As the name suggests, this program is used for migrating legacy data (say via a text file) into SAP. Hence, for instance, we shall consider the case of bringing over Organization data (Org. units/Positions) into SAP.

Technical Details:

• Use t-code ‘lsmw’ to proceed.
  
• In the LSMW screen, firstly a Project, then the Subproject, and the Object must be created. These fields hold free text, and it is recommended to have business-relevant names in the same so that they can be identifiable at a later point in time.

• Click ‘Create’ once the above are filled.
  
• In the next screen, a list of process steps is shown (ref. below)

• By default, ‘Define Object Attributes’ is selected. Click ‘Execute’ and a screen to capture the recording is shown.

1. Here, click ‘Display-Change’, select ‘Batch Input Recording’, and then click on ‘Recordings: Overview’ to create a recording.

2. Click the ‘Create Recording’ button on the next screen and name the recording along with a related Description then click ‘Continue’. Later, the ‘Transaction Code’ must be entered to begin the recording.

Note: Recording Name should be the table name itself. Ex: In this case PP02 transaction will hit the table ‘HRP1000’ so, enter the Recording Name as ‘HRP1000’

3. In this case, we enter ‘PP02’ and click Continue.

4. In the PP02 screen, key in the relevant data (ref. below) and click ‘Create Infotype’. In the next screen, enter the Object Abbreviation (free text) and click Save. A message ‘Record created’ is displayed.

5. In the next screen, click ‘Default All’ to map all the fields with the respective technical objects/names and click ‘Save’.

6. Now, exit this screen, and the initial recording screen is shown. Ensure, the Recording created is populated under ‘Batch Input Recording’, then click Save.

• Next, ‘Source Structures’ must be defined as shown below.

• Now, in the main LSMW screen, click on ‘Object Overview’ and ‘Table’ on the pop-up.

• This shows the list of fields including technical names. It can help in listing Source Fields and also in preparing the data template.

• Next, ‘Source Fields’ are to be defined. Follow the below and list all the mandatory/desired fields related to the Tcode used earlier for recording, then click Save & Exit.

• Further, the ‘Structure Relations’ must be defined following the below steps.

• Now, enter ‘Define Field Mapping and Conversion Rules’ related screen.
  
• Click ‘Display <-> Change’ and expand the ‘Extras’ menu to click on ‘Auto-Field Mapping’

• Continue in the pop-up (Auto Field Mapping: Settings). All the fields listed shall be prompted with respective source field names for mapping. Ensure the fields are rightly auto-mapped and Save.

Note: Any field(s) mapped manually might corrupt the conversion program. It is best to go with the above option.

• Next, the Fixed Values/Translations/User-Defined Routines can be defined. This is optional and must be created only when needed.

i. For instance, based on the above field list, if the requirement is to pass ‘1000’ in the Infotype field, a Fixed Value for the same can be defined as below and the system shall default this field with the value set during the LSMW run. Refer below for creating a Fixed Value.

• In the next few steps, data files need to be specified, read; and converted using the following options

• In ‘Specify Files’, the path to fetch the data from must be selected as shown (usually from a file on the computer).

Note: Usually, a .txt that is Tabulator delimited is used

• Now, to assign the files to the structure, follow the below steps

• Now, execute ‘Read Data’ and the number of transactions read thru the data file is displayed. Verify the same and proceed to the next step.
  
• Execute ‘Display Read Data’ to see the records in the data file mapped to the structure/source fields. Ensure the correctness of the values mapped to source fields as the same is inserted into the PP02.

• Next, execute ‘Convert Data’ to see the total records converted.
  
• Further, the same can be viewed by executing ‘Display Converted Data’. Ensure the correctness of the values/fields mapped.
  
• Finally, the following steps must be run to insert data into the system.

• Post creation of ‘Batch Input Session’, the same must be run. The processing starts by selecting the batch input record and clicking on the ‘Process’ button.

• Next, the session can be processed in one of the 3 different modes.

1. Foreground Processing – Runs record by record and field by field.
2. Display Errors only – Runs in the background and breaks/pauses whenever an error is encountered.
3. Background (most used) – Runs in the background completely and shows the total processed transactions/errors as part of the batch summary.

4. In conjunction with the Processing Mode, the desired Additional Function(s) can be selected.

• The above steps need to be repeated in case of errors to ensure the successful creation of Organization objects.

Tip: In case of errors and the data in the file is modified, the lsmw execution flow can be repeated from the step ‘Specify Files’ when a new data file is selected else, it can be done from the step ‘Read Data’ itself.

• Post-processing, the data is inserted into the table HRP1000, and here is a snapshot. This can be accessed thru t-code ‘se16’.

• The same can alternatively be viewed on screens PP02 and PPOME, as shown below.

PP02 screen:

PPOME screen:

• LSMW Migration – This section details the actions to be taken to copy an LSMW configuration from a given source to target.

In the Source System:

1. Export – From the LSMW screen, expand the Extras menu and click ‘ExportProject’ and ‘Export’ on the next screen. This creates a .txt file.

2. Change Request – From the LSMW screen, expand the Extras menu and click ‘Create Change Request’.

Now click ‘Create Request’, name the Transport Request, and save it.

In the Target System:

3. Import – From the LSMW screen, expand the Extras menu and click ‘ImportProject’ and the LSMW setup file (.txt) must be selected.

4. Transport Request – The Change Request created earlier can be imported/deployed to the target system via the usual Transport process.

With these we can successfully load legacy/historical data in SAP.

The post LSMW Config. (for Beginners) – SAP HCM first appeared on ERP Q&A.

When you design your SAC Planning model, you create dimensions for data collection and retrieval purposes.

We, currently, witness customers and partners who create for each table of their SuccessFactors query a corresponding dimension in the SAP Analytics Cloud planning model.

They mix the concept of Analytics and Planning models and forget that properties and hierarchies allow to retrieve data. A dimension in the Planning model is required when it allows to differentiate the collected data. This overwhelming number of dimensions can have a very negative impact on the performance of the model, especially if several dimensions have a large numbers of dimensions numbers and the Planning Area option wasn’t configured.

In this blog we will cover the following topics related to Workforce Planning using SAP Analytics Cloud Planning(referenced as SAC Planning) with SuccessFactors Data(referenced as SF).

1. Create Planning Model with Description and Hierarchy using SF Data Fields
   
2. Create Planning Model with Property using SF Data Fields
   
3. Creating Public Dimension with Property and its usage in Planning Model using SF Data Fields
   
4. Setting up the incremental load and schedule settings with SF Data

Topic 1: Create Planning Model with Description and Hierarchy using SF Data Fields:

In this section, we will create a model with SF Data and set the description and hierarchy out of the existing fields in SF.

In this example, we have dimensions like Position/Title, Division, Gender.

Parent-Child Hierarchy: Division as Parent and Position as Dimension (Child)

Description: Position as Dimension and Position Title as Description.

• Create a query using the SF Tables available. For our scenario we have selected Job Information as shown below.

• Search and select the fields available as shown below.

• Once you create your query, it will be available in the Draft Data as shown below.

• Once your data is ready, click on the query in Draft data. Your new model will be loaded with the dimensions and data respectively. For Planning Model, first step should be to enable the check box for “Enable Planning”.

• Below is the list of properties available for a dimension. The best practice for a Model is to use these attributes for dimensions which in turn will have better performance in data refresh and data retrieval in your story.

• Select the Column ‘Position’ and in the Details section you can see the options for Dimension type and attributes. Select the Add Dimension Attributes dropdown and select Description. Select Position Title as description. Do check the change in the icon of the fields before and after the attributes selection as shown below.
  
  • Position Title as Dimension before Attribute selection.

• Position Tile as Description Attribute for Position Field.

• We can have Parent Child Hierarchy as an attribute for a dimension in SAC. Select the position dimension and add new dimension attribute with Parent-Child Hierarchy. You can see in the below image that ‘Parent’ is mentioned in bracket. It indicates that the dimension you map here in this attribute will be the Parent for the selected Dimension. In our scenario, we can have Division at top level (Parent) and Position as detail level (Child). So, you need to add ‘Division’ as Parent-child hierarchy attribute to ‘Position’ dimension.
  
  • Select position dimension and in the ‘Details’ section select ‘Add Dimension attributes’. Select Parent-Child Hierarchy in the drop-down list. Now select the ‘Division’ dimension as parent for ‘Position’.

• You can see in the below image that Division is now shown as Hierarchy Attribute.

• Please note that for Planning Models, at least one Measure is required. Also make sure there is no data issues in your model before creation. In case of any duplicates or null values in your data those needs to be corrected or it will be ignored during Model Creation.

• After you create your model, you can see that only Position and Gender is available as dimensions as shown below.

• If you select the Position dimension, then you can see that ‘Description’ and ‘Division’ will have the respective data associated. You can also note that when Hierarchy Attribute is created, the values of the hierarchy will be stored in rows in the dimension directly. To distinguish between the Attribute and Dimension data, you will see <root> in each row representing the attribute value. For Position Dimension rows, you can see Division Values mapped. <root> indicates that its Top-Level in the Hierarchy.

• You can select on the hierarchy button on top to see how the Parent-Child Relationship is established as shown below.

Topic 2: Create Planning Model with Property using SF Data Fields:

In this section we will describe the Usage of Property Attribute with SF Data. Property will be an additional column within the Dimension like Description Attribute we defined in the earlier section.

To illustrate this scenario with example, we have selected User Information like Gender, First Name, Middle Name as the fields from SF and declare them as Property for User ID Field.

Property: User ID as Dimension. Gender, First Name, Last Name as Property.

• Select User Table from the SuccessFactors Query Tab.

• Select the fields required for the property along with the dimension field.

• After the query gets created, select the ‘User ID’ column, and select ‘Add Dimension Attributes’ and select ‘Property’.

• You can properties for the User ID column as shown below.

• Do sort out the mapping issues before creating Planning Model. After you create your Model, in the Model Structure you can see only User ID as the Generic Dimension.

• Once you select the User ID Field, you can see the other SF fields as properties mapped to User ID. Gender, First Name and Last Name are now the properties for User ID.

Topic 3: Creating Public Dimension with Property and its usage in Planning Model using SF Data Fields:

In this section we will describe how we can create Public Dimension with Properties and use them in the Planning Model.

• Go to Modeler Section and select Public Dimensions Tab and create a new dimension.

• In the Create Dimension popup, select the type of dimension you require and provide a unique name for your dimension and select create. Please note that we have selected the Data Access Control Check box here. It can be used to restrict the users in SAC on this field.

• By default, the data will be empty and you will not have access to the Data Management initially. You need to Save the dimension as a first step to use the Data Management Tab.

• You can add the custom properties for this public dimension as shown below.
  
  • Initial view of the dimension with no data and properties.

• View after creating Custom Properties.

• Once you save the Dimension, the Data Management Tab will be enabled.

• In the data management tab, Click Import option and select Data Source.

• Select SuccessFactors from the connections and new Query window will appear. To illustrate the Public Dimension with Property, we have select Position Table with ‘Position’ as the Dimension and ‘Division’, ‘Department’, ‘Business Unit’ as Properties and ‘Position Title’ as the Description.
  
  • Selecting Position Query.

• Selecting the Fields required.

• After the query is created, you need to finish the mapping before the data gets imported. Do check the required attributes and select appropriate fields so that there are no mapping issues before data import.

• After you finish the mapping, your attributes would be like below screenshot. Check for the mapping issues and do finish mapping.
  
  • Attributes mapped with the dimension fields from SF.

• No Mapping Issues shown in the below screenshot.

• Once the data import is finished you can switch to the Dimension tab to see the Dimension values and other Attributes as shown below.

• As a next step, we need to add this public dimension to the existing planning model. Go to the planning model created and in the Edit option select ‘Add New Dimension’ button as shown below.

• Select the type of dimension and search for the public dimension you have created. Click on the Add button and you can see that in the Model your public dimension is added.
  
  • Search for the Public Dimension as shown below

• Public Dimension is now added to the planning model.

Topic 4: Setting up the incremental load and schedule settings with SF Data:

In this section we will illustrate how to set up the incremental load for SF Master Data(Dimension member in SAC).

As a business requirement, when we import master data, we do not want to update the full master data every time the import job is scheduled. Instead, if we set up incremental load option and schedule the import job, after the first full load, only the master data changes happened after the last import will be updated.

This feature is critical for customers having large set of master data with daily/weekly/monthly refresh/update requirements.

Please note that incremental load should be set up during the Query Creation Stage. Once you create the model, you do not have the option to set up the incremental load later.

• For this scenario, I have taken User Table in the SF Query.

• Select the fields required for your model and in the filters section you can see the ‘Set Incremental Load’ option. Do select the same.

