Oracle E-Business Suite and SAP SuccessFactors integration

What moves between them

The flow is unidirectional from SuccessFactors to Oracle EBS. ml-connector polls SuccessFactors Employee Central on a schedule tied to your HR cycle, reading PerPerson (employee records), EmpJob (assignments), EmpCompensation, and FOCostCenter. Each employee is written to EBS open interface tables (HZ_PARTIES and related HR entities) with the appropriate responsibility and organization context, then ml-connector submits the EBS concurrent program that imports the interface data into base tables. Cost centers are validated against FOCostCenter in SuccessFactors before writing to EBS GL_CODE_COMBINATIONS interface. New hires, terminations, and job transfers are synced with each poll cycle.

How ml-connector handles it

ml-connector stores the SuccessFactors RSA private key encrypted and generates a fresh SAML assertion and Bearer token before each call, expiring and refreshing at 20 hours to avoid the 24-hour token boundary. EBS ISG calls use HTTP Basic Auth with username and password, and ml-connector re-authenticates on any 401 response to refresh the session token. On the EBS side, ml-connector maps SuccessFactors employee and cost center data to the ISG REST endpoint for each customer's ISG hostname and port, inserts records into the configured open interface table (e.g. HZ_PARTIES), and submits the matching concurrent program request with the appropriate responsibility and organization context. SuccessFactors uses non-standard OData datetime format - /Date(milliseconds)/ in responses - which ml-connector parses correctly. OData queries are paginated at $top=1000 to avoid silent record loss. The concurrent program execution is asynchronous and may take minutes to hours; ml-connector tracks the request and audits the completion status. Because EBS customers host their own ISG, hostname and port are configured per customer, and the required application context headers must be supplied for each call.

A real-world example

A mid-market manufacturing company runs Oracle E-Business Suite on premises for GL, procurement, and inventory, and uses SAP SuccessFactors in the cloud for core HR across three locations. Before the integration, the finance and HR teams operated separately: payroll ran in SuccessFactors every two weeks, but the GL and headcount in EBS were updated manually by exporting an HR register and re-entering cost center assignments and employee codes into EBS. New hires took days to appear in EBS because the process was manual. With Oracle EBS and SuccessFactors connected, each time an employee is hired or changes roles in SuccessFactors, ml-connector reads the update, maps the employee and cost center to EBS GL dimensions, and inserts the record into EBS open interface tables. The concurrent program runs that same day, and the next morning the cost center structure and headcount in EBS match SuccessFactors. Month-end close is faster because the GL account mappings are already correct.

What you can do

• •Sync new hires, terminations, and job changes from SAP SuccessFactors into Oracle EBS open interface tables with correct cost center and organization context.
• •Map SuccessFactors cost centers to EBS GL code combinations so payroll allocations land on valid GL accounts.
• •Handle OAuth2 SAML Bearer token generation and refresh, and EBS ISG HTTP Basic Auth with automatic re-authentication on session expiry.
• •Poll SuccessFactors on a schedule tied to your HR cycle, with OData pagination and non-standard datetime format parsing.
• •Submit EBS concurrent programs that import interface data into base tables, tracking completion status and auditing every record.

Questions

Do I need to configure anything special in SuccessFactors or EBS?

In SuccessFactors Admin Center, register an OAuth2 client and upload an RSA public certificate to enable SAML Bearer token generation. In EBS, deploy the required REST services via the Integration Repository ISG for the open interface table and concurrent program you want to use, and the EBS administrator must grant Invoke permissions on those services to the user account ml-connector will use. ml-connector handles the rest.

Why is the import asynchronous in EBS?

EBS open interface tables are not direct updatable tables - they are staging tables. When you insert a record into an open interface table via REST, the actual import into the base tables (HZ_PARTIES, GL_JE_LINES, etc.) happens through a concurrent program that runs asynchronously. This design lets EBS validate, transform, and audit the data before it commits. ml-connector tracks the concurrent program request and audits completion.

What if my ISG hostname or port changes?

Each EBS customer hosts their own Integrated SOA Gateway at a unique hostname and port. ml-connector stores this per customer so that when you change ISG infrastructure or failover, you update the customer configuration and ml-connector continues to poll without any code changes.