Configuring Position Management Settings

A major part of Position Management, is the vast capabilities when setting up the position object, and designing how the system behaves.

In this lesson, you will learn the general position system settings that can be set up. This will be helpful as you go throughout the training and learn about different elements of how positions are maintained and behave in the system.

This lesson covers Position Management Settings and Concepts that relate to Position Behavior and Position Management System Configurations. These topics include:

• Position Types
• Position Control
• Position Hierarchy
• Hierarchy Adaptation
• Synchronization and Matrix Synchronization.
• UI Customizing
• Transition Period

Examples to other Position Management Settings will be learned during the course.

Position Types can be used, if needed, to define different system behaviors for positions, outside of the standard behavior of Position Management. If selecting Position Types, settings maintained for fields under Position Type override the settings maintained under Position Management Settings.

Positions can be of different types, allowing for different behavior on the user interface, but also in imports. All default position types can be customized, and you can also create custom position types as needed. Positions records are then assigned to these position types.

The standard behaviors that can be specifically defined by position type include:

• Triggering a workflow on Job Information if position changes have been synchronized to incumbents. The default behavior does not trigger the workflow.
• Reassigning direct reports if the manager vacates the current position. By default, the system reassigns the direct reports to the next available manager.
• Adapting the reporting line after the position hierarchy has been changed.
• Determine whether and how job relationships for this employee are adapted
• Set up and manage transition periods for more than one position
• Define the synchronization of position matrix relationships to job relationships of incumbents

Standard Position Types

When you enable Position Types, you get the standard position type, Regular (RP) and Shared (SP):

• Regular Positions (RP) – One Incumbent is assigned. Regular positions would be occupied normally by one employee, or by up to two or three employees in exceptional cases, such as job sharing or transition periods.
• Shared Positions (SP) – More than one incumbent is assigned. Shared positions are positions occupied by two or more employees and they are used in some circumstances where multiple employees are hired for the same job, positions with high turnover or similar.

Position Control (field: positionControlled ) is an attribute on the Position object that controls whether the target FTE is checked when an employee is assigned to this position. In addition, the attribute triggers the stable headcount processing when an employee is assigned to a new position during Position Transfer or Position Reclassification.

If a position is subject to position control, the full-time equivalent (FTE) values of all incumbents assigned to the position must not be higher than the FTE value assigned to the position.

This is checked when:

• A new employee is hired.
• The manager assigns a new position to an employee or changes the FTE of an employee on the Update Employee Records screen.
• The position or FTE value is changed in the History.
• The FTE value of the assigned position is changed.
• The system searches for a suitable position when a position transfer or position reclassification is required.

If a position is subject to position control, the system checks for each imported job information record, whether the FTE values of an incumbent assigned to the position must not be higher than the FTE value defined for the position. This can be very time consuming, especially if there are multiple incumbents assigned to a position, as we know this for "cumulative positions" with multiple records. Please consider this impact in time when performing a job information import. SAP SuccessFactors recommends that you set the position control to No in such cases.

In Position Management, a Leading Hierarchy gets defined in Position Management Settings → Hierarchy Adaptation tab. You want to define a leading hierarchy to reduce effort involved in keeping the position hierarchy and reporting line hierarchy in sync. The main value proposition for using Position Management is to plan and control headcount and vacancies, and the Position Hierarchy is the only way to ensure this.

There are two hierarchy options: Position Hierarchy and Reporting Hierarchy.

• The Position Hierarchy – represents the position-to-position relationship. The Position Hierarchy prioritizes the Positions, and their relationships to other Positions.
• The Reporting Hierarchy – represents the person-to-person relationship. The Reporting Hierarchy prioritizes the Reporting Structure of Managers relationships to their Direct Reports.

In the Position Hierarchy, as positions change and employees are assigned to positions, the employee’s relationships to other employees, including who their supervisor is are reflected of the Position structure. The position structure determines the reporting line. Changes made to the leading hierarchy are automatically made to the other hierarchy.

You can also opt to have no leading hierarchy. You should do this if you do not want to use hierarchy adaptation, meaning that neither the position hierarchy nor the reporting line is changed when the other hierarchy is changed.

Without Position Management, you only have the reporting hierarchy, which is visualized in the regular Org Chart.

The position hierarchy determines the reporting line so that the supervisor for employees is inherited every time that a position assignment changes or the position hierarchy is changed:

• Assigning an employee to a position will make this employee the supervisor for employees on positions below this position.
• Moving a position to a new parent position will update the supervisor on the position to become the incumbent of the parent position.
• If lower-level positions with incumbent has a parent position without incumbent, then the manager of the lower-level position is the next higher-level position that has an incumbent.

