Hire SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding ABAP Devs

Client type: Global Tier-1 automotive parts supplier with four assembly plants in Japan and Thailand.

Challenge: The company faced repeated delays in SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding, causing production start-up slippage and overtime costs.

Solution: We supplied a squad of three augmented ABAP developers specialised in SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding forms and Japanese labor localisation. They refactored legacy ABAP workflows, introduced rule-based work-center assignment, and developed a mass-hire program that imported 500 operator records from CSV in minutes. Continuous integration pipelines ensured every transport passed ATC checks. The augmented team worked entirely remote yet overlapped with Tokyo office hours, joining daily stand-ups and sharing code reviews in Git. By the second sprint, internal ABAPers adopted our unit-test templates, lifting overall code coverage from 28 % to 71 %. A bespoke dashboard built in ABAP RAP gave HR real-time visibility of onboarding bottlenecks and compliance metrics. Because capacity was elastic, we ramped down to one developer during hyper-care, reducing ongoing spend without losing knowledge continuity.

Result: Plant HR cut time-to-productive employee from 5.6 days to 1.8 days, saving ¥37 M in launch overtime. Error rate in personnel number creation dropped by 92%, and the team’s Go-Live occurred two weeks ahead of the OEM audit.

Client type: Mid-size regional bank serving 5 million retail customers across Honshu.

Challenge: SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding lacked automated FATCA and AML screening, stretching new analyst activation beyond regulatory limits and risking fines.

Solution: Two senior ABAP contractors from Smartbrain joined the bank’s DevSecOps stream within 72 hours. They created ABAP class wrappers around third-party KYC APIs, inserted dynamic panels into SuccessFactors Onboarding, and added e-signature capture compliant with Japan’s Electronic Records Act. All code was peer-reviewed, ATC-clean, and transported through ChaRM without incident. Knowledge transfer occurred through paired programming and recorded walkthroughs, enabling permanent staff to own the new code baseline. When demand spiked during a graduate intake, Smartbrain scaled the team to four developers for a single sprint, handling 1,200 concurrent hires without performance degradation. Once the surge passed, the bank returned to the original two-person arrangement, illustrating the financial flexibility of outstaffing over fixed headcount.

Result: Average onboarding lead time fell from 14 days to 4 days. Regulatory audit findings related to onboarding dropped to zero, and the bank avoided projected penalties of ¥120 M. Internal developers reported a 35 % productivity boost thanks to reusable ABAP service classes delivered by the augmented team.

Client type: Multinational fashion retailer operating 1,100 stores and an e-commerce platform in APAC.

Challenge: Each holiday season the HR team had to onboard up to 8,000 temporary staff, but SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding ABAP batch jobs crashed under the load, causing payroll errors and brand-damaging delays.

Solution: Smartbrain deployed a blended pod—one lead ABAP architect and two mid-level developers—specialised in high-volume SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding. They re-engineered data models, replaced custom BDCs with RFC-enabled ABAP RAP services, and introduced parallel processing via background jobs tuned for HANA. Integration with WorkForce Management was refactored using CPI adapters, eliminating fragile flat-file transfers.

Result: The retailer processed 8,300 holiday hires with zero downtime; onboarding throughput improved by 310 % (from 150 to 615 employees per hour) and payroll error rate fell below 0.3 %. HR now completes seasonal onboarding two days before store openings, cutting overtime spend by ¥54 M annually. After peak season, the augmented team was released within contractual notice, leaving the internal team with clean, documented ABAP code and CICD pipelines.