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Author's profile photo Sharath T N

SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central: Managing Pensioners

This blog describes the implementation design principle document on managing pensioners in Employee Central.

 

SuccessFactors Employee Central is the Core HR module that is usually the system of record for many downstream systems such as payroll. Employee Central holds data of active employees as well as pensioners of an organization. While most transactions in EC pertain to active employees, some transactions need to be performed on pensioners. These changes also need to be replicated to downstream systems for further processing.

 

Persons who have worked as a regular employee for several years and has retired from their occupation are called as a pensioner. The pensioner in certain companies get payments called pension from the day of retirement. This blog focuses on how pensioners can be managed in Employee Central specifically for those who get a pension from the company.(The focus is not for pensioners getting paid from the government).

What are the typical requirements of maintain a pensioner?

  • Handling Position and cost center
  • Handling death of a Pensioner
  • Handling Survivors /Beneficiaries
  • Maintaining Address
  • Maintaining Bank Information
  • Maintaining Personnel Information
  • Maintaining changes to payments for pensioners
  • Where are the SFIDPs published?

The details of the solution for are mentioned in the implementation design principle document. Link at the end of this blog.

 

Solution details

There are two possibilities with respect to the Employee Central core. Customers can decide if they want to create new employment or retain the same employment.

Typically rehire is performed on the same employment .

There are two use cases for a new employment for a retiree. In certain countries, it is necessary to create a new employment to make sure that the privacy laws are adhered to. In such scenarios, a new employment is created for such employees. The advantage of creating new employment (New PERNR) is that the admin cannot see the previous work history of the pensioner though the history user interface of the job information portlet.

There could be scenarios where retirees/pensioners return to work at the same company as a separate employment. This could be returning to work as a Contractor (Contingent Worker) or in a different job role. If the employee returns to work in a different job role, they should be hired into EC with new employment. This will provide the ability to run a regular payroll for the new employment while the pension payments can be processed on the previous employment that has been retired/terminated.

 

 

Employment Status and Mapping of Event reasons with that of ERP actions

In dealing with pensioner it is important to know the different employee status in Employee Central. For each Employee Central status, the corresponding user status for Employee Profile is shown in the table below.

 

 

 

Employee Profile /User Status Active user
Employee Central Status Active
Suspended
Dormant
Paid leave
Unpaid Leave

 

 

Employee Profile /User Status Inactive user
Employee Central Status Discarded
Furlough
Retiree
Terminated

Before the event reasons are mapped to actions in ERP, it is necessary to know the status available for Employees.

 

ERP STATUS

There are 3 status indicators in ERP. The customer-defined status(STAT1), Employment status(STAT2), and the special payment status(STAT3). The below table shows the values and the description. Typically payroll considers the employees in status (Inactive, Retiree, Active). Payroll only considers the employee in withdrawn status if a date is defined in infotype 3 – field “Run Payroll up to“ (ABWD1).

 

Though all the 3 statuses could influence the payroll, we could focus on Employment status (STAT2).

 

Status Code Status Description
0 Withdrawn
1 Inactive
2 Retiree
3 Active

 

The Event reason in Employee central is mapped to the actions in ERP. The employee status in Employee Central is set by the event reason configuration and similarly, in ERP the Action (not the Action Reason) sets the employment status of the employee in ERP

 

The below table shows the recommended mapping between EC and ERP to handle the retiree.

 

EC Event Reason EC Event Employee Status EC SAP ERP Action Type ERP Action Reason

Employee

Status ERP

 

1000-Regular Termination Termination Terminated 10 – Leaving 01-Voluntary 0 – Withdrawn
2000-Retirement with no Pension Termination Retiree 10 – Leaving 02- regular retirement 0 – Withdrawn
2001-Retirement with Pension payment through PY Termination Retiree 14 – Retirement 03-retired with pension 2 – Retiree
3000-Death after Retirement Termination Terminated 10 – Leaving 04- Death 0 – Withdrawn

3500 Death after Retirement

With survivor

Data Change Terminated 10 – Leaving 05- Death with company pension survivor 0- Withdrawn *
1100 Hire as Pensioner(New employment use case) Hire Retired 11-Hiring of Pensioner 02- Hired as a retiree 2 – Retiree

Note that if there is a beneficiary/ Survivor who continues to get the pension after the death of the retiree that person should be hired as a survivor.

Document Details

The implementation deign principle document has more details on

  • Mapping of Event reasons in Employee central to Employee Central Payroll actions
  • Handling Partial Retirement (Germany-Altersteilzeit)

Link to the Implementation principle document

 

Where are the SAP Successfactors  implementation principle documents published?

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      18 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Om Awasthi
      Om Awasthi

      Hi Sarath,

       

      Nice post. I have a question related to same.

       

      if employee is terminated and status set to retired, how do we change status to dead when they die if they are already terminated?

      I am fairly sure you cannot terminate him twice, once for retirement and once for death.

      Author's profile photo Sharath T N
      Sharath T N
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Om,

      If the emplyee is terminated and still getting paid - Pension then this pension has to be stopped. The IDP has the information on how to handle death situation . Please read from the document below.

