Technical Implementation of Payroll Control Center with Employee Center Payroll

This blog is co-authored by Jai Korpal  and Gobinder Sandhu. 

As explained in our previous blog on the overview and outline of steps for Payroll control center implementation  , EC Payroll functionalities should be summed up as – 

Employee Central +  SAP HCM Payroll on-cloud + Payroll Control Centre. 

ie. ECP =  EC + ECC+ PCC

This blog aims to address the technical implementation sequence of steps which can be divided into two parts –

1. SuccessFactors Provisioning and Instance setup
2. Employee Central Payroll setup

The aim for this blog is to touch upon all the important technical configuration points for payroll control center setup. We assume familiarity with concepts of SAP Basis, Security, EC-ECP integration, ODATA services and ABAP to maintain the simplicity of this article. If there are any deep dive questions on any of the technical points mentioned in the article, we would love to chat in detail about them separately.

So, let’s begin by listing down the pre-requisites before we begin our technical setup are as follows:

• Declustering of payroll results is available

For this we need to activate the HCM Declustering Tools business function (HCM_LOC_CI_50). This process creates new transparent tables for each internal table of the payroll result (PCL2). This feature allows synchronous updating of new transparent tables during the payroll run. More details on the this function are available here à Declustering function  or read through this SAP note à 1774918 – HCM Declustering Tools with Payroll Result Implementations.

• SAP Gateway is active

Navigate to below given path and execute the “Activate or Deactivate SAP Gateway”. This activity will start all the SAP Gateway services and is needed to access the services used by PCC.

SuccessFactors Provisioning tasks

• Check “Enable Employee Central Payroll”, “Enable Payroll Integration” and “Enable Payroll Control Center” under Company Settings in provisioning
• Implement SAML configurations as per the SAP note 2253359  and update the ECP Logout and Assertion service link under “Authorized SP Assertion Consumer Service Settings”. This enables authentication for the Payroll manager and Payroll administrator when they access the Payroll control center application from with their SuccessFactors account.
• Review the data model for visibility of data field such as XXXX

SuccessFactors Instance tasks

• Configure a group, role for Payroll manager/Payroll administrator and assign appropriate roles including PCC applications as contained within the ‘Payroll Control Center’ user permissions.

• Configure Payroll system assignment, Payroll control center object and SAP system assignment

We need to configure the above three MDF objects in order for us to connect to the right ECP system. There are options to specify ‘Classic’ and ‘Simplified’ payroll control center modes of deployment here in the ‘Payroll Control Center’ object. For the purpose of our implementation and illustration, we use the ‘Simplified’ version. More details on Simplified vs Classic can be read here. Minimum requirement for simplified version is EA-HRXX 608 SP29.

For the Payroll control center configuration as depicted below, there are two options ‘Payroll control center’ and ‘Payroll control center classic’. The classic version maybe used for pre-FP3 (feature pack 3) SAP installations on on-premise side. SAP recommends using the simplified version that is more intuitive and user-friendly.

Note – you may need to permission the thee objects in your SuccessFactors EC Instance. This can be done via Configure Object Definition by setting Secured = “Yes” under the Security section. (pic below)

Employee Central Payroll Setup

1. Business Functions Activation – Use transaction code SFW5 to activate the below listed business functions

HCM_LOC_CI_50: HCM Declustering Tools
HCM_LOC_CI_62: Payroll Data Source Framework
HCM_LOC_CI_63: Authorization Framework for transparent PY data
HCM_LOC_CI_68: Payroll Control Center for the Payroll Process Manager
HCM_LOC_CI_72: Payroll Control Center 02 o
HCM_LOC_CI_76: Payroll Control Center 03 o
HCM_LOC_CI_79: Payroll Log Storage o
HCM_LOC_CI_81: Payroll Control Center 04 o
HCM_LOC_CI_88: Payroll Control Center 05 o
HCM_LOC_CI_89: Payroll Control Center 1605 o
HCM_LOC_CI_92: Payroll Control Center Simplified Configuration o
HCM_LOC_CI_95: Payroll Control Center – Action Log Viewer o
HCM_LOC_CI_97: Payroll Control Center – Process Management
HCM_LOC_CI_99: Payroll Control Center: Alert Management and Team Alerts

2.PCC ODATA service configuration

Use transaction SICF to activate the below listed services, once activated we need to maintain SAP system alias for these services.

hrpy_pcc_al_2: Payroll Control Center –Action Log Viewer
hrpy_pcc_conf_1: Payroll Control Center – Process Configuration
hrpy_pcc_conf_2: Payroll Control Center Simplified Customizing – Policies
hrpy_pcc_errm: Payroll Control Center –Error management

hrpy_pcc_errm_t: Error management: Team Assignment
hrpy_pcc_proc_3: Payroll Control Center – Process Management
hrpy_pcc_proc_2 : Payroll Control Central – Three Click Payroll

hrpy_cockpit_m: New Payroll Error for EC Mashup
hrpy_pcc_m: New Payroll Process Enhancement for B1502

pyc_conf_srv: Simplified Configuration Service
pyc_cont_003_srv: Action Log Viewer Service
pyc_cont_pem_002_srv: Error Management and Team Viewer Service
pyc_process_manager_srv: Process Management Service

Navigate to SPRO->SAP Netweaver->SAP Gateway->ODATA Channel -> Administration ->General Settings -> Activate and Maintain Service  & maintain the SAP system alias for the ODATA icf node and activate the node.

You can verify the activation by navigating to SPRO->SAP Netweaver->SAP Gateway->ODATA Channel -> Administration ->General Settings -> Assign SAP system alias to OData service

3.Creation of Batch user : A batch user is needed by the payroll control background jobs also called as Daemon jobs. This user needs to have the following authorizations – P_PYD_AAUT, S_BTCH_NAM, S_RFC,  SE38,  S_PROGRAM and needs to be assigned to PYC_ADM_TRANSACTION as shown below.

A daemon job is a executable program running in the background without requiring specific user input. When payroll manager or admin clicks on a button on the front-end UI in Employee Central such as run payroll or initiate policies, the predefined daemon jobs run in the background at the predefined frequency to ensure that payroll is run. Without this configuration turned on, nothing will happen when you start a process in the Payroll control center from the front-end.

Another important aspect of PCC implementation is creation of ABAP classes for customer specific validations and KPI’s. There are samples available such as CL_PYC_CHK_FP4_SAMPLE (Validation) and CL_PYC_EXAMPLE_KPI_EE_NUM (KPI).

In end, we would just want to mention some excellent resources which helped us in our journey of implementing Payroll control center.

• 2053309 – Payroll Control Center FP1 Ramp-up Documentation
• Implementing PCC- a consultant’s view by Steve Cottrell
• The Payroll Control Center for SAP ERP HCM and SAP SuccessFactors by Imran Sajid
• 2437540 – Payroll Control Center – Process Management corrections
• Also there is a new Event Listener functionality for the Payroll Control Center that was released in Q2/2016 (1605) that automates the processing for one-click monitoring in the Payroll Control Center. You can see that in action here.

About the authors:

Jai Karan Korpal  is an experienced SAP and SuccessFactors Integration architect, speaker, blogger who specializes in SAP HCM(PA/OM/ESS/MSS), SuccessFactors Employee Central, SF Recruiting and integration technologies such as PI/HCI/Boomi.

Gobi Sandhu   is an experienced SAP consultant, blogger , mentor and project manager with expertise in SAP HCM/Payroll, SuccessFactors Employee Central, EC Payroll, SF Recruiting and on-premise – cloud integrations.