Path to the top of mount people analytics’ report stories

Basecamp mid 2021

Before we dive into the new features, let’s have a look at SAP’s rebranding of People Analytics. 

We noticed that a lot of people are still talking about “People Analytics in SAP SuccessFactors”. While most of us know what is meant by this, this naming is not entirely accurate anymore and might lead to confusion. We see where this is coming from. In the past, there were actually 3 versions of People Analytics:

1. People Analytics – Embedded edition, which replaced the Reporting suite in SAP SuccessFactors
2. People Analytics – Planning edition, which replaced Workforce Planning
3. People Analytics – Advanced edition, which replaced Workforce Analytics

Nowadays, SAP is no longer talking about the above-mentioned People Analytics versions. Today, the People Analytics term is only used when talking about the collection of products that allow you to analyze HR data coming from SAP SuccessFactors. And as SAP is now using People Analytics as the name of this collection, they also came up with new names for the individual products and abandoned the idea of the Advanced edition. 

The current individual People Analytics products are named as follows:

1. Report – Story, the embedded version of People Analytics.
2. SAP Analytics Cloud for Planning, the new version of People Analytics – planning edition. Workforce planning is now covered by a strategic workforce planning template in SAP Analytics Cloud.
3. Workforce Analytics is actually the former product that was to be replaced by the advanced version of People Analytics. SAP now decided to continue with the advanced edition for a longer time, as Workforce Analytics is experienced as a good tool and there is no need to replace it.

Useful new features

Our previous blog post about People Analytics ended with a set of features that we were looking forward to. Well, we are happy to say that in the meantime we have been able to use many of those.

• While company specific objects were made available for reporting since the launch of Report Story, the ability to report on fields containing company specific objects was still missing. In the main table, you now have the option to report on the code and name of the object, while navigating to the specific sub-table allows you to report on detail fields of the object.
• Where upon release, scheduling an individual table was not yet featured in Report Story, SAP has now made this available through Report Center. You can now schedule individual tables in the same way you scheduled the former Table Reports. And while scheduling offline reports is already possible, we are still awaiting scheduling to email or to an SFTP server location.
• Helping other colleagues in creating reports was not easy when Report Story had just been launched, as you weren’t able to proxy as them. Recently, this inconvenience has been resolved, so you can run and edit reports as a stand-in for someone else.
• For Employee Central data, there are now standard reports available in the content store for you to download. The content store is located within the Report Center, so you can easily import these standard reports in your platform. Please note that the Stories downloaded from the content store must first be adapted to match your data model before they can work properly.

• As SAP already announced during the first half release of 2021, mid-July SAP SuccessFactors Learning data became available for reporting in Report Story. This means almost all data in SAP SuccessFactors is now available in one single tool, except for Recruiting Marketing data. While there are still some limitations when using this data source, having the data available is already a big step in the right direction and makes us wanting more! Data blending, where we use LMS data and other data in one single table or chart, is currently not possible. Scheduling of an individual table with LMS data is also not possible yet. Custom columns were already available for reporting from the beginning.

The road ahead

As you could read in the previous section, a lot of new features have already been introduced. But, there are still other features that will be launched in the near future. To give you a few examples:

• SAP wants to make Report stories available in different places of SAP SuccessFactors. Dashboards tiles, for example, could be published to a user’s homepage to provide insight into important KPI’s or to indicate that an action needs to be taken. Needless to say, this has a positive impact on the end-user experience.
• Deep links on the other hand should make it possible to take action directly from the report, by clicking on e.g. the employee ID to jump to their profile. Additionally, SAP is not only planning to extend the accessibility in SAP SuccessFactors online, Report Stories will also become available for mobile consumption.

Aside from the features announced in the SAP route map, other non-announced features will become available together with other improvements that will be made during the half-yearly releases.

Earlier, SAP has announced the sunset of all legacy reporting tools. SAP earlier communicated this the edit and create of legacy reports would already start in 2021. For Report Table, Report Canvas and Tiles & Dashboards this has been postponed. For other tools, or parts of them, the sunset has already started. Dashboard tiles will no longer be supported in the mobile app. And, SAP announced Classic Reporting, List Views and Spotlight Views will be sunset in 2022.

In conclusion

SAP has made a lot of progress in making features available and the tool has evolved into a mature product. The time has come to think about your upgrade to People Analytics – Report Story.

We advise you to do the upgrade now, as this is beneficial for your company in many ways:

• Useful new features available
• The fewer reports created in the old tool, the less migration required.
• It is a great opportunity to review existing reports.
• Users will be able to access reports in one tool only.
• Sunset of legacy reporting tools

If you want more information about the upgrade to Report Story, or you are looking for guidance in your upgrade process, feel free to get in touch with our team of experts.