We have recently gone live with Employee Central along with Time Off and Time Sheet functionalities, so thought to share my experience with the community.
A couple of month’s back I wrote a blog on Time Sheet and Time Valuation ( SuccessFactors Employee Central Time Sheet and Time Valuation) which gives more of technical details to configure Time Sheet, rather than actual scenarios we encounter in project or pain points/challenges anyone face during the implementation.
In this blog, I would like to emphasize on few key things which are commonly required to use Time Sheet feature efficiently in any implementation. Let’s get started with my findings.
Additional Fields:
In any organization, it is quite common to track the employee time spent on each project. In standard solution, we have the option to charge time to cost centre, and sometimes this may not be sufficient to capture enough details like for which project employee is charging time.
To cover this, we can add additional fields easily as Time Sheet objects are built on MDF framework. It is also possible to upload attachments if required. Below is the screen shot with additional fields to capture employee time.
Reports:
Reports play vital role in any product, we have below 2 standard reports for Time Sheet, but they may not be so useful especially if customer specific fields are defined in Time Sheet to track additional information. However, the alternative is you can define your own report which is quite easy.
1) Employee Times Overview
2) Time Pay Type Overview
We have created few reports (example below) to track employee time on the daily basis and weekly basis.
Note: In below report, Hours field is a calculated field with the formatting option set to 2 decimal points. For some reason, Analytics system is showing around 10 decimals (for example 7.6 in EC is being shown as 7.5999999) in reports, therefore, use calculated field with formatting to get the desired result.
Workflow Notifications and Approval: When it comes to notifications, in particular Time Off and Time Sheet, notification template is very generic, therefore enough details are not provided in the notification as of now. However, SuccessFactors is working on building template-based notification to address this issue which is very similar to template based document generation. Once this feature is released it may be so handy to build the notification relevant to the object.
Another challenge we have with Time Sheet approval is, no statistics (such as a total number of hours in the week etc.) are provided in approval page for the approver to get a quick view before approving the time sheet. Apparently this is also in roadmap so soon we can have better approval version. As a workaround solution custom report such as below can be created to meet the purpose. In the below report, Weekly Recorded Hours is an aggregate calculated field.
Current Time Sheet Approval Page
Custom fields for Reporting: By default, custom fields are not available for reporting, therefore ticket must be created to get them enabled for reporting.
Important : Enabling advanced reporting may take longer time as there are a couple of activities involved in this process. As an implementation partner we need to raise a support ticket, then “customer support” team has to raise an internal ticket, then batch jobs have to be run etc…
In a nutshell, make sure that you are giving enough time to CS team to get advanced reporting enabled.
