SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central (EC) Lead

Job Title: SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central (EC) Lead

Location: UK (Maidenhead / hybrid; regular client site presence)

Position Type: Full-time

Experience Level: 10-14 years

Role Overview

We are seeking an experienced SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central (EC) Lead to own the EC solution on a large-scale SuccessFactors and Employee Central Payroll (ECP) transformation. The programme migrates a complex UK public sector payroll and HR estate from SAP HCM on S/4HANA into the SAP SuccessFactors landscape, covering approximately 65,000 employee and pensioner records, 17 payrolls, multiple public sector pension schemes (LGPS, Teachers, NHS), external employers paid on the client's payroll, and a significant multiple-employment population.

Employee Central is the system of record for the programme. It goes live first, alongside Recruiting and Onboarding, and then becomes the source of employee data for Employee Central Payroll. For several months between those go-lives EC runs alongside the existing SAP payroll, so the EC design has to work for both. The EC Lead owns the EC design end to end and is the client's main point of contact for EC design decisions, covering the organisation structure, position management, job and pay data, employee lifecycle events, custom data objects, role-based permissions and data retention.

Requirements

Key Responsibilities

• EC solution ownership. Own the Employee Central solution end to end, from fit-to-standard and detailed design through configuration workbooks, build, testing and go-live, and take accountability for EC design sign-off at each programme milestone.
• Client design leadership. Lead EC design workshops with HR, payroll, finance and IT stakeholders, present options with a clear recommendation, record decisions, and drive open questions to closure with named owners and dates.
• Foundation and organisation structure. Design legal entities, business units, divisions, departments, locations, cost centres, pay groups and pay structures, including the UK legal entity fields (for example PAYE reference and Accounts Office reference) that SAP does not deliver as standard. The client is redesigning its organisation in parallel, so the structure must absorb change without rework.
• Position management. Design position management and the reporting hierarchy, including how the hierarchy is built during migration where the legacy system holds little position-to-position reporting.
• Employee data and lifecycle. Design job information, compensation and pay components, and the employee lifecycle (hire, rehire, transfer, job and pay change, termination), with event reasons, workflows and business rules.
• Complex populations. Design how EC handles:
• Multiple and concurrent employments
• External employers paid on the client's payroll
• Pensioner populations held in EC without an active position
• Employees moving between payrolls and employers
• Extensibility. Design custom MDF objects for client-specific data held today in custom infotypes (for example teacher qualifications and status), and agree with the client what is carried forward and what is retired.
• Permissions and data protection. Design role-based permissions with the client, and the data retention and purge approach (DRTM) that meets UK GDPR and the client's statutory retention rules.
• Payroll and integration alignment. Agree with the ECP Lead and the integration team the EC data that payroll depends on, and the EC to payroll replication approach, including the period when EC is live but payroll still runs on the existing SAP system.
• Data migration. Work with the data migration team on EC load templates, field mapping, transformation rules and reconciliation across each data cycle, and confirm EC data quality before each load.
• Recruiting and Onboarding fit. Make sure the EC design supports the Recruiting and Onboarding modules going live alongside it, including position, job and new hire data flowing into EC.
• Testing, cutover and hypercare. Support system integration testing and UAT, own EC defect resolution, prepare and run the EC cutover activities, and lead EC through hypercare and stabilisation.
• Team leadership. Lead and quality-assure the work of the EC configuration consultants, set configuration and documentation standards, and review all EC build before it goes into test.
• Governance and reporting. Report EC progress, risks and decisions to the programme leadership and steering forums, and support architecture assurance and change control throughout the delivery lifecycle. Technical Skills & Experience

Technical Skills & Experience

• Deep hands-on Employee Central configuration: foundation objects, Corporate and Succession data models, country-specific fields, picklists, MDF and generic objects, Business Rules and workflows.
• Position management, including position hierarchy design, Position Org Chart, and the rules that keep positions and employee job data in step.
• Role-based permissions design, including permission groups, target populations and field-level access.
• EC data loads and validation using Import Employee Data, MDF import and export, Integration Center and the OData API.
• Data Retention Management (DRTM) and UK GDPR design in SuccessFactors.
• Understanding of how EC feeds Employee Central Payroll, and the EC data payroll relies on (pay components, cost assignment, multiple employments).
• Working knowledge of SAP HCM (PA and OM infotypes) to map the legacy design and data into EC.
• SAP Activate, configuration workbooks, and managing the twice-yearly SuccessFactors release cycle.

Essential Experience

• At least two full-lifecycle Employee Central implementations in a lead or solution architect role
• Leading client-facing design workshops and owning design sign-off
• Position management and complex organisation structure design
• Role-based permissions and data protection design
• Migration from SAP HCM on-premise to Employee Central
• Leading and reviewing the work of a configuration team

Desirable Experience

• UK public sector or local government HR (for example councils, schools and academies, pension funds)
• Employee Central integrated with Employee Central Payroll
• Multiple and concurrent employment design
• Recruiting and Onboarding integration with EC
• People Analytics (Stories) reporting on EC data
• Organisation redesign delivered during a live implementation

Certifications

• Essential: Current SAP certification in SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Core, kept up to date through SAP Learning Hub.
• Desirable: SAP SuccessFactors certification in a second module, for example Recruiting, Onboarding or Employee Central Payroll.

Soft Skills

• Confident with senior client stakeholders, and able to challenge and hold a design position
• Clear decision-making and the ability to explain trade-offs in plain language
• Strong written communication for design documents and decision records
• Coaching and quality review of less experienced consultants
• Attention to detail appropriate to data that drives payroll
• Ability to manage competing priorities across parallel workstreams