Managing Legacy Positions via Import or Sync

You can think of the position file as a table in the SAP SuccessFactors database. This table holds the data of all the positions, active and inactive, defined in your instance. This table can be exported from and imported to your SAP SuccessFactors instance. Same as with the MDF position data, there are a couple of options to create the legacy position model:

• Option 1: Importing the Position Model
• Option 2: Syncing the Position Model

Both of these options are available to administrators and located within Admin Center → Succession for the Succession Nomination Method: Position. It is important to decide which option will be your ongoing process because the position hierarchy must be maintained and updated regularly for Succession information to display accurately.

The terminology within this document and the product is defined below and should be considered when discussing Succession.

A role is a job description and a set of competencies/skills required for that job. It can be as broad or narrow as the instance administrators want it to be. Roles are grouped into families.

A position is a specific instance of a role that can be filled by an employee, or it can be vacant. For example, we might have a role called "Sales Director", and there might be four specific positions using that role (Sales Director West, Sales Director East, and so on).

A job code is used to match an employee or a vacant position to a role. Roles can have multiple job codes associated with them, but employees can only have one.

Many customers choose to import the position model because of a former system which holds this type of data like an HRIS.

This option is intended for customers already managing positions in their HRIS or other master system, or those who have purchased succession planning licenses for a smaller population than the number of total employees they are loading. As an administrator, you can also manually import the position information by navigating to Admin Center → Succession → Position Management: Position Import.

The import file is used for creating and updating the incumbents of position records as well as attributes of vacant positions. The same format can be exported from a position model on demand. The order of the columns may vary; additional fields may be inserted in the future.

File format is CSV. Extended ASCII characters (curly quotes, and so on) are not supported. The same file encoding options supported in the Employee Import function (including Western (ISO), Unicode (UTF-8), and foreign-language encodings) are supported here. Enclose text values in double-quotes.

Figure: Option 1: Importing the Position Model

Important information about the position import file format follows:

Column header:	Sample value:	Column required?*	May be blank?	Description:
MODEL	1	Required	No	This value must always be "1".
POSITIONCODE	salesrep123	Required	Yes	The position code is a unique identifier for the position record. It can be customer-supplied (alphanumeric) or auto-generated (numeric). Leaving this value blank will always create a new position, whereas if it's supplied, the system will use it to check for an existing position first and then update it if found.
POSITION_TITLE	Account Manager	Optional*	Yes	The succession org chart optionally allows the display of the position title instead of the employee title. If your system is configured to always display the employee title, this value is not required.
USERID	jsmith1	Required	Yes	The employee's user ID. The value in this file must match an existing active employee record (specifying a nonexistent or inactive userID will result in an error). If left blank, the current incumbent (if any) will be removed from the position, leaving the position marked as TBH.
MANAGERPOS	salesmgr32	Required for new records	No	The position code of the position that this position reports to. (Note that this is not a user ID; the employee's current manager could be different than the position they are projected to report to.) If a position has no manager, use the value NO_MANAGER. Blank or invalid position codes will result in errors.
KEYPOSITION	0	Optional*	Yes	Indicates whether the position is key or a level of criticality. This can be set by a rating scale, so while the most common options are 1 (Yes) and 0 (No), any numeric value that corresponds to a criticality rating can be used. If column is not included, value for existing positions will not be changed. If column is included but value is blank, record will be set to 0.
JOBCODE	salesrep	Optional*	Yes	Valid fields are: Title, Jobcode, Department, Division, Location, Manager (specify a user ID), HR (specify a user ID), Matrix_Manager (specify a user ID), CustomManager (specify a user ID), and Custom01 through Custom15. These fields only update TBH positions.

TITLE	Account Manager
DEPARTMENT	Sales
DIVISION	ACE Software
MANAGER	Cgrant1

Generating the position model from employee data is intended for customers that do not already have a master source for position data. Administrators with user management permissions should find the option in Admin Center → Succession → Position Management:Sync Position Model with Employee Data.

The sync function can be used to "seed" the position hierarchy based on the employee data. You can run it once employee records are loaded and it will create a matching position for each employee.

The first option to select in the sync function is what to do with inactive incumbents: either mark their positions as TBH, or delete the positions. The sync process bases its changes on employee data, so this only changes positions that have inactive employees in them—not positions that are already marked as TBH. (To delete TBH positions, you must either go to the org chart to delete them manually or use the import function with the "DELETE" command described below.)

If the sync process encounters an active employee that is an incumbent in a deleted position and that position reports to a position that is filled by the employee's manager, the system will reactivate the deleted position (rather than create a new one).

There are three sync options for when employees report to new managers. Typically, customers should choose one on which to standardize that best fits their needs:

• Always create a new position for the employee (successors stay with the old position, now TBH). The first option is conservative, erring on the side of creating new positions, which is the safest route—all position-based succession plans will be preserved. However, this can also result in unnecessary position records that will have to be removed manually.
• Update the position to report to the new manager's position (successors move with them). The second option is aggressive: positions always follow employee changes, and new TBH positions are never created in the wake of an employee move. This means you will spend less time cleaning up unnecessary TBH positions. However, you have to manually intervene when a position gets moved that should have been kept under the old workgroup.
• Create a new position for the employee only if they leapfrog or move laterally and only if they have successors. The third option is a hybrid approach which applies some additional logic.

To ensure that planning and visibility permissions are correctly applied,the manager userID should be specified for TBH positions created via the import file to match the incumbent of the manager position, .

Displaying Position Title Instead of User Title

With the legacy position nomination method, there is an option to have positions as a type of container to which the succession plan is assigned but which would not have any content attributes. We can simply use the user titles on all succession screens so that we do not have to fill in position titles when importing positions.

When the position title is used, however, there is a switch in the Org Chart Configuration under the Succession Org Chart tab to Display the position title instead of user title. This will affect the Succession Org Chart and on the Nomination and Successor Portlet in People Profile. When the option is enabled, we see the position title and when it is disabled, we see the user title.