Validating Travel or Work From Office Time Recording to check if employee is vaccinated in Employee Central Time Sheet

[NeeleshKamath]

We are currently going through some tough times due to covid and as a result there are stringent rules being formed for travel and work from office at various organizations

Example Idea or Requirement (Also a use case presented during Gartner Demo)

1. Employee wants to work in the office next week on a specific day.


2. Due to COVID rules, only 50 people are allowed in the office and they need to be vaccinated.


3. Employee fills out their time sheet for the next week using the Work from the Office time type (would have to be configured) and creates a single record approval. When they save), the system checks with the Vaccination portal if this employee was vaccinated


4. If yes, the employee can submit the record, and this is sent via workflow (you can define a separate workflow for each time type, so it needn’t be the employee’s manager, but perhaps the building manager) for approval.

Similarly, we can have cases where employee requests or records a business travel in his/her time sheet to visit a place for a business meeting. Prior to travel, we would need to validate if employee is vaccinated or not?

This idea is from frans.smolders. Credit should go to him for coming up with this innovative idea

The below is the solution for this problem that I have proposed based on my testing in the sales demo instance.

We thought of sharing this idea and solution so that multiple customers or partners can benefit from similar requirements around the globe due to Covid.

Solution

Please ensure that you have enabled the Health and Covid Vaccination Portlet via the upgrade center.

Kindly check this blog for the same.

https://blogs.sap.com/2021/04/16/health-and-vaccine-status-tracking-portlet-in-successfactors-people...

It is not mandatory to use the above portlet. You can also build your own custom MDF for tracking the vaccination status of your employees. But we recommend using the one delivered by SAP.

 

USE CASE (Work from Office)

As an Employee, I want to request for working from office next week.

Example say

• For next week Wednesday, I request to be in the office for the full day (Planned day is 8 hours). I record this with time type categorized as extra as shown below.

               

• But then on Wednesday I actually work and record Working Time as 7,5 hrs (and not 8hrs as I had planned).

 

In this use case, I need to be paid for the 7,5hrs and not 8hrs. This can only be done if you record the Single record approval as Extra Time type. Therefore it will not collide with the actual working time record, and the Single record approval can be ignored in the time evaluation.

 

USE CASE (TRAVEL)

In case of travel, you actually record the hours you are traveling. This is a normal attendance time type. Say travel to a customer place usually takes 4 hours and I have planned for those 4 hours in advance in the coming week.  The advance request for travel also needs to go through the vaccination validation.

 

For both these use cases, Make sure you enable the time type for single record approval. This can be done by maintaining the relevant workflow configuration in time type as shown above.

For demonstration I am using travel use case but the validation remains the same for Work from Office as well.

Now, Create the below rule to check if Travel  is recorded and if the employee has registered a vaccine status. The rule should be created with Scenario (Time Sheet Validation)

Ensure you attach this rule to the corresponding time recording profile

Testing

I did a small test for user Emma ward. Currently, she does not have any vaccine status registered in EC

Trying to record Business Travel, leads to an error in time sheet (note submit for travel is not enabled unless you save timesheet first)

Next, I now maintain the vaccine status for this employee as “Fully Vaccinated”

Maintaining Travel now goes through our validation successfully and Travel Time Recording can be submitted individually

We have automated this config as part of SAP SuccessFactors Best Practices and you can apply this in a matter of minutes from upgrade center as shown below

Thanks to Frans as well for Collaborating on this topic.

Stay Safe

Best Regards

Neelesh