Describing SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Position Management

Objectives

After completing this lesson, you will be able to:

  • Identify the main features, benefits, and tasks in SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Position Management
  • Explain how positions relate to jobs and employees in SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central

Introduction to SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Position Management Academy

Watch the introduction video on SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Position Management Academy.

Employee Central Overview

SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central increases workforce productivity, helps to standardize HR processes globally, and provides full visibility to make better people decisions. We do this by providing a digital HR experience, embedded localization, and best practices to harmonize processes on a single people platform.

Employee Central allows organizations to capture and store robust, effective-dated, connected data about their employees and their company structure. The data that is collected and stored in Employee Central is used as the basis for the entire SAP SuccessFactors HXM Solution, allowing for data to be synchronized across the suite, to support the talent modules.

Employee Central allows organizations to:

  • Manage employees with a global system of record

  • Capture all employees data in one place

  • Generate reports with powerful analytics

  • Combine talent data for a comprehensive employee profile

  • Review talent data against data from other enterprise systems to make informed decisions

In THR81, the Employee Central Core Academy, you have learned the fundamentals of Employee Central. Most of that knowledge will be prerequisite for lessons and exercises in this course. Some of the knowledge that is required includes a deep understanding of the EC foundational structure, Metadata Framework (MDF) objects, tools, and principles, setting up workflows, Business Rules, Role-Based Permissions, Importing data, propagation, etc.

Position Management Overview

Position Management allows you to create, maintain, staff, and activate positions in administration tools. Position Management offers an easy-to-use interface that can be accessed entirely through the tools in the instance, giving customers more power to control their configurations and maintenance. Position Management offers a Position Hierarchy display to view how employees are related to positions, where open positions are, and helps HR identify successors easily.

SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Position Management offers:

  • Increased Flexibility – Position Management offers a broad range of configuration options, allowing companies to fine-tune it to fit their needs.

  • More Simplicity – The solution reduces the administrative overhead to a minimum.

  • Tight Integration – Using Position Management will give a customer benefits not only in Employee Central, but also in the integration with other talent modules and external platforms.

Position Management is a solution for facilitating a company’s organizational management and helps to streamline other integrated areas like Job Information, Recruiting Management, Succession Planning, etc. Customers can maintain a target organizational structure by creating a central repository of authorized positions. A position enables the hiring of one or more employees with the specified job classification onto the position. It allows the planning and assignment of resources that are needed in the organization, independent from actual employee assignments. You can attach further information to positions that can be used beyond employee assignments, such as succession data, requisitions, job profiles and more.

Employee Central Position Management makes it easy for you to do a number of things:

  • Create and maintain positions online with appropriate controls.
  • Store and track position category (regular, part-time, intern, and so on), current incumbents, and previous employees in that position.
  • Use position control to track the headcount to suit your needs.
  • For to-be-hired positions, you can open requisitions in Recruiting, with the required position information.
  • Integrate Succession Management with Employee Central positions so that the successors are planned based on the existing position's hierarchy.
  • Integrate with SAP Fieldglass to create job postings for contingent workers.

Position Management is a way to manage your workforce by allowing the creation, editing, and depreciation of positions in the past, present, and future. Using Position Management, you can easily adapt and change positions to meet the needs of your organization.

It is the most efficient way to link people to jobs and maintain control of the number of positions you have in any given part of the organization.

Position Management has a number of benefits enabling organizations to manage the workforce better:

  • Open Positions – while positions are vacant, HR can work with them to plan and structure the organization and use the information for recruiting and succession.

  • Linked to Recruiting Management and SAP Fieldglass – vacancies can be tracked with the specific details of a position. Vacant positions can be linked to job requisitions highlighting the number of open positions, the originators of the job requisitions, the hiring manager, and the elapsed time since the job requisition was created. Position information can also be sent to SAP Fieldglass and be used to recruit and hire contingent workers. Once hired, the contingent worker information can be seen on the position org chart and basic organization chart in SAP SuccessFactors.

  • Tracking Incumbents – In some cases, it’s important to track whether an employee is on assignment (global or secondment) as well as whether they either have a right to return into the position (e.g., parental leave or other circumstances). Reporting lines are also automatically updated during these events.

  • Hiring people into a position – Positions are part of the job requisitions created in recruiting. When people are hired into these positions, all or some of the data that is part of the position defaults during the hiring process. This process reduces the amount of data entry required during the hire.

  • Positions are flexible in SAP SuccessFactors. Business Rules determine how positions get approved and how they are used in Employee Central.

Positions are MDF Generic Object records, that can store and share information throughout the system. This allows the system to extend the HXM Suite capabilities, ensure data entry efficiency and accuracy, and simplify organizational and workforce maintenance. Additionally, because it is based in the Metadata Framework, customers can access the Position Management structure to easily administer and maintain it directly in the instance.

Position Management has its own set of tools to configure and administer the system, however many common MDF tools are shared, such as Configure Object Definitions, Configure Business Rules, Manage Data, and Import and Export Data. Understanding how these tools work will be critical for the course.

Benefits of Position Management in Employee Central

Position Management is an important aspect of the SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central solution. Its primary purpose is to facilitate workforce planning and subsequent control of the workforce against that plan. It also has the main benefit of facilitating increased data entry and efficiency by defaulting fields into employee’s records when they are attached to a position.

