Document Generation in Employee Central
Dear All,
after being away from SCN for so long, I am back. Eager to share with you another cool feature that we deliver in 1508 – Document Generation in Employee Central.
Phil’s initial blog already mentioned about the initial thought process that went into designing this solution. As mentioned, although Document Generation was supported via partner solutions, there was always ask from customers to provide this feature natively in Employee Central. Yes, we heard you and here we are.
With release 1508 we release the basic version of “Document Generation” for the HR Administrators. It is available as an opt-in feature under provisioning. Once provisioned, appropriate access given and basic configuration done, the activities are available in Admin Center and will allow HR Administrators to create a document for employees as of today. For example, Address proof, service experience document, certification of employment, Letter of reference etc.
1) Manage Document Template: In this step administrator can perform the CRUD operations for a document template. Please specify the parameters like template name, description, country, language etc. In the template document, you can specify the text of the letter along with placeholders for the actual data like employee name, manager name, current date and so on.
2) Manage Document Template Mapping: In this step administrator can perform mapping of placeholders with actual data fields. Say for example, if a placeholder [[empname]] was defined for Employee name. It can be mapped to Personal Information -> Formal Name.
There are 2 types of mappings available – direct and calculated binding. Direct is as the name suggests, used for direct mapping to hris fields. For calculated binding, it is to be used when a value cannot be directly determined and needs to be calculated instead. For example – age, years of experience etc.
3) Generate Document: In this step administrator can choose the template, language and the user for which the document needs to be generated. And can download to his computer or email to user’s email.
Eager to hear back from you as always. For more details, please reach out.
Best Regards,
Priyanka
Super! Couldn't have said it better myself! 🙂
I love it.
So, you say, this is the light version - does this imply we can expect a "heavier" version?
I understand it is picking data as of the current date, right? Good start, but I think it would need to be able to fully access effective dated data.
A typical case:
You would change compensation or capture a promotion effective dated into the future, but you'd want to send the respective letter today.
No moaning - I love what you did - just pointing towards possible next steps.
HI Sven,
thanks. Yes we have the other dates handling in our roadmap and we work on enhancing the solution with more features. Keep watching this space.
Best Regards,
Priyanka
sure I will.
We currently develop an HRIS roadmap for a customer and there are still a few points that might shift the balance towards on premise core HCM (cost and lack of personnel cost planning features in EC being 2) for the next 5 years. If EC can make 3rd party document generation unnecessary, this may help tipping the balance the other way.
lets align offline on this.
Very nice!
Will this functionality also be supporting the MDF?
Best regards,
Maxime
Hi Maxime,
Thanks for your interest! Where MDF fields are also available via the data model hris elements, these can also be used for letter generation. Pure MDF object support is on our roadmap.
Best regards,
Phil
Straightforward and to the point. Looking forward to the next releases! 😉
Without even making much noise about it, we have 3 customers asking for this functionality, and setting this up in a EC demo instance took me no more than about an hour from start to finish this morning 🙂
Best regards
Kristian
HI Kristian,
very happy to hear this. This is the kind of feedback we love to hear from our customers and consultants.
Best Regards,
Priyanka
There are some tweaks that proved a bit of a challenge initially. Hopefully the patch releases will address some of of it.
The end result looks good.
Hello Kristian,
sure, we can discuss if you faced any issues. Please send me an email. The detailed instructions guide is prepared, which can also help.
Best Regards,
Priyanka
That would be great. Only, how do I get your email?
Cheers
Kristian
sent a message to you.
Hi Kristian, how are you?
I tried to set it up in my demo instance but it doesn't activate. Coudl you mind sharing me the steeps to activate it?
Thanks
Hello Ricardo,
the implementation guide is here.
Please let us know which step you are currently facing problem with.
Regards,
Priyanka
Great Priyanka¡¡ Thank you very much for your information; It's very cool 🙂
I have an other question, is this functionallity able to generate contracts (document) for candidates before the candidate become employee?
Thank you very much
Ricardo
HI Ricardo,
thanks. Not at the moment.
regards,
Priyanka
Hi Priyanka,
I really want to try this long waited feature. I am not able to download the guide. Could you please mail me the same?
Thanks in advance.
Regards
Vel
Hello Vel,
the guide is available here. Do you have the SAP service marketplace authorizations to download the same?
Best Regards,
Priyanka
Thanks for Info.
We have requirements of letter generation on change / adding of allowances. For example, if CCA (City Compensatory Allowance) changes because of Location changes, Customer wants a letter to be generated for Location change reflecting the allowance change also. Is it possible?.
Thanks.
Event-driven changes are on our product roadmap. With the current release, it is possible for the HR Administrator to generate a letter reflecting the actual, current information concerning the employee, i.e. you could create a letter after the location has changed to inform the employee his/her current status.
Best regards,
Phil
Thanks Philip. You have mentioned that Letter can be generated now. Also you have mentioned that 'Even-driven changes are on our product roadmap'. Can you please elaborate on this?.
Thank you.
No worries. In your examples above, you mentioned " On Change / Adding of Allowances" - these are what we refer to as "Events". In general, we are examining the standard events that happen in an employee's lifecycle and where customers may require letters to be generated for these events.
Good... This means we can take out letter on such scenarios. Thanks..
Good... This means we can take out letter on such scenarios. Thanks..
Thanks for sharing much useful information , I quickly configured it and able to generate the documents. PDF output is really nice.
One question, can we restrict the target population of user from generating the document . It seems to be now if a user has access to "Generate Document" , he/she is able to generate document for anyone in the system.
Thank you.
About restricting the population, we are controlling based on RBP, so if one doesn't have access to any employee's data, he is not allowed to generate document.
