Views

From Wiki

Overview

Purpose

The aim of this document is to describe the functional specifications for an Employee information management system. It is part of an extension module that supports Human Capital Management. This funtional specifications will be later on implemented following the Technical documentation.

Scope

This is the core of the module and every other functionality will depend on this. It will provide the functionality of managing the information of the employees. That is, it will provide the ability to add, delete, modify, search and list the employees and the information associated to them.

Design Considerations

Dependencies

Every other future extension of this module will be based on this module. This makes it necessary to design a solid structure that will allow other functionality to be developed in top of it. This module will be dependent on Openbravo core module.

Constraints

Openbravo ERP already provides a mean to manage employees. This module will provide wider managing tool. Still, it will be consistent with the previous approach.

Functional Requirements

User roles & profiles

The following roles are involved:

• HR Manager: the HR professional responsible for running HR related process and activities. They will have access to every employees information within their organization.
• Manager: responsible for giving permission, feedback, etc. to the employee in certain situations.
  • Senior managers: concerned about the hierarchy of employees reporting to them. Needs to be able to see their organization as a hierarchy.
  • Front line managers: concerned about the employee reporting to them.
• Employee: the individual being managed. Will have access to their own information.

Business process definition

Employee records management:

• Add
• Modification
• Delete
• Search
• List

System setup:

• Default
• Team + Team manager
• Salary Category
• Position + Salary categories for each position
• Contract type

User stories

Mary is the Human Capital Manager of an advertising agency responsible for the coordination of 120 employees with several level of management. The legal structure of the company follows a structure similar to the one shown in the following diagram.

At the same time, the management structure of the organization could be similar to:

System Setup

First of all, Mary does the setup of the system to have it ready for usage.

• The first step consists on setting the default values. To get this done, Mary will navigate to the Human Capital Management folder in the menu. The defaults can be set in the window called default in the setup folder. This window will allow to select a employee category. Every employee entered in the application will have this value set in their employee category field. This field is hidden in the employee window so it is not modifiable from this window. This value matches the business partner group in the business partner window. It must be kept on mind that every employee is a business partner. Also, default values for expense reimbursement can be entered. This defaults could be different for each organization. Note that there must be some business partner category in the system to be able to fill the HCM defaults setup window.
• Next the salary categories available within the company will be entered by inserting new records in the salary category window. This salary categories will have a unique name and a salary range. In the salary category window, there is a child tab called cost, where a cost per some unit of measure can be inserted if the employee is going to perform operational tasks. For example, cost per hour or cost per unit produced could be inserted here in other to use this data in Project and Service Management.
• Afterwords positions will be entered. Position is the concrete name of the job the employee holds in the company. This positions and salary categories will exist under certain organization. Each position will be identified with the name. In the positions window, there is a child tab called salary category. The salary categories available for the present position will be added there. Only the salary categories available for the organization of the position will be available. Each salary category can be related to several positions. The mapping is only valid within the organization selected. The same combination of position - category could exist within different organizations.
• After that, Mary will enter the contract types used in the company.
• Eventually, Mary will want to enter the teams within the company. To enter a team Mary will click in the team window in the setup folder of the menu. The name of the team will be entered. As the employees have not being created yet, the add manager process can not be done. Once the employees that are managers are entered in the system, the HR manager will click the 'add manager' button. A new window will pop up. In this window the managers name and start date/end date can be filled. The information regarding the managers is kept in a child tab in team window. As the teams are part of a tree, Mari can click on the tree icon, and locate the team in the corresponding hierarchical position.

This process is illustrated in the following diagram:

Addition

Whenever there is a new hire in the office, Mary navigates to the Human Capital menu and clicks on employee window. Then clicks on new icon to enter a new register.

• She fills the mandatory and non mandatory information in the header of the register.
• She fills the different tabs if needed:
  • Contact: For every contact (telephone, e-mail address, cell phone, etc.) a new register will be entered. In each of the the contact type will be selected and the information fields. It is necessary to set whether it is private or business contact information and whether is the main contact of that type.
  • Location: For every address that wants to be kept a record must be filled out. It also has a check to distinguish whether is a business or private address and whether is the main address.
  • Bank Information: For every bank account that wants to be kept a register will be entered. At least one and only one will be checked as default.
  • Employment Information: In this tab