Processing Leave Requests 

Purpose

You use this process to process leave requests.

Prerequisites

You have scheduled background processing for the required reports or have provided suitable variants of the reports for your time administrators and approvers.

For more information, see the Implementation Guide and choose Personnel Management ® Employee Self-Service ®Service-Specific Settings ® Working Time ® Leave Request ® Processing Processes ® Define Report Variants and Background Processing.

Process Flow

Below is an example of the process when an employee requests leave. Processes involving changing and canceling leave or deleting a request that has not been approved are largely similar.

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       1.      An employee wants to take two weeks of leave. He or she accesses the Leave Request Web application. He or she sees in the Team Calendar that other team members also have leave at the same time. Nonetheless, he or she requests leave for the planned period.

The leave requires approval. The system automatically determines the approver responsible and lists the name in the Web application. If required, the employee can overwrite the name of the approver.

The following process steps can, but do not have to be integrated with SAP Business Workflow. The reports and functions are available for both procedures. For more information about the workflow, see General Workflow for Documents.

       2.      The employee’s request is stored in the database of leave requests with the status Sent.

Once a day, the RPTARQEMAIL report (Leave Requests: Send E-Mails) is run in the background. The system sends an e-mail to the appropriate approver for the requests with status Sent that require approval. The e-mail notifies the approver of the steps required.

       3.      The approver accesses the Approve Leave Requests Web application from the Universal Worklist.. The application provides the approver with a list of all the leave requests that require his or her approval.

       4.      The approver selects the employee’s leave request. After checking the Team Calendar, the approver realizes that the employee’s leave request cannot be approved since it would mean there would not be enough team members at work for the period in question.

The approver writes a note in which he or she states why the request has been rejected. He or she then rejects the request.

       5.      The RPTARQEMAIL report sends an e-mail to the employee notifying him or her that the request was rejected. The employee accesses the Leave Request Web application. He or she selects the request in the Absence Overview. He or she sees in the note the reason why the request was rejected.

       6.      The employee looks at the Team Calendar and finds a period in which no other team members are on vacation. He or she changes the period of the request. The employee specifies the change in period in the note.

       7.      The RPTARQEMAIL notifies the approver of the request by e-mail. This time the approver can approve the request.

       8.      The request receives the status Approved in the database. The RPTARQEMAIL report sends an e-mail to the employee notifying him or her that the request was approved.

       9.      The system processes the requests further according to their status:

                            a.      The RPTARQPOST report (Leave Requests: Post) writes all requests in the database that have the status Approved to the Absences (2001) or Attendances (2002) infotype.

                            b.      The system may not be able to post the requests to the infotypes if, for example, they collide with other infotype records. These requests are given the status With Errors.

The RPTARQEMAIL report sends an e-mail to the relevant time administrator to notify him or her that the requests were unable to be posted.

                            c.      The time administrator accesses the RPTARQERR report (Leave Request: Process Posting Errors). It lists the requests with errors.

                            d.      The time administrator analyzes the error situation in the backend system.

¡        If he or she can solve the cause of the problem and save the data record in the infotype, he or she uses the RPTARQERR report to set the request to Posted.

¡        If the problem cannot be solved, because the employee has other commitments at the time, for example, the time administrator rejects the request.

   10.      The RPTARQEMAIL report sends an e-mail to the employee notifying him or her of the change in status of the request.