Using Position Management with Employee Central allows for many increased benefits. For example, Using Position Management with Employee Central allows customers to take advantage of all of the benefits of Employee Central, while expanding on the suite capabilities. Additionally, Position Management is very effective in driving process across the SuccessFactors HXM Suite, such as Recruiting Management, Onboarding, and Succession Management.

  • While positions are vacant, HR can work with them to plan and structure the organization and use the information for recruiting.

  • Vacancies can be tracked and the position data can be used to store succession data and open requisitions.

  • When hiring or transferring, data is propagated from positions to employee’s job information. This leads to higher data quality and stronger HR control.

  • When employees are temporarily out of their positions, this information is tracked, their jobs can be temporarily staffed, and the reporting line is automatically adapted.

Position Management is one of many extension applications that SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central offers. It enhances the system capabilities for organizations, and has some of the most robust features as it is based on the Metadata Framework.

When using Position Management in Employee Central, you will find the following elements in the solution:

  • Position Management introduces the position hierarchy next to the reporting line. All positions have a target capacity based on Full Time Equivalent (FTE). The customer can decide if positions allow multiple assignments.
  • Positions hold the same fields on job classification and organization entities as the job information of employees.
  • When assigning employees to positions, the system inherits this information from the position to the incumbent, using data propagation rules.
  • Position creation can be tightly controlled through conditional workflows and notifications.
  • Requisitions can be created directly from the position and populated with data.

Using Position Management will give customers benefits not only for headcount and workforce planning, but also when using talent applications like recruitment and succession.

Position Management is an optional feature within SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central.

Position Management Tasks and Responsibilities

Position Management is a data structure which will need maintenance, and it is not maintained on its own. Configuring Position Management is only a small part of implementing Position Management. There are several considerations such as :

  • Evaluate processes and roles to determine which features are needed.
  • Establish a Central Administration (and Regional Administration, if needed) to support major restructures and transfers of employees, assess business needs, process requirements, setup and usage.
  • Establish a training plan for initial and ongoing training to each audience involved in Position Management
  • Identify key roles to support the entry and maintenance of positions. Role-Based Permission framework allows for a granular control over position actions and position object field permissions, as well as the target population to act upon or which positions are visible based on the hierarchy
  • Ensure processes are outlined to ensure timely updates and synchronization of data, flowing data to other modules, regular auditing and deactivation of positions.
  • Standard audit reports are utilized to ensure regular auditing of positions, and deactivation of invalid positions.

Positions

In Position Management, Positions are records that store Position information that can be assigned to employees. Any employee who is hired or transferred into a position inherits the position attributes. The position object supports multiple fields which typically map to parallel fields on an employee’s job information.

Position Management ensures that the employee job information is consistent because the position object stores organizational data such as department, location, and job code, and this data can be shared to the employee’s record. The position object can also store additional information that can relate to succession, recruiting, and additional custom fields to meet any customer requirements.

Positions can be linked together to create a Position Organization Chart or a Position Hierarchy, which is different from the traditional Reporting Hierarchy. A Reporting Hierarchy is the traditional Org Chart, where employees are related to other employees based on their managers/teams.

For example, an engineer might be on a team with many other engineers, all reporting to one manager. Whereas on the Position Org Chart, all of those engineers might be in the same position, with a parent position of senior engineer.

When using and setting up Position Management, you can decide whether your leading hierarchy is the position hierarchy or the reporting hierarchy.

Note

SAP SuccessFactors recommends that the leading hierarchy be set to the Position Hierarchy, to reduce effort involved in keeping the hierarchies in sync, as changes made to the position hierarchy are automatically made in the reporting hierarchy. This training follows the leading hierarchy of the Position Hierarchy, as recommended best practice.

Positions and Jobs

In the THR81 - SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Core Academy training, you learned that employees are hired through a process that includes filling out Employee Data, which is made up of Person and Employment data objects. One of the most important objects for Employee Data, is Job Information(jobInfo) , that serves as the center of the HRIS system. Job Information connects employees to the organization, their job, and their manager. The Job Information object specifically stores the Position field and the Job Classification(job-code) field.

When looking at an employee’s Job Information record, there are fields that are connected to other data in the system. For example, Location is a field that references the Location Foundation Object, and displays a list of Location records. The same is for fields like Job Classification and Position.

Job Classification is part of the Foundation Object structure in Employee Central, and references a list of Job Classification records in the system. In Employee Central, when an employee is assigned a Job Classification, typically data that is shared from the Job Classification record can be propagated onto the employee file. This increases data entry efficiency and accuracy, and reduces data misconfiguration.

When data is propagated from the Job Classification record, common field data can be shared to the employee’s Job Information record. Common data includes fields such as the Job Title, Pay Grade, Employee Class, Regular/Temporary and Standard Hours.

The employee’s Job Information is a union of Position and Employee. A Position is a specific instance of a Job Classification. Positions represent a seat in an organization, that is held by one or multiple employees, and these Positions can inherit attributes from the Job Classification. The Job Classification object stores all job codes defined in a company and information associated with the job code, such as job level, pay grade, regular/temporary, job function and other attributes.

The Position Object stores records in the system, just like the Job Classification. These records include organizational and job related data, that is also displayed in the employee’s Job Information record. Whenever the employee is assigned to a position, the information from the position record can propagate to the employee's job information fields using a business rule, to ensure data accuracy and consistency in the system.

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