Implementing SAP ERP HCM systems globally either in a big-bang or country rollout on SAP ERP HCM implementation is a strategic effort that requires a lot of decision making at the outset. The most important decisions concern setting up the project team’s structure and establishing the proper project governance. These early, key decisions are very important as they ultimately drive your project’s requirements, scope, design changes, and its eventual acceptance.

With any system implementation project, companies want to ensure that they have a good adoption rate and that their employees find the new solution fits their needs at the end of the project. As a result, companies typically decide to have the majority of the project team be centrally located within the main country of operations (for example, in the US). This decision, however, can have negative effects that might not be readily understood at the beginning. For example, in a global SAP ERP HCM project implementation the employees all are not located in one country. This can present problems in many ways, not the least being that different countries have different requirements for how they run their HR operations, legal reporting, and data privacy.

If a project team is located in only one specific country, the danger is that you end up with a biased set of system requirements and business processes and a potential gap in what is required by other international countries (i.e., the project team is not trained in another country’s specific laws and regulations). Since the project team members located in one country won’t necessarily understand another country’s laws and regulations, they won’t be able to effectively guide the implementation team through the other country’s legal requirements and data needs. This can lead to all kinds of negative legal consequences and can cause significant project delays, which adds additional unanticipated costs.

Setting Up Your Project Team

It’s imperative that the team model be set up so that global and regional subject matter experts (SMEs) are available to help coordinate and gather business requirements for the SAP ERP HCM solution. These global and regional experts must have full accountability on the project and should be the ambassadors for the project for their given region. Many global SAP ERP HCM implementations are structured so that all the heavy hitters are located geographically in the same area. The danger with this is that it can create a bias on the part of the project team, resulting in the implementation not creating a true global solution that meets all legal reporting and data needs.

This can be detrimental as projects should not have all their main resources located in one geographical location but should have their key resources spread across a variety of different geographical regions and countries. This set-up not only creates a need for a more global solution and unbiased design, but also helps with the internal marketing of the project and communicating the project’s goals and directives across the globe. Many projects get off on the wrong foot simply because the international countries feel that they are not being listened to and taken seriously. Having the support of the regional and country leadership from the get-go drastically improves the chances for acceptance of the project acceptance and for the proper requirements being drafted at the outset.

Finally, in addition to having regional and country SMEs be a part of the core project team, it’s also important to establish a global SAP ERP HCM governance committee to serve as a sounding board for key solution-related decisions. This committee should meet on a routine basis and review overall global designs, solution change requests, and the project status. The committee is a key factor for ensuring that your solution is reviewed for quality and cross-country integration. Committee members should include project team leads, project managers, regional SMEs, and change management leadership.

Global vs. Local Design for a SAP ERP HCM Implementation

A final key decision that you should consider carefully is when to allow countries to deviate from the standard, project team-defined global solution. Typically, the overall SAP ERP HCM solution should be 75 percent global and 25 percent local. The 25 percent localization supports the business need for country-specific data related to employees, legal reporting requirements, and other legal compliance needs (such as audits to support local country-specific legislation).

The SAP ERP HCM system should deliver most, if not all, the country-specific functionality (for SAP-supported countries). It is common for these projects to have to deal with these types of country-specific rules. Determining whether to add these localization capabilities is exactly the kind of decision that should be made by the SAP ERP HCM governance committee as it is the ultimate sounding board for ensuring that the localization fits in the overall SAP ERP HCM solution. In the view of most project leaders, these governance committees are only needed during the build and testing phases as this is typically when a design change request takes place. However, really the best approach is to have the governance committee in place for all phases of the project: design (planning), build, test, deploy, and post go-live.

During the planning phase, the project governance committee is established. This committee’s primary role is to define the project scope as far as country roll-out schedules (i.e., big-bang or separate), identify the key team members in the different country regions, and work with the project steering committee on creating and managing expectations. When forming these kinds of governance committees, it’s important that companies ensure that there is proper representation from the different regions as well as select employees to serve on the committee who have a deep understanding of how the global HR operating model should look.

During the design phase, the project governance committee is mainly responsible for ensuring that the overall solution meets the scope of the project and that it’s truly global in nature (not biased or built only for a few countries, but built for all countries in which the company operates). As stated above, since 25 percent of the solution is typically localized for specific countries and 75 percent is standard across all, the governance committee needs to ensure that the localization requirements are met for either country-specific local regulatory, legal, or payroll reasons. Some examples include:

• ?Storing of specific social insurance data
• ?Storing of country-specific payroll wage types
• ?Capturing appropriate national and tax identification numbers
• ?Maintaining employee and company data within the SAP ERP HCM system that is required for local legal reporting

During the build and testing phases, the project governance committee functions mainly as a change control board for the implementation. The committee should meet frequently and discuss any design changes that come up either for the global solution or a country-specific need, as well as review any effects that any changes may cause on the project. In addition, all members should vote on any new, approved change requests that are added to the company’s SAP ERP HCM global template and ensure that other countries or regions follow the change.

The primary focus of the committee during this phase is to ensure that the global template is maintained and includes any approved changes, as well ensuring that the solution is being followed. Project leaders tend to put change requests forward during the build phase that do not actually fit within the global solution (or a country tries to add a local requirement that doesn’t follow the guiding principle that it has to be for a legal, regulatory, or payroll reason). These end up being costly to the project in the long run as there is no longer a standard solution.

After go-live, the governance committee should still stay in place as there are always going to be requests made to enhance the SAP ERP HCM system after it goes live. If a project chooses to go with the big-bang solution (all countries going live at once), there should only be minimal changes once it’s live. However, if a roll-out approach is followed, the governance committee’s oversight is crucial (for example, it’s their job to review which countries should be next on the roll-out schedule for design requirements). It’s key that the governance committee continue to operate with the same guidelines and principles as it did in the initial roll-out. Although it is natural for projects to relax their standards and be more lenient after going live, this tendency negatively affects the global template solution that the company operates and should be avoided.

Keys to Success

It’s important that the points covered in this article are discussed and decided upon at the initial stages of an implementation project before project blueprinting begins. Having a well-defined project team structure that is set up so that there are strong project resources in the different regions and countries helps ensure that your solution is truly global and unbiased toward a specific country. In addition, establishing and maintaining a strong SAP ERP HCM global governance committee throughout all the phases of your project is key to the ultimate success of your implementation or integration project. A strong committee ensures that the scope, design, and approach of the overall solution is appropriate and, ultimately, successful. By following these practices and making these important decisions early on, project teams gain a much clearer understanding about how to build and manage a successful implementation or integration project.

Mark S. Jackson

Mark Jackson has been working with SAP ERP HCM for more than 12 years and specializes in SuccessFactors Employee Central and the SAP ERP HCM Personnel Administration and Organizational Management modules. He has had numerous experiences with implementing and leading SAP ERP HCM and SuccessFactors globally and is a subject-matter expert in defining global templates for SAP/SuccessFactors implementations.

You may contact the author at Mark.S.Jackson@gmail.com.

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