Time Management for Concurrently Employed Persons 

Concurrent employment exists in SAP HR Time Management if an employee has more than one personnel assignment at a company or organization and the time-management regulations of all the personnel assignments are to be analyzed and processed together by the system. In Time Management, an independent personnel assignment arises if the work commitments and related time-off entitlements are defined independently of each other and can therefore be terminated independently of one another. In the system, this means the data of the infotypes that are assigned to a personnel number.

Employees’ temporary reassignments for a limited time, where an employee substitutes for a coworker in a different position, for example, and thereby adopts the coworker’s working time regulations and remuneration, do not have to be represented in a separate personnel assignment.

Origin and representation of time-management rules

The time-management regulations you define in Customizing for Time Management relate in most cases to the employee’s organizational assignment defined in the personnel assignment through the relationship of employee subgroup groupings and personnel subarea groups.

Time-management regulations such as the working time, overtime regulations, regulations for managing time accounts, and so on are defined not only in employees’ personnel assignments. Other relevant time-management regulations relate to the employee as a person and are laid down in other agreements such as collective agreement regulations, company agreements, and legislation. They apply regardless of the individual personnel assignments.

An employee’s working time is defined for each personnel assignment. All regulations related to adherence to the working time relate to the employee’s personnel assignment.

At the same time, there are labor protection regulations defined by law, such as the maximum daily working time. These regulations relate to employees as persons. In this case, they are not permitted to work longer than is legally allowed. The time an employee has worked must therefore be checked over all of his or her personnel assignments.

Time Management for Concurrent Employment enables you to check and process time-management regulations over multiple personnel assignments.

Checking the time-management regulations

Your main goal when configuring and modifying Time Evaluation for Concurrent Employment to suit your requirements is to check all time-management regulations in detail for the following:

·        Are there time-management regulations that apply only to one personnel assignment?

Examples are the working time specified in the contract or regulations to determine the basic pay.

·        Are there time-management regulations that apply to all personnel assignments belonging to an employer, union, and so on?

These regulations may relate to employees’ length of service, for example.

·        Are there time-management regulations that have to be processed over all personnel assignments in the organization?

This can include labor protection regulations laid down by law, such as the maximum daily working time or adherence to break times.

Time-management task areas relevant to concurrent employment

The following time-management tasks are the main instances requiring joint processing of regulations over more than one personnel assignment:

·        Planning working times and checking employees’ availability

In planning an employee’s shift times, you have to analyze all personnel assignments and the resulting work obligations. If you do not, it may result in an employee being scheduled for two work centers at the same time.

·        Recording working times

To prevent collisions between personnel assignments, for example, in the overtime requirement, you have to take account of all of an employee’s personnel requirements when recording working times. You must also prevent employees from reporting sick for one personnel assignment to be able to work overtime for another personnel assignment, for example.

·        Checking labor protection regulations

Labor protection regulations mostly apply to the employee as a person and have to be checked over all of the employee’s personnel assignments.

·        Accruing absence quotas

You may want to prevent employees with two personnel assignments from receiving more leave entitlement than employees with only one personnel assignment. You must therefore ensure that in automatic leave accrual the predefined maximum values are not exceeded over all of an employee’s personnel assignments.

·        Determining and valuating overtime

There are a large number of possible regulations in this area. One example: Employees receive overtime bonuses after working x hours each day. You want to take account of all hours of overtime that the employees worked over their individual personnel assignments. To be able to check the regulation, you therefore have to total all hours of overtime for each employee.

·        Checking value limits (LIMIT function)

A large number of individual and contractual regulations in this area require, for example, that the status of particular time balances be analyzed in relation to the employee as a person and not the personnel assignment.

·        Error checks

In this area, collisions between time data of different personnel assignments is particularly relevant.

For each time-management task, you have to decide for Time Evaluation for Concurrent Employment whether joint processing of several personnel assignments is necessary.

Planning working times, determining availability, and recording and administering time data

When planning and recording working times, time administrators have to have an overview of all of an employee’s personnel assignments to be able to decide for each case whether all of the employee’s personnel assignments are affected by an activity such as recording an absence. The system can currently only support administrators in this task.

Evaluating time data

To realize concurrent employment, time evaluation can process data from more than one personnel assignment together. Joint processing enables time-management regulations to be checked and executed on the level of the employee or several particular personnel assignments, and not on the level of one individual personnel assignment. This means that time evaluation can compare, total, or evaluate on an equal basis employees’ time data over all their personnel assignments. It then determines wage types, time balances, messages, and attendance and absence quotas from the results.

Joint processing of more than one of an employee’s personnel assignments does not mean, however, that Time Evaluation executes all processing steps (time evaluation functions or schema rows) together for all personnel assignments. Generally, only particular processing steps of the schema have to be processed jointly to realize individual contract elements or legal requirements. Other processing steps can be executed as normal for each of the employee’s personnel assignments separately. Time Evaluation for Concurrent Employment enables you to customize for each time-management regulation which of an employee’s personnel assignments are relevant for the processing step.

For agreements stipulated in collective agreement regulations or company agreements in particular, you have to decide on a case-by-case basis whether the regulations relate to the employee or to the elements of one or more personnel assignments.

Time evaluation has to know the personnel assignments for which it has to process processing steps, elements, or regulations jointly. You therefore have to group the personnel assignments according to the processing step. You cannot use existing Time Management groupings to group personnel assignments because the existing groupings are based on the organizational assignment of one individual personnel assignment. This calls for a new way of grouping personnel assignments for joint processing.