Integrating SAP Employee Central with SAP ECC and SAP S/4 HR

Oct 31, 2024

Our step-by-step guide to seamless integration, data replication, and troubleshooting tips.

By Malcolm Paris - SAP HCM/SuccessFactors Architect

So, you invested in SAP Employee Central (EC) to give your users the state-of-the-art HR in the cloud experience.

But what about all those other SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) modules that still need your HR data? And the downstream integrations from SAP HR?  

You might be running SAP Payroll for one or for multiple countries and not be ready for the significant projects to migrate these to Employee Central Payroll (ECP). 

With this in mind, SAP has been developing Employee Central over the last 10 yearsso that it feels integrated into the ERP offerings despite being a separate product with its own platform and architecture.  

Core Hybrid Deployment

Here, we are looking at what SAP refers to as the Core Hybrid Deployment Option to “use Employee Central as system of record for all employees and retain the ERP system for specific processes, such as payroll or time management.  

This is also known as Replication or Infoporter. 


The scope of these integrations is as follows: 


  1. To provide tools to map and to migrate employee master data from SAP HR to Employee Central 

  2. Once that migration is complete, to enable replication from EC to SAP HR of: 
    • Employee master data  

  • Employee organisational assignments 

  • Organisational objects     

  • Employee time data (time-off and timesheet) 

 

Once replication is enabled, data is mastered in EC and changes are sent to ECC or S/4 HR. It is important NOT to make any changes to infotypes in scope of the replication or they will simply be overwritten by the data from EC. 

What is in-scope? A whole new section will have appeared in your IMG when you installed the Integration Package, and its here where we configure the mapping from EC portlets and fields to SAP HR infotypes and fields for both employee data and the organisational structure. 

Integration timeline

Here’s a brief timeline of the SAP developments thus far: 

  • December 2013: The first release of the integration add-on for SAP ERP HCM and SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central (SFSF EC INTEGRATION 1000). Supporting Dell Boomi or CPI middleware. 

  • November 2020New BIB (business integration builder) replication introduced, not available with BOOMI. BIB replication is a feature of the integration add-on for SAP ERP HCM and SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central (SFSF EC INTEGRATION 1210 / PA_SE_IN), which is only compatible with SAP Cloud Platform Integration (CPI) as the middleware.  

  • SFSF EC INTEGRATION has been replaced by a new add-on named ECS4HCM, which is compatible with SAP S/4HANA. The PA_SE_IN add-on can be used with SAP S/4HANA 2023 until 2030. As soon as customers switch to a higher release of SAP S/4HANA, e.g., release 2025, then only the new add-on ECS4HCM can be used. 

The ECS4HCM add-on continues to be recommended where a big footprint of HR data is required downstream in ECC or S/4. 

Master Data Integration (MDI)

However, often S/4 only needs a limited amount of HR data, commonly referred to as a HR mini masterWe can use the replication for this, but SAP’s recommendation for HR (and many other cross-functional scenarios) is to move to Master Data Integration (MDI).  


SAP MDI is a cloud-based service designed to help businesses maintain consistent and accurate master data across their enterprise applications. It provides a centralised platform for managing and synchronising master data across different SAP and non-SAP applications, including worker data, customer data, product data, and supplier data. 


The replication integration is initiated from ECC or S/4 with a scheduled background job. Typically, the job is scheduled between ½ hourly and ¼ hourly. The replication process queries Employee Central for any changes made since the last run (using the SF Compound Employee API). 


Any changes are translated through the BIB integration mappings (configured on ECC or S/4) to make the master data changes to the relevant HR infotypes.  Employee data, organisational assignments and organisational data are all processed. 

separate cost centre integration (ECC or S/4 to EC) is also included with the integration package. 


For error handing, a simple EC tool called the Data Replication Monitor (DRM) is available in EC. It shows all data that has been sent from EC. By default, it filters out the successful transactions.  Where there is an error, it logs the error message returned when trying to make the infotype change. 


Further diagnostics are available in ECC or S/4 where the replication can be run manually for individual employees with verbose logging enabled to see a very detailed log of the replication process and any errors encountered. 

Want to know more?

Daniel Phillips

SAP Business Development