Date: 11 Jan 2010
By Sami Khan
In the current economic climate, with frequent organisational restructures, maintaining an accurate, up to date organisational structure can be labour intensive and time consuming. However, it remains a critical task that, if done incorrectly, has numerous negative repercussions, such as, incorrect payroll cost assignments, or workflow recipients.
A painstaking task.
While the Organisational Management component within SAP provides the necessary functionality to model a business' organisational structure, some users' experience shows that using this standard functionality as delivered can have its limitations. Firstly, it may not provide all the information stored in your organisational structure. For example, a user may be unable to view or report on the structure via industry or division unless the structure has been ‘massaged' to facilitate this shortcoming and doesn't show the ‘actual' structure or reporting lines. And secondly, information is not always visible in a single screen. For example, you may not be able to see information such as Job Evaluation Results or reporting lines in the one screen.
These types of challenges often make data extraction, reporting and updating a daunting task, comprising multiple queries and reports, Excel based cross checking, etc. Third party tools are often used to address some of these gaps.
But it doesn't have to be
With some additional configuration you can transform the Organisational Management component into a useful tool for your users. There are two areas where the effectiveness and efficiency of your organisational management system can be improved very quickly. Creation of new objects: to be used for reporting and process improvements A tailored maintenance screen: providing users with a one-stop-shop for their maintenance needs. As an additional benefit these improvements will in turn enhance the foundation underpinning system-based processes and access control.
How so?
Based on some recent project experiences, common Organisational Management requirements are the inclusion of industry codes or division information. In the first example above, one solution is to set up organisational units that represent an industry or division, however, as mentioned this can lead to a misrepresentation of the organisational structure. An alternative solution would be to create a custom object such as "Industry Code" or "Division" and link it to either the organisational unit or position objects. Standard reports can then be run to show all employees within an industry for example.
In another customer based example of the use of new objects, Australian Standard Classification of Occupations or "ASCO codes" were stored in organisational management by creating an "ASCO" object and linking it to positions. The users were then able to report on and identify the different skill levels within the organisation.
Similarly, storing HAY evaluation points using the standard delivered functionality allows you to store a total value but may not give the required break down of know-how, problem solving and accountability points. With some additional work, you can capture this information (see area outlined in red in Figure 1. )
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| (Figure 1: Enhanced Job Evaluation Results) |
Single Source of Truth
Now that we have expanded the information available, we can streamline the Organisational Management maintenance tasks by configuring the maintenance interface (or transaction PPOME) so that all of your new objects and relationships are viewable and maintainable in a single screen. Not only does this provide a single point of entry but also gives the end users a comprehensive view of the organisational structure. For example, you can search for and display all positions linked to a particular ASCO code in PPOME. (see area outlined in red in Figure 2).
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| (Figure 2: Enhanced Maintenance Interface) |
In addition to the search and view functions, you can integrate existing objects or infotypes into the PPOME screen for maintenance. For example, you can use a tab to assign ASCO information to the the position (see Figure 3).
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| (Figure 3: New Tabs in the Detailed Area) |
So by enhancing the maintenance screen you can control the majority of the organisational structure through one transaction.
And another thing...
An additional benefit of enhancing Organisational Management as described above is that new objects, etc. can be accessed within SAP's Structural Authorisations with Context. For example, you could allow an administrator to be able to update the ASCO codes for positions in one part of the structure but not maintain them for another (see last month's issue).
This can also be applied to facilitate more complex HCM processes driven by human resource policy such as where a person in a HR role can be designated as the career and succussion planner for multiple parts of the organisation.
In this article I have illustrated some easily achievable benefits of applying some additional effort in organisational management. These benefits can be far reaching especially when it comes to process improvements and visibility of information, and can be achieved with minimal disruption of existing ‘business as usual' processes.
Technical Summary
Outlined below are the steps to add additional features to your Organisational Management component of SAP:
