SuccessFactors Position Management pros and cons
Everyone working with Employee Central at companies above 500 EE’s encounter the topic of Position Management. With the advent of Intelligent Services and an tighter process integration, it is a hot topic. I just ran a solution architecture & scoping workshop with a client, and relevant stakeholders were invited. For Recruiting, there were 5 participants, Succession 4, Learning Management 8. Position Management pulled a total of 12 participants ( ! ) – several of whom had crossed the Atlantic for just the purpose of understanding the implications of using Position Management. Anyway, I have always heard the question “is position management relevant for us?” question. Some companies are certain & confident it is mandatory or required for them, others are more reluctant. SAP does not offer a lot of guidance so recommendations comes down to the individual consultants ability to analyse the clients processes and characteristics and provide guidance based on that. This should always be done, although it can be difficult in a sales phase before the work order / SOW is signed to do it. I have compiled this list of pros and cons and would like to check the community what topics you consider when advising clients to use Position Management or not.
PROS:
- Data maintained by HR on positions propagates to employees Job Information
- Higher data quality + stronger HR control
- Ability to use positions for RBP and approval flows
- Recruiting Management uses position object, e.g. ability to create job req for a To Be Hired position and new hire is linked to position
- Succession Management uses position object for Succession Org Chart
CONS:
- Cannot add new employee without having a position to link employee to
- More maintenance work for central HR function (strong governance needed)
- Changes to position data propagate to employees via business rule (adds overhead)
- Client needs to perform more data conversion
- Once turned ON, it is troublesome to turn OFF
What do you think?
Per your observations given in the article, especially the 1st point in the Cons - "Cannot add new employee without having a position to link employee to" - It means that if you choose to activate Position Management - it needs to be implemented for all the employees in the organization - The system does not provide you the choice to activate/ implement it and use it for only few employees in the organization (Partial Position Management is not possible in SuccessFactors). Can you pl confirm on this.
It's possible, we have a client that is deploying Employee central in phases with the full population already in Successfactors. It's not easy as you need to work with a combination or Rules to hide fields and RBP. It works but avoid it if possible, it's a lot of work.
For the record, I'd like to add a few additional Pros to support the use of Position Management:
Position Management allows for the planning and assignment of resources that are needed in the organization, independent from actual employee assignments, with such benefits as:
Can we utilize position management without having Employee centeral?
Hi Erik,
Can two people managers share a position and a team? We have a few people managers doing job sharing in our company, and at the moment all direct reports are only assigned to one of the two. I have done some research on position Management, and from what I can see it looks like it is still the case that one can only assign the direct reports to one of the two people managers.
Thank you in advance.
Kind regards,
May