How to optimize identities’ lifecycle management in your information system using SAP HR events?

This blog exposes a method for designing SAP HR integration with SAP IDM, it also gives you a large understanding of HR use cases and some tips to succeed this implementation. Here are some thoughts summarized from several customer experiences on SAP HR implementation with IDM.

HR possible use cases related to IDM scenarios

Combining Personnel Administration (PA) “tasks” (example: leaving) and “reasons” (example: firing) can quickly have different meanings and generate many changes on an employee PA file. Below is a description of the most common PA tasks which defines one employee lifecycle:

• Hiring: hiring a new employee can be under different contract types or different employment categories for instance, as a permanent employees or as a trainee.

• Rehiring: reentering an employee into a company after a long period of time, for example, for maternity protection leave (same as Suspension of contract)

• Organizational reassignment: changes when the employee changes positions, cost center, or is moved to another subsidiary.

“Promotion” is an essential case to consider for IDM design, as it can be directly related to automatic roles calculation such as ESS/MSS roles.

• Country Reassignment: refers to an employee being assigned to an organizational unit in another country, in other words, the employee is being expatriated to a different country.

• Basic employee information modification: changing an employee’s last name in case of Marriage. This case can also represent a highlight when Login IDs are based on user’s last name.

• Early retirement: as any other “early event” it’s when updating information for future events in SAP HR. (Same as Extension of contract)

In those use cases we should manage validity dates with attention during IDM design phase.

• Leaving case: When an employee leave the company.

Identity Lifecycle regarding HR Business processes

Key steps for a successful design of SAP IDM scenarios derived from HR use cases

     1. Dig into how customer deal with every HR process

Essential SAP HR personnel administration tasks are defined and performed differently from one customer to another.

Prepare a set of questions to ask about every process during design phase, an example of questions would be:

• How do HR operators deal with expatriations?
• Is it a leaving task followed by a rehiring?
• Is it only an organizational change?

    2. Think big … start small

When implementing HR with IDM, we tend to automate accounts management following a predefined rules.

Automatic rules can’t fit to 100% of company employees, that’s why it’s important to demarcate HR scope on a small “population” for a start then enhance      it to the most.

    3. Make it simple

SAP IDM provides a set of good utilities to manage rules on roles such as RBAC, Dynamic group for automatic calculation, inheritance between Business Roles Layers ….

When designing role model, let it be as simple as possible and avoid combining many IDM utilities, the structure gets quickly messy and it’s always a pain  to explain to IDM end users.

    4. Spot relevant information

Pick up relevant information of what you need to know to build SAP IDM workflows and translate what you understood from HR process to IDM workflows      in a basic way.

From IDM side, everything is about creation, modifications and deletion.

     5. Summarize and focus on SAP IDM fundamentals

Sort out the collected information and focus on what you really need to know to build IDM workflows, below an example of an easy way to recap:

*Specific modification: implementing a triggered modification workflow based on event tasks in IDM to respond to one customer specific business requirements.

*PA: personal administration

What you need to know about customization

Here are some tips that you will probably have to anticipate:

• Query result: If you realize that you have many records for the same employee, you will probably have to ask your developer to make it all in one.
• HCM write back: if you choose to write back information to HR, think about unselecting the corresponding “communication” data from SAP Query as you set SAP IDM as master on “communication” infoset.
• Future events in HR such as future departures, usually require a modification on the standard query selection.

Driving SAP IDM processes by SAP HR events proves to be a good way to cut off support costs.

Feel free to try those tips and leave us a comment to let us know if it turns efficient for your projects too 🙂