Articles Tagged ‘ask the experts’

Symphony Webinar: Tips and Tricks for Year-end Payroll: How to Be Proactive, Not Reactive

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

 

Join us for this free webinar and find out how to prepare for year-end payroll

Date: Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Time: 2:00PM – 3:00 PM EDT

Common year-end payroll mistakes can quickly multiply your headaches during an already busy time. To ensure a smooth year-end transition, this webinar will guide you through the steps to preparing for year-end payroll. Let Symphony – the SAP HCM experts – teach you key strategies to put into action to streamline the year-end payroll process and prepare for the upcoming year. Kathy Morris, a Senior Consultant at Symphony Management Consulting and former SAP “Year-end Tax Angel” will discuss best practices for year-end payroll and provide tips on:

·         How to get your system ready and perform configuration updates

·         Ways to approach YE processing to ensure success

·         What tools are available to assist with YE closing

·         How to create an annual project plan and check list

 

Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/784467408

 

 

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Integration within the HCM Module

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

Question

How is integration in personnel management a critical function?

Answer

Integration within the HCM module (i.e. Personnel Administration to Organizational Management, Personnel Administration to Time, Time to Payroll) and within the SAP system (i.e. HCM to Finance, Payroll to Cost Accounting) is one of the key benefits of implementing SAP within an organization.  It provides for a single point of data entry into one module/sub-module which can be utilized in another module/sub-module.  For example, employee master data entered into the personnel administration sub-module of HCM can be used by other modules (i.e. Finance, EH&S, Project Systems) without having to rekey the data, thereby saving time, reducing keying errors and ensuring data consistency.

 

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Qualification Catalog Structure

Monday, August 16th, 2010

Qualifications can be a foundation for many functional uses in SAP.  Qualifications equate to the requirements capabilities needed to perform the duties of a position, to the initial skill set held by the person most qualified to receive an offer of employment, to development areas identified as part of the annual performance appraisal process. 

 

Many organizations will start with a basic structure comprised of qualification groups for three competency areas:

 

1.)    Core or foundational

Sets the tone and/or context and frequently aligns with key behaviors expected from everyone in the enterprise (Example: Customer Focus)

 

2.)    Functional and/or technical

Knowledge and skills/abilities that is required for a specific function that may range from programming skills to the ability to give effective presentations

 

3.)    Managerial or leadership

Capabilities that allow an individual to be an effective leader of people and/or processes

 

Beyond the initial three competency classifications, organizations may also define categories for licenses or certifications, education and experience. The key is to assess how your organization will use the qualifications catalog going forward and assure that the categories are meaningful to the organization’s needs and sustainability.

 

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Uploading Data from Excel to SAP

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

Question

How we can upload large number of new joining data through Excel into SAP?

Answer

When there is a large amount of data that you need to upload to your HCM infotypes, the best way to do this is to use of LSMW (Legacy System Migration Workbench) options.  You may remember this functionality from back when you were in the “Cut-Over” phase of your original implementation.  This approach is favored due to its ease and pre-defined Excel spreadsheets that SAP has available for many of your standard infotypes. 

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Organizational Management Integration with Personnel Administration

Monday, July 19th, 2010

Question

After performing transfer action though LSMW, the new position assigned to the employee in Infotype 0001 is not reflecting in organization structure, only the position is reflecting without person.

 

Answer

There are a number of outstanding questions that would need to be answered before we are able to provide a comprehensive response, however, you can start by verifying that the PLOGI setting on table T77S0 is set for OM and PA to be integrated and if this is for data conversion there are programs that are to be run after data conversion programs are run: 

 

RHINTE00

If HR Master Data is available in the above form, you can use this report to transfer data to OM.

RHINTE10

This allows for objects created in Organizational Management to be “recognized” during transactions in Personnel Administration      

RHINTE20

Checks whether all of the objects relevant for integration exist in both PA and OM.

RHINTE30

Allows you to transfer a person’s org. assignment, position, org. units, etc.) from OM to Infotype 0001 in PA

 

If you need further clarification, please provide us with the following information: Is this first time the LSMW was used for this action?  Was Infotype 0000 populated with the action or did the program only update Infotype 0001?  Were the other org. structure fields populated (org. unit, job) on Infotype 0001 or just the position?  Is LSMW being used to do data conversion to prepare for go live? 

 

Feel free to respond or ask additional questions in the comments section.

 

 

 

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Implementing SAP E-Recruiting

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

If you are new to SAP E-Recruiting, then you may need some advice to get started.  We will begin posting a series of blogs that will show you how to begin the journey in implementing a company’s SAP E-Recruiting functionality. Let’s start from the basics.

1.      Define your Recruitment Business process. It is important that you know every step of the recruitment process so that you can define most of the SAP E-Recruiting screens based on your process. This way it will be more manageable for your recruiters to use the new software and be more familiar with the new process. Here is a sample of a high level business process for recruitment. Your company recruitment process may be similar or slightly different than the one depicted below. You can use this as a reference when documenting your recruitment business process.

untitled-1

2.       Define your Sub-processes. The definition of your recruitment business process does not stop at high level. You need to go deeper. The next step is to define what each sub-process does. Let us give you an example:

untitled-22

In this step you need to define what these sub-processes are all about, that way you have a better picture of your entire process.