Synchronizing positions and their hierarchies and incumbents provides the flexibility needed to manage the organization by either position or incumbent. Indeed, when there are no vacant positions, the position hierarchy is the same as the employee-supervisor hierarchy. When there are vacant positions, the employee-supervisor hierarchy represents the effective hierarchy. This allows the incumbent to be assigned to a different set of attributes than defined by the position. The degree to which the incumbent can be different from a position is configurable using rules and permissions.

In Position Management, based on our leading hierarchy, there are a set of options to determine whether and how changes to one hierarchy will be reflected in the other one. Some of the scenarios that we can define in the Hierarchy Adaptation tab in Position Management Settings:

• Reassign Direct Reports According to Position Hierarchy on Termination Screen.

  Available options are No / Yes - Always / Yes Optional. Leading practice recommendation is to set this field value to Yes-Always, to reassign the direct reports based on the position hierarchy.

• Default The Supervisor Or The Position In Hire, MSS Job Information And History

  Available options are Yes and No. If Position Hierarchy is the leading hierarchy, it is recommended to set this value to Yes. This option allows for automated data maintenance while ensuring consistency and alignment. Selecting No, on the other hand, would allow Position and Reporting hierarchies to diverge.

• Threshold for Running Adoption of Reporting Line and Job Relationships as a Job.

  Once the number of incumbents of either child positions or matrix positions hits the number set as Threshold (only values between 5 and 20 are possible), the updates to the hierarchy or job relationships will be carried out as a scheduled job. If the number falls below the number, then the update will happen immediately. Please note that if the number is 0, then it will never be triggered as a job. Also, this setting is only relevant if the position hierarchy is the leading hierarchy.

  Note

  With Centralized Services enabled for adding or rehiring an employee, adding a fixed term contract, saving a global assignment, publishing compensation promotion data, saving an internal hire, or adding a concurrent employment, the transfer of employees to a new manager runs in the background (asynchronously). In these cases, no job is triggered, regardless if the threshold is exceeded or not.

  If you are using business rules to derive event reasons and a threshold is defined for the hierarchy adaptation, you must select an event reason to be used for the hierarchy adaptation in the job from Admin Center → Company System and Logo Settings → Default event reason to use when processing direct reports and job relationships offline.
• Automated Daily Hierarchy Adaptation

  In the past, when an employee got assigned to a position, the derivation of the employee’s supervisor did not take into account any future changes on position side, e.g. when a position was moved to a different parent position in the future or when the incumbents of the position's parent position were changed in the future.

  With the Automated Daily Hierarchy Adaptation set into Yes, the system to automatically adapt the hierarchies using a daily job if they are not in sync. The daily recurring background job checks for each employee, who is assigned to a position, if their assigned supervisor still matches the position hierarchy, and in case the reporting line and position hierarchy are not in sync, the system updates the employee's supervisor assignment accordingly.

  Once this job is enabled:

  • Any changes that are made with effective date TODAY, will be synced automatically in the system and not carried out by the job.
  • Any changes that are made with a future effective date will be carried out by the job running on that specific date.
  • Any changes that are made with a past effective date, will be synced in the next run time of the job, but the effective date of these changes would be affected and according to the job, not to the actual change, which may not be recommended if past dated transactions occur regularly in the organization.
  Note

  The Use Automated Daily Hierarchy Adaption setting cannot be set to Yes, unless a scheduled job "Position Management Daily Hierarchy Adaptation" with daily recurrence is submitted. This type of job can be now set up in Admin Center, using the Scheduled Job Manager tool.

  More information can be found in Setting Up Automatic Daily Hierarchy AdaptationSetting Up Automatic Daily Hierarchy Adaptation, and the following KBA: 2257661 - Automated Daily Hierarchy Adaptation Admin Opt-In

• Automated Daily Hierarchy Adaptation - Offset in Days

  This setting is only applicable if you set Automated Daily Hierarchy Adaption to Yes. Specifies the number of days before any future dated position changes will be synced with the incumbent of the position. Leaving the value as 0 means the hierarchy will be adapted at the date on which it gets out of sync, whereas setting the value to 7 would adapt the hierarchy one week before it gets out of sync.

  This is an optional step if using Automated Daily Hierarchy Adaptation.

The Synchronization tab in Position Management Settings includes the following options:

• Position to Job Information Synchronization. When positions assigned to incumbents are updated, and a business rule is set in Rule for Synchronizing Position to Job Information, you can decide on how the system should synchronize this information. The available options are:
  • Automatic: If you choose this, synchronization takes place in the background. RECOMMENDED.
  • User Decision: A pop-up appears after every position change asking whether the incumbents should be synchronized.
  • User Decision If Required: A pop-up only appears if the position and the incumbents are not in sync.
  • Never: No synchronization takes place.
• Rule for Synchronizing Position to Job Information. The rule you select here is used when the position is changed in the Position Organizational Chart or via import and the changes are synchronized to the incumbent’s job information.
• Rule for Synchronizing Job Information to Position. The rule you select here is used to determine which common fields between Job Information and Position are synchronized when Job Information is changed and this leads to a position reclassification or position transfer.

  In Synchronization, you can define rules to synchronize Position to Job Information, and from Job Information to Position. Synchronization and business rules will be covered in depth later on.

  
• Search for Position in Position Reclassification. Choose "Yes" if you want the system to first search for a position that has status To Be Hired before creating a new position.
• Search for Position in Position Transfer. Choose "Yes" if you want the system to first search for a position that has status To Be Hired before creating a new position.
• Stable Headcount Area for Position Control Mode. It is recommended to have "No Selection" for this field as we are not creating positions in the background. You could use an organization level for this if you wanted to have the system automatically transfer/ create/ deactivate positions within the organization entity chosen here or maintain a stable total FTE value.
• Automated Position to Job Information Synchronization. If the "Position to Job Information Synchronization" Job is set up in Scheduled Job Manager, you can set Use Automated Job to Yes, to ensure changes to future records on both positions and job information of employees are always synchronized. If these records aren't in sync as of the start dates of the records of the position or in the Job Information, the job triggers a synchronization from position to Job Information for the fields that are defined in the "Position to Job Information" synchronization rule.
• Offset in Days. You can specify the number of days into the future until which the "Position to Job Information Synchronization" Job considers changes on positions and Job Information records. You can set it to a value between 0 and 30. If there are no changes within the offset to either Job Information or position, no synchronization takes place. If there is no offset configured or value is set to 0, then the job only considers records whose effective start date is the same day as the day the job runs.

If you are using the Position Matrix Relationships association in Positions, you can configure some parameters in this tab, for the synchronization between the Position Matrix Relationships and the Job Relationships of the employees assigned to the positions.

• Synchronize Position Matrix Relationships to Job Relationships of Incumbents. You can use this option to determine whether and how the synchronization of position matrix relationships and job relationships is executed. The possible options are:
  • Always: Synchronization takes place every time when the position assignment of the employee is changed or when the matrix relationships of the position are changed. RECOMMENDED.
  • Never: No synchronization takes place
  • Only when position assignment of the employee is changed: Position matrix relationships are only synchronized to job relationships of incumbents when the position assignment of the employee is changed
  • Only when Matrix Relationships of the position are changed: Position matrix relationships are only synchronized to job relationships of incumbents when the matrix relationships of the position are changed
• Synchronize Job Relationships for Vacant Matrix Positions. You can use this option to determine how to synchronize job relationships for vacant matrix positions. You can use one of the following options:
  • No: When the setting is set to No, the options for transferring job relationships are shown on the Termination and Internal Hires pages.
  • Delimit Job Relationships: When this setting is set, the options for transferring job relationships are no longer shown on the Termination and Internal Hire pages. This setting checks if there is another incumbent available for a given matrix position, for example, if the job relationship manager's employment is terminated.

    - If there is another incumbent available, this user is assigned as the new job relationship manager.

    - If there is no other incumbent available for this matrix position, then the given job relationship type is delimited (this means that the system sets an end date for the job relationship that is equal to the termination date.)

  • To Incumbent On Next Higher-Level Position: When this setting is set, the options for transferring job relationships are no longer shown on the Termination and Internal Hire pages. This setting checks if there is another incumbent available for a given matrix position, for example, if the job relationship manager's employment is terminated.

    - If there is another incumbent available, this user is assigned as the new job relationship manager.

    - If there is no other incumbent available for this matrix position, the search proceeds to the higher-level positions of the user whose employment is terminated until the system finds an incumbent. This incumbent is assigned as the new job relationship manager.

• Automated Position Matrix Relationship to Job Relationship Synchronization. If the "Position Matrix Relationships to Job Relationships Synchronization" Job is set up in Scheduled Job Manager, you can set Use Automated Job to Yes, to ensure changes to future records on both position matrix relationships and job relationships of employees are always synchronized. If these records aren't in sync as of the start dates of the records of the Position Matrix Relationships or in the Job Relationships, the job triggers a synchronization from Position Matrix Relationships to Job Relationships.
• Offset in Days. You can specify the number of days into the future until which the "Position Matrix Relationships to Job Relationships Synchronization" Job considers changes on Position Matrix Relationships and Job Relationship records. You can set it to a value between 0 and 30. If there are no changes within the offset to either Job Relationships or Position Matrix Relationships, no synchronization takes place. If there is no offset configured or value is set to 0, then the job only considers records whose effective start date is the same day as the day the job runs.

The UI Customizing tab in Position Management Settings includes some of the options that determine the behavior in regards of Positions from a user interface (UI) perspective.