• Once you select the ‘Set Incremental Load’ button you can see two changes one at the Available Data section in the left and other at the Filter Section as shown below.
  
  • Available Data Section: There will be a special icon enabled on the potential fields on which Incremental Load can be Set as shown in the below image. It can be Date Time Field or Numeric Field.
    
  • Filters Section: ‘Drop Token’ option will be enabled where you can drag and drop the field from available Data Section.
    
  • Please note that only selected fields will have the incremental load option enabled. It can be datetime or numeric field.

• After dropping the field, you get a notification stating, ‘Incremental load will start applying after this import’. It means that first import will be of full load and based on the first import date and schedule settings incremental load will be applied.

• After the query section, you can work on the model to enable the planning option and other transformation rules, calculations required and make sure your model have no issues. Select Create Model.

• Once Model is created, go to data management tab and in the import jobs section, you can select ‘Import Settings’.

• In the Import Settings, you can set the Import Method and see that Incremental Load is enabled as shown below. Based on your business requirement you can select any of the import method options below.
  
• Import Setting with Import Method.
  
  • Update: This option must be selected for Master Data, where existing records will get updated with new changes and new records will be added. The dimension of the Planning Model will reflect only the latest state from SF. Example: User Table, Job Info Table.
    
  • Append: This option cannot be used for Master data, because it relates to Data, where you can have multiple rows for one ID. Example: Historical Salary of User.

• Import Setting with Incremental Load.

• You need to enable the ‘Schedule Settings’ in your import job so that master data gets refreshed on timely basis. You can select the highlighted Schedule Setting option and set the Frequency as Repeating. You can also select the Recurrence of Schedule either Daily, Weekly or Monthly. There are other options like start date, end date, time zone and start time as shown below.

Please note that, for Planning Model to have master data refresh on regular basis, you need to have both the incremental load setup in the Query Creation section and Repeating Schedule Setup in the Import Job Section.

To Summarize we have covered the best practices for SAC Planning Model and Setting up the incremental load for SF Data.

The post SAP Analytics Cloud Planning with SAP SuccessFactors (HCM): Step by Step Illustrations of the Best Practices for Workforce Planning first appeared on ERP Q&A.

Budgets are arguably one of the most important elements of the Compensation Module configuration. It is where the business needs and requirements meet the module to define set rules that affect downstream guidelines and eligibility for the entire program. The budget can make or break the entire success of the program to ensure that it is compliant with what your organization needs are. Therefore, it is important to understand the options that the system has, along with the limitations, when making configuration decisions with your implementation partner such as Veritas Prime. Additionally, as our organization changes, we may find that we need to shift budget configurations for our templates year to year as things change.

We are going to focus on some of the most common budget configurations we have seen clients pursue and the pros and cons of each to help your organization better determine which is right for you. For some, a pro may be a con and visa versa. Keep all considerations mentioned in mind when researching and discussing options with your implementation partner. The top budget configurations that will be focused on in this blog are:

• Percent of Current Salary
  
• Custom Fields
  
• Target Amounts
  
• Direct Amounts
  
• Budget by Groups
  
• Budget on Guidelines

In addition, we will dive into the Guideline Modeling tool in reference to the Budget by Guidelines option.

Budget Options

Before we dive into the various configurations mentioned above, I want to dive into some additional options to consider that are relevant to any budget set up to keep in mind.

Budget Components: the components allow us to select which fields on the worksheet will affect the budget spend. This can be simply the merit field, bonus amount, or any other element you have built into your worksheet for planning. There is the ability to also multiselect which allows us to have multiple fields affect the spend of any single budget. Sometimes we see the same budget for Merit and Adjustments so we can select them both from the component options to accomplish this.

Include Ineligible: Simply put, this option allows us to include ineligible employee data in the budgeted amount. This is specific to each organization and is something to keep in mind to turn on and off based on your requirements.

Prorating: If you are using proration in your template, it is possible to flag whether the proration will affect the budgeted amount given for anyone who is prorated.

Hide Percentage: If there is a need, you can always hide the actual budgeted percentage and only show the amount on the budget pod in the compensation worksheet.

Budget Configurations

Percent of Current Salary

Possibly the most common and SAP best practice configuration, the percentage of current salary allows you to simply take a percentage of all the current employee populations salaries to build a budget amount. It is a very basic and easy set up that allows for quick changes to the percentage year over year by the basic admin.

The configuration is simply setting the mode to PercentofCurSal and entering in the percentage in the budget value as a whole number (i.e., 2 would indicate a budget of 2% of current salary).

The configuration is simply setting the mode to PercentofCurSal and entering in the percentage in the budget value as a whole number (i.e., 2 would indicate a budget of 2% of current salary).

Custom Fields

The custom field option allows for a large range of options for that actual output of the budgeted amounts. Typically, we would set up a field, it can be visible or hidden, on the worksheet and point to that field to pick up 100% of that field for the budget. It is important to consider that the amount we are granting is on the employee level, not the planner level. A common use of this is to use a lookup table to find a percentage based on a specific data point (such as country), then multiplying that by current salary. This is a good way to have varying budget percentages based on the varying employee data. One of the biggest considerations is that you will never be able to display the exact percentage for the budget (such as 3%) in the budget pod. With this set up the percent will always display as 100%, alternatively, we can use the hide percentage field and only display the amounts.

The configuration requires us to create a field on the template via Design Worksheet that we can point to for the budget. This can be a calculated field such as the lookup table method described above or an import field if you want to control the amounts via the UDF import per employee. The field should always be of Money type and Reportable. Again, we can choose to display or hide this column on the worksheet.

Once the field is created and set up, we can use the Column ID from the field to configure the budget and point the field. We will want to set the Mode to PercentOfCustomField and the value to 100 indicating that we want to take 100% of the value coming from the custom field. We will then need to set the Column ID of the field in the Base Custom Field input on the budget to connect to our budget field.

Target Amounts

To budget based on targets allows us to load a target increase or lump sum amount per employee and use that as the baseline for the budget. This allows for large-scale variation by the individual employee as each employee is loaded with their own target amount. There are standard fields on the User Data File available, such as MERIT_TARGET, that the admin would load with an amount. Based on this amount, we can set the percentage of that amount to be used for the budget. Typically, we would give the exact budget amount and set the budget value percent to 100. This option should only ever be used if we need to get to the granular level of setting budget per employee as it is admin intensive to load and validate the values every process.

The general set up is straightforward for this option as we just need to set to the target mode. There are four different standard target fields and corresponding modes available to be used, Merit Target, Lump Sum Target, Lump Sum 2 Target, and Bonus Target. The standard fields in the User Data File must be used and generated for the configuration to work.

Direct Amounts

The direct amount feature allows us to set an amount, per compensation planner, to be distributed. This allows for flexibility of varying budgets at the planner level. It is particularly helpful for organizations that follow a top-down budget methodology. There is a lot of set up and work on the admin side to assign individual budgets per planner. If you have a large population of planners intended for the compensation cycle, this can be particularly time consuming. Once the actual budget is set up for the direct amount option, there is an additional budget distribution tool that needs to be utilized to set the budget per planner.

From the basic configuration level, the budget needs to be set to Mode DirectAmount and given a value of 100 and Based On the planner.

Once this general configuration is set up, you can dive into the budget distribution options. The tool is located by following Compensation Home > Plan Template > Manage Worksheets > Budget Assignment. You will need to use the plus button in the upper right corner to add each of the planners to assign their budget. You will see the ability to add budget for each planner based on amounts and percent.

Budget by Groups

The budget by group feature really combines the ability of the different budget modes while allowing the variation ability of custom field budgets. From a basic perspective, it allows you to create groups, whether that be countries, business units, etc. to give these groups varying budget percentages. The biggest benefit of this option is that you can display the budget percent in the pod unlike the custom field option. When you are displaying the budget from a higher level, you can see a combined budget or break the budgets out by group. Below you can see where we have distributed varying budgeted amounts based on countries and then split those into the country groups.

The configuration requires us to create the Family and Groups that we assign the budgets for. This is done in the Action For All Plans >> Group Assignment tool. You create the family as the overall budget group to be assigned then the individual groups that employees will be assigned to.

When you create a new group, you can select it and set the individual budget value assignments.

There are some options to manually assign the groups or do a mass import for the groups. I recommend using groups names for data that can be easily extracted for each employee to make the import option for the groups easy to work with. Once the groups assignment and budget values are set up, we can set the options for the budget assignment on the template. The flexibility comes in here with the ability to do different modes. For this example, we are doing percent of current salary. The budget value should always be 100 to indicate 100% of the group assigned percent. Based on should be set as group and we will then need to use the Family Name field to indicate the family we have just created.

Budgets by Guidelines

Guidelines help moderate a program and ensure that planners are staying within the policies set by the compensation team and leadership. Guidelines are typically a range of increase recommendations based on a set of criteria such as the employees Performance Rating and Range Penetration. When we talk about using these guidelines that are set to create a budget, we are referring to the default value of the guideline table to establish budget values by employee. The table must be created first in the tool to then drive the budget. As an example of how this works, you can have a guideline of 3-5% increase for a specific employee and say the default value is 4% of their current salary. One of the biggest challenges when you enter in a default value, is that the field will populate with this recommendation. What this means is our remaining budget for this option will ALWAYS display as $0 upon launching the program. There is one work around to this which requires us to re-enter the values as 0 after launch for every user via Executive Review Import feature.

The configuration is very easy given that the table is created and generated by the admin team with default values. We will talk shortly about the Guideline Modeling tool that can be used to assist the admin in creating guidelines. The key set up of the budget includes setting the mode to Guideline, the value to 100% of the guideline default, and Based on User. One consideration, you do not need to set the value to 100, you could inflate it to give extra budget to give the sense of input and not have the budget default to zero as discussed above.

Guideline Modeling

Guideline modeling is a tool that can be used regardless of which budget option you choose. However, I want to highlight the use case particularly when using the budget by guidelines option as this tool can help you drive your budget using the guidelines to get an exact budget amount. The tool at its core for this use case is to set an overall budget amount for your organization and use real employee data to create guidelines that equal up to that intended budgeted amount. The tool allows you to set an intended budgeted amount based on one of the guideline criteria such as Rating.

Once you have your budget set, you can then enter the tool to adjust your guidelines based on where your real employees fall within the guidelines. This will help you adjust the guidelines to hit your targeted budget. The system will additionally provide you with some recommendations that you can auto select to automatically update the guidelines for you. Once you have created your ideal guideline model, you can push it back to the template table automatically and thus create the budget for the system based on guidelines.

We could talk about guideline modeling for days, but it is important to note here the key limitations with guideline modeling. This is simply an additional available tool for you to utilize but should not drive which budget you go with as none are dependent on this tool.

Key Limitations:

• Models can only be made on one budget type at a time, meaning, if you have a combined budget for Merit and Adjustment, you won’t be able to get a true model
  
• Sorting and assignment of budgets can be only on one pivot point. If you have guidelines based on rating and salary benchmarks, you will need to set the budget percent on only one of those criteria.
  
• The tool itself can be difficult to get started and working, there has been little to no improvement on the tool from SAP in years and nothing indicated on the road map

Wrap Up

There are plenty of ways to get creative and find a budget solution that works for your organization. It is always important to keep in mind and fully test and discuss any limitations the solution presents. Keep in mind that if you go with an approach one year and it doesn’t work out, there is always an opportunity to change to something new!

The post Choosing the Right Budget Configuration for Your Organization first appeared on ERP Q&A.

But we also have lots of cool new feature that are general available. As usual, first a small summary of what we deliver. You can then navigate to those topics that are of interest for you, or if you want to read through the whole blog you can do as well – but bring a bit time with you ;-).

What do we deliver in H2 2021?

1. New Time Sheet User Interface

• Call for action: switch to new User Interface !
• Hiding of calendar, reduction of new time sheet UI from 3 to 2 columns

2. Clock in out Integration (Time Tracking)

• Integration of clock in / out events into the timesheet
• Possibility to edit / create new clock in / out events in the time sheet
• Mobile punch clock and web clock

3. Notification mail in case yesterday has missing times

• Ever wanted to send a timely notification mail if employees have forgotten their time recording?

