The transition was triggered by an expiring compatibility agreement ending on December 31, 2025. As a result, the HR system landscape had to be brought to a new technical level in time to ensure continued compliance, supportability, and operational stability. Kurtz Ersa centrally manages payroll and time management for several group companies with around 1,050 payroll entities per month. Different collective agreements, works agreements, and co-determination structures added further complexity to the HR landscape.
“The premise was clear: We wanted to keep what had proven successful over the years,” explains Jürgen Stahl, Team Leader Business Process Solutions at Kurtz Ersa. The foundation for this was the SAP Readiness Check, which identified the necessary adjustments in the existing system – ranging from custom developments and coding adaptations to Fiori-related topics.
In addition to the technical transition, Kurtz Ersa used the opportunity to clean up the existing SAP HR landscape. Obsolete payroll areas, personnel subareas, variants, and wage types were removed in order to reduce unnecessary complexity in day-to-day operations. Another key success factor was the newly established key-user setup, with two dedicated key users each for payroll and time management. They consolidated functional requirements, coordinated testing activities, and acted as the interface between business departments, IT, and FIS. “The biggest success was definitely bringing the key users fully into the project. It gave the collaboration between business, IT, and FIS completely new momentum,” says Stahl.
SAP Fiori was also introduced selectively: not as a complete replacement for SAP GUI, but specifically where it supports employees and managers in their daily work – for example in Employee Self Services (ESS) and Manager Self Services (MSS) for leave requests, time statements, payslips, and approvals. In addition, tools from the FIS/hrd product family were used. The copy and comparison tool FIS/hrd CCC supported realistic testing scenarios through targeted data transfers into test and development systems. The FIS/hrd Schema and Rules Analyzer (SRA) helped especially in time management by making complex rule structures more transparent and enabling changes to be validated more reliably. Both tools continue to support Kurtz Ersa in daily H4S4 operations beyond the transition project itself.
With the completed transition, Kurtz Ersa now has a stable and future-ready technical foundation for upcoming HR initiatives, such as SAP SuccessFactors and potentially international HR scenarios.