The following options will be available within the UI Customizing tab:

• Rule for Defining Copy-Relevant Position Fields. You can assign a Default Position Attributes in Position Organization Chart scenario business rule to default position field values according to the source position when creating Lower-Level or Peer Positions from the Position Org Chart.
• Respect Workflow at Copy Position in Position Organizational Chart. If a workflow for Position creation is triggered, you can decide on this option whether the same workflow should trigger if an administrator mass creates positions using this option. Unless there is a business reason to specify otherwise, normally this option is set to No.
• Use Company Filter for Positions in MSS Job Information and History. If set to Yes, the available positions from the position field in the Employee File will be filtered according to Legal Entity / Company to display only the relevant positions. The positions will be still filtered by company (Legal Entity) in the Hire process even if this value is set to No.
• Allow Selection Only of Positions That Have Status 'To Be Hired' in MSS Job Information and Hire. If set to Yes, the available positions from the position field in the Employee File and the Hire Wizard will be filtered to show only To Be Hired or Vacant positions. This will be not applicable to the Job Information History UI, which displays all positions regardless of TBH status.
• Display 'Incumbent of Parent Position' in Hire, MSS Job Information and History. This option enables the field in the Position Information section to filter positions available in the position field based on the incumbent of the parent position.
• Show "Deactivate Position" Option in Employee Termination Screen. If set to Yes, users can determine to deactivate or not the position upon terminating the employee holding the position.

A transition period occurs when an employee leaves a position and a successor is appointed to that position before the incumbent leaves it. This means that the position is overstaffed for that time by incumbent or FTE. This means that you can assign a successor to a position while the employee who is leaving the position is still assigned. The transition period can be enabled Globally or based on Position Type, which would allow to define transition periods for only a group of positions or specify different periods to allow over staffing of positions.

To enable Transition Period in the system, some steps need to be completed

• In Position Management Settings → Transition Period tab, set Use Transition Period to Yes.
• In Period you can define a number which over staffing a position by incumbent or FTE will be allowed.
• In Unit, you can set into Days or Months

Other tabs that can be found in Position Management Settings are related to:

• Right to Return. Only relevant if Global Assignment or Leave of Absence are enabled in the instance, this tab allows to set up the business rules and event reasons to create a right to return to a position and be unassigned from a position in those scenarios. You will explore the Right to Return from Global Assignment in Unit 4 of this course, and more information can be also found in the Implementation Guide: Right to Return.
• Integration. In this tab, you can turn on the integration with Recruiting Management and select the business rules to derive job requisition template and field mapping between position and job requisition. Additionally, you can select to Raise Events in Intelligent Services whenever a position is created or updated. More information can be found in the Unit 5 of this course.
• Import. This tab is used to define how the system behaves in import scenarios. Typically, the settings will be set to No during initial load to avoid possible performance impact, and then set to Yes. A good resource to find out more about these import settings is the SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Position Management: Design Considerations and Recommendations document:Implementation Design Principles

The following checks are available in the Check Tool. Under the System Health tab, you can run all checks selecting the application Position Management.

• All mandatory Position Management settings have been made (PositionManagementSettingsMandatoryFieldsCheck).

  Verifies all the mandatory Position Management Settings are enabled.

• Position to Job Information sync rule has been correctly defined (PositionToJobInfoSyncRuleCheck).

  Your Position to Job Information rule contains a statement that sets the sync rule supervisor in Job Information. This is not allowed, since the non-leading hierarchy is automatically updated by the system.

  Your Position to Job Information rule contains a statement that sets the sync rule company in Job Information. This is not allowed when using the Company Filter in Position Management Settings

• Business rule for position code generation has been correctly defined (PositionRuleAutoCodeGenerated).

  Reviews the code generation for the newly created position objects.

• "Pending Data" setting for position object definition is active (PositionPendingDataFlag).

  Checks that the pending data flag is set to 'Yes' in the position object definition.

• Mapping rule for Recruiting Management Integration has been correctly defined (PositionCheckMappingRuleForCOAPIBasedRCMIntegration).

  Make sure that the value entered in the field name of each mapping exists in the OData object Job Requisition. You can find this in Admin Center → OData API Data Dictionary. If a field refers to another OData object, you need to use the dot notation.

  The value before the dot is the name of the field in the Job Requisition and the value after the dot is the name of the field in the referring object. For example: hiringManager.usersSysId

• All values available in the Position Matrix Relationship picklist are also available in the Job Relationship picklist (PositionMatrixPicklistCheck).

  Verifies that the values in PositionMatrixRelationshipType picklist are also available in jobRelType picklist, to ensure correct synchronization of matrix relationships from Position to Job Relationships.

• Mandatory fields are filled in Position (PositionMandatoryFieldsCheck).

  Checks for missing mandatory (non-conditional) fields for all active position records.