4. Cross midnight Time Sheet (Time Tracking)

• General availability
• New enhanced filter categories for time valuations to create the correct premium pay when employees work in night shifts into a public holiday or out of a public holiday
• Sample configuration to handle Germany specific §3b core night handling
• Flextime bandwidth and cross midnight

5. Additional Quick Approval Cards and Quick Action cards on new homepage

• Quick action card for web punch in / out clock and team absence calendar
• Quick approval cards for time sheet, manual clock in / out recording, single time sheet record approval, purchase and payout leave approval

6. Team absence calendar permission

• enhanced permissions to enable the team absence calendar

7. Time Off / Time Sheet Reporting Dashboard

• Quick information for managers on teams absences, attendances, time collectors, overtime, approval status of time sheets, configurable thresholds for overtime or time account balances

8. Concurrent absences for Netherlands, UK and Spain (Early Adopter)

• allows employees to be on sickness leave and have other overlapping absences like for example vacation

9. Termination end handling in Time Off (Early Adopter)

• allows a better handling for termination and rehire

10. Edit-disabling of external time data records in time sheet (Time Tracking)

• allows to have imported external time data records read only in he time sheet so that employees can´t edit it

11. Cancellation instead of deletion of leave payout requests after approval

• allows to cancel payout requests instead of delete to keep full history

12. Permission enhancement to reduce absence type read access on target group basis

• you can now create more sophisticated permission roles for viewing absence time types

13. Defaulting of continued pay dates (Entgeltfortzahlung) and sick pay supplement dates (Krankengeldzuschuss) for Germany (Early Adopter)

• delivers default values for end of continued pay and sick pay supplement date fields

14. Mobile Time Off permission enhancement on custom field level overwrite

• allows to set read only permissions for custom fields in mobile time off

15. Conditional fields positioned next to the respective standard field

• improves usability on time off UI for conditional fields

16. Rule function for allowance recording validation in time sheet

• rule function that returns the number of allowances in a period

17. Enhanced time integration to SAP onprem Payroll (Early Adopter)

• good news for onprem customers: we provide same Time integration capabilities for onprem payroll as for EC Payroll

Even the list to read takes already lots of time ;-). As usual, fasten your seat belts, we dive into the details:

1. New Time Sheet User Interface

Call for action: please switch to the new time sheet User Interface

As already announced via various channels: for non Time Tracking customers using the old time sheet UI please prepare yourself to move to the new Time Sheet UI. The old time sheet UI will be phased out with H2 2022.

This is how the old time sheet UI looks like:

And this is the new time sheet UI:

I have introduced this new UI and elaborated on the benefits in my H1 2021 release blog and described how existing time sheet customers can switch it on (via the upgrade center). Please start your change process now, we plan a mandatory switch with H2 2022 release.

And please note: This does not mean that current Time Sheet customers need to move to our new Time Tracking product ! If you are happy with the current functionality of the time sheet, all is good. You don´t have to move to Time Tracking. You just have to switch to the new user interface. The rest stays the same. And this is switch is only relevant for non-time tracking customers, cause in Time Tracking there is only the new UI available.

New feature: Two column layout

But we have enhancements in the new UI as well. We reacted on customer feedback saying that the new time sheet UI looks a bit too overloaded with information. We reacted by hiding the calendar control that consumed quite a lot of the space behind a button. So, only when users really need to have the information in the calendar at hand or need to navigate in the calendar they can now call it with this specific button. This in turn changes the column layout of the new time sheet UI from three to only two:

After pressing the calendar view button you get the old calendar with same information and possibilities as a pop-up:

(as you can see, my employee Emma Dorn was a bit lazy with time recording, that´s why there is so much red in the calendar).

2. Clock in/out integration enhancements (Time Tracking / Early Adopter)

I am really happy to announce that we took a next big step in bringing our clock in / out solution to a profound and many business use cases covering solution.

Integration of Clock in/ out punches into the time sheet

From this release onwards employees can see their clock in / out punches in the time sheet UI. Whether they come from time recording terminals, digital mobile clock or via web clock. So, you got all time data of an employee in one place, in one UI. Not only absences, attendances, breaks, on-calls, allowances, but now also the external performed clock in / out events. And for better transparency you get two sets of information – a day view of all time events of the day and if you click on a time record only those those paired time events that led to this time sheet record based on the pair formation.

When you click on an imported time sheet record, you get the time event pair that led to this dedicated record:

Or, if you simply want a list of all clock ins / outs aka time events per day, you just click on the tab “Time Events” and you get the full list:

In the right day panel of the time sheet we show all time events (clock in / outs) for this day. An employee has hence the full overview on his daily recorded times, as well as which time events led to which time record based on the pair formation. You most probably say: hey, that´s nice. That´s what I awaited for since long in this solution. But what if an employee has forgotten his punch ? A display only is then not really much worth.

Yes, you are right.

And that´s why we also provide the feature to create (or delete) a manual time punch in the time sheet for those folks who forgot to punch in. Or the terminal at that time did not work properly, was out of order…. or any reason why you need to create a manual time punch. The employee just needs to click on the create button:

A pop-up appears where the employee can choose the time event type, the clocktime and also choose a reason code (reason codes can be configured and are optional. You might have different reasons like: punch forgotten, terminal out of order) and a comment:

But that´s not yet the end of the story. Wouldn´t you also expect for this manual time punch recording a dedicated workflow? Cause if employees can delete a terminal clock punch and create manually a new time event unnoticed in the time sheet then there is not really a control of accuracy possible. Hence a workflow for approval would be good. That´s why we also provide a workflow ;-). And the workflow is not just a workflow. As already mentioned above, the comments and reason fields are optional But if you use “reasons”, then you can use this reasons in your workflow rule to decide based on the reason if a workflow needs to be triggered or not. So, you are able to define for example that when an employee has chosen a reason “terminal out of order” there is no workflow triggered, hence an autoapproval, but when the employee chooses the reason “punch forgotten” then a workflow shall be triggered.

Now, where do you configure if reason codes and comments shall be mandatory? You do all this kind of configuration for the clock in / out handling in the admin center, “configure clock in / out” page:

And of course do we display all of this information like pairing status, reason code, comment, the workflow approval status, the origin of the event (manual event, web clock/ mobile app, terminal) in the details section of the time event in the time sheet:

And this information is also available for time administrators on the manage manage clock in / out page as well. This screenshot shows the manage clock in/ out page for time administrators:

Again, you might say, all nice and good. But do you think your company is too complex? There are many employee groups within one location, some are allowed to record a manual time event, others don´t. Some are allowed to delete a punch coming from the terminal, others not. Let alone when it is a global company having different rules and regulations in each country. But to cater for all this different requirements within a company we provided very fine granular permission configuration options to set up what a user is allowed to do on clock in / outs in the time sheet.

These are the new clock in / out permission options that you can use for a “self” target group:

• View Time Events – Allows you to view time events in the time sheet
• Create Manual Time Events – Allows you to create manual time events in the time sheet or in case a punch has been forgotten
• Delete Time Events created using Terminal – Allows you to delete time events uploaded from a time recording terminal. This might be necessary when there are “double punches” in the system, cause you swiped your card with the same reason code within a short time
• Delete Time Events created manually – Allows you to delete time events created in the time sheet
• Delete Time Events created using Clock Time – Allows you to delete time events created via “Clock Time” quick action card or mobile app

And of course this new permissions can be used for roles like time admins and employees. It has however to be mentioned that the configuration of this clock in / out permission roles is a bit different than what you are used to know.

To configure the permissions you navigate in admin tools, manage permission roles to the dedicated clock in / out permission section:

You get then to a page where you can define for example roles for an clock in / out administrator and for an employee role. Afterwards you tickmark the permissions that you want to set for each role. For an admin this could look like this:

Whereas for an employee it could look like this:

And afterwards you need to maintain the assignment and the target group for this role. This is done on the next tab of this page:

You might ask: why is this role setup different than what I am used to know? The answer is: the whole clock in / out pair formation machinery is running outside Successfactors, it runs on a different platform. And that´s why the permission setting is a bit different, but it is still done from the admin tool. But these are technical details you don´t need to bother with.

In the end it´s the same: you define permissions, set target population and afterwards you assign this role to users or permission groups.

But let me end this small excursus on permissions. It is all pretty self-explanatory once you set it up and at the end of this chapter you find anyway a link to a blog with more detailed information on the overall set up of clock in /out.

Like already mentioned, each time event in the time sheet (and on the admin manage clock in / out page) comes with all details that are available for this record. Like for example approval status of the manual recorded time events, terminal number for those time events coming from a time recording terminal (if your terminal can provide this data via our API), pairing status…And we also provide for time administrators and employees an indication if the pairing status of time events was not successful. Cause this really helps employees to identify if they need to correct data in the timesheet. And you will also see a fundamental change and improvement compared to SAP ERP Time. In SAP ERP Time the time valuation stopped when there was a time pair that was not successfully built. It just stopped. Even when there was a clock out missing for tuesday and the employee has correct time data on the subsequent days, the SAP ERP Time valuation still is stuck on Tuesday. No further time data processing from RPTIME. Hard stop in time valuation on Tuesday. Bad luck if your payroll was due to run and there was on Tuesday a clock in missing but not yet corrected and the employee has lots of other records for the whole week. No data for payroll for the rest of the week. Only when the error on Tuesday was corrected, time valuation did process this day. But bad luck when there was another punch missing on Wednesday as well. The ERP time valuation now runs Tuesday successfully but stops again on Wednesday. And again no processing of the rest of the week.

We handle this better. In our world only those records are marked as faulty that really could not be paired. But our time valuation is processing all other records and even can feed payroll with wage types resulting out of the other correct records of the week. This is only one of many benefits of the new world.

But of course this error needs to be corrected as well – cause something is missing and wrong. But it does not stop time valuation. And to better identify that in the pair formation something went wrong we highlight those records in the admin Ui and even in the employees time sheet in a specific manner.

For administrators we indicate in our Manage clock in/ out console those records that could not be paired with a red color code – at the very beginning of each line and even the content of the field “pairing status” is red:

Reasons for no successful pairing can be multiple, but most often it is that an employee has forgotten a time punch and you have a single time event remaining that cannot be paired. And this kind of visualization is also done for the employees time sheet. I used some big arrows to visualize this:

You see on day level on the very left side an indication that something is wrong. By clicking on it you get the error message, like:

And in the day panel on the right side we indicate which time pair led to this red status:

This visualization of unpaired time records to an employee is a big relief for time administrators. Cause now an employee can see on a glance in his time sheet if during the day or the week unpaired events exists – and correct this. And they see on a glance on which day, which record. Hence time admins do not have so much correction work any more. But what if the employee can´t correct his missing punches, cause he went right on the last day on vacation or got ill or you simply don´t want to give him permissions to create manual time events? No worries, as you saw above: the time admin can see this kind of red indication in the manage clock in / out page as well and delete or create new events so that the time pair can be created.

But remember: the upload of events from terminals can happen nearly real time. So you might say: if we upload in a minute interval and the pair formation is real time, then immediately when an employee punches in the time event is marked red ?? But the employee is still on work and the clock in can only be paired with a clock out when the employee leaves office or goes into break hence employees and time admins would be swamped with lots of unnecessary alerts and red time events?? Does this make sense? No worries. We thought on this as well: You can configure an “overdue time event” period that needs to elapse before so-called “start” time events are shown red and alerts triggered. This can again be done in the time events configuration page:

With this setting a time event is only indicated red when 17 hours have passed and it is still unpaired. As mentioned above, this setting applies only for start events – cause we don´t know how long an employees shift is and how long he is expected to work to hard code this, hence you can adapt it as you like. But so called “stop-events” are treated differently. “Stop events” are the logical stopper of another start- event. A clock out is for example a “stop event” that is the end of a clock in (which is a start event). But an “end break” event for example is not a stop event – yes, it stops the break-start event, but it simultaneously starts a similar status as if the employee has clocked in. But don´t get confused with this ;-). You will find more info in the already mentioned blog on the secrets of start / stop events and in the end it´s not really complicated. Here we just need to know that a stop event which cannot be paired turns immediately into error, regardless which period you have defined above. If a stop event cannot be paired it means a clock in is missing and this is immediately a clear error. Whereas start events consider the above mentioned “overdue time event” period

But lets have again a concrete example to illustrate this:

Compare the following two screenshots, same employee, same time event from October 15th. One is taken as the 17 hours not-paired threshold has not been reached – the status still says Not paired, but it is not red, cause I took it on 15th October:

And now, on 19th October, same time event looks like this: red. And via the details link you even get the real-time information how long this event is in the status “not paired”:

Now lets come to the next real cool new enhancement for clock in / out:

Mobile Clock in / out app and webclock

This might be interesting for you if you don´t use clock in /out hardware terminals but you want to give your employees the possibility to nevertheless “clock in” when they get into office, when they work from home or when they work at a customer site. This can be enabled either with our mobile punch in application or even with a web clock that is running for desktop applications.

This is how the mobile app looks like:

This App does not only provide you the possibility to perform clock in / outs, but you see also the already performed clock in / outs per day. And when you have punched in it shows you the elapsed time since the last punch. Very nice feature. You can easily see how many hours you have worked since last clock in – and derive easily how many hours you still need to work to fulfill your daily planned hours.