3.      Define your steps within the business process. Here is where you need to get one of your sub-processes and break it down into steps, triggers and user roles. Take out your process flow charting hat, turn on your computer and start charting away. Of course the assumption here is that you’ve spoken with a few people like the SME’s (Subject Matter Experts) in your company about the recruitment process unless you are the SME. The reason why you need to do this so that you can start visualizing some of the SAP E-Recruiting solutions that you have in mind for your company. On the process flow diagram that you will be doing, it is expected that you refer to SAP E-Recruiting screens and solutions to define this part of the process. Below is an example of a process flow diagram.

untitled-31

4.       Identify steps in the sub-process that will be using SAP.  This is a little tricky and you may not get this during the first try. Identify which step will use an SAP E-Recruiting transaction. By identifying the step and linking it with an SAP E-recruiting screen/transaction you will be able to get a better idea how that step will be completed by the system. From there you can go into more detail on screen design, configuration items and most of the technical solutions that particular step needs.

 

With these steps you will be on your way to defining your Recruiting business process. The next blog in this series will discuss the first steps to set up SAP E-Recruiting. Keep checking our blog for more SAP Tip & Tricks and feel free to leave questions/comments!

 

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Creating job tasks/functions in SAP

Friday, June 18th, 2010

Question

How can I create a job task/functions in SAP?

Answer

Utilizing transaction PP01 you can create a task.  The object type would be a ‘T’ for Task.  First create the Object Info type with both the short and long description.  Complete any remaining info types as required per your requirements.  The next step would be to tie the task to the job via a relationship.  In PP01 enter the job object number, with an object type of ‘C’ and then choose the relationship info type.  Enter B 007 as the relationship for the task to the job.  The type of related object would be a ‘T’ and then enter the object number.

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Symphony co-hosts upcoming webinar with Symmetry

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

Wednesday, June, 16 2010 at 2:00 pm EST

Register here: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/750333336

Many organizations struggle with decisions on how to best incorporate SAP HCM into their technical environment. The question that often arises is whether or not to implement HCM on a separate landscape. This consideration is a key concern for smaller organizations that cannot afford the financial burden of an additional landscape. In the end, many companies do choose to maintain a separate HCM landscape however, issues such as data security and privacy concerns do not have to be the driving factors in making this decision.

Let Symmetry - the SAP security experts; and Symphony - the SAP HCM experts, walk you through some of the most common misconceptions about HCM security before you make that critical decision and spend money on a new environment.

In this free session Kellie Fitzpatrick (Symphony) and Scott Goolik (Symmetry) will discuss the pros and cons of implementing HCM on a separate instance and why data security and privacy issues should not be the only deciding factors when implementing HCM.

Attendees at this expert led session will be able to:

-Review general concepts of SAP HCM authorizations; how they are used, how they are different, and some of the critical “gotchas.”
-Learn methods to effectively manage HCM security in a shared environment.
-Determine when you should consider a separate landscape and when you should consider a combined landscape.
-Understand the limitations of implementing on a separate instance and the level of maintenance required.
-See real-life examples of companies that have implemented on separate landscapes, those that have implemented on the same landscape, and why that decision was right for them.
-Take home action-items to follow up on in your environment:
- Details of specific Authorization Objects that require restrictions.
- Techniques to protect data in non-Production systems.
- Review of available Authorization Model monitoring tools that
guarantee against security breaches.

Date: Wednesday, June 16
Time: 1:00pm - 2:00pm Central / 2:00pm - 3:00pm EST
Cost: Free

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Advanced Vacation Payout

Friday, June 4th, 2010

Question

Our Company is three weeks from go-live SAP HCM. We have a union rule that requires us to pay union members in advance for vacation. Many of them take five weeks all at once. We have a weekly payroll. It appears that the way to do this in SAP is to process each vacation request manually through each of the next 5 payrolls (for each employee requesting vacation). This is a huge pain for our payroll department in our legacy environment, and soon to be in SAP. Do you have any suggestions?

 

Answer

Step 1 - In Time Management, enter the Vacation hours for the five weeks, then run Time Evaluation for the five weeks.

Step 2 -  In Payroll, there is an Off-cycle/On-Demand Payroll run option, where it can be run for the next five pay periods for the employee, so their taxes, etc. , will be calculated and taken correctly. (On the actual production payroll for the next 5 pay periods, Payroll will know and exclude the employee from the Regular Production run).

 

An enhancement that may be explored post go-live would involve a custom solution utilizing a combination of forms, workflow, and custom programming to automate the entry part of the process.  The Time Evaluation and Off-cycle steps will already be a part of your new SAP Payroll procedure and not require any further adjustments. 

 

Either way, we recommend you move forward with go-live and only consider a custom solution after go-live and stabilization. Waiting until after you are stabilized will allow you to have a better understanding of your new system and help you to be better prepared when you begin to make adjustments or expand your HCM solution.

 

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How can I take Benefit plans out of my drop down lists?

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

Question

I don’t want to show obsolete plans in my drop down lists, but don’t want to delimit them because I want to keep my history intact. What can I do?

Answer

In order to prevent your old plans from showing in the drop down lists, delimit them at the plan level.

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