At HRIZONS®, we’re all about bringing new, value added ideas and solutions to the SAP SuccessFactors market. Tomorrow, we’re extremely excited to be showcasing our latest product, part of our HRZ® CLOUD APPS, powered by SAP Cloud Platform portfolio at an SAPinsider webinar.
It’s called PAD™ | Performance Accountability Dashboard and it’s really cool!
How’s that for substantive marketing jargon…
In all seriousness, PAD™ is going to be a game changer for enterprise customers looking to be more effective at strategic goal execution.
Why? Several reasons:
- Tracking goal execution results has been very employee centric, data entry intensive, and primarily driven by HR and the annual performance management process. It’s basically process automation and basic tracking. Important but not strategic.
- Creating workforce alignment to KPIs (key performance indicators) in an enterprise is very hard to do in practice, even with goal management systems. The typical approach and prevailing methodology is to cascade goals down or to align goals up to your one-up leader. Very slow and not very effective in the real world. Even with technology and goal importing capabilities, it’s almost impractical for most businesses to align goals to key business metrics effectively, never mind consistently. Most executives would agree that it is very important if you want to drive better business outcomes and engage your workforce so they clearly understand how their performance, or more likely team performance, impacts business results, but alas, it’s really hard to do, bordering on impossible.
- Even if you are successful at deploying goals consistently throughout the organization and linking employee goals to business objectives and key metrics, how do you know how the organization is executing effectively? How do you update those goals and trust the data? How do you hold people accountable for results? At the manager level it’s possible because the information and data is manageable. But at the Director level? The VP level? The EVP level? The C-Suite level? It’s virtually impossible to scale.
It may seem like a lofty goal but we believe we’ve created a product that begins to provide the governance, insight and simplicity needed to do just that. Now to be clear, PAD™ is not a stand-alone product, it is an extension product, delivered via SAP Cloud Platform.
What does that mean? It means that first and foremost, you have to be a SAP SuccessFactors customer that is using or willing to deploy their Performance and Goals product. Why? Because PAD is integrated to and dependent upon the Goal Management module. Rather than build redundant technology, PAD simply augments and improves upon it.
Some of you may ask – isn’t that just a bolt-on product? The answer is a resounding NO! It’s actually leveraging what’s called PaaS (platform-as-a-service). You see, SAP built a cloud platform called SAP Cloud Platform (go figure…) and we deploy PAD using that platform because it allows us to provide our customers with a turnkey software product that includes a seamless user experience where users can access PAD directly from the home screen and we developed a pre-packaged integration to SAP SuccessFactors via their APIs.
Why is this important? Simple: ease of installation and ease of deployment for our customers. Very little change management because users already know how to log into SAP SuccessFactors and how to navigate to a module. So PAD becomes one of those modules.
Okay, but let’s get back to the important stuff vs. the techy stuff.
What does PAD do differently?
- It tracks and trends goal execution results over time, which provides leading indicators of performance, showcases progress (or lack of) and identifies areas that require intervention more easily. Business metrics graph results, why not goal execution?
- It enables organizations (Note: not people, organizations) to prescribe and segment context appropriate master goals (quantitative goals – a.k.a. business metrics) to drive strategic initiatives consistently across the organization. This is really, really important because this is what allows the customer to align its workforce to its business metrics.
- Once you’ve deployed your master goals, it provides leaders with goal execution roll up insight and dashboards to drive accountability for achieving better outcomes across the organization. And, it allows drill downs so leaders can see what is being executed (goal plans), not just what the results are like in a traditional business dashboard.
So, PAD is new, its innovative and it is powerful! Why? Because it can help organizations better harness the power of its people and align them to driving better business outcomes, whether they be financial results, operational efficiencies, patient or customer satisfaction scores…
Oh, and if you want to learn more and you have time tomorrow, REGISTER for the SAPinsider webinar we’re hosting tomorrow. And if you can’t, no worries, there will be a recording made available by SAPinsider I’m told. And, if you’re interested, feel free to go to our website to learn more about PAD™ | Performance Accountability Dashboard.
Best, Jim
Jim Newman, President & CEO, HRIZONS
