Managing termination, vacancies, and open positions
in SAP ERP HCM:
Q&A on OM and PA reporting with Danielle Larocca

What are best practices for handling positions in SAP ERP HCM after a termination event? On Thursday, December 8th, ask HR expert Danielle Larocca your questions on managing and reporting on new, open, and temporary positions, vacancies, and rehires.

Editor's note: An edited transcript of this Q&A is now available, or review the full Q&A discussion in the thread below.

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Hi Danielle,

I would like to understand what would be considered "best practice" for managing positions within SAP HR given some specific scenarios.  Given the below types of organizational changes, when is it appropriate to change the attributes on an open position vs creating a new one?  Some scenarios that we face include:

- An instance where a minor change to job title may be required but the overall responsibilities of the role are not changed.  Can an existing vacant position be updated?

- An instance when responsibilities may be transferred from one part of an organization to another (change in manager/cost center responsible).  Can a vacant, open position be transferred to the new cost center and modified or should a new one be created?

- Replacement of an employee who is leaving but for a short period of time there is an overlap where the position cannot be vacated and the new replacement hire joins prior to their departure.

The current processes implemented within our organization require new positions to be created in each of these instances.  As a result the positions within our organization are very dynamic and difficult to manage/track.  We feel that allowing us to make changes to the position would help to minimize the effort required to keep the open positions clean.  Is there a best practice for handling these types of scenarios?

Dec 7, 2011 -- 11:05AM, Lauren wrote:

Hi Danielle

I am on version SAP ECC 6.0.  I am having trouble determining how SAP applies the Reporting Period in PQAH/Ad Hoc Queries.  If you have any documentation on this, that would be great, but here are 2 scenarios that show my question:

1.  If you run a query and set the Reporting Period to 'Other Period' and define this as a full year; ie. 1/1/20xx - 12/1/20xx with a filter on Employment Status = Active, any employees that have terminated during that particular year will not be displayed in the query data.  Why?  Is SAP only looking at data on the last day of the date range I have defined?  Or does the latest Employment Status supercede an earlier status of 'Active' even if this employee had an Active status within the defined time period?

2. With the same reporting period as above, with a filter on Action = hiring (and no filter on employment status), if an employee was hired and also termed during the reporting period, their hiring action will not be displayed in the resulting query.  Do you know why?

I have also been hunting for documentation that shows the maping of SAP R/3 HCM fields to BW field as the friendly field names are not the same in both products.  Would you be able to point me in the right direction?

Thank you very much!

Lauren

Hi Lauren.

What a way to start out the questions!  You have some real tough ones and it seems like you are an advanced user.  Let’s start with Questions 1 and 2.  For starters you mention using the Ad Hoc Query.  The limitations you face with selection options may be because you are using the Ad Hoc Query.  I prefer the use of SAP Query (SQ01) to the ad hoc queries for many reasons including concerns of how it works.  To learn more about that check out the 455 SAP OSS Notes for Ad Hoc Query that can be found at websmp210.sap-ag.de/support.  With that said you have limited options for date selections with Ad Hoc Query however if you use SAP query you have several options which I describe below. 

The Today selection will be used 90% of the time.  In almost all cases you need to select Today as the day you want your report data current as of.  By default the system is always set as Other period.

Selecting Other period  and leaving the dates next to it blank will pull every record in the database (not a good thing!).  If you do wish to select other period you will need to enter a date range on the screen.  The data selection period enables you to specify the period in which employee data records are read. Only records which overlap with the      specified period by at least one day are selected. To define an interval, enter the start date in the left column and the end date in the right column.            

 Selecting Other period  and entering dates in the Person selection period the system selects only those employees who are members of the enterprise on at least one day in the specified period. These are persons with a valid Organizational Assignment (0001) record. You can specify an interval by entering the start and end dates in the left and right columns respectively.

Question 3 is about BW and about identifying the field mappings to BW.  I do not have a list although I would recommend sending the question through the general HR Expert or BW expert mailboxes.

I hope that helps.                                      

Dec 8, 2011 -- 1:39AM, CrisannTellez wrote:

Hi Danielle,

I would like to understand what would be considered "best practice" for managing positions within SAP HR given some specific scenarios.  Given the below types of organizational changes, when is it appropriate to change the attributes on an open position vs creating a new one?  Some scenarios that we face include:

- An instance where a minor change to job title may be required but the overall responsibilities of the role are not changed.  Can an existing vacant position be updated?

- An instance when responsibilities may be transferred from one part of an organization to another (change in manager/cost center responsible).  Can a vacant, open position be transferred to the new cost center and modified or should a new one be created?

- Replacement of an employee who is leaving but for a short period of time there is an overlap where the position cannot be vacated and the new replacement hire joins prior to their departure.

The current processes implemented within our organization require new positions to be created in each of these instances.  As a result the positions within our organization are very dynamic and difficult to manage/track.  We feel that allowing us to make changes to the position would help to minimize the effort required to keep the open positions clean.  Is there a best practice for handling these types of scenarios?

Hi Crisann.

Like all things in SAP you may get different answers on this one.  My golden rule for position management is to maintain accuracy and history indefinitely.  With that in mind corrections or typos are usually the only scenario where you CHANGE a position (go in and alter it).  Yes I agree it is frustrating to create new positions but if you didn’t you would not be following the rules.  For example I’ve seen SAP implementations were positions were re-used and changed as needed.  DOL /OFCCP and other fun audits have torn them to shreds over this.  Every position in the organization is a standalone item (and you should also be using a 1 to 1 relationship between people and positions) you should maintain the history and integrity of each and do not change them.  Even for scenarios where an employee starts as an Admin and gets promoted to a Supervisor you cannot just change the position you need to have the history of them being an Admin and vacating that position and moving to a newly created Supervisor  position.  Use of the Position creation action helps (more info available in the IMG) to expedite the process.  I once worked for one of the largest employers in the world with hundreds of thousands of employees so we actually used ABAP to automate the creation of positions via a simple single-screen program.  It’s a necessary evil but one that will save your but in an audit in the future. 

Thanks