We are on a mission to fundamentally change how companies attract, engage, and empower their workforce in order to drive business results. A big part of our strategy includes bringing high-value solutions together with our suite to deliver unique value for clients. Most HR leaders I meet with tell me they are on a journey to deliver more value to their organizations and they are looking for us as their partner to help them do this. So while we have a leading suite of solutions in HR, it’s still important for us to build deep partnerships that enhance the value we can deliver for clients.
Benefitfocus is one of those leading partners. Benefitfocus provides best-in-class Total Benefits Management in the US and serves over 23 million people on their platform BENEFITFOCUS® Marketplace, providing a consumer-like shopping experience where people shop, enroll, manage and exchange benefits.
I’m excited to announce that SAP will soon begin to resell BENEFITFOCUS® Marketplace as the SAP® U.S. Benefits Management application by Benefitfocus. Through this agreement, we will offer clients in the U.S. a powerful, end-to-end human capital management solution that improves benefits administration efficiency and platform user experience throughout the employee lifecycle.
Clients now can chose to have a single vendor to deal with on integration, support, and service delivery. Simplifying their experiences.
This agreement with Benefitfocus boosts our current strong relationship and will allow us to provide our customers with a smooth journey to the cloud. It’s about bringing market-leading benefits and capabilities to SuccessFactors Employee Central users seamlessly, via quick and low-risk implementations.
Benefitfocus is a leader, and they lead in the uniqueness of the U.S. benefits market – more robustly than anyone can. Many HRIS vendors claim to have U.S. benefits nailed, but when you look closely at the market, roughly 70% of companies use a specialist provider. While HR systems can solve some of the puzzle, they don’t solve it all. When we look at our competitors’ customers, instead of using their HRMS based benefits, they use a specialist provider, often Benefitfocus.
It’s clear that U.S. healthcare costs create a massive challenge for U.S. employers and employees. Managing those providers, plans, and programs demands more than what our competitors’ HR systems can do. As we continue to enhance our own capabilities, we will design them in a way that works well with Benefitfocus. We understand the power of partnership. We have left the “not invented here” syndrome for our competitors to grapple with.
Even the world’s largest vendor of enterprise software can’t build everything. SAP has a strong tradition of partnering with specialist vendors who excel in a specific niche, and integrating them into product, support and contract. Today we are building on that tradition with Benefitfocus.
Over the last year, we have built out significant global benefits capability in Successfactors Employee Central. We will continue to provide our customers with transparency and insight into their benefits from around the world. Whether it is a complex car allowance in the UK, festival allowances in India, Superannuation in Australia or time accounts in Germany, we get the global picture. We plan to include specific US benefits capabilities over time into EC.
It’s a matter of depth and breath. BenefitFocus has a broad and deep portfolio of services and solutions for U.S. benefits. It provides a sophisticated solution that serves the needs of the most demanding benefits customers. While some customers don’t need that sophistication, many do.
Bringing industry-leading and mission-critical solutions together with the most comprehensive HCM suite in the market to deliver business results and simplification for customers is something we believe no one else in the HR technology industry can match.