Upon pressing the “Clock Time” button you get the selection possibility which kind of punch/ time event type you want to perform. This is of course configurable and depends on the settings that are done for the “clock in/ out group” that each employee is assigned in job information. Hence you can choose if there are only simple clock ins and clock outs, or even a dedicated time event type that starts a break, or that starts another attendance type like “short business trip” when you for example need to leave a building to go a long way to another building and this time shall be considered as working time.

What we do not yet support in general for the clock in / out scenario is however creating automated absence types with a clock out. This means you cannot clock out with the reason “doctors appointment” and expect that this creates automatically an absence record in the system. You would need to create a normal absence record either via the time sheet UI or via the time off Ui and perform then a normal clock out. So, currently clock in / out pair formation can only create attendance or break records for the time sheet.

But coming back to the mobile app and web clock.

What if you say: well, nice. But we don´t allow business apps on private mobile phones and not everyone has got a company mobile phone. Or the usage of mobile phones in your company is completely forbidden? Not each customer can due to security reasons allow mobile phones in the company, and neither are all employees out there yet digital natives. And you don´t want to invest in time recording terminals neither. We have got a solution for this customer segment, too. Just use our web clock that runs on the desktop:

Mobile web clock

You can navigate to the web clock via so-called quick actions right from the homepage:

Just click on the card for “clock time” and you get this:

The functionality of the web clock is similar like the mobile punch app. There is an elapsed clock running starting from the last clock in (or to be precise: last “start event”), you get the list of already performed time events per day and you can choose out of the time event types that are assigned to the employees “clock in / out group” in the job information. Plus you can easily navigate from this card into your time sheet if you want. Cause an edit of an already performed punch in the webclock or even a delete is not yet possible – neither from the mobile app. For this you need to navigate to the time sheet. Currently only a create of new time events – or clock ins / outs- is possible. But we plan to work on this.

In order that employees and even time administrators can distinguish which clock in / out came from a terminal or from web/mobile we even store this information and visualize it in the administrators clock in / out console and in an employees time sheet:

And when you say – yes, this is. The web clock or mobile app thats exactly what I need but only for one dedicated location or only for one employee group and others shall not be allowed to use the mobile app or the web clock, than we cater also for this. Just configure the new permission option for mobile /web clock and assign it to your permissions groups. This is done in the already mentioned new permissions and comes under the user permission section:

That´s more or less it. This chapter turned out to become a bit longer than planned, apologies. But I tried to explain a bit all the various business cases we now support with our clock in/ out application. If you now ask yourself, how is the overall configuration of this done, how is terminal software fed with a mini-master set of the relevant employees, what´s this “clock in/out group”, then let me direct you to an excellent blog of my colleague Steffen Dubetz. You will find all information you need to set up the whole scenario in this fantastic Clock in / out blog.

And if you ask yourself why this wonderful solution is still in Early Adopter mode and not General Available – the answer is quite easy: The microservice that handles the pair formation is not yet rolled out to all datacenters and we can make it only general available when all data centers are provided. Sydney, Rot, Amsterdam, Arizona, Ashburn, Singapore are the datacenters where this is already enabled, the rest is to come soon.

And let me now come to the next topic, it fits nicely into the clock in / out story, but I spent and extra chapter for it, cause many customers are looking for this possibility:

3. Notification mail in case yesterday has missing times

Especially in the positive time management area, and especially when you have clock in / out terminals integrated, you expect your employees to do a timely and correct time recording. But it can happen that employees forget their daily time recording. Many customers ask hence for a possibility to push in such cases notification mails to the employees. But you don´t just want to send each day a generic reminder to all employees. If you send to all employees each day the reminder function get´s lost. It´s like spam mails.

So, you probably just want to send a notification if yesterday was a planned day. Cause it makes no sense to send a reminder on Monday that employees have not recorded their times on Sunday ;-). And you don´t want to send notifications if yesterday was a full absence day. So, there needs to be a bit of logic to do this in a smart way.

4. Cross Midnight for Time Sheet (Time Tracking)

General Availability

I am glad to announce that we move the cross midnight for time sheet functionality out of the early adopter status into general availability. So, each time tracking customer can use this functionality from H2 2021 onwards. Please find all necessary information on cross midnight in chapter 4 of my previous blog. In this one I don´t repeat the overall topic, but just describe the new features around cross midnight handling.

New filter options in time records filters

Determination of the correct premium for an employee working in a night shift can be quite complicated when it comes to constellations where an employee works “into” or “out of” a public holiday or into / out of a Sunday. In many countries you usually get when working in the night into a public holiday or into a Sunday from 00:00 onwards a higher premium instead of the normal night premium. Cause the employee then works physically on a public holiday or Sunday. And mosten often this higher premium is not only paid for the hours on the public holiday (or Sunday) itself, but even till 06:00 in the morning of the following day. Working into our out of Sunday was already covered in last release, now we deliver an enhancement to detect the correct premium pay when working in or out of public holidays.

Not so much theory, lets face a concrete example:

Todays shift day starts at 22:00. On the next calendar day (which is from 00:00 onwards) there is a public holiday. The start time of the planned working time determines the shift day, hence all hours “today” are not on a public holiday, but the hours after 00:00 are performed on a public holiday. This is what we means with “working into a public holiday”. And in many countries in Europe the employee gets for the times from 22:00 a night premium, but for the times from 00:00 onwards a public holiday premium. Hence time valuation needs to be able to look into the next days public holiday definition in order to generate the correct premium pay.

Another example for working out of a public holiday: Here the employee does not work a night shift, but a very early shift on Tuesday starting at 04:00. And remember those countries where a public holiday premium is paid not only on the public holiday itself, but till 06:00 in the morning the following day. For this the time valuation needs to look onto yesterdays day definition: yesterday was Monday and this was a public holiday. The employee performs on Tuesday an early shift starting from 04:00. So, our early shift employee receives when working his normal shift on Tuesday the time from 04:00 – 06:00 a public holiday premium, although the public holiday was yesterday (but spanned till 06:00 on the day after). And for this it is necessary that the time valuation is able to check tomorrows and yesterdays public holiday definition.

Hence, the time valuation overall needs to be able to look on the weekday and public holiday definition one day ahead, and one day back. Checking the weekdays like Sunday was already possible in our Early Adopter version, but now we enhanced the time records filters in a way that you also can check the public holiday definition of previous and next day.

This is how the new time record filters look like – you see the option to check the holiday class for the previous day, for current day and for next day. With this you should be able to cover all complex night shift scenarios:

To get this new option don´t forget to consider it in your permissions rule. This is done in the time management object permissions, “holiday class filter for time records”.

Core Night handling – §3b Einkommensteuergesetz Germany

Let me briefly touch upon a fairly complex pure German topic. In Germany work during night shift comes along with specific tax free portions of the night premium depending on if you start your work before or after 00:00. If your work started at 22:00 for example then the tax free portion of your night premium is 25% till 00:00, but 40% in the time frame from 00:00 – 04:00 and after 04:00 it is again 25% till 06:00 in the morning. But if you started your work after 00:00 then all night hours are only 25% tax free. So, the decisive factor is if you started work before or after 00:00. Many German SAP onprem customers know this kind of regulations as “core night handling” (Kernnacht) covered by the §3b Income Tax law (Einkommenssteuergesetz).

To cut a long story short: our solution is of course able to handle this. But since the configuration of this is a bit complex our Best Practice Team created sample configuration for core night handling. You can download and adapt. This facilitates and eases your implementation projects. See it as a kind of pattern that you can adjust – cause each customer will have it´s own flavour in it. My colleague Neelesh from the Best Practice Team deserves the merits to facilitate with this pre-configured patterns customer implementations.

Lets come to the next new cross midnight feature:

Flextime bandwidth and cross midnight

And last but not least, we enabled flextime also for cross midnight. If you are first time reader of my blog please refer to my previous blogs on our flextime (in German “Gleitzeit”) concept. During the last releases we delivered a profound solution for this business case with flextime bandwidth, working time account calculations and automated periodical processes on the working time account like for example an automated cut above a threshold.

In last release it was not possible to have night shifts AND a flextime bandwidth. This obstacle is now removed. Just assign a flextime bandwidth in the cross midnight day models as you would do it for any other shift:

5. Additional Quick Approval Cards and Quick Action cards on new homepage

In last release we already delivered a quick approval card and an engagement card for leave requests. We add now more approval cards and also quick action cards.

The approval and quick action cards are shown on the home page and allows a manager or a time administrator to quickly do his daily business and for employees to have a quick and fast navigation or even direct action. The approval cards get pushed to the respective person and each card has specific content to facilitate a quick approval – instead of opening each workflow item one by one to get detailed information.

A bunch of quick approval cards are added this release. Quick approval card for:

• Approval of time sheets
• Approval of single attendance records
• Approval of manual time events created or deleted for clock in / out
• Approval of purchase leave requests
• Approval of payout leave requests

This is how the overall homepage looks like with this cards:

Each card contains business context information. For the time sheet card we even enhanced the context information with additional fields based on various customer feedback in the past. We have for example an indicator if allowances or on call times are recorded within the time sheet, if absence records exist and of course the working time account balance. This facilitates the quick approval process. And if nevertheless an approver needs to see more details, he can click on the details button and navigates to the original workflow item with all information on it.

I am not describing all cards here, but just take the time sheet card as an example – you can quite easily figure out how the others look like by just using them:

The approval cards are piled up on a stack, but you also can click on display all and you get them in a kind of overview form:

Let´s come to the time management quick actions cards. We deliver 2 new quick actions, one for the web clock to perform clock in / out punches and one for the team absence calendar:

On the card for clock in / out I already elaborated in previous chapter, here just a screenshot again:

By default the system knows that I am currently clocked in and does provide me the only logical possible next time punch event: clock out. For this employee only clock in / out events exist, if this employee would be in a “clock in group” that allows also break punches, you would see here an option to clock out for break as well. And in the right corner you also see the direct navigation into the time sheet where an employee can see / record all his time data and see working time account balances or realtime valuation results.

And the “View team absences” card does what it says: it navigates directly to the team absence calendar. The enhancement here is that it is now not only for managers, but the navigation is now also possible for employees. To enable this we introduced a new permissions. Check the next chapter on this:

6. Team absence calendar permission

As you have seen above, we deliver a quick card for direct access to the team absence calendar. But you can even decide based on permission settings if everyone in your company shall have access to the quick card. If there is a specific employee group that shall not have access to the quick card, you can create an own permission group and not set the below shown permission.

However, this permission even gives you more. If you want to use the quick card for the team absence calendar you must set the permission. But not setting it does not only mean no access to the quick card, but it also means: no access to team absence calendar at all. Some customers wanted to have the option to disable the team absence calendar for a specific employee group. Before this was not possible, the navigation to the team absence calendar from our time off UIs was always there. Now you can remove the navigation possibility.

7. Reporting Dashboards for Attendances and Absences

Let me draw your attention now on a very cool new enhancement. Your managers and time administrator will for sure love this feature. It´s a new reporting dashboard. Well, in fact two different dashboards. One for absence records and time account balances and one for time sheet data like attendance time types, time collectors, overtime, allowance types.

These dashboard work only with the SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) reporting. And the dashboards are only kind of templates that you can adapt and adjust. But before going into the details, lets have a look on how these dashboards look like.

First the dashboard for time sheet data:

You see figures and diagrams based on time sheet approval status, time types, allowance types and collectors.

And this is the absence dashboard:

You see figures and diagrams based on absence time types and time account balances.

The good thing here is that you easily can configure the dashboards. You can put thresholds and limits into the dashboards. An example would be for working time or time off in lieu accounts that you define a threshold of 20 hours and you easily can see then if the threshold is reached.

Or you can define a minimum duration of absences, let´s say 10 days, and only then it counts like in the example above as “long and recommended vacation” to get a figure how many employees have taken a mandatory or minimum 2- weeks vacation for example.

There are lots of business use cases possible with this kind of dashboards. You just need a bit creativity and willingness to explore the options that are available in this tool.

Let me just draw your attention on another feature that comes with this dashboard – the navigation from the dashboards to dedicated list reports:

Overall this provides managers and time admins a direct access to important facts and figures. And they can easily set filters and date ranges themself.

8. Concurrent absences for Netherlands, UK and Spain (Early Adopter)

What are concurrent absences?

Normally two absence records at the same time is not possible – from most business case point of view and even from system behavior point of view. Either I am in vacation or I am sick. If you try to record a vacation overlapping with an illness record this ought to be a collision and not possible. However, you might have the business case where you want to enable that an employee gets ill during an existing vacation and the vacation record should be interrupted by the illness record. This is possible with our “split and delimit” collision configuration. But having an active illness record and in parallel an active vacation record ? Not possible currently in the system. Well, it was not possible, now it is.

