Personnel Administration component runs on Employees Data. The data needs to be maintained for various purposes;
- Personal Data including employee’s personal details, his contact information and his family related data is used to identify an employee.
- While Organizational Data is needed to categorize employee according to his assignments and career history etc.
Various other types of information is also captured for different reasons. Each of such information, in SAP terminology, is called as an Infotype which has 2 different aspects; for data entry operator to feed employee’s data in system and the way data is stored in backend system.
The first part (the user view) is ‘configured’ according to a customer’s needs; single record per employee, multiple records for one employee or multiple records for multiple employees at a time.
- The first scenario ensures that the data is maintained for specific employee and is used to maintain data which is ‘specific’ in nature (for instance, each person has different name so 1 employee 1 type of information).
- The second scenario is used to record procedures where a series of information need to be maintained for an employee at one time (a person is being hired in system and therefore his personal data, address and other information need to be maintained one after other).
- The 3rd scenario is used to support situations where various employees have to have similar type of information maintained for them (such as an allowance is paid to all employees).
From user perspective, the above scenarios are maintained using Master Data Maintenance, Personnel Actions and Fast Entry options. Technically, these need to be adjusted according to customer needs. Technical aspect usually covers the following:
- Information Type (known as Infotype) and the attributes (at field levels). Additional fields need to be added / fields to hide for specific type of employees etc. You customize the Infotype.
- Information Flow for procedures (for instance hiring need different types of information than the ‘transfer’ process). You use actions / infogroups to define different Infotypes for different procedures.
- Information Maintenance on Conditions (if employee status changes from single to married, family information needs to be maintained). You use dynamic actions to cover such scenarios.
- Defaulting certain fields to avoid extra-effort.. You use features to control such process.
There's a lot more in the component, however, the above description describes the basic elements of Personnel Administration component.
