As the end of mainstream maintenance for SAP Business Suite including SAP ERP HCM in 2027 comes nearer, SAP is offering a solution for customers that are not yet ready to bring all their HR processes to the cloud with SAP SuccessFactors solutions.

With the move to SAP Human Capital Management for SAP S/4HANA (SAP HCM for SAP S/4HANA), customers can benefit from a maintenance window until 2040. While SAP SuccessFactors solutions remain the strategic focus of SAP’s HR portfolio, customers can rely on a long-term support to ensure hybrid processes still work. In addition, the solution will make use of the SAP HANA database and a higher level of the underlying SAP NetWeaver basis. More details about SAP HCM for SAP S/4HANA can be found here in the blog from Ralf Wagner.

Many of our customers today run a hybrid HR solution environment. They use SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central for core HR in combination with SAP ERP HCM for payroll or time management processes. SAP provides a pre-packaged integration between these solutions, based on an SAP ERP add-on named ‘PA_SE_IN’. If an SAP ERP HCM customer decides to upgrade to the new SAP HCM for SAP S/4HANA solution they will get a new version of the add-on, now named ‘ECS4HCM’. Again, this will enable a smooth integration in a hybrid setup. In addition, it will prepare customers well for a long support period and make use of the new technologies mentioned above.

PA_SE_IN evolved a lot over the past years, and we still support the early technologies with that add-on. For the benefit of our customers, the new add-on will not only make use of SAP HANA technology as a result of moving from SAP ERP to SAP S/4HANA, but we also make the new add-on simpler to implement and simpler to run.

The new add-on will be available together with the first release of SAP HCM for SAP S/4HANA in Q4 of 2022. To allow the move from PA_SE_IN to ECS4HCM, both add-ons will be offered in parallel for the yearly releases of SAP HCM for SAP S/4HANA up until the 2025 version. Based on that, customers can use any of the SAP HCM for SAP S/4HANA releases of years 2022 to 2025 to move from PA_SE_IN to ECS4HCM.

Each SAP S/4HANA on premise release is planned to be supported for 5 years, i.e., SAP S/4HANA 2022 is planned to be supported until 2027, and SAP S/4HANA 2025 is planned to be supported until 2030. For the add-ons that means that PA_SE_IN can be used with SAP S/4HANA 2025 until 2030. As soon as customers switch to a higher release of SAP S/4HANA, e.g., release 2026, then only the new add-on ECS4HCM can be used.

The transition to the new add-on will be described in a guide. Customers already using the business integration builder feature of PA_SE_IN will have a low effort to move to the new add-on.

We will provide more information and details here in the SAP SuccessFactors Customer Community over the coming weeks by updating this blog. Make sure to check back every once in a while, to stay up to date.