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Author's profile photo Doug Brown

Work Schedule Finder – OSS Note 1795844

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

WSF button.png

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.

Finder screen.jpg

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.

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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.

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The feature P0007 should be checked and maintained if required to return the correct variable key.

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Next check and maintain the field selection for the variable key to ensure the WSR finder button is included.

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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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      5 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Luke Marson
      Luke Marson

      Hi Doug,

      Great job with your first blog post. There's a lot of useful detail here and I'm sure the community will find this useful.

      Best regards,

      Luke

      Author's profile photo Doug Brown
      Doug Brown
      Blog Post Author

      Thanks Luke.

      Was remiss in adding that note 1795844 (in addition to 1795843) has further details and info on the T588M settings.

      Kind Regards

      Doug

      Author's profile photo Harish Krishnan
      Harish Krishnan

      Great Improvement provided by SAP.

      IN a project in 2009, we had to build a major customised search help with all bells and whistles to provide this same functionality.  This is probably something that should have been available long ago, but better late than never.

      Author's profile photo Doug Brown
      Doug Brown
      Blog Post Author

      I agree Harish. If you see some of the other threads on SCN that talk about the Customer Connection Program you will see it came out of that initiative.

      Have also floated a bespoke development in the past but, thankfully, didnt go down that route and concentrated on the naming convention.

      This came out in May and im surprised others dont know about it so happy to share. Thanks

      Doug

      Author's profile photo Garrett Meredith
      Garrett Meredith

      Thanks for the info on this great tool, however I'd like to bring up one issue that I just reported to SAP.  The Filter criteria section within the WSR Finder doesn't recognize the proper work week.  It assumes that day one of the work week is Sunday and for our implementation, Monday is the start of the work week.  I could not find a solution to correct this or configure the tool to look at the work week, so I submitted a ticket to SAP.  Just thought everyone would like to know this if they don't have Sunday as the start of their work week either.

      Garrett

      Update:

      Response from SAP:

      "

      It is also true that the first day of the week in this tool is Sunday but this is not really an

      error, this is a system design."

      Not sure I agree with this (maybe system design, just not good design), but since it's not part of the standard system as SAP support mentioned, we would have to request custom development to allow it to recognize the correct work week.  I will still suggest my users utilize this new function, however realize that they'll have to understand how to use the filter to get what they need.