Work Permit Date Expiration Alert in Employee Central

This article is created to design the alert notification for the HR Department or Immigration team of the company where the employees work on work permits like H1b, F1, or any other visa types. According to the best practices within Human Capital Management, the work permit information needs to be maintained for all individuals who have a valid work visa and this information should be maintained within Employee files of SAP SuccessFactors. This alert notification will be useful for an employee, HR and Immigration department of the company to keep track of employees work visa information with valid start and expiry dates. This process will help companies to work with immigration Govt. department on a timely fashion to reduce the possibilities of delaying visa extension submissions.

SAP SuccessFactors has given the ways with which we can generate the alert notifications when an employee’s visa expiration date is near, now it depends on company policies how soon the HR or Immigration group of the company would like to get notified. It may be 1 month or 3 months, again it depends upon the type of visa category.

Use Case – For our proof of concept, I am configuring this alert in our SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central module. The basic condition is – trigger an alert message to a group of people in immigration team of the company before 3 months prior the visa expiration. For example – if work permit expiration date value in Work Permit Info portlet is Nov 25, 2018, then alert should go to Immigration team on Aug 25, 2018.

Step 1 – Create an alert message in “Manage Data”. This message will reflect in the email. Make sure that Alert Header and Localized Header should be same and same goes for Alert Description.

Path: Admin Center -> Employee Files -> Manage Data

Step 2 – Create a workflow in “Manage Organization, Job and Position” section and assign the respective group or role or person who you wanted to get notified about the visa expiration.

In this method, we can also create approval workflows in the same configurations if that is your requirement but here in this example we are just emailing to the group of HR or Immigration Team. You may also call any additional contributors to place their comments as soon workflow executes.

Employee central gave this functionality to remind the alert notice in the number of days and number of months, you may also leverage this field by entering the number of days in “Remind in Days” field, so workflow may remind you with an alert.

Path: Admin Center -> Employee Files -> Manage Organization, Job and Position

Step 3 – Create a business rule which checks the condition of 3 months before visa expiration date. This can be done in the section “Configured Business Rules”. Choose the correct base object to execute your business rules for other conditions, like for work permit expiration date the details stored in “Work Permit Info” base object and for alert use the “Alert” as base object.

Path: Admin Center -> Company Settings -> Configure business rules

Step 4 – Assign the business rule in “WorkPermitInfo” object as a “saveAlert” action in “Manage Business Configuration”

Test the configurations –

Check the employee work permit information portlet and change the expiration date which should be 3 months from today’s date.

Go to Employee Profile and check the work permit information portlet. In Figure 5, the Expiration Date is Nov 25, 2018. For testing, change the Expiration date as often as you want in the Employee Profile section.

As per the Business Rule, the alert message should be triggered to the dynamic group who will be in the workflow “WFworkpermitAB”.

Execute the job and check the emails triggered to the workflow group created. When the system data is Aug 25, 2018, the email should trigger to the Dynamic group assigned in Step 2.

Figure 6 is the email which will trigger on the date exactly before 3 months.

Conclusion: With the help of these configurations and approach, the email notifications or alerts can be triggered in SAP SuccessFactors. There are many other business cases which can be easily configurable and achievable with the help of custom MDF objects and Business Rules.

Key Learnings:

• The important part of setting up alerts and email notifications is to understand the creation of business rules and how to call the values from the appropriate base object.
• EC Tags needs to be assigned properly within “alertMessage” as [[SUBJECT_USER]], the square parenthesis are important to declare the parameters. See Figure 1
• Multiple logics can be added within Business Rules if used appropriately and one should know when to use the model as a base object.