part of our standard solution offered to customers.”

This is the reason SAP is running the full SAP SuccessFactors HCM Suite, including Employee Central on HANA, for 95,000 SAP employees globally and over 150 legal entities. SAP has every SuccessFactors application running live and integrated with other business functions, which is very important – the HR data speaks with finance data, controlling data, purchasing data, contingent data – and all of this data is illustrated on a robust dashboard called the Digital Boardroom.

The advantage, according to Stefan, is that HR is left with more time for strategic work instead of doing headcount every day. He accesses the HR system on his mobile phone, the digital boardroom or any other device and he has the information at his fingertips. So this gives back real time to work on real issues like developing people and helping managers guide their teams. Because despite all of the new technology, workforce decisions are still made by humans – but now they make those decisions with better data and facts.

Customer Stories

The event had over 140 breakout sessions and 101 of these were presented by existing customers – that is a lot of first-hand learning! Two of these customers took center stage on day one to speak about how SuccessFactors has helped them transform their business and their people strategy: American Airlines and Tapestry.



Tapestry is a global house of brands that you may recognize including Coach, Kate Spade, and Stuart Weitzman. They recently formed this brand new entity bringing the brands together one year ago.

Tapestry Global CHRO Sarah Dunn spoke about how HR is at the center of the new company. She said the reason it is at the center is the people of this company are at the center. She said when they started this company’s vision they reached out to the employees globally to get their input into what they wanted the company to be. The outcome was to be a place where employees love to work, investors believe in and future brands want to be part of. The company is a $6 billion company that has 22,000 employees in 22 countries who mostly work in the stores. They realized that they had to create an employee experience to match the customer experience to ensure success.

They have implemented 8 modules of SuccessFactors in 15 countries for 18,000 employees in the past 12 months. This big bang approach allowed them to show every employee that they were serious about their mission of creating a great employee experience by investing in the tools that made their lives easier. They feel it is foundational for their company to create frictionless work for all employees which enables HR to spend time focusing on creating the culture and supporting the leaders to be able to coach the employees to be the best they can be. They talk about bringing your best self to work and feel that you can’t do this if you are frustrated by your work processes so they believe this implementation will allow their focus to be on people and culture rather than process.

Her words of wisdom to the audience is to be bold and not let challenges like getting the business case together hold you back from addressing the human revolution. Spend time with your CEO and senior leadership team to help them understand what this Human Revolution is about and what the impact is on competing in the future if the company doesn’t make critical changes. Finally, once you get over those hurdles, be optimistic, resilient and realistic to keep that vision for the future.



American Airlines does not have an HR department; instead, they have a people team. Mark Mitchell, Managing Director of HR Shared Services, led the technology integration when American and US Airways merged and is now working to insource and grow services for the people team and their service center.

Their business priorities driven from the CEO are all around people-centered culture which is building the caring and trust of their people. When you have the right employee experience it brings to life the customer experience you want to deliver, the operational results and financial results.

Currently, they have 130,000 team members around the globe in 60 countries and operate their in-house service center on the SAP case management platform and every day they speak to over 600 team members to help them get the answers they need to enable them to do their jobs well. In the past 2 years, they have rolled out 7 modules of SuccessFactors by early 2018 and implemented the private HEC cloud payroll. On top of that, they expanded their use of SAP Fieldglass for their contract workers. They believe this implementation is the foundation for their quest to drive a people-driven culture.

One of the most important aspects of this project was Employee Experience. SuccessFactors plays a crucial role in this. They started 2 years ago with the Talent Suite that included recruiting, recruiting marketing and onboarding because they knew to achieve the American Airlines of the future, they needed to have the right people and skillsets and a way to bring them into the company. Because both previous companies had been through a series of mergers and acquisitions, they didn’t have a reliable database of employee data so they implemented Employee Central to give them a single source of truth, which helps run the employee service center and demonstrates a new level of caring and trust for their employees. The company also has a large contingent workforce base (41,000 people) so they are on a journey to integrate SAP Fieldglass with Employee Central that will allow their leaders to have a holistic view of their total workforce, which will help the leaders continue on the journey of employee care.

New Initiatives

New HR Community with Simple Solutions to Big Problems
SAP SuccessFactors is building an open community of purpose-built and easy-to-consume applications designed to tackle the most critical people issues facing HR professionals and business leaders today. With this community approach, SAP SuccessFactors is bringing together organizations of all sizes, from enterprises to startups, to co-create “simple solutions to big problems.”

