How to select the right implementation partner for your SAP SuccessFactors implementation

How to select the right implementation partner for your SAP SuccessFactors implementation

So you’ve selected the SAP SuccessFactors HCM suite as the core HR and/or Talent Management cloud solution for your company, now what? The next step will impact the overall success of your project, and that is the selection of your internal implementation team and an implementation partner. In the SAP SuccessFactors ecosystem, there are many implementation partners to choose from. In this blog post (which is an excerpt from my book, Implementing SAP SuccessFactors – A Client centered approach) I review the key criteria and approach for selecting an implementation partner.

Selection Criteria

There are several areas in which a vendor should be evaluated and rated. Your procurement team may have other criteria they want to include. For example, they might prefer to have Financials – included as a separate category (instead of it being part of the stability category as I have listed below).

• Cost
• Experience
• Full Service Capabilities
• Stability

– Years in existence as a company

– Number of years implementing SAP SuccessFactors

– Financial strength

– Consultant and leadership turnover rate

• Partnership
• Culture and Fit
• Post Go Live Support Services
• References

The Decision Matrix

To make the partner selection a structured process, I highly recommend using a decision matrix. The figure below shows a simplified decision matrix. When creating your own decision matrix, you want to specify the selection criteria, rating scale, which vendors will be evaluated, and the members of the internal evaluation team. In this example, all the selection criteria are equally weighted. Not shown in the figure are the individual scores of the evaluation team members.

Each member of the selection team will have a detailed area to indicate their overall ratings and pros and cons for each partner under consideration. The individual team member ratings are then summarized and included in the overall score, which is displayed in the summary view below.

While the simple decision matrix above will work for some organizations, others may want to place a higher importance on one or more of the selection criteria. This can be accomplished by using a weighted decision matrix. This makes the evaluation process more complicated, but more accurate. For example, if References are more important than Cost, then a higher weight will be assigned to the References criterion. The figure below shows a weighted decision matrix.

Note the addition of the “Weights” column in the figure above. The total rating for each criterion now becomes the average rating from the selection team multiplied by the weight. The References, Culture and Fit, Partnership and Full Service Capabilities columns are weighted the highest and will have a greater impact on the overall ratings.

Conclusion

Using a structured process with the correct evaluation criteria to evaluate and select the right implementation partner will significantly increase the possibility of a successful project. To get the detailed description for each of the listed selection criteria or for more implementation tips and guidelines on how to successfully implement SAP SuccessFactors, refer to my book.

This post was originally published on the 3D Results Blog.