In the last entry I wrote \u201cthat the only HR departments that go on SAP are the ones that are forced to do so by their CEO.\u201d\u00a0 While there\u2019s some truth to this, I\u2019ve also written in the past that if I were a CIO, I\u2019d go out and buy Oracle financials, PeopleSoft HR, SAP supply chain, etc\u2026 and hook it all up in the back end with whatever API\u2019s I\u2019m using and some nice web services for portal and Cognos for business intelligence.\u00a0 While that\u2019s all well and good, it\u2019s just not reality.\u00a0 (and every now and then I need to be realistic)<\/p>\n
Reality states that SAP and PeopleSoft are incredibly different to integrate.\u00a0 So while you really do have options when you\u2019re selecting your HR vendor, what the rest of your organization is on does matter.\u00a0 No matter how your vendor presents the technology, in the back end, SAP is a real time system and PeopleSoft is a batch system.\u00a0 There is good and bad to both of these processing philosophies both for HR processing and broader organizational integration.<\/p>\n
SAP being a real time system sounds great, and it usually is (assuming that you are on SAP for all your ERP systems).\u00a0 However, true real time integration creates havoc all too often.\u00a0 While we love real time, the truth is that once the employee record has been updated, a dozen other HR fields have also updated, and a cascading tidal wave of change has gone out to finance, operations, etc.\u00a0 By the time you realize that the initial employee record change was in error, it\u2019s too late, and rolling it back 5 minutes later means rolling it back in 20 downstream consumers of that data.\u00a0 All in all, real time data integration is a great thing, but you really do need to understand what it all means.<\/p>\n
However, I should talk about PeopleSoft (considering I pissed everyone off by calling it batch).\u00a0 I\u2019ll stand by the batch part, but I\u2019ll concede that you can put in as many hooks as you like making workflow real time.\u00a0 So when you hire an employee, the workflows go out in real time to manage tasks.\u00a0 However, anyone who has ever implemented payroll, ben admin, or whatever will probably wholeheartedly agree that most system processing and data integration between the ERP modules happens in those fabled batches.\u00a0 So while you eliminate some of the problems we noted for SAP, much of the native integration within the ERP suite isn\u2019t so timely.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s the point?\u00a0 We started this article saying that mixing and matching ERP modules may not be the best thing.\u00a0 Honestly, it\u2019s hard to get a real time system to talk to a batch system and vice versa.\u00a0 On top of that, within a consistant ERP suite, the vendors have built in the API\u2019s for HR to talk to finance (and whatever else) pretty seamlessly.\u00a0 Visions of XML are great, and they do simplify the old worlds of async interfaces.\u00a0 But true effectiveness in your ERP suite is greatly simplified by staing within the ERP suite.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the last entry I wrote \u201cthat the only HR departments that go on SAP are the ones that are forced to do so by their CEO.\u201d\u00a0 While there\u2019s some truth to this, I\u2019ve also written in the past that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,29,18,26,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hr-technology","category-hrms","category-oracle","category-sap","category-vendors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}