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In November, the SAP SuccessFactors People Analytics product team made an exciting announcement - the legacy reporting tools will be phased out by November 2025. This means that, three years after the introduction of Report Stories, customers have a two-year window to transition to the new and improved Reporting tools.
1. One Report Tool for Everything
Report Stories is the reporting tool for the future. In 2020 SuccessFactors released Report Stories, stating and it would eventually replace all the historic operational reporting tools. In November 2023 they started the countdown, giving customers two years to move onto Report Stories. From November 2025 all customers will be able to do all their reporting via Report Stories and all other reporting tools will be deactivated.
2. Report Stories offers the same user experience as PowerBI
The Report Stories front end is actually an embedded version of SAP Analytics Cloud. If you do not know what that is, SAP Analytics Cloud (or SAC) is the SAP response to Microsoft's PowerBI or Tableau. It is a powerful front end analytics and visualisation tool.
This means that your Report Stories interface and the people analytics experience it creates is going to be as good as any other enterprise analytics tool. You will have a huge range of charts (from columns to lines to hotspots and more), table options, text options and more. You are able to add filters and ways of navigating the structure. You can change the colours and layouts. You will also have all the same functionalities in terms of counts, averages and segmentations.
Given the Report Stories is also embedded into SuccessFactors from a permissioning perspective (see below), Report Stories is a true enterprise reporting tool of the future.
3. Report Stories is free
Ok, the legacy reporting tools were free too. But given the new reporting power you are being armed with, and considering that an individual SAP Analytics Cloud licence is worth hundreds of pounds/euros/dollars, Report Stories is incredibly good value.
4. Report Stories Permissioning is easy
Over the last three years, we have see Report Stories permissions become both a huge opportunity and a risk for customers. They are a risk because most customers do not take time to learn about them up front, and learn the hard way that they do not work as expected. They are an opportunity because with a few clicks you can give every line manager in the business a report that only shows them their data.
As additional detail, Report Stories is designed for scaled, operational reporting - it is designed to let everyone and anyone explore the data they are allowed to see, in a curated experience. In order to fulfil fast and scalable reporting, Report Stories permissions are very simple - you can only see the data you are permissioned to see through your SuccessFactors permissions.
Customers who understand this and consider this in their dashboard experience and design processes are hugely successful. Customers that need users to see data that is beyond their default SuccessFactors permissions need to be careful, and should probably look at SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics.
5. Opportunity to reimagine your function
The migration from the legacy reporting tools to Report Stories can appear daunting and it will force businesses to not only migrate but to reimagine their reporting and analytics. They will be forced to review their old reports and reconsider which ones actually added value - and consider what the value actually was.
For us the migration to Report Stories is not only a chance to reimagine your Reports but an opportunity to reimagine the people analytics and reporting teams itself. For years our customers have wanted to invest in their teams, not just their tools, but the business case for reporting team investments was not there. Report Stories changes that because it operates so differently that teams will need to operate differently. They will need different capacities, different skills and maybe even different operating models.
Between now and November 2025 customers will not only need to reimagine their reports but they have an opportunity to reimagine their teams. What should they look like? What skills do they need? What value do they create now? What additional value will they need to create over time.
There has never been a time more daunting, more exciting and with more opportunity to improve reporting at SuccessFactors customers.
