Intro
I thought i would give my experience of implementing one of this years HCM Time Management Improvements - Work Schedule Finder. This was released in May 2013 and came out of the Customer Connection program mentioned in other blogs on SCN.
This improvement is available as an individual SAP Note 1795844. This note is also included in Support Packs 95 for ECC6 and 61 for ECC6.4 (that is EHP4).
Lets look at the basics of the improvement.
Overview
The improvement adds a new button to the Infotype 7 screen with the label WSR Finder. When this button is selected a pop up screen is provided that allows you to now search for specific work schedules based on a number of parameters.
It should be noted that the schedules that are queried are related to the selected employees specific PSG, ESG and Public Holiday Calendar groupings. In other words, the schedules that are relevant to the employee.
The criteria that can be used when searching for a schedule, is based on the specific working pattern that is defined within a schedule. It allows the parameters to be entered on each required day and are as follows:
Work Start – the start time of each specific day entered in the screen. E.g. Monday with a 9am start.
Start +/1 – this is a tolerance, defined in minutes, that tells the system to return schedules that meet the defined start time plus or minus the required tolerance. E.g. look for schedules on a Monday with a 9am start time with a 30 minute tolerance will return schedules where the Monday has a start time between 08:30 am and 09:30 am.
End of Work – the end time of each specific day entered in the screen. E.g. Monday with a 5pm end time.
End +/- this is a tolerance, defined in minutes, that tells the system to return schedules that meet the defined end time plus or minus the required tolerance. E.g. look for schedules on a Monday with a 5pm end time with a 30 minute tolerance will return schedules where the Monday has an end time between 4:40pm and 5:30pm.
The last criteria allows for a more general search in that you can simply define the amount of planned working hours on each day and the system will return all work schedules who meet this required pattern. This can also be defined in combination with the start and end times to take breaks (paid and upaid) into account.
Also note that you can also increase the amount of weeks to search for patterns that recur over a greater period like every 4 weeks. The search capability only supports up to a maximum of 6 weeks (but the error message reports 5 weeks).
When you have found the schedule you looking for you simply select it, confirm by selecting the green tick and this populates the Work Schedule Rule field in Infotype 7. The Infotype can then be saved.
Implementation
Now a brief overview of what you need to do to apply the SAP note to achieve this new functionality.
The preferred approach would be via the application of the specific support pack although the same can be achieved by applying the specific note.
There are a number of manual steps that need to be carried out to enable the functionality in addition to a standard configuration step not listed in the note.
First, you need to create the GUI Status and GUI Title Screen for the 0100 and 0200 screens in Infotype 7. In my experience, the application of the note within the Support Pack included this step so I simply had to check the screen status and title screen to check they were included and then continue. For further details see the note.
The following is not listed in the note but you then need to ensure that the new button is included on the IT0007 screens based on the configuration of T588M.
The feature P0007 should be checked and maintained if required to return the correct variable key.
Next check and maintain the field selection for the variable key to ensure the WSR finder button is included.
This improvement provides a much needed, if indeed simple, improvement to the searching for Work Schedule Rules. It is also simple and quick to implement.
Good luck and be interesting to hear of your experiences in this area and in the wider TM space.
Kind Regards
Doug
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