11.1 Position Management Overview: Positions, Jobs, and the Leading Hierarchy

11.1 Position Management Overview: Positions, Jobs, and the Leading Hierarchy

Quick Answer: Employee Central Position Management lets organizations create, maintain, staff, and activate positions in administration tools. A position is a seat in the organization, a specific instance of a job classification, held by one or more employees. Employees hired or transferred into a position inherit its attributes, usually through a business rule. Positions form a position hierarchy, which by default and by SAP's strong recommendation is the leading hierarchy.

What Position Management Is

Position Management is part of Employee Central within SAP's core HR, time, and payroll solutions. It offers:

• a central repository of authorized positions that represents the target organization
• planning and assignment of resources independently of current employee assignments
• a Position Hierarchy display that shows how employees relate to positions and where open positions are, and helps HR find successors
• links to Job Information, Recruiting, Succession Planning, job profiles, and more

Position Management has its own tools, but it also relies on common MDF tools: Configure Object Definitions, Configure Business Rules, Manage Data, and Import and Export Data. THR79 assumes you know Foundation Objects, MDF, business rules, workflows, and RBP from THR80 and THR81.

Benefits

• Flexibility and simplicity
• Positions hold the same job and organization fields as employees' Job Information
• Open positions (To Be Hired) support planning, recruiting, and succession while vacant
• Integration with Recruiting and SAP Fieldglass: create job requisitions directly from a vacant position, pre-filled from position data, and track open positions, originators, hiring manager, and time since creation. Positions can also be sent to Fieldglass to recruit contingent workers, who then appear on both org charts.
• Incumbent tracking: when employees are temporarily away, their jobs can be staffed temporarily, the reporting line adapts, and a right to return can be tracked for global assignments or leaves of absence
• Business rules determine how positions are approved and used

Tasks and Responsibilities

SAP stresses that Position Management is a data structure that needs ongoing maintenance, and configuration is only a small part of implementing it. Consider:

• evaluating processes and roles to decide which features are needed
• establishing central administration (and regional administration if needed) for restructures and transfers
• a training plan for each audience
• key roles for entering and maintaining positions. RBP gives granular control over position actions, field permissions, and target populations (Section 11.2).
• processes for timely updates, synchronization, data flow to other modules, regular audits, and deactivating invalid positions, supported by standard audit reports

Positions and Jobs

Job Information (jobInfo) is the center of the HRIS. It connects employees to the organization, their job, and their manager, and it stores both the Position field and the Job Classification (job-code) field.

• Job Classification is a foundation object holding every job code and its attributes (job level, pay grade, regular/temporary, job function). Its data often propagates to Job Information: job title, pay grade, employee class, regular/temporary, and standard hours.
• A position is a specific instance of a job classification, a seat held by one or several employees. Positions store organizational and job data that also appear on Job Information, and they can inherit attributes from the job classification.
• The employee's Job Information is a union of position and employee. When an employee is assigned to a position, position data can propagate to Job Information through a business rule (Section 13.2).

Positions can also store more information, such as succession data, requisitions, job profiles, and custom fields.

Two Hierarchies

You choose the leading hierarchy during setup. By default, the position hierarchy is the leading hierarchy, and SAP strongly recommends keeping it, because many Position Management functions assume it. Options and consequences are covered in Section 11.5.

Roles Using Position Management

How This Chapter Is Organized

Section 11.2 enables Position Management and sets permissions. Section 11.3 tours the Position Org Chart, Section 11.4 configures the position object, Section 11.5 sets Position Management Settings, and Section 11.6 creates and mass-maintains positions. Chapter 12 follows positions through the employee lifecycle, and Chapter 13 covers rules and integrations.