There are some countries where really two absences need to exist in parallel in the system, and even both shall be replicated to payroll. And we provide this with our so-called “concurrent absence feature”.

The business reasons for it differs from country to country. In Netherlands for example all illness records need to be recorded with an open end date – even when you have a doctors certificate. And only when the employee really returns to work the end date of the illness record is set. So, technically the first end date of the illness record is 31.12.9999 – and this record overwrites then all future recorded vacation records. When the employee returns to work after 2 weeks he would need to re-create all his future vacation records. Not nice.

Or there are countries where you partially go on maternity / paternity leave. You work half day and the other half day you are on maternity leave. But nevertheless you might get sick or go on vacation during this period. And here again 2 valid overlapping absences need to be in the system.

Or there are countries where you are ill, but only partially ill. You are ill at 80% hence you got a work capacity of 20%. Means for a 40 hours week you ought to work 8 hours. But yet, you can go on vacation or get another illness on this day. This is a business use case for Netherlands and to support not only the multiple absences at the same time, but also the so-called “work capacity” we introduced the country specific work capacity field which also gets replicated to EC Payroll.

So, couple of reasons why “concurrent absences” are needed. This feature is available for Early Adopters for country extensions UK, Netherlands and Spain. If you are interested in it, get in contact with us.

And due to the fact that a proper collision handling for overlapping records normally exists to prevent erroneous data entry, we inform the employee upon absence recording that concurrent absences exist in the period where he wants to create the new one – just in case he did not intend to create a concurrent absence, but really made a mistake ;-):

9. Termination end handling in Time Off (Early Adopter)

We have enhanced the process handling of termination an employee in a way, that enables you to rehire him in the same accrual period. For more information on this topic.

Termination End Handling blog

10. Edit disabling of external time data in time sheet (Time Tracking)

You most probably now our external time data API via which 3rd party systems can send attendance or break records into the time sheet. This API is used when you have external time recording systems running and want to feed our time valuation, when you use our Clock in / out integration or partner clock in / out integrations.

You can now send for each record in the payload an indicator if this record can be edited in the time sheet or not. Why is this important?

Usually when you have clock in / out or other attendance systems connected then what the terminal devices send is usually the truth. You don´t want that someone edits this record. If there is an edit necessary, you usually edit the original raw data and send then the data again. Otherwise you might have an inconsistency in the data when you edit a record in a system where you have the data replicated to.

For this we provide a new field in the external time data called “correction scenario”. The default entry of the new field is “Time Sheet and External system”, this means the external data record can be edited in our time sheet UI. If you already use our Odata API and you don´t want a different behaviour, you don´t need to change anything. If you don´t give us an entry for this field, the default is handled in a way that you can still edit the record in the time sheet.

However, if you don´t want that an external time data is edited, you can now send us for this field the value “External System”. This has the effect, that the record appears in display only mode in the time sheet.

This is how the new field in the external time data looks like:

If you set this field to “External System” you can´t edit the record in the time sheet. As you can see, the fields of the record are read only then:

Some points worth mentioning:

If you added custom fields in the time sheet those can still be maintained. When you for example upload times from external systems and want to add a project code in the time sheet, then you are still able to do so, cause the project code would be a custom field.

If by any reason you nevertheless need to edit the record you can via manage data for this external time date record choose the value “Time Sheet and External System” again, and this allows you then to edit the record in the time sheet.

And please note that this feature works only for Time Tracking customers and with this only in the new Time Sheet UI.

11. Cancellation instead of deletion of leave payout requests after approval

Another small, but yet important enhancement. This is for time account payout requests from employees. It can happen from time to time that when an employee requests a time account payout, it gets approved but the employee then changes his mind after approval. In the past, when a time account payout request was already approved it could only be deleted in order to remove it. A deletion of the time account payout request however had the effect that the entry vanishes completely – and this does not really give you then the full correct history of employee interaction.

That´s why we exchange the “delete” functionality in the time administrator workbench with a “cancel” functionality. You can see in belows screenshot that there is no a cancel functionality instead of a delete functionality:

And if you cancel, the status changes to “cancelled” as well:

The end-to-end process to EC Payroll still works the same as for deletion: a proxy gets created which triggers a re-read of Payroll integration and the payroll might trigger a recalculation if payroll has already processed this.

If you still want to delete this record from the database, you can do this via manage data.

12. Permission enhancement to reduce absence type read access on target group basis

This permission enhancement goes back to a highly voted influence request on influence.sap.com. We deliver for the employee time object an enhancement that allows you to further restrict read access for absence time types. You can for example define a role where a workers council is allowed to see only absences of type “vacation” and only for a specified target group, like all employees in location x. This permission is then read everywhere – in the time administrator workbench, team absence calendar and reporting.

Please note that this enhancement is only relevant for absence time types, not for time sheet nor for time accounts.

Here is the option, it´s in the target group definition:

13. Defaulting of continued pay dates (Entgeltfortzahlung) and sick pay supplement dates (Krankengeldzuschuss) for Germany (Early Adopter)

This is only relevant for country extension Germany. In Germany there are regulations that in case of sickness 42 calendar days within a 6 month period is paid leave (or even within 1 year from start of sickness to first start of next sickness). Well, to be precise: for each own sickness cause / diagnosis a new 42 days period starts.

In SAP ERP IT2001 Absences there is an automated calculation of the end of continuos pay date which gets read from SAP Payroll engine. Furthermore, many customers pay after this 42 days a sick pay supplement which usually differs from your normal salary. And rates and periods can even vary amongst different employee groups. For sick pay supplement there are as well fields in the Absence Infotype in SAP ERP and they can also get calculated automatically based on configuration.

In the country extension for Germany we have in EC Time as well fields for end of continuos pay and sick pay supplement start / end date. These fields get replicated with our IT2001 replication to EC Payroll. Up to now you had to manually fill those fields. However, we started to go the path to do an automated calculation. In this release we take the first step and provide a basic automated calculation which will be enhanced in next releases with further functionality. This new automated calculation does not yet consider linked sickness records (you usually link them when you get from the health insurance the information that they are based on the same illness cause). So up to now it is only a kind of initial defaulting when an illness record gets created. And when you link the absences you can overwrite the defaulted fields with your manually calculated dates. Due to the limited initial functionality is why we ship this feature only for Early Adopters, means it is not in the general shipment. If you are interested to already use this feature, get in contact with us and we activate it for you and you can give us feedback to further improve it. And if you are interested in this topic but expect a more automated calculation, stay tuned cause we are working on this.

But how does it actually work? You can set for each timetype of the category “sickness” a period for defaulting the fields “end of continued pay” and “start / end of sick pay supplement” via manage data:

If a sickness record is created, you will have an additional button “Set sick pay dates” in the absence request form:

After pressing the button, the defined periods are added to the start date of the absence:

If you need to change a date cause you need to consider linked absences for example, you can overwrite the defaulted values. The sickness record including this defaulted fields are replicated for Germany and SAP payroll into the Infotyp 2001 Absences.

14. Mobile Time Off permission enhancement on custom field level overwrite

Another quick one: the mobile time off application did in the past not consider the permissions for custom field overwrite. If for example you have a custom field for an illness absence type where time administrators are attaching an illness certificate you usually set this field for employees to read only. However, this permission was not considered in the mobile time off app. Now it is. So, no action for you, if you have set this permission it works now also in the mobile time off app correct.

15. Conditional fields positioned next to the respective standard field

Just a quick update on this one: in the past there was no logic for the Time Off UI to place conditional fields next to the field where the condition was set. The mandatory fields were just added at the very end of all fields on the UI – which was not very user friendly. This has now been changed. The conditional fields are automatically set next to the field where you defined the condition for. If you for example set a condition on time type level that for example when a user chooses a specific absence type he needs to enter in a reason in a dedicated custom field, then this mandatory reason field appears next to the time type field.

16. Rule function for allowance recording validation in time sheet

This rule function can be used for on save validation rules for the time sheet. It allows you to check for example allowances in general (or a specific allowance type) and to sum up the occurrence of this allowances in the period you specify. The return value is hence the number of allowances. You can prompt an error when for example a specific allowance type is tried to be recorded more than 10 times a month.

This is how the rule function looks like:

You get the new rule function in the time sheet validation rule scenario.

17. Enhanced time integration to SAP onprem Payroll (Early Adopter)

You might know that our integration scenarios from EC Time to EC Payroll are not only more but even more advanced then the integration to SAP onprem payroll. This double integration scenarios come now finally to an end and we can provide same integration content for both worlds.

For Early Adopters we provide for onprem customers same integration scenarios as for EC Payroll customers.

This includes daily planned working time replication into IT2003 (this makes double configuration and maintenance of workschedules on both sides unnecessary), clock-time based absence records into IT2001 with country specific fields (especially for illness records), for a bunch of countries time account balance replication into IT2006 and the time wage type replication from EC time valuation into IT 2010. All based on point-to-point replication.

If you are interested in this Early adopter program, please get in contact with us. There are certain technical conditions to be met – like 6.08 latest support package, EA-HR SP99 latest support package, PA_SE_IN 32 and the so-called BIB implemented.

The post Successfactors Time Management – new features in H2 2021 first appeared on ERP Q&A.

Before we come to the new features, let me first do a small recap on our Time Tracking product if you have not yet heard of it.

We have since April our new Successfactors Time Tracking product available. This product can be seen as the extended version of our current EC Time Sheet and Time Valuation. Allow me some metaphers: Time Tracking is going to be like Champions League as opposed to the National soccer Leagues, like Formula 1 as compared to Formula 3, like Olympics as compared to district league, like the Miles Davis Quintet as opposed to normal Jazz bands performing in your town. No offense – even district league or playing in small Jazz bars is already an accomplishment (which I still dream off) and many are happy with this, but it´s not top of the range. With Time Tracking we are heading into the top direction.

What is Time Tracking exactly?

All new future features for time sheet and time valuation will only be available for Time Tracking customers. If you don´t need them, when you are happy with the existing time sheet and time valuation capabilities then no need to change anything, you still can use them without the need of the Time Tracking product. But if you want to consume this new features – like for example the below mentioned Single Record Approval, Clock in / out Integration or Cross Midnight functionality in Time Sheet – you need to have a Time Tracking subscription. Upon subscribing Time Tracking a switch is set in the system that enables you using the H1 2021 and future Time Tracking enhancements.

If you are already using the time sheet you can keep the existing configuration. Of course you need to adapt it a bit with respect of the new features – like for example new workschedules and time valuation rules to cater for cross midnight or a new attendance time type with a workflow configuration assigned to enable the single record approval feature. But we will come to this later. You can find out if a feature needs Time Tracking by looking on the table of content and the respective chapter heading – I mentioned it there.

And what about Time Off – are the enhancements around absence recording or localization need as well the Time Tracking subscription?

No. All Time Off enhancements will stay under the EC subscription and will come without any additional cost to you.

Basics cleared. Now lets focus on H1 2021. What´s in the box?

1. New Time Sheet User Interface

As already briefly mentioned in my last release blog, we have a new Time Sheet User Interface. In H2 2020 this was only for Early Adopter customers, and now it is going to be released as general available. How does it look like?

The new time sheet comes with 4 sections, I colored them:

The calendar pane (red), the time sheet overview pane (green), the daily time recording pane (yellow) and the information / alerting section (red circle):

The new time sheet comes with lots of usability improvements and new features. Let me start with the calendar pane (red border):

On the very left side of the time sheet you see a calendar control panel with which employees can navigate easily to the time sheet they want to maintain. Just click on a day in the calendar or browse through the calendar. This is a big improvement compared to the old time sheet UI where you could only navigate by clicking from week to week successively. But there is even more in this calendar control: we indicate already in the calendar not only public holidays or days on which an absence has been recorded. We also give information on the time sheet status right away in the calendar – if there are unapproved time sheets or time sheets that needs still to be submitted. So, with a quick glance on the calendar the employee gets all information he needs to decide if his time recording is complete or not. To show all different possibilities (not yet submitted, rejected, amendment pending…) would turn this calendar in a colored overkill, hence we summarize this all with the red color which means: attention required. Something is not good with this time sheet and you need to analyze it and work on it.

