Outlining Organizational Management Concepts

Objective

After completing this lesson, you will be able to outline the basic object types in OM

Concepts of Organizational Management

OM provides a basis for implementing or using other Human Resources components (such as Personnel Development and Compensation Management) and cross-application components (such as Workflow).

Using OM, you can achieve the following objectives:

  • Create a model of the organizational and reporting structures of your enterprise for a specific period.
  • Obtain an overview of the current status of your organizational and reporting structures at any time.
  • Valuate and analyze easily.
  • Plan and simulate future planning scenarios.

​Object-Oriented Design

OM is based on object-oriented design, that is, each element in an organization represents a standalone object with individual characteristics. These objects are created and maintained individually. They are then linked together by using relationships, such as those indicated in the figure Methodology - Object Oriented Design, to form a network. This network has the flexibility to perform human resources planning, forecasting, and reporting.

You can create additional object characteristics. This provides additional information for other components, evaluations, and so on.

All object characteristics (for example, relationships and description) are maintained in infotypes.

Object Types

An organizational plan consists of many object types. The object types shown in the figure Object Types form the building blocks. Each object type has a key associated with it.​

​Object types such as tasks and work centers are also important elements of OM.

Persons are the holders of a position. Positions are defined and assigned to organizational units and cost centers.

Organizational Unit: Object Type Key O

Organizational units represent units of your company that perform specialized tasks or functions. Based on the allocated tasks or functions, these units can be departments, project teams, or groups. ​ A project team is a way to see a different view of your organization in addition to the departmental view.

You can set up the organizational structure of your company by creating relationships between the organizational units. The relationships can be in a hierarchy or a matrix. The organizational structure forms the basis for creating an organizational plan.

Note

An organizational unit is different from an enterprise structure such as a personnel area, company code, or business area. These are used to model structures in Personnel Administration (PA) or Financial Accounting (FI), for example.

Position: Object Type Key S

Positions represent concrete and specific job roles that are held by persons within the company. Positions are company-specific.

A position is usually occupied by one person. However, a position can have multiple assignments. For example, two employees can share the workload of a position in a 60:40 ratio.

Positions can be 100% filled, partially filled, or left vacant.

Job: Object Type Key C

Jobs are general classifications for sets of functions. Positions are created based on jobs. For example, if you create a position (for example, manager of the US Sales Office), you can relate it to the corresponding job (for example, manager) that exists in the job index.

A job describes a position. Through this relationship, the position automatically inherits the tasks, qualifications, and characteristics assigned to the job. This significantly reduces the time required for data entry, because characteristics do not have to be assigned to each position separately. Instead, they are inherited through the descriptive job.​

Jobs are important in the following components:

  • Shift Planning
  • Personnel Cost Planning
  • Career and Succession Planning
  • Compensation Management

Note

When you create jobs, they are listed in the job index. A job index is a list of jobs that are maintained for an enterprise.

Cost Center: Object Type Key K

Cost centers are maintained in CO and can be related to either organizational units or positions. The relationship between organizational units and cost centers is hierarchically inherited along with the structure.

Person: Object Type Key P

Persons generally represent employees within an organizational unit and hold positions within the organizational structure.​

Persons are linked to the organizational plan when positions are assigned to them.

​The characteristics of persons such as organizational assignment, planned working time, basic pay, and addresses are maintained as infotypes in PA.

The Organizational Assignment infotype in PA contains the position assignment. If integration is active between OM and PA, the Organizational Assignment infotype also contains the defining job, organizational unit, and cost center assignment.

Task: Object Type Key T

Tasks describe the responsibilities of organizational units, jobs, positions, persons, and work centers. Examples of tasks include answering the telephone, developing marketing material, and appraising clients.

Tasks can be classified in the following ways:

  • As part of the workflow for monitoring cross-application processes (new workflows are created with the object type TS, as opposed to the object type T)
  • As personnel management tools to describe jobs and positions

For personnel management purposes, tasks are individual duties and responsibilities that must be undertaken by employees.

You can create single tasks or task groups. Single tasks are individual activities, and task groups are activities that are performed together.

All tasks are contained in a task catalog. The catalog also displays the relationships that exist between different tasks, provided that task groups have been defined.

To link tasks to a set of positions, you must first link the task common to all positions to the corresponding job. In this way, when you create a position based on the job, the tasks are automatically transferred to the position.

When you assign the same task to several jobs, you can use different weightings (for example, an administrator can spend 60% of the time on the task filing and an analyst can spend 20% of the time on the same task).

This gives you accurate information when analyzing job descriptions.

Work Center: Object Type Key A

ILT

Work centers represent the physical locations where tasks are carried out. A work center can be determined using a general location description (for example, Philadelphia Branch Office). However, the general location description can contain an exact description of the location, such as a specific desk with specific equipment in a particular building. An exact and precise description is useful in a production plant.

Several positions can share one work center. For example, the Reception work center can be assigned to two positions that are held by persons who work different shifts.

After you create work centers, you can describe their attributes. You can define restrictions or specify certain checks that have to be performed at regular intervals.

Other Object Types

Other object types such as qualification or budget can be used in OM to further define the organizational plan.​

Some object types are not applicable in OM, even though they are defined in the same tables as the OM objects. For example, object types D, E, and L are similar in nature to OM object types, however, they are applicable to Enterprise Learning.

Object Maintenance

ILT

You can change standard object types or create new ones in OM.  ​

The following information can be defined:

  • Essential relationship:

    You specify the relationship type to be created when you create an object in expert mode.

  • External object types:

    You specify the interface program to be used for reading and using external object types.

  • Structure search:

    You specify the evaluation path to be used in the structure search help for various object types.

You can create two-digit object types in the customer namespace range of 01–99. 

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