Modernizing SAP HCM: Improving Payroll Processing with Payroll Control Center
This is the third post in a series of blogs on how to modernize your SAP HCM environment. This installment discusses the benefits of the Payroll Control Center add-on.
Payroll Control Center (PCC) assists administrators in becoming more efficient in their day-to-day payroll management activities. Currently, payroll administrators spend a great deal of time running reports to validate data throughout the various stages in a payroll run. PCC offers a modernized approach that automates all payroll reporting activities, eliminating several time-consuming tasks.
For example, you can set the payroll system to simply show you what has passed a validation rule and what has not vs. the typical process of digging through data. This is done by creating a platform that can be used to create validation rules against a declustered payroll database. These validation rules can be unique to each organization and can handle the complexity if required. Instead of a payroll manager running reports and analyzing the results, the system performs these tasks in a timely and efficient manner, allowing the payroll manager to concentrate on items highlighted by the system validation as needing attention.
If you have also installed HR Renewal 2.0 on the system, then tiles can be set up to house the various payroll step activity. These tiles allow the Payroll Manager to quickly view the information and drill down to the users with the exception. If the exception is valid for this payroll run, the manager can simply adjust the flag and move on. If the information needs to be corrected, they can also see what the issue is and make the necessary correction, or make the required phone call and have the appropriate person make the change and rerun the step where the error was discovered.
The robustness of the system and the level of complexity available for the rules depends upon what each entities landscape looks like. For customers running the SAP HANA database (the recommended approach with this particular solution) with HR Renewal 2.0 installed, they will experience faster processing time and have the ability to create the most complex rules. For those not running HANA, speed and the ability to build complex rules decreases as the declustering function can expand the database by 2-5 times its current size if HANA is not being used. The larger the database, the less complex you can make the rule and have it run in an agreeable time. An example of the time difference is shown below and was provided by SAP in the “SAP Payroll Control Center powered by HANA Webinar,” presented by Frans Smolders in March 2014.
So what does Payroll Control Center offer organizations running SAP?
- Pre-payroll master data validation results in “cleaner” payroll data
- More efficient processes to identify and fix errors during and after the payroll run
- Quicker analysis of payroll results for pre-defined tolerance exceptions
System Requirements for PCC
- SAP ECC 6 Enhancement Package 7
- SAP NetWeaver 7.4
- SAP_UI on SP8
- HR Renewal 2.0 (recommended but not required, potential reduction in functionality)
- SAP HANA (recommended for optimal results but not required; potential reduction in functionality
For organizations looking to add efficiency to their payroll processes, PCC offers a more effective way to run payroll and minimize errors. By utilizing PCC, organizations can enable their payroll department to spend time on more strategic tasks vs. time-consuming validation, and ultimately achieve the most important goal – paying employees on time and without error.