The middle section (green border) represents the selected time sheet overview. It shows the approval status of the time sheet, calculated time recording sums and for each day of the time sheet the daily planned time and and the sum of recorded attendances per day. So, you see on a glance if there are times missing. When there are time records for a day you see this indicated at the end of each day line. Each business fact has it´s own icon: attendance recordings, allowances, on calls or absences:

And below of this day overview section there is the of course a summary of time valuation results, the actual balance for working time accounts and time off in lieu accounts (and nice: what was added so far this week). You have got the time collectors that you want to present to the employee, like for example total hours worked in the actual month or like on the screenshot below the number of early, late, night shifts worked per month:

Now, let´s come to the essential pane, the daily time recording pane. Remember, this is the very right one (yellow border) on this screenshot:

You come to this either by collapsing it or by clicking on a day in the overview.

Let´s have a closer look on this:

As usual attendance records, allowances, breaks, on call times and absences can be recorded here. If breaks don´t get manually recorded but automatically deducted via our fix or dynamic break deduction you see them in this section as well as imported external time data coming from a terminal system or from other 3rd party systems.

The day pane gives you moreover in the header information on the planned working time per day – like shift or day model name for the selected day, the start / end time of the planned time and the flextime bandwidth (if configured) as well as the planned break times. All this information is mainly read from the work schedule day model and gives the employee all information he needs to know to see from when to when he is planned. Yes, for a normal admin employee each day working from 08:00 – 17:00 this is not really necessary, but when you have got shift employees in varying rotation patterns this information is needed. And you can see here of course the sum of the daily recorded attendance times as well.

As a positive time recorder you can easily do the time recording with one click when you have worked just like you ought to according to your workschedule: just click on the “Apply planned time” button on the top right corner of the day pane and you are done.

And if you want to record more records on a day, like absences, on calls, allowances or further attendance records, all is done in this pane, you get a scroll bar then.

Based on customer feedback during the Early Adopter Phase last release we did a further nice enhancement. In the day pane we show the approval status of an absence. And furthermore not only “active” absences are shown, but also the full history of the absences. This means even cancelled or rejected absences are shown here. So full transparency for an employee on his absence records:

Full responsiveness and accessibility

There is a lot more to say on the new time sheet UI, but let me just shed the light on two features: The new Time Sheet user interface is fully responsive. This means you can use it on any device, it automatically adapts to the size of the screen. This helps in those cases where our native mobile time sheet app does not yet provide a solution for – like custom fields in the time sheet for example. Just use this time sheet UI on your mobile device and you can enter time records with custom fields.

New time sheet UI responsive on a mobile device:

And, second, the new time sheet UI is furthermore fully accessible, this means even handicapped people seeing badly or nothing can use our time sheet and record their attendance times.

As in the old time sheet UI we still process all time data entries of course in a real time valuation and the results -like updated week sums, time valuation results like overtime premium or any other calculated premium, working time account or time off in lieu account updates but also errors and warning messages are presented in the UI upon the Save action.

There is a lot more that could be mentioned – like for example easy re-labelling of field names or headlines just as the customer want´s to have it, adding lots of custom fields of different data types to add for example an attachment to a time record or the visualization of the working time account or Time off in lieu account by the external key of your time account, but best to read in the implementation and user guide on this new features and the new look and feel. Or even better: just upgrade and use it.

How to get the new time sheet UI?

Now, how can you activate the new time sheet UI? This is done via the upgrade center:

You get on this side before doing the actual upgrade information on the new UI, a video with explanations and even a FAQ document that you can preread.

If you choose the option to upgrade to the new UI all links in your instance direct automatically to the new time sheet UI. You can try this out in a test instance for example if you want. And in the unlikely case you don´t want to push this immediately to your employees you even can revert this upgrade activity within 30 days. You have the old time sheet UI back then for all employees. And you even can after the upgrade create a custom tile with the URL of the old time sheet if there are some employee groups who still need the old one, or if maybe in some areas even workers councils need to approve to use the new one. But be aware that all standard links like “View my timesheet” or the quick action on the new homepage direct to the new time sheet after the upgrade.

But remember: the old time sheet UI does not get any features or further enhancements, nor does it support new features. And it is going to be retired in the future.

Now the crucial question is: do you have to pay extra for the new time sheet User Interface – this means do you need the Time Tracking subscription to consume the new Time Sheet UI?
Answer: No.

Even if you are not a Time Tracking customer, you can upgrade and use the new Time Sheet UI and benefit from the improvements.

2. Single Record Approval in Time Sheet (Time Tracking)

This is a feature that comes only with the new Time Tracking product and that runs only in the new Time Sheet user interface.

What is single record approval?

Up to now the whole time sheet was always send for approval. Yes, you could have sophisticated workflow rules where for example a workflow is only triggered when a specific time type is recorded or the time valuation has calculated overtime – but always the whole time sheet, all records, where sent to approval.

Ever wanted to have a single business case approved in the time sheet as opposed to the whole time sheet? Like for example a training-record? And maybe even in advance to have a kind of pre-approval for specific attendance facts like planned overtime or planned home office to document in the system that this is okay for the employees managers?

Then you can use the new single record approval for time sheet. It´s an approval like for absence time types: you assign a workflow configuration directly to an attendance or on call time type. And if you have done so all this time types trigger an own approval step.

You might now ask how this approval interacts with the overall approval of the time sheet? What happens when the time sheet gets approved, but a single record within the time sheet has still an approval pending or even gets declined after the overall time sheet has been approved? Are therefore wrong data send to payroll?

Well, this cannot happen.

You can only submit a time sheet when all all records “inside” a time sheet that need a dedicated single record approval are approved. Only then the overall time sheet can be submitted. Before this, the submit button is not activated. Yes, in the end this means that an employee cannot submit his time sheet as long as there are unapproved records in it, but this is the only way to prevent a data mess in the payroll system. If you use this single record feature, make your approvers aware of this fact and let them have single records approved in a timely manner.

When a time type is configured to need an approval, you see in the new time sheet user interface a dedicated submit action for this record as well as it´s approval status:

And as mentioned, to avoid payroll inconsistencies, time sheets cannot be submitted when a single record is still in the status “to be submitted”, “pending approval” or “declined”. The approval status of each single record configured with an approval workflow needs to be “approved”.

3. Time Recording till 24:00

Another little feature that is awaited from customers since long. We finally get rid of this technical debt and make hopefully some customers happy with it.

Up to now it was only possible to set up workschedules or perform absence or attendance recording only till 23:59. But what, when the shift or the time recording ends exactly at 24:00? I spare you all the technical details why this was so tricky from a technical point, but even from a philosophical point this is not really easy. What is 24:00? When you check your smart watches or your Iphone or your television program, 24:00 does not exist. The actual day ends with 23:59. So, 24:00 is rather 00:00. But 00:00 on the actual day cannot be, cause otherwise the employee has started work at let’s say 16:00 and worked back into the past, or is it back into the future? ? We all know from Doc Brown and Marty McFly from the famous 80s- movie how dangerous it can be when you meet your earlier you ;-). So, logically and practically it is 00:00 next day. Cause on 00:00 or 12:00am the next day starts. But next day would already mean the end time of an absence or attendance is on the next calendar day……

To cut a long story short: we implemented a logic to allow having a time recording till exactly 00:00 (or 12:00am) which is not yet a “cross midnight” or next day constellation. When you record an absence or an attendance which exactly ends at 00:00, the end date will still be the same as the start date. And I think there is not more you ought to know ;-). It is possible now.

To consume this new feature you don’t need to subscribe to Time Tracking, this works also without it.

This is how it looks like in the new time sheet UI:

And now the crucial question: what if you want to record attendance not only exactly till 00:00 but also crossing midnight? You know that we enabled workschedule and absence recording for cross midnight recording in H2 2020 release. And in H1 2021 release we have taken the next step and enabled cross midnight for attendance recording in the time sheet and time valuation:

4. Night shifts in Time Sheet and Time Valuation – Early Adopter (Time Tracking)

It´s with an extra pleasure that I can announce finally a feature that is long awaited for by many customers: cross midnight attendance time recording. After the release of cross midnight for time off in H2 2020 we continued the journey and enabled our time sheet and time valuation to cater for night shifts and cross midnight attendance recording.

Preconditions:

• Cross Midnight for Time Sheet is only available in the Time Tracking subscription
  
• Cross Midnight for Time Sheet works only with the new Time Sheet User Interface
  
• Cross Midnight for Time Sheet is only available for customers participating in the Early Adopter program for this topic. This means it is not yet general available to all customers in H1 release

But how does our cross midnight solution look like – and what do you need to configure?

Introduction

First of all you need a workschedule that is marked to allow cross midnight. This flag was already introduced in H2 2020 as part of the cross midnight for time off delivery. If you do not know on this, or on the capabilities on cross midnight for time off, please read my blog on the H2 2020 release:

Just as a reminder – this is how the flag looks like for a day model:

And for the workschedule:

Logic of logical day ?

The overall logic of cross midnight is of course the same as already established for cross midnight for time off: The shift day (SAP ERP onprem guys might know the term “logical day”) is always the day on which the night shift starts. So, when the nightshift starts at 22:00 (or 10:00 pm) on Monday an employee needs to record a single vacation day on Monday, cause this is the shift day. And same principle applies for attendance recording and time valuation: When there is a daily overtime calculation rule on a shift spanning two calendar days, then of course all hours recorded in the shift from Monday to Tuesday shall count for the daily overtime calculation – or any daily calculation like did the employee record more than 10 hours per day; is the minimum break regulation met per day; or all other daily valuations. Regardless if the “physical” day is Monday or calendar day Tuesday. As long as when they are part of shift day. But the exciting question now is – how long on Tuesday morning shall recorded hours be regarded as belonging to the “logical” day Monday?

Lets illustrate this with an example and a picture:

Employee has a night shift from Monday 31 January 21:00 – Tuesday 1st February 06:00. He records working time from 21:00 to 06:00. We got a break from 01:30 – 02:30 (either manually recorded or automatically generated as a fix break from 01:30 – 02:30 or as part of a dynamic break 1 hour after 5.5 hours working time). Then there is a gap, no recorded time, but on 06:30 he records again working time for 2 hours till 08:30, cause he needed urgently to finish something.

Yes, I know. Overall the employee comes over 10 hours which is not allowed, and why should there be a gap before he starts working again? But let me take this example to illustrate how the system deals with the records during the employees planned time and even with those after his planned time. Cause now you learn another enhancement in the work schedule day model that helps handling those times correct: the night shift bandwidth enters the game. And in our example the segment “night shift bandwidth” in the day model is from 20:00 – 08:00.

The automatism of correct day assignment of manually created or generated (breaks) records works as following: the working time from 21:00 till 06:00 is of course assigned to the “logical” day Monday, cause this is the day on which the shift starts. The break is created from 01:30- 02:30 and as well automatically assigned to the logical shift day Monday, cause the start time of the break overlaps with the planned working time from the previous day. But then there is still an attendance record in the very early morning – even one that starts after a gap completely outside of the employees planned time which started on the previous day and lasted till 06:00. What shall the system do with this record? I mean it is likely that this belongs to the shift and day before, but can we know for sure? Does it belong from a valuation point of view to Monday? Or already to Tuesday? In SAP ERP there was the possibility to set a manual “previous day” indicator for this record. But this was really difficult to understand for employees and even time administrators. Result was lots of erronoues data in the system.

To overcome this we invented the “night shift bandwidth” that allows to handle this constellations automatically, without manual interaction and without causing employees or time administrators headache to figure out on which logical or calendar day they need to record what with or without a previous day flag.

Nightshift bandwidth

The nightshift bandwidth is a new start / end time segment that you can maintain in those day models which are marked as “cross midnight allowed”. The start time of the bandwidth is not really relevant, cause all hours recorded on the day the shift starts are automatically taken as belonging to this shift day, whether they are recorded before the start of planned time or within planned time. Hence the cross midnight bandwidth is relevant only for those records that are recorded on the next calendar day but having a start time outside after end of planned time of the actual shift.

The beauty of this approach is that you can configure for each day model the bandwidth differently if you need or want to, and it is a simple and easy to understand configuration in the workschedule. End users or time admins don´t need to bother with setting a strange flag in their time recordings to which day this record shall belong, and you don´t need to create complicated valuation rules in time valuation for it

And speaking of configuration for cross midnight – what else is needed?

Next day indicator in time segments filter

Most of the logic that you need for handling cross midnight has been hard coded into the time valuation to ease your life of configuration. If you have daily overtime calculations (or weekly and the week ends on a nightshift going into the first day of next week), if you want to count all hours on a day for 10hours checks or any other time valuation / calculation: you don´t need to consider specifics for cross midnight. The described logic above which time recordings or hours count for a shift day (logical day) are already hard coded. But there is one thing where configuration flexibility is needed, and this is when it comes to the generation of pay types like night shift premium. Everyone who has done this configuration in SAP ERP in the famous T510S table knows how tricky this can be, especially for more complex trade union contract regulations. Just an example:

There are usually night shift premiums at let´s say 25%. And when an employee performs regular work on a Sunday he gets a 50% Sunday premium for it. But what´s the correct premium pay when an employee works from Saturday into Sunday – cause he has got a night shift on Saturday? Well, there are different variants: usually you pay only the higher premium. And this would in our example be from 22:00 – 24:00 Night premium 25% but then from Sunday 00:00 onwards the higher 50% premium for Sunday work. But some trade union contracts constitute even that both need to be paid. Or there are also regulations for some areas that define a Sunday not only from 00:00-24:00, but till Monday 06:00 in the morning. And there are lot more variations possible (I let aside for simplicity reason the constellation working into or out of public holiday, which sometimes even is a Sunday.

