What’s new in HR renewal 2.0 feature pack 4 and feature pack 5 for professional users?

Hi Community,

On May, 14^th the fourth feature pack (FP4) and few days ago, on August, 13^th the fifth feature pack (FP5) for HR renewal 2.0 has been released.

But, what’s in for you here? Let me introduce to you the new functionalities we enabled for HR renewal 2.0.

With FP4 we concentrated on smaller, but important enhancements for many of our productive customers.

Extended Search Help for Positions and Organizational Units

With these enhancements the Search Helps for Position and Organizational unit input fields now offer a combination of text-based search, organizational hierarchy search and Favorite Organizational Units.

Picture 1: Extended F4-Search Help with HR renewal 2.0 FP4

The extended search help is per default activated for the following instances when Business Function HCM_PAO_CI_8 (HCM, Personnel & Organization 08) is activated:

• Roadmap Forms: initial step „General Process Data“, field „Position“
• Various PA-Infotypes with fields OrgUnit or Position
• OrgManagement: Managed OrgUnits (IT 1001/012)

Automatically active (after installing FP4) will be the usage of the new extended search help for the following standard FPM Forms:

• Move Position (HRPAO_MOVE_POSITION) 4field “OrgUnit” within section “Destination Organizational Unit”
• Move Org Unit (HRPAO_MOVE_ORGUNIT) 4field “OrgUnit” within section “Destination Organizational Unit”
• Create Position (HRPAO_CREATE_POSITION) 4field “Managed Org. Unit”

The new extended Search help can also be used in customer specific FPM forms or customer specific infotypes!

With FP4 we additionally enabled the global info types 0017 “Travel Privileges”, 0128 “Notifications” and 0712 “Main Personnel Assignment” for the usage with HR renewal.

And – last but not least – we delivered the country versions with localized info type configurations for: Romania, Kazakhstan, Thailand and Ukraine.

HR Renewal 2.0 FP5 focuses on TCO enhancements to speed up the implementation of solutions for HR Professionals, as well as usability enhancements.

All enhancements were specific requests by productive customers and cover feedback from HR end users as well as system administrators. For FP5 you have to activate business function HCM_PAO_CI_9 (HCM, Personnel & Organization 09).

First enhancement of FP5 is that

General Process Data screen always editable in roadmap forms within the initial scenario step.

To give you some more insight in the reason of this enhancement I would like to describe one business case in more detail:

The General Process Data screen includes especially the “effective date” information. As end users confirmed in our discussions this date is often entered incorrectly or have to be changed during the process, so that it is necessary to correct the date after leaving the initial screen of a roadmap process.

But – so far – the initial screen could not be changed after the user has moved to the next step in the roadmap. This was a deliberate design decision since the parameters entered on General Process Data (e.g. organizational assignment information) often determine screen structures, default values, field attributes etc. of the subsequent infotype screens.

Productive users gave feedback that this handling is too rigid and not user friendly. Therefore we decided to change the behavior of the system here.

Second enhancement of FP5 is the

     Step-dependent infotype content / attributes in roadmap forms.

Also some more details on this enhancement:

Until FP5 it was not possible to provide different infotype content for different steps in roadmap forms. All users had the same set of infotypes available.
There was only the possibility to set the entire roadmap form to „read-only“, for approvers. But often it is not required to give all users all information, sometimes users will not even be allowed to see all information entered in a process.

Therefore now infotypes can be configured differently per scenario step within a roadmap form. These roadmap forms can also be used to kick-off change requests by a manager (who sees a limited set of infotypes) and have an HR expert complete further, more complex employee data.

Picture 2: Define step-dependent roadmap form with HR renewal 2.0 FP5

Picture 3: Define the attributes of the step-dependent infotypes – HR renewal 2.0 FP5

Picture 4: Result -step-dependent Roadmap form with HR renewal 2.0 FP5

The third enhancement of FP5 is

Generate HCM P&F Roadmap Forms based on Personnel Actions.

Because HR Renewal for HR Professionals is largely used by existing ERP HCM customers it was not a surprise, that these customer requested a tool to take over the configuration they already have in place to handle multi-infotype scenarios/employee contractual changes. For these scenarios like hiring, internal transfers, terminations etc. the customers are using „Personnel Actions“.

To lower TCO and reduce the manual effort to make these settings available as HCM Processes & Forms content – which is required for HR renewal – a new report helps customers to automate the creation of HCM P&F content for PA by generating processes and form scenarios of type „Roadmap Form“.

Picture 5: New IMG node for Generate Processes and Forms based on Personnel Actions with HR renewal 2.0 FP5

Excluded from this enhancement are settings for personnel actions via feature IGMOD – I know, I know!! 😐

Additionally only „Roadmap Forms“ are generated, so no other form type (like FPM forms, mass forms) is supported in this approach and it does not apply to PD infotypes.

The forth enhancement of FP5 I would like to point your attention to is

Context-dependent UI field control for infotypes.

Customers usually want to change the UI attributes of fields per infotype.

So far they could achieve this with different tools, but none of these tools seem to be as fast/efficient as classic options customers are used to from the SAPGUI world.

If customers e.g. change the setting field attributes for the user interfaces – which reside on the new infotype framework – via table T588MFPROPC there are some disadvantages:

These settings e.g. apply to all user interfaces that run on the decoupled infotype framework (so also to ESS), and only fields of P-structures are included. Additionally there is not F4 help available for input fields etc..

If customers decided to create an own FPM configuration they faced other disadvantages:

That they had to have someone with know-how of FPM, they had more effort to copy standard configuration, adapt it and then add the own configuration ID to the configuration of the master data application.

The new IMG activity allows customers to define field attributes per application context, e.g. specifically for HR Professional / Master Data Application + roadmap forms as well as for fields of UI structures.
All input fields are supported by F4 value helps to make only correct entries.

Picture 6: IMG node to define context-specific UI field properties with HR renwal 2.0 FP5

And the fifth enhancement of FP5 is

Navigation from infotype to related configuration settings.

There are certain customizing activities that can be called from the infotype UIs, e.g. current settings. Therefore, the user has to be able to navigate to these IMG activities quickly via ‘Further option’ link in the master data application. In addition, some values have to be defaulted when navigating to the IMG activities. Such kind of navigations can now be realized by configuration in LPD_CUST.

Picture 7: Configuration of quick navigation from infotype to configuration settings with HR renewal 2.0 FP5

For more information about the enhancements in HR renewal FP4 and FP5, or our deliveries with previous feature packs please visit our resources space (implementation information) on service market place.

Saying this I hope I could give you a good overview of our recent investments and – as always – we are very interested in your feedback!

Best regards,

Sylvia Strangfeld

sylvia.strangfeld@sap.com