SAP consolidated HR document management across 105,000+ employees and more than 100 legal entities by deploying OpenText Content Management for SAP® SuccessFactors as the content layer for its global SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central rollout, reducing document types by 96%, migrating 8.5 million records, and automating GDPR compliance at enterprise scale.
“Within the global HR organization, our aim is to make core HR processes as seamless as possible for our teams, so they can focus on SAP’s mission,” said Fausto Brembilla, SVP Head of Global HR Service Delivery at SAP. He added that automated retention and deletion policies are “a huge benefit for GDPR compliance.”
SAP’s legacy HR document repository held nearly 2,000 different document types with little global consistency, and GDPR compliance required manually sifting through thousands of records to identify which to dispose of. As the company prepared to deploy SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central as its next-generation HCM platform, the manual approach became untenable at the scale of 105,000+ employees and more than 70 countries of operation.
After evaluating several ECM providers, SAP selected OpenText Content Management for SAP SuccessFactors for its tight integration with SuccessFactors and compliance capabilities. Working with OpenText Professional Services, SAP migrated 8.5 million documents from the legacy system to the new platform, standardized 70 global templates in place of the original 2,000, and executed a single big-bang go-live across the entire global business in place of a phased rollout.
The deployment embeds OpenText Content Management directly inside SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central workflows, so HR documents are consistently generated, stored, governed, and accessed within the SuccessFactors environment. OpenText Content Management handles retention-policy automation, deletion enforcement, and version control, while SuccessFactors provides the HCM backbone, employee master data, and process orchestration. The combined platform now supports tens of thousands of employees across more than 100 legal entities.
During SAP’s annual compensation review—when the document management platform faces peak load—the system generates approximately 80,000 letters for global personnel, which OpenText Content Management handled “with flying colors” per Brembilla. GDPR compliance, previously a laborious manual process that detracted from value-added activities, now runs as automated retention and deletion policies across every document type. Employees can access their own documents on the same platform that supports HR self-service workflows.
SAP’s long-term aspiration is core HR processes fading into the background so employees can focus on their work. Brembilla described the next phase: “if an employee sends a document attesting a change to their address or marital status, we aim to use AI-powered automation to update their employment record without a member of the HR team getting involved.” He added that OpenText’s AI roadmap was a key selection criterion from day one: “We think AI innovation from OpenText will play a key role in helping us address those challenges.”