Creating event reasons during implementation

Events are job occurrences that span over the employee lifecycle. Employee Central delivers a standard exhaustive Events picklist. You cannot add a custom Event. You can, however, deactivate or relabel the Event picklist values.

Employee Central also lets customers differentiate the reasons behind an event using the Event Reason foundation object. For example, a promotion may be a lateral promotion with no pay change or a vertical move with a salary increase.

Use the interaction below for examples of event reasons for an event.

Event Reason

Event reason is an XML-based Foundation Object; therefore, the records are managed through the Manage Organization, Pay and Job Structures interface. In the figure, Event Reasons, you can see an example of an event reason for ACE, Corp.

Event Reasons are tethered to Events and define the employee status.

You learned that Event and Event Reasons are mandatory for employment-related transactions. When managers initiate a transaction, they need to manually choose the appropriate event and event reason, making it error-prone and the resulting reports unreliable.

To streamline this process, Event Reason Derivation (ERD) can be set up for customers so that the system automatically selects the appropriate event reason according to the changes made to an employee's data. The employee status is updated, if necessary, depending on the event reason.

Appropriate event reasons are determined using business rules. ERD requires a lot of initial setups since each possible data change in Job Information and Comp Information must be anticipated and tied to a specific event reason. For example, the system must differentiate between employee transfers, promotions, location changes, pay changes, position changes, etc.

Customers who want ERD set up for their system should first determine the event reasons they need to cover for all types of changes in the system, then the field changes associated with each event reason. If a rule does not set the event reason, the system issues an error, and the initiator cannot resolve the error.

In the case of Hire, Rehire, and Termination events, event reasons are manually selected. You cannot create a derivation rule to assign event reasons for such events automatically.

If a customer chooses not to use ERD, the Event and Event Reason will always be chosen by the user initiating the transaction.

Business rules can trigger a workflow tied to the event reason to ensure the transaction goes through the appropriate approval process before it is active.

Bypassing Event Reason Derivation

Even with Event Reason Derivation turned on, those given the RBP rights to Insert New Record from the history of jobInfo and compInfo blocks can bypass this process. If you do not go through the Take Action button available on employee files, you will manually choose the event and related event reason for the change you are making. When you update the necessary fields and choose Save, the change is automatically stored, and no workflow is triggered.

This is referred to as an HR Edit, and this capability should only be given to a more administrative audience.

To review, if ERD is turned on and the individual performing the change navigates through Take Action or uses the Pencil icon (edit) on the block, then the system chooses the correct event and event reason (and triggers a workflow if one is configured for that particular change). If the individual navigates through History → Insert New Record, they must manually choose the event and event reason, and no workflow is ever triggered.

Customers operating in multiple countries/regions often have event reasons specific to that country/region. As the employee is always clearly assigned to one legal entity and one specific country/region, you can set up the system to show only the relevant event reason records for that employee.

When it is set up, administrators and managers can use the records on all screens with an event reason field [Employment/Personal Information page; Update Employee Records page; History pages (for example, Job History); Add New Employee page, and so on].

This feature is helpful for the following reasons:

• Large customers operating in multiple countries/regions that have several legal entities in one country
• Customers that have a high number of country/region-specific event reasons