“Today, we are seeing unprecedented levels of innovation in HR technology,” SAP SuccessFactors President Greg Tomb said. “We believe this wave of innovation will result in a ‘human revolution’ that will allow businesses to focus time, talent and energy on the thing that really matters: the people that lead to business outcomes. With this community, we can help assemble a complementary set of solutions for our customers’ diverse needs. And, if they don’t exist yet, we can co-create them together.”

Building upon the success of the SAP App Center, this new community consists of partners organized around six initial pillars: well-being, pay equity, real-time feedback, unbiased recruiting, predictive performance and internal mobility. It will offer current and prospective SAP SuccessFactors customers a curated set of solutions to augment their existing systems and tap into the latest sources of innovation faster than ever. SAP SuccessFactors will continue to expand its network of partners and pillars in the coming quarters to cover all aspects of the employee journey. Below is a list of all of their current initiatives which are quite spectacular.

The Human Revolution – SAP Joins forces with Arianna Huffington’s Thrive Global
Arianna Huffington’s Thrive Global is a behavior change media and technology company offering science-based solutions to lower stress and enhance well-being and performance. SAP SuccessFactors and Thrive see well-being as exceptionally important if a company wants to get the most from their people. Because of this Thrive Global, SAP SuccessFactors and their communities launched the Human Revolution, a set of attitudes and principles designed to help us tap into our collective humanity and learn how to connect with ourselves and each other in new and innovative ways.

The issues that affect the workforce are all around us – how they get solved is what Thrive and SAP SuccessFactors are focusing on. Below is a graphic that illustrates the very real issues affecting employees around the world that SAP, Thrive and their Human Revolution are looking to solve. You can read the full press article that outlines each one of these issues here.
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Additional partners comprising this new community are focused on providing solutions to other critical people issues, including:

• Helping employees dial down financial stress with Best Money Moves
• Ensuring employees are paid equitably with PayScale
• Developing next-generation leaders with AI-powered coaching from Cultivate
• Providing insightful feedback to enhance employee engagement with Culture Amp
• Achieving diversity goals with Blendoor
• Eliminating recruiting bias with Brilliant Hire by SAP employees in the SAP.iO Venture Studio
• Hiring, growing and retaining top talent using AI to build a deep talent database with Plum
• Hiring internal, external and contingent talent more effectively with AI from HiredScore
• Mobilizing the workforce to cover understaffing with Andjaro

I really like the fact that a technology partner is addressing issues caused by digitalization and the influx of too much technology and connectivity that ultimately lead to burn out and bad decisions resulting from too much work, financial stress and a less than ideal personal life. Helping people to be in a better place personally will only help companies achieve great things.

New Digital Assistant
SAP SuccessFactors announced a new digital assistant designed to provide an intelligent, automated way for the entire workforce to get answers and complete HR related tasks. For example, HR can provide faster, easier answers to new hire questions; managers can easily award spot bonuses; employees can quickly enter time worked. This frees employees’ time for more important tasks, thus helping to create a more effective and engaged workforce with higher productivity.

According to SAP SuccessFactors, the assistant, currently in beta with a select group of customers, provides the entire workforce with a personalized, engaging experience by applying machine learning to guide and recommend actions based on verbal and/or written questions or commands.

The digital assistant leverages the SAP CoPilot bot framework and SAP Leonardo machine learning to deliver a conversational, interactive experience for employees using SAP SuccessFactors solutions from the desktop and on mobile. It is also integrated with collaboration platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams, connecting seamlessly to the tools employees are already using every day.

The digital assistant learns and understands what an employee is looking for, enabling them to find information and take action from the conversational interface without the intervention of a human being.

Not only does this help engage the workforce, it significantly simplifies and redefines what is possible for improving HR service delivery.

“Helping people take control of their careers and get their work done is at the heart of what we strive for at SuccessFactors,” SAP SuccessFactors President Greg Tomb said. “The future of HR applications is mobile, intelligent and leverages all the ways we can interact with tools – both verbal and written. By bridging the gap between how employees engage with technology at home and how they leverage technology to get things done at work, our new digital assistant makes interacting with HR easy, timely and productive.” 

My Take

Clearly, the focus with SAP SuccessFactors is to be your partner – not just for technology, but in helping you solve real problems that get in the way of an employee performing truly at their best. Bill McDermott said it best: “You have to give the employee a journey and be a leader – not manage. The days of KPIs and managing by email are over. People have a deep human need to know how they fit into the company strategy, what piece of the puzzle is theirs, what role they play. It’s what boosts employee morale. Employees win, companies win.” I agree – well done SAP SuccessFactors.