SpinifexIT Easy Reporter for SAP HR Payroll – Deep dive session 1

Over last 4 months I have been working on SpinifexIT tool to develop reporting and analytics in SAP HR-Payroll. It offers a great tool to quickly develop insights into critical HR data but not limited to like people movements, secondments, on-cost values of Annual Leave, Long Service Leave etc.

When I scoured the internet I could not get much about SpinifexIT tool deep-dives so here it is. I am offering some tips and tricks to develop quick reports through SpinifexIT tools. Also happy to stand corrected and would be great to see some insights from other experts as well.

One of the most powerful feature is the PD structural report development. It runs via the Organisational Management layer in SAP HCM and can be a solid foundation to get details of vacant and/or leader positions, other details on positions like PA/PSA (if maintained on position in HRP1008), Authorities and Resources, Planned Compensation and host of other relationships.

It is crucial to understand the business requirement to ensure correct foundation to use – The PD structural or the PA (Employee level) information in the report.

Note that there is a significant performance issue if the search object type in the above snapshot is not the Org Unit (O) which is the top of the organisation generally. But you can run it at any Org Level. The report does take a long time to process if you instead search for a Position (S).

When you choose the PD structural report in the 1^st tab, for an OM level reporting, subsequently, in the 2^nd tab “Report Columns” tab, you can go to Org Management on the left side, PD structural within and then choose the OU or the Position or the Person to start with. Note that from the ABAP database perspective, it is now using only the HRP tables and not the PA* tables.

The more straightforward and intuitive report development is from the Employee Level or on the 1^st tab of any report development through Spinifex, the Employee Report or PD structural report radiobutton in the first screenshot above. I will not go through the easy ones here but would rather share my experiences with things which I found useful.

Scenario: Show 2 position IDs for an employee, one current and the second one, previous to the current position. We assume for simplicity sake here that Infotype PA0001 has the latest position as the current record and the immediate previous is a different position ID. These 2 positions to appear on the same row will require an ABAP code which could be complex but Spinifex has a powerful feature.

For this requirement you would first need to drag and drop a calculation field from the left side, which is under Additional Functions. Use the calculation field as an output format of “D Date Format” and configure as below to get an end date minus 1 new calculation field in the output row.

Next, to get the previous position ID, use the PA0001 position field from the left side under Master Data >> Infotype Data >> 0001 Organisational Assignment but configure the Field Settings as –

Date to read Data – “E Read data based on a date column on the report”

Select Column with Date – Your Calculation Field

Select Column with Employee No. – Employee No.

And there you get the previous position in the same row as the current position! Quite handy and you can understand that this feature can be used similarly to develop other powerful insights.

Scenario: Sometimes the business requirement for an employee report requires historical information of all positions since his hire date but with certain filters being applied either on dates, actions on PA0000 or any other filters.

In this case it is better to start the report settings using the “Up to today” radiobutton on the selection screen of the 7^th tab “Review and Test Report”.  This gives all the records and then you have the flexibility to filter out certain records based on the 4^th tab “Define Filters” as shown below as an example –

Combine this with the Advanced Column feature of “Merge” and you have a very powerful tool within Spinifex to slice and dice the data as the report requirement dictates. More on the Merge feature in the next blog.