So, you see, there needs to be flexible configuration options to sort out this constellation in the time valuation. And for this we enhanced the segmentation possibility in the time valuation type “Filter segments from Input Group” with a “next day” indicator:

Please be aware: this field is not enabled by default to “editable”, hence you don´t see it. This is to not confuse customers who haven´t got night shifts at all. You need to set the “day” field in the object “time segment filter” via “configure object definitions” in the visibility to “editable” and then you can use it.

This option collects all hours of the selected input time type group which are seen from the logical day point of view after 24:00. And to get those you need to define a time interval from 00:00 – 06:00 and choose the option “next day”. But remember: this is only necessary when you need to treat data that starts and ends on the next day differently. If for example you pay from 00:00 – 04:00 a different premium than from 04:00 – 06:00. And if you got records that start and stop completely on the next day, but belong to the logical previous day.

Let´s look on a real example how to configure if you want to pay during night shifts from Mon-Friday a 25% night premium, but on Saturday only up to 24:00, cause from 00:00 onwards the Sunday premium 50% needs to be generated.

I concentrate only on the main configuration, the time valution rule of type “Filter input groups”. As a precondition you need to create 2 time records filter:

Those filters include:

Filter 1: weekdays Mon-Friday

Filter 2: Saturday

Then you need 3 time valuations of the valuation type “Filter input groups”.

This first one shall calculate a night premium 25% from 20:00 -06:00 next day on the days Mon-Friday. You set the clocktime intervall, add your filter for the weekday Mon-Friday, assign an input time type group and as time type group below you add your 25% premium:

Then you need another time valuation that calculates the night premium on Saturday.

You apply your time records filter for Saturday, choose the time segment from 20:00 – 00:00 and assign as well the 25% night premium:

Pay attention that up to now you did not need the “next day” option in the “day” field. But this comes now, cause we need to get the hours on Saturday from 00:00 onwards, cause for those a Sunday premium shall be generated. Hence, you need a third time valuation where you again apply your Saturday filter, but now with a time segment 24:00 (or 12:00 am) till 23:59 (or 11:59 pm). And to prevent that you valuate the hours on Saturday in this time segment you choose the option “next day” in the day-field.

And done ! You have configured night premiums during the week (whether they are recorded before or after midnight) of 25% but the night premium on Saturday is only till 24:00, and from 24:00 onwards there is the higher Sunday premium paid.

Of course, to round this fully up you would need a fourth valuation with filter on Sunday and 00:00 – 23:59 to generate a 50% Sunday premium for those hours that are recorded on the shift / weekday Sunday and which are not coming from the Saturday night shift.

To summarize:

If you got simple requirements like a night premium 25% is paid from 22:00 – 06:00 each day you don´t need any specific day indicator in this segmentation rule, you can create a rule with the time interval 22:00 – 06:00 and assign to the time type group below a 25% night premium. The next day indicator in the segmentation rule gets only relevance when you have night shifts into Sunday and from 00:00 on Sunday the Sunday premium needs to get generated as opposed to the 25% night premium. This segmentation possibility in conjunction with the time records filters where you can select a range of weekdays or single week days, and / or public holidays allows you to flexibly put those hours into time type groups that you want to collect together or that you want to separate into another (with the time type group above / below mechanism of the time valuation rules).

I know, this all sounds a bit complicated – but unfortunately some time management topics are exactly: complicated ;-).

But to summarize what you ought to do in configuration:

• set the cross midnight enabled flag in the workschedules
  
• assign a night shift bandwidth if necessary (not mandatory, only when you got situations where an employee can completely after his shift record another attendance that shall be evaluated together with the times of the previous logical day)
  
• for correct premium pay generation it might be necessary depending on the complexity of your rules to use a segmentation valuation with next day flag set

Now, let´s end this excursus on configuration and come to how a night shifts are visualized in the new time sheet UI:

Recording of cross midnight attendances

It´s always a challenge to present end users the fact that they started work on one calendar day and ended on the next. We tried to come up with a simple and nice approach. It´s just like on your flight ticket. We show the time data on the same calendar day, but with a little +1 indicator:

Assume an employee has a night shift from Monday into Tuesday. All his time recording needs to be recorded on Monday. Not only those records that are before midnight or cross midnight, but even those records that even start after midnight. This is new compared to SAP ERP Time Management! And I just give you a second to think over this – all time recording on this shift day be it on calendar day Monday where the shift started or on calendar day Tuesday where it ends, all time recordings have to be done on Monday ! This sounds easy for endusers, doesn´it? As mentioned previously, an end user should not be bothered with logical day and calendar day. He works in the nightshift on Monday, cause this is the day on which the shift starts. Hence all time recording is done for and on Monday. And that everyone understands this the system generates automatically the +1 indication when he enters a start or end time that is after 00:00 automatically. So, there is not any thougth the employee needs to pay attention to if he needs now to choose Monday or Tuesday as a calendar day, he just picks the day which the shift starts.

Lets have a look: this is when an employee records in a night shift from 22:00 – 05:00 enters 22:00 – 03:00 (or like in the screenshot from 10:00pm – 03:00am). He does not need to bother, he just enters the times and the system places automatically at the end time a +1 to indicate that this is 03:00am next day:

And when the employee continues his time recording and wants to enter a subsequent time record – does he need to navigate to the next day and place a “previous day assignment” or whatever? No. Remember: all time recording is done on which the shift starts, even when the time record starts after midnight. So he just continues on the same day and chooses the start / end time 03:00 – 05:00 (or 03:00am – 05:00am) and the system places automatically the +1 indicator:

And internally the time valuation takes all hours correct according to the internal logical day assignment.

So, all in all quite easy.

Now, what´s the story with the Early Adopter program, why is it not yet General available?

Early Adopter program for Cross midnight

If you want to use this feature you need to participate in our Early Adopter program.

The Early adopter program allows a hand-in-hand introduction of a big new topic, gives customer close cooperation with Product Management and us the possibility to collect feedback. This topic is part of the Early Adopter Program mainly cause there are some small gaps in H1 that need a workaround handling or that cannot be covered at all in H1. Let me just touch upon those:

Gap: working into / out of public holidays shall trigger a different premium then normal night work

The solution is capable of handling situations where employees work into the next day, and of course the system can then calculate a different premium pay- as long as we can identify the day. And this is possible if it is a special weekday, but not if it is a public holiday. What do I mean with this?

When employees work from Saturday into Sunday it is possible to generate from 00:00 onwards a Sunday premium, cause you can define this via the weekday option “Sunday” in combination with the clocktime definition.

But it is not yet possible to generate a different premium when employees work in a nightshift into a public holiday or out of a public holiday and this time slice shall generate a different premium then for normal night work. There is not yet a possibility to define a filter for “yesterday was a public holiday” or “tomorrow is a public holiday” where the employee works into or out of.

Gap: automatic collision handling from one time sheet into the next

When your time sheet period is from Monday – Sunday and you have a record that starts on Sunday and goes till Monday morning 05:00, but you have already recorded another attendance recorded on Monday from 04:00 – 06:00 this should normally trigger a collision. An employee cannot have overlapping time records. This kind of check cannot yet be performed directly upon time recording. We have a batch check for this constellation via our Check tool – so, you need to run from time to time this check tool, you get an indication on which day for which employee there are overlapping records from one timesheet into the other and then manually clean up the situation by deleting one of the overlapping records

But again: this is only for situations cross-time sheet periods. During a time sheet week this automated collision handling works of course.

This two gaps are planned to be solved with the H2 release.

So, let me finish this topic right here, I don´t won´t to go too much into the details. The main message is:

• we provide a solution for attendance recording and time valuation for cross midnight handling
  
• it´s in H1 only available as part of Early Adopter program
  
• it´s part of the Time Tracking subscription
  
• there are some gaps in H1 that we plan to overcome with the H2 release – which we target as a release where this solution is set to general available

5. Clock in Clock out Integration – Early Adopter (Time Tracking)

Let´s come to the next big topic, clock in / out integration. Another big step in closing big business gaps that prevented customers to move to the cloud with time management.

Clock in / out – many of you know this topic. You got a time recording terminal connected to your entrance gate or door, or a standalone terminal for time recording behind the access controlled entry. Or you are running a webclock on PCs and after starting the PC the employee is clocked in – or you use mobile devices, biometrical scanners….. there is plenty of hardware out there to 1) identify an employee for access control and 2) combine this with an employees time recording.

A real access control solution was never SAPs business, but the integration of other dedicated software solution provider that handle this and of course the possibility to receive the employees time recordings, the clock in / out punches. In the very past this was the CC1 interface, then then HR-PDC interface and now Successfactors has got it´s own way of dealing with clock in / out integration, it´s via OData APis.

How does the process flow look like?

It needs a view words to explain I guess:

Whatever device you have on which employees perform their clock in / outs those devices (or in the end the server software) needs to be able to send this raw time punches via Rest API over the internet. On our side we perform then the pair formation, this means we connect raw time punches to a business semantically correct time record. Like for example an employee clocks in at 08:00 and 4 hours later out with reason “break start”. After 30minutes he clocks in again and after another 4 hours he clocks out. We create 3 records out of this:

08:00 – 12:00 working time

12:00 – 12:30 break

12:30 – 16:30 working time

It´s just an example – you can have many more clock in / out “reasons” or just a simple clock in / out. This is called on our side “time event type”.

This time pairing is done in our time event processing application. But not only this, it furthermore performs input checks and highlights in the Admin UI time events that could not be paired for example.

A successful paired time pair either with category “attendance” or “break” is then sent to our Time Sheet. Once in the time sheet, the time valuation processes these records just as any other time record in the time sheet.

Admin UI

The time event processing application comes with an admin UI where a time administrator can monitor the uploaded time events (that´s how we call the clock in / outs or time punches). The pair formation gets triggered automatically real time after uploading of the time event. An admin can see in this admin console if the pair formation was successful or not, if there are time events left that cannot be paired (cause the employee has for example forgotten to clock out):

This view can be filtered on employees, pairing status, date, time and more. In addition you can configure what fields shall be shown in this list. There is for example the Terminal Id that comes together with the clock in / out – if you don´t need it, hide it.

But what can an admin do if there are time events missing? Well, he can create manual time events in this screen:

He even can delete existing ones.

But most important is that he sees when time events are missing and the admin needs to add something in order to have a successful time record. Currently we provide only the options to add a manual time punch via this admin console. We plan for next release to enable employees with an ESS scenario where he can redo forgotten punches triggering a workflow process.

Configuration

What do you need to configure for this? Check this overview:

First clock in / out needs to be activated in provisioning. Then there is a job that needs to be scheduled that replicates the employee data together with a new entity “clock in – out group” to the terminals. This scheduling is done in provisioning. All employees having a clock in/out group assigned are replicated to the terminal software. The clock in / out group informs the terminals what kind of clock in / out reasons an employee can use.

The clock in/out group is a new field on the job info, and it´s kind of configuration profile for clock in / out. Currently it bundles the “time event types” like clock in, break start, clock out… . This bundle can then be assigned to an employee in the job information. Cause it might be that you have got employees that are allowed to record different event types within your worldwide organization. You create this groups and event types via the admin center in EC. Choose the “Configure Clock in Clock out action”:

Next step is mapping the time event types to a real time type that is used to send the data to the time sheet. This is done in the action “configure time type derivation” via the “manage data” activity:

You can select the category attendance and break (note, a time punch with an event that shall create an absence record is not possible). If you just enter the category and don´t choose an explicit time type the system takes for attendances the “default import attendance time type” as maintained in the employees time profile (which is assigned in the job info), same if you don´t further specify the break category – the time profile default break time type is used.

One of the last steps is of course assigning the clock in – out group for the employees in the job information. Make sure you have enabled the clock in/out field in the job information via configure business objects, otherwise you cannot maintain it:

And you need of course to maintain the technical integration – but I just mention this 3 steps, cause it is quite good described in the “Integrating Terminal with SAP SuccessFactors Clock In Clock Out” section of the implementation guide. You need to:

1. Setting up Oauth connection for terminal
   
2. Create Oauth tokens
   
3. Configure REST API for sending terminal punches

Our clock in / out solution is in H1 only available as part of an Early Adopter Program, hence not general available for all customers. Reason is: in H1 this solution is not available for all data centers, there is a phased roll out during the next couple of months.

