MSS Personnel Action - HR Processing

All of our MSS Personnel Actions are work-flow enabled, so there is a ProcessFlow kicked off when each is entered. That gives us lots of options, and we do differrent things depending on the action. Some actions are approved by the work unit (PA53 update). Other actions are sent to particular HR staff via UserActionNodes for their review/approval first. Other actions have multiple paths depending on the data (e.g. an FTE reduction doesn't need VP approval, but an FTE increase does). Good luck!

We have almost all of our PA52 actions entering process flow (not hist or Bio). I think your choice depends on how you feel about supervisors' level of expertise with Lawson. Example: We had to bring Leave of Absence actions to be centralized in Corporate as managers were entering leaves of varying lengths for employees who should not receive leaves. Another problem was pay actions were not being monitored and managers were submitting inappropriate raises with large retroactivity.

We keep the Pa53 to be exclusively used by superusers in HR (corporate). It's a screen with large implications--be careful letting people have the authority to approve anything they want.

Pos Change actions are not in process flow, but superusers who run a PA100 review the report carefully and delete actions that would put bad data into Lawson.

Initially, we let satellite HR folks do "_HR" actions that would go around process flow, but this was also eventually discontinued due to bad data entering Lawson without oversight.

Barb and Todd,

Are the flows used for the personnel actions standard, delivered flows from Lawson? Or does each action require a custom-built flow to be developed? We are new to Process Flow and have not taken the leap of faith we feel is required to unlock personnel actions through MSS. However, we'd like to automate as many actions as we can, safely. It sounds like doing it through Process Flow is the safest way to go.

Would either of you be willing to provide any guidance in the process you went through to get some of your PA flows up and running through PFI? If so, please feel free to contact me via email or through this post.

Thank you...

TBonney,
All of our Process Flow's were custom written by us to suit our particular needs and purposes. There are a number of articles on the Lawson knowledge base that can help get you started - 557613 is a pretty good overview. Looking at the two Lawson delivered sample flows, Actionapproval.xml and Actionapproval2.xml, are helpful to get some initial ideas for your flow. There is almost no limit to what you can do with ProcessFlow - approval paths, notifications, and much more.

Hi All,
We have a test group using Personnel Actions in Manager Self Service and we too customized our PFlows to take different actions based on parameters in the action.

Based on the business unit (Process Level) the employee is in, we copy the HR Director of that business unit on action notifications, showing the before and after values of the action. If the HR Director comes across anything unusual, they can contact the manager and Corporate HR. We also copy the Manager who submitted the action on an email that shows the before and after values, which serves as the Personnel Action Form (PAF).

All actions trigger an email to the HR Customer Service Center where the actions are reviewed for completeness and accuracy, if the action is complete, it is approved using the Process Flow Inbasket.

The PFlows trigger a lot of communication emails as well as generating the necessary paper trail for audit purposes.

The one this we don't have that I wish we did is a method to capture text from the manager when submitting the action. Our offline PAF has a text box managers can put comments that help explain anomalies and results in fewer phone calls and rejected actions.

Our flows were all custom designed. We are owned by a larger organization and they have an umbrella IT organization that installed Lawson one location at a time. They had a process flow programmer working full time and he designed all our process flows separately. Any time we need a change we contact the IT organization and they will work to make the changes.

I'd be glad to help, Tbonney, but I think you're looking for more technical expertise than I possess.

I will start wit hte KB Article you suggested BarbR.

Thank you all for your feedback!

Implementing Process flow approvals requries PFI/professional of Process Flow - as I remember you can not do approval workflow with Process Flow Standard.

You can use process flow standard as a delivered tool but if you want the approval workflow you need to be on professional or integrator. If you know process flow it is not that difficult to create a simple flow around a personnel action. The PA52 action will stay in pending until it is approved by whoever you are defining as the approver. Once they take the action you would just enter an AGS to update PA53 to indicate that the action was approved....

Here is a PA53 AGS:
_PDL=< appProdline>&_TKN=PA53.1&_EVT=CHG&_RTN=MSG&_LFN=ALL&_TDS=IGNORE&FC=Change&PCT-COMPANY=< Company>&PCT-EMPLOYEE=< Employee>&PCT-ACTION-CODE=< Action>&PCT-ACTION-TYPE=< Action_Type>&PCT-ACTION-NBR=< Action_Nbr>&PCT-EFFECT-DATE=< Effect_Date>&PCT-APPROVAL-FLAG=Y&_DELIM=%09&_OUT=TEXT&_EOT=TRUE

If the approver "declines" the request you would just want to delete the action using an AGS like this:
_PDL=< appProdline>&_TKN=PA52.1&_EVT=CHG&_RTN=MSG&_LFN=ALL&_TDS=IGNORE&FC=Delete&PCT-COMPANY=< Company>&PCT-EMPLOYEE=< Employee>&PCT-ACTION-CODE=< Action>&PCT-EFFECT-DATE=< Effect_Date>&_DELIM=%09&_OUT=TEXT&_EOT=TRUE

I am guessing that the majority of Lawson clients using workflows have created their own custom flows for approvals because the delivered process would not fit most companies.

Hi Is there a way to provide access to non Manager to MSS? As our staff admins do some of the works for their manager as per approval? Can we give defined access?