      Link to the Implementation principle document

      Regards,

      Sharath

      Author's profile photo Lisa MacCormack
      Lisa MacCormack

      Hello Sharath,

      I came across your blog while searching for a way to handle the death of a retired employee.  As a result of the latest release (2H 2021), the option to insert new record with an event reason of termination is no longer possible

      https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/3103944

      Are you aware of any workarounds for this scenario?  I opened a ticket with SAP Support and was told that you are no longer allowed to terminate a retired employee and you need to update the retired record with the event reason for death.  This will not work in our environment with all the downstream impacts (ROE's, benefits, pension deductions, etc).

      Any information or help you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

      Thanks,

      Lisa

       

      Author's profile photo Sharath T N
      Sharath T N
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Lisa,

      For retirement you can use the take action ->Termination.

      Once the person is retired if you want to add the end of pension period or death of the pensioner.

      Please use data change event . That should work.

      Regards,

      Sharath

      Author's profile photo Lisa MacCormack
      Lisa MacCormack

      Hi Sharath,

      Thank you for your quick reply.  The issue with using Data Change is that we need the Employee Status to change from Retired to Terminated in order to accurately flow over to payroll (SAP On-Prem) as a Termination.  If we use Data Change, the employee status will remain as "Retired".

      Thanks,

      Lisa

       

      Author's profile photo Sharath T N
      Sharath T N
      Blog Post Author

      For the onP integration part you can associate the termination of pension (Death, other reason) and then map it to the appropriate action in ERP to eventually set the payroll status to withdrawn

      regards,

      Sharath

      Author's profile photo Lisa MacCormack
      Lisa MacCormack

      Hi Sharath,

      I really appreciate your help with this.  We are fairly new to EC so I'm just trying to understand what you mean. If I choose Event = Data Change, how do I choose "Death of Employee" for my Event Reason?  It isn't an option. Is that because we have a business rule for Event Derivation?

      Thank you!

      Lisa

       

      Author's profile photo Sharath T N
      Sharath T N
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Lisa,

      Yes it would be a new event reason . In the history UI it needs to be selected . You can not perform this using take action.

      Regards,

      Sharath

      Author's profile photo Sharath T N
      Sharath T N
      Blog Post Author

      2 possibilities

      1. Event Reason “death” has employment status “Terminated” -> this Event Reason can only be used in the History, not in MSS -. Event - Data Change
      2. Event Reason -  “Death”  Event Data change has employment status “No Selection” -> this Event Reason can be used in MSS and History, the Employee Status stays as the previous record if it was retired it would still be retired

      Regards,

      Sharath

      Author's profile photo Lisa MacCormack
      Lisa MacCormack

      Hello Sharath,

      It appears this solution you proposed previously is no longer working.  Do you know of another solution that can be used to Terminate a Retired employee after Death? I really appreciate any help you can provide.

      thanks

      Lisa

       

       

      Author's profile photo Sharath T N
      Sharath T N
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Lisa,

      Yes there seems to be a problem from the last release.

      The data change event can still be added but the status will not change to terminated. This is the current issue.

      There is a fix that will be worked on.

      So for the time being the status remains as retired.

       

      Regards,

      Sharath

      Author's profile photo Lisa MacCormack
      Lisa MacCormack

      Thanks for the response Sharath!

      Author's profile photo Jose Luis Olmos Segovia
      Jose Luis Olmos Segovia

      Hi Sharath,

       

      The issue still the same. By chance, do you know if this problem will be solved in the next release?

      And is there any workaround to terminate as death a retired employee?

       

      Thank you,

      Jose Luis

      Author's profile photo Sharath T N
      Sharath T N
      Blog Post Author

      Hi All,

      This has been fixed in the patch , see KBA for more details

      3374087 - ECT-218237: Allow employment status change from retired to terminated and vice versa

       

      Regards,

      Sharath

      Author's profile photo Jose Luis Olmos Segovia
      Jose Luis Olmos Segovia

      Hi Sharath,

      With my partner S-user I cannot access that note. Could you share the content here?

      In any case, I found that deactivating the centralized services for termination the system allows me to terminate a retired employee. But would like to see what SAP advises officially.

      Thanks,

      Jose Luis

       

      Author's profile photo Sharath T N
      Sharath T N
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Jose,

      Sorry this is still only internally released. But you can raise a ticket giving this KBA as reference . Support will help in this case.

       

      Regards,

      Sharath

      Author's profile photo Cyndi Sweatman
      Cyndi Sweatman

      Hi Lisa,

       

      Curious what you found as we have the same issue. Would you be willing to share?

       

      Thanks,

      C

      Author's profile photo Lisa MacCormack
      Lisa MacCormack

      HI Cyndi,

      Sure I can share!

      We created a new Event Reason called Death_Retired. This event reason has an Event of Data Change and Employee Status of Terminated.  We then use the History UI to insert a new record with this event reason.

      I hope that helps.

      Lisa