Have you also considered to make generated documents available to the employee within EC instead of sending the created document via email?
Hello Joachim,
at the moment we are not storing the letter in EC, but we have it on our roadmap.
Regards,
Priyanka
Thanks Priyanka for your very quick response.
let me ask you one follow up question on that one, please.
Can such letter generation be made available as a self service? E.g. if employee needs an 'employment certificate', he/she could generate the pre-defined letter him/herself instead of submitting a request to HR to get this letter created and send back?
Regards,
Joachim
also on roadmap.
2 clarifications:
1. Is there a list of placeholders that can be used, and any limitations on selected placeholders?
2. Any control on the email recipient ie. who to email the generated doc
Thanks.
Hello Keng,
1. for placeholders, you create your own placeholders and map it later with actual hris fields.
2. email is sent at the moment to business email of employee.
Best Regards,
Priyanka
Hi Priyanka
We've been presenting the document generator to one of our existing clients, and I'd like to give you some of their feedback directly. Two main points:
1) The documents should be stored in the employee profile for reference. That's on your roadmap, but I thought I'd mention to you that as an important feature.
2) There was a request to set up dynamic content, so that if a person has a certain value registered, specific text may be generated. If for example, a given benefit is registered in the employee profile (say, as a boolean or picklist), a piece of text is generated in the document.
Now, as I put more thought into this: would you be able to create this by having calculated mapping triggering a business rule to generate a text string directly in the document?
Thanks for getting the implementation guide ready, by the way.
Best regards
Kristian
Hello Kristian,
thanks again.
Yes storage is on roadmap. About your other requirement, it should be possible already for EC field. As mentioned in guide for example if an employee's gender is male, insert pronoun as he/his, while for female insert she/her. The same approach can be used for bigger text.
Best Regards,
Priyanka
Hello.
Can someone help me with the following mistake
When new configuration UI for object DocumentGenerationTemplate and try delete unwanted fields, such as template ID, Effective start date, Tokens, Workflow ID and mapping documents and save appears the following mistake that attachment.
Hello Guadalupe,
effective date, template ID, Tokens are essential fields. Please don't delete them. I would rather suggest to use the config UI delivered by standard .
Regards,
Priyanka
Hello
Can someone help me with the following mistake
When new configuration UI for object DocumentGenerationTemplate and try delete unwanted fields, such as template ID, Effective start date, tokens, Worklow ID and mapping documents and save appears the following mistake "meta is a required field/association in object ConfigUIMeta"
Thanks
Regards
answered above.
Priyanka, question in the documents it will be possible to add any type of image. e.g. an employee photo? lets say we try to generate an ID Card format, with the general info of the employee and his photograph.
Thanks
Hello Carlos,
the template is common for legal entity and image usually referred here would be company logo. At the moment dynamically picking up each employee's photo will not be possible.
Best Regards,
Priyanka
Hello there Priyanka,
My organization would be adopting Success Factors Employee Central in a few months and would like to educate our employees on what Employee Central is.
Specifically, we would like to utilize an analogy to describe Employee Central.
I was thinking of comparing Employee Central with the heart that is essential for the functioning of the other body parts.
May I seek your assistance in improving this analogy or suggesting a better one perhaps.
Best regards,
Shamini
Thanks Shalini. Good to know that your organization would be adopting SuccessFactors Employee Central. As you know , It is the global system of record brought to you on cloud across geographies, legal entities, cost centers etc. Additionally it is the core HRMS system closely integrated with other cloud based solutions like learning, performance management, recruiting etc. So employees can use self-service scenarios on cloud, also can use social collaboration tools, or can use the Mobile apps to interact with system. Managers can perform MSS scenarios. HR heads could see key analytics figures, built in metrices and dashboards. So a system for everyone based on their role. Hope it helps you.
Dear All,
enhancement to Document generation functionality in 1511 can be seen at Enhancements to Document Generation - Employee Central in 1511
Best Regards,
Priyanka
gud update on SF functionalities ....
Hi all,
it is perfect that starting with b1602 documents can also be created by employee or manager via self service.
Which further enhancements are planned for 2016? Would be perfect to have an overview.
Some ideas: mass creation, automatic creation linked to certain triggers - like event reasons or certain datafields, different stationary for different legal entities, text blocks linked to Business Rules,...
Thanks for an update.
Greetings,
Martina
Thanks Martina. We have the mass generation, events based handling in our roadmap. Please keep watching this space.
Best Regards,
Priyanka
I need to generate Promotion Letter with the following data.
Minimum Pay
Maximum Pay
Mid Point
I am unable to directly map Base Object 'Pay Range' through Document Generation Mapping. Hence I created a rule to set these values and mapped the rule back in Document Generation Mapping. However when I try to generate the document I receive the error message, "You do not have permission for the following Placeholders". I am using the system as the Super Admin with access to all FO.
Has anyone else faced this issue before? Is there any restriction that we cannot use Parameter 'Pay Range' or any Model Objects when creating a rule with Base Object 'Document Mapping Rule Result'?
Hello Priyanka,
I have a question, I have a letter and when i want see it to Generate Document retired employees do not appear to choose them..any idea?
Best regards,
William
Hi William,
this is currently not supported. Please vote for the following product idea:
https://influence.sap.com/sap/ino/#/idea/208710
I totally agree that this feature woudl be highly beneficial as this is a normal HR procedure.
Thanks 🙂
Best regards,
Martina
Hello William, Martina Stoeger ,
sorry, I somehow didnt get notification for this.
I believe this functionality is already provided. Kumaraguru V , product manager will guide you further on this .
Best Regards,
Priyanka