SAP HCM to SAP SuccessFactors migration

Hi

Organizations using SAP HCM are more or less forced to migrate to the cloud with SAP SuccessFactors (Employee Central) being the given path.

This migration has a big impact on the IDM System as the main authoritative data source is changing.

Since there is no ootb SAP SF Driver available from OT I am wondering what approaches have been chosen by the community and what experiences did you make or whether there are any recommendations.

Regards,

Matthias

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Identity Manager
  • Verified Answer

    +1  

    Looks like there is no out of the box driver.  You will have to work on your own.

    You have two issues. 

    1. Protocol translation - can we query, read, or write data.
    2. Business Logic - what does an add look like?  What did that change in data mean?

    From some quick reading, here are the API endpoints:

    So you have choices.  I personally prefer SOAP, them younguns much prefer REST but whatever.  (Thanks to Holger for the quick response with the endpoints.  I had found them when I went looking a few months ago, but did not have them handy).

    What are your needs?  For HR as an authoritative support?  Probably different than writing back to HR.  What Entitlements are possible to glean from the remote system, and should we provision or just collect them?

    Having said that, if you embark on this task, I would be curious to follow along, since i have a morbid fascination with SAP but no excuse (nor test system) to work with...

  • 0 in reply to   

    hi, it seems the soap based "SFAPI" is being deprecated:
    https://userapps.support.sap.com/sap/support/knowledge/en/2613670

    I worked on an integration over soap interface some time back - SuccessFactors would deliver a custom report on all employee records and their attributes per request, which can be parsed and used for hr feed. If I remember correctly this was preferred by the SF admins as it gave them easier control on what information we can access, compared to granular api permissions. 

  • 0 in reply to   

    Currently there's an SAP HR iDoc Driver in place with extensive business logic around it covering all the typical needs of a JML process based on sapActions (Massnahmen). It also means that IDM is doing a lot of internal calculations/queries to gather data across the SAP object structure which is basically mirrored in IDM (sapP, sapS, sapO, sapC). Also processing of future data is implemented for triggering various events. 

    The first step will be to questions/confirm the requirements and make things simpler as this interface and the surrounding logic has been in place and rock stable for ~20 yrs (Kudos mainly to Volker).

    In discussion with the SAP SF provider the working assumption is to use OData. It has been suggested to implemented queries on SAP SF to simplify the REST Driver Logic on IDM side as OData would require a lot of additional individual queries against service pointers in the response data to have all the IDM relevant information retrieved. The basic idea is to hand back a lot of the business logic to the HR system where it should be instead of doing it in IDM. 

    One challenge for sure is the future data which has been nicely handled by the iDocs, on the other hand we should not need to handle stale data anymore which would also be an improvement.

    I'll keep you posted about the journey.

    One thing for OT though - having an ootb driver would be very nice instead of doing all custom implementation. Looking on how many SAP (HR) customer are pushed to the cloud, I'd say the need is there. Other IAM vendors are ahead in that area.