And there are still some gaps we need to cover in the next release, like for example allowing an employee to record manual time events, the visualization of the raw time punch data in the employees time sheet or notifications to employees when time punches are missing. And we plan to provide mobile web clocks or apps with which you can punch in or manually record punches. But these are things to come. But if you are interested in implementing this solution in H1 you can do so as part of the Early Adopter Program.

6. Time Management Engagement Cards on the new Homepage

Below you see the new homepage:

At the top row you see direct navigations to for example the leave request or the time sheet. If you click on those the leave request form comes up for example:

And the good thing: the leave request as well as the time sheet opens up in a responsive form. So, you even can use this easily on your mobile devices, the screen size adapts to the size of your device and you can use the web application without restriction on your mobile device.

But we also provide a nice card that dynamically appears when an employee has taken no vacation for too long:

This card is shown dynamically to each employee when there is a time span of 30 days elapsed during which the employee did not take any vacation days (and no vacation is recorded during the future 60 days). This card is a nice way to remind automatically employees to cater for their work-life balance and to take off-days. The card comes with a direct navigation to the leave request:

The second card is for leave request approvers only. It visualizes in a nice way the pending leave requests and gives approver the possibility for a quick approval without having the need to navigate to the workflow approval inbox. If there are more than one pending workflow request they get piled upon each other:

And speaking of approvals, this is a nice bridge to the next topic:

7. Workflow dashboard

Does this sound familiar to you? Payroll run is due and although your approvers are advised to approve all time sheets before the payroll run, in real life there are always lots of time sheets not approved and employees are then not getting paid correctly? Lots of complaints afterwards, lots of frustration on all sides.

Here comes the solution, the new Workflow dashboard:

This dashboard gives you live figures on pending workflow requests for time off requests and time sheets. You get a nice and comprehensive overview on the current pending workflows and the possibility to drill down into details:

With this view you not only see the time sheets that are still pending for which period, but it gives you also the information at which approver those time sheets are currently pending and contact details like mail address or phone number to nudge this approver. This nice little dashboard will for sure help you getting all times approved before the next payroll run!

If you want to use this dashboard you need to download it from the content store in the report center:

Lets come to another smart enhancement to ease facilitate the business day of a time administrator:

8. E-mail notification for time administrators

This is a feature that has been build from our platform frameworks team. This will ease the life for time administrators. There is now the possibility for time administrators to get e-mail notifications for alerts / warnings from the Admin Alert 2.0 inbox. This means there is no pro-active navigation to this inbox necessary, you just need to observe your mail box to be informed on new incoming alerts or warnings. You can subscribe for specific alert/ error types directly in the admin alert inbox and set if you want to have a daily or weekly notification. With this option you can flexibly decide which alerts / errors shall be routed to your inbox:

The mail looks like this:

And the links direct you into the Admin Alert 2.0 inbox from which you can then for example directly navigate to the employees time sheet or leave request.

9. Mandatory block leave

This is not really a new feature, it´s just the description of what is possible with creative usage of existing mechanisms. Many customers -especially in the banking sector – have a company policy that mandates their employees to take at least 2 weeks (14 days) continuous leave. Sounds easy, just count absences and if more than 14 calendar days you are done. But unfortunately, it is not that easy. The period can include public holidays, end on public holiday, start on a public holiday, the absence does not have to be a single time type but can be multiple different ones, interrupted by weekends start / end on weekends and so on. As long as the employee is 14 days in a row not in office and working, the policy is met. So, as always, when you start digging you find the devil laying in the details. But this policy can be met.

10. Overtime forfeiting after xx days

Same as the mandatory block leave – this is not a new feature, but just another best practice tip what you can do with already existing functionality.

Each country has got it´s laws and regulations on working time. Laws are always subject to interpretation and customers have different ways how to meet specific laws or regulations. Lively discussions exists since long for regulations that stipulate that overtime which is banked into a time account needs to be compensated / taken within 60 days for example, otherwise the hours forfeit. Easily formulated requirement, but as often, tricky in a real implementation.

Some customers follow a run simple approach: like each end of quarter the overtime account is set to 0. Yes, if overtime is performed on the last day of the last week of a quarter it might get tricky for an employee to take this time off in lieu, but then you can transfer it for those special cases to next quarter for example. This way of handling overtime accounts can already be now achieved with our “periodic time account processing” mechanism since 3 releases as described here.

But what if a customer really wants to adhere literally to each sentence of a law? This would mean that each performed overtime hour has it´s own forfeit-time stamp. This can only be covered with dedicated time accounts each with a different booking period. Which in turn means if an employee performs on each day of the month overtime (okay, unlikely case – but this is to illustrate what I mean) 1 hour overtime, then he has got at the end of the month 20 or more single time accounts each with a 60 day validity. You see – quite complex and quite confusing to have so many time accounts for an employee. And when you then take a full day off, multiple time accounts are deducted, but need to be reposted again in the correct order when the employee decides to cancel this absence again.

I spare you more complicated scenarios ;-). But, if a customer really wants to implement this, he can.

You can use our new ad-hoc time accounts and with a little help from the integration center it can be achieved that with each recorded or calculated overtime an ad hoc time account gets automatically created per day with -for example- a bookable period of 60 days.

11. Enhanced peer permission possibilities for Team Absence Calendar

Over the last release we steadily enhanced the Team Absence Calendar with new features. Based on the fact that we deal with highly sensitive data (employees absences) there needs however to be a rock solid way to enable customers to define in a fine granular way who can see what. This was a highly voted request on influence.sap.com – and we not only listened, but also acted: let me introduce the new possibility in the permissions configuration to restrict the “target population” to “peers”:

With this new possibility you can define in the role based permissions exactly what shall be shown to whom in the team absence calendar.

12. Absence custom field replication to IT2001

Our EC payroll colleagues have enhanced the integration of our absences to IT2001 with a nice little feature. It is now possible to replicate a Time Off Absence time type custom field into an existing IT2001 standard field in EC Payroll.

This might help to cater for specific illness or other absence related use cases, where the payroll engine needs to be able to read a specific information out of the IT2001. You can then create a custom field on an EC time absence time type and map this custom field in the replication mapping table to a standard IT2001 field. Not all fields are allowed here (some fields are excluded cause otherwise it would break the whole replication process) but we make it easy for customers. You find the allowed mapping fields in the value help of the mapping table. Please check the documentation in the EC Payroll replication handbook for more information.

This helps already for many specific country dependent requirements. Like for example in Hungary it is needed for the absence type Child care leave to enter the dependent ID together with the absence type and pass it to payroll. A solution now can be:

Customer creates a custom field “Dependent ID” in the Dependent Portlet in EC; he also creates a custom field in the Employee Time object (Absence Form) to allow the user to enter the Dependent ID available from the dependent portlet in the absence time type. Final step is to map the custom field “Dependent ID” from the Employee Time in the mapping table infotype 2001-KENN2. The IT2001 replication writes this field then into the IT2001 record on EC Payroll side.

13. Defaulting of disability period for US and Canada

A real country extension for US and Canada has been delivered from our Globalization colleagues. In US and Canada there exists the absence reason “short term disability”. From a business point of view this absence type needs to have 3 additional dates to document the end of disability period 1 – 3. Those fields can be defaulted by the system (and of course overwritten from a HR Admin if needed).

This information gets then of course replicated to EC Payroll IT2001.

The duration of the periods can of course be configured. This is done on the country specific time types US / Canada. You need to choose via manage data the time type object, choose as sickness variant the option “short term disability” and you can enter the duration in days for 3 periods.

14. New Successfactors Time and Attendance community page

Just another short announcement: we established our own dedicated community page in the Successfactors Community due to heavily increasing customer numbers and more and more features in our solution. It´s a place to discover and share knowledge around our Time Management solutions. There are blog post, release information’s, event announcements and also a Q/A forum where customer / consultants can discuss and advise each other on specific time topics or get help for their concrete questions.

Use this page to get help from other customers / consultants and new insights and even share your knowledge and also provide help and insides. This works only when giving and receiving is in an equal balance. The board is monitored from time to time from Product Management, but it´s mainly intended to be a knowledge share board amongst external time specialists.

You can find the page here:

The post Successfactors Time Management – new features in H1 2021 first appeared on ERP Q&A.

Onboarding 2.0 relies on business rules to determine the user experience for new hires based on attributes such as organizational information. In this document certain scenarios are listed where in business rules can control the following

• The Home Page Tiles visible to the new hire
  
• The Onboarding Program associated with the new hire’s specific scenario

Scenario 1 Custom tiles visibility on the home page (Note this is not for the new home page)

Very often there is a requirement Custom Home Page tiles should be shown based on organizational attributes like company or division or sometimes even based on country.

One recommended use of these tiles is to provide policies or non-signature forms for the new hire to reference in a convenient location. Using business rules, we can determine which tiles and policies show up for a new hire based on their country or other attributes. Below is an example of how to restrict visibility based on the country of employment.

Step 1: Open transaction for creating business rules.

To create a business rule, navigate to Admin Center>Business Rules Admin and select the “+” to add the business rule.

Step 2: Select the right rule scenario.

In Configure Business Rules select rule scenario Custom Tile > Show New Hire Onboarding Content scenario.

Step 3: Enter the rule header.

Create your rule name as shown in the following example:

Step 4: Add the ‘If’ condition

Create the rule for a specific country. In this example, we’ve considered the country of Ireland. Select Process and enter the criteria. Process Type is equal to Onboarding and the Process User Job information Legal Entity Country is equal to Ireland.

Note: The legal entity in Employee Central must be already associated with the country/region before creating this rule.

Step 5: Create the custom tile

Once the rule is created, go to the Admin center > Manage Home Page, and select Add Custom Tile. Enter a Tile name and select an icon for the custom tile as shown in steps 1 and 2.

Step 6: Turn on Rule-Based toggle.

Slide the Rule-based toggle to turn it ON, and select the rule base and select Rule Scenario “Show New Hire Onboarding Content”. Select the newly created business rule from the drop-down. In this example, the created rule is ‘ONB_Custom Tile Ireland’.

Step 7: Assign the business rule created earlier.

Select the correct tile. For example, to add content for the specific country/region tile, select ONB_Custom Tile Ireland. Click on the Document icon to insert the Document link to the tile.

Step 8: Select the document that must be a part of the custom tile

Select your document. Note you must have your policy uploaded before this step under Admin> Manage Documents.

In manage Documents , use the upload icon on the bottom right corner of the screen

Select Policy document as the document category.

Step 9: System generates the link for the custom tile.

The system will then generate the link for your custom tile. We recommend that you move the link below the title, subtitle, and body text as the system generates the link above the Title.

Step 10. Select Your Onboarding Journey from the Section field so that it appears to new hire during the Onboarding process.

Scenario 2 Selecting the Onboarding program using rules

Step 1: Navigate to the transaction Manage Onboarding and Offboarding Task

Click on the “New Program” or copy an existing program.

Enter the ID, Program Name, and brief description. Add tasks that are relevant to the program

Step 2: Update the task properties

Step 3: Finalize the tasks

If you have copied a program remove tasks that are not related and save the program

2.1 Create a lookup table for efficient usage of rules

A business rule is needed to select the variant based on the country for this scenario. You would need a lookup table to optimize the rule.

Step 1: Navigate to Create Object configuration

Step 2: Create fields for the lookup object

The lookup table should mainly contain two fields, Country/Region and Onboarding program.

• Field “externalCode” is of type generic object and the source object is country/region.
  
• Field “externalName” is hidden and is not used.
  
• Field Cust_ONB2ActiviriesConfig is of the type generic object and the source object is ONB2ActivitiesConfig.

Step 3: Create data

Once the object is created, use the manage data transaction maintain the values of Onboarding programs based on countries. This mapping would be used in the business rule .

2.2 Business rule to select the program

In this rule, you can use a lookup table to determine the Onboarding program based on the country of employment,

Step 1: Navigate to configure a business rule

Choose the scenario Select Onboarding Task Configuration. Create the rule by giving ID and name

Step 2: Create the If and Else conditions

If and Else conditions are the content of the business rule. Using a variable to hold data helps in optimizing business rules. The lookup table which was created in the previous steps is now used to read and assign the correct Onboarding program based on the country of employment.

So passed on the county the onboarding program is chosen. Similarly you could create a lookup table based on Division, Business unit etc.

The post SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding 2.0 Configuration Optimization Technique – Implementation design principle first appeared on ERP Q&A.