COVID-19 Impact: How New Offerings from SAP Can Help Companies?

COVID-19 has disrupted the way businesses operate. It has affected the well-being of workers, their mobility, engagement, productivity and more. The challenges that companies face in managing their workforce are evolving daily.  Some of the key human capital challenges faced by businesses include driving productivity and engagement, slowly bringing back workforce to the office, managing a combination of the virtual and physical work environment and bringing down staff costs as businesses navigate into unchartered territories.

An EY survey highlights that around 70% of the organizations find a fall in productivity as the single biggest concern for continued remote working. Over 70% of the organizations are shifting to virtual methods of recruitment, and leveraging emerging technologies like AI, Machine Learning (ML) and robotic process automation.

To control the spread of the coronavirus and to ensure business continuity, most enterprises implemented work from home policies for their employees earlier in the year. As the world returns to a new normal, organizations have to grapple with new challenges. They need to comply quickly with fast-changing new regulations around workplace health, safety, and access. With restrictions slowly being relaxed, they have to ensure that the employees are returning to their premises in a controlled and secure manner.

Enterprises worldwide are now looking for solutions that can protect people and their families from unnecessary exposure to COVID-19 without compromising their business efficiency. They are required to file health records and manage documentation to comply with the new global and local healthcare regulations. They have to ensure that employees submit self-attestations of fitness to work, control workspace access and take measures to maintain workplace safety while minimizing the risks and keeping costs under control.

Bring back employees to offices in a secure manner

Keep people safe and ensuring physical distancing

Comply with evolving healthcare regulations

Automate physical identity and workspace access

Keep track of people’s health and emergency needs

SAP SuccessFactors Visa and Permits Management along with AlertEnterprise solutions enable businesses to successfully manage the process of bringing people back into the office while automating enforcement of complex and evolving COVID-19 health and safety policies to ensure safety.

SAP SuccessFactors Visa and Permits Management efficiently manages health and safety policies that govern how employees return to work in a repeatable manner that minimizes risk.

Guardian by AlertEnterprise is another solution that makes streamlined and secure access to workplaces possible. An SAP endorsed app Guardian’s real-time integration with SAP SuccessFactors helps allow enterprises to control access to the workplace in a precise way through self-attestation, screening processes, and more.

Guardian’s Health and Safety Intelligence Tracker enables organizations to track exposure to the Coronavirus across people and places by contract tracing and ensures workplace sanitization. The entire solution is easily integrated with badging and access control systems.

• The tracker ensures safe working conditions and workplace distancing.
• Controls the number of people on the premises
• Manages access to temporary overflow sites
• Enable new shift working patterns
• Respond quickly if restrictions are reimposed

SAP’s existing offerings, such as Human Capital Management (HCM) and Qualtrics can also be a valuable addition to the enterprises as businesses look to restart and make a stronger comeback amidst the COVID-19 crisis. The software helps organizations to work remotely in a secure environment, drive employee engagement and productivity.

If you’re looking to reimagine your business operations or want to implement new COVID-19 management solutions from SAP, we can help you. We are a global SAP partner with long experience in helping businesses to deploy various SAP products and solutions. Click here to know more about our services.

A unified HCM makes it easy for HR teams to handle various aspects of employee management including, monitoring work hours, payment roll-outs, performance-based rewards, and facilitating employee training & development.

A good unified HCM system provides both perception-based data and operational data. SAP Qualtrics based solutions provide both the data under a single dashboard. Three Qualtrics based solutions that organizations will currently find relevant are:

1. SAP Qualtrics Employee Engagement: It uses the Open Text IQ analytics tool to process the text-oriented response of the employee to gather important insights on employee perception and behavior. The insight provided can help HR teams create an engaging work environment in work-from-home situations.

2. SAP Qualtrics Employee Lifecycle: As the name suggests, this solution helps organizations gather all the data of the employees during their entire lifecycle working with the company. The information is useful in retaining employees.

3. SAP Qualtrics Employee Benefit Optimizer: The pandemic has caused a situation where some companies are hiring to acquire new capabilities while some are compelled to cut their staff. The Employee Benefit Optimizer helps HR teams in understanding the benefits that employees want with a choice-based conjoint methodology.

SAP ERP Human Capital Management (HCM) can be a valuable addition to the HR department as businesses look to make a stronger comeback amidst the COVID-19 crisis. The software helps in payroll processing, allocating special funds and immediate release of payments, driving employee engagement and productivity.

• Workforce Mobility: With the COVID-19 pandemic situation still not under control, your staff is expected to work from home, and this is likely to continue for a while. SAP ERP HCM offers a complete enterprise mobility stack, including business processes, mobile platforms, and mobile applications to help your employees work from anywhere, anytime.
• Virtual Employee Training and Learning: The SAP ERP HCM learning environment provides organizations with web-based, virtual, and classroom training tools. Businesses can customize learning paths to the individual educational needs of employees and learning styles. The Analytical functionality lets you plan, track, and measure training impact.
• Recruit the Best Talent: SAP ERP HCM makes it easy for organizations to attract and recruit the best people and quickly make the new hires productive. The web-enabled, SAP e-recruiting tool application accelerates the recruiting process, allowing you to build and source from a global pool of internal and external talent.
• Optimize Employee Talent: The SAP HCM allows you to take a holistic approach for all your talent-related processes to help you identify the talent pool, train and sharpen the skills of your workforce, and align employee goals with your key business objectives.
• Drive HR Process Efficiency and Compliance: Automation of several operational processes, such as workforce administration, time management, payroll, special insurance provisions, claim processing, allocating funds for employee welfare etc., increases efficiency and supports compliance.
• Align Business Objectives and Monitor KPIs: By using real-time insights into the employees and tracking their key performance indicators (KPIs), can help your business optimally benefit from human-capital strategies and programs and measure your workforce’s contributions to the overall business objectives.

In addition, SAP is offering open access to SAP Concur TripIt and SAP Concur Duty of Care and is running a regularly updated blog on legal changes emanating from the COVID-19 for SAP ERP Payroll & SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll.