100 Critical Human Capital Management Questions

In 2017, SAP SuccessFactors published a White Paper entitled “100 Critical Human Capital Questions” designed to assist HR leaders and corporate executives to intuitively recognize the importance of human capital to the growth and success of their enterprises.

This paper included a series of questions designed to help organizations understand these metrics, and to make those decisions.  Sample questions specific to Workforce Demographics and Diversity include:

1. What percentage of your workforce will retire in the next year or in the next five years?
2. What is the average age in your organization? In the last five years, has it increased, decreased, or remained the same?
3. What is the average tenure of people in your organization? In the last five years, has it increased, decreased, or remained the same?
4. What is your ratio of managerial to non-managerial staff? In the last five years, has it increased, decreased, or remained the same? 

Answering HCM business questions is important

Many organizations struggle to understand the key human capital metrics, and even more struggle with data access and reporting.  The paper is a great reference for the questions that you should be able to answer in order to make informed critical strategic decisions.

After reviewing the paper from SAP SuccessFactors, I decided that I was interested in the question “What percentage of your workforce will retire in the next year or in the next five years?”.  We all know that when the Baby Boomer generation began a few years ago that it left a gap in the workforce for many employers. 

With Query Manager, I picked a handful of fields that I wanted to see.  I even added a basic calculation that tells me which generation each employee belongs to, to assist in my review. See below:

Having easy access to your data, and the ability to manipulate and evaluate that data to answer critical HCM business questions like these is important.  As stated in the paper:

“If you cannot answer at least half of the following questions, or if gathering the necessary information to answer these questions takes you a considerable amount of resources and time, then you should consider an alternative approach to human capital measurement. There are costs to not knowing the answers to these questions.”

Having the ability to extract the key data fields from your SAP HCM system is often a challenge, as noted in the following blogs: SAP HCM Reporting: Are Query tools ancient history?,  A Quick Fix to Employee Status that can improve your HCM Reporting, and How to better design your HR actions to improve HCM Reporting.  With EPI-USE Labs Query Manager, it’s both fast and easy.  

Easy access to your SAP data

Query Manager was designed to solve the biggest challenge all SAP HCM customers face, which is reporting.  All customers have difficulty accessing data in SAP as there are a handful of different solutions required to get at the data.  Each solution – whether it be the Ad Hoc Query or the Wage Type Reporter – has limitations on the types of data accessible.  For example, the Ad Hoc Query can access basic infotype data, but not payroll data or time results.  The Wage Type reporter can access payroll data, but not master or configuration data.  Even if multiple solutions and utilities are leveraged to get the data, the user still has to extract all that data into an application like Microsoft Excel or access and try to marry the data back together for each employee.  This manual task is time-consuming, error prone and costly for an organization. 

Other organizations leverage ABAP programmers and the like to create custom hard-coded reports as a workaround.  This process involves the design of a spec, custom code creation including security provisions and the development lifecycle of moving this custom program from a development client onto QA for testing and then finally on to production.  These hard-coded reports have to be reviewed with each system change, update or patch to ensure that they continue to work properly.  Also, any system changes like the addition of a wage type or a new reason code requires that the report be modified accordingly, a time-intensive and costly experience. 

Do you have the ability to answer these types of questions in your SAP HCM system?  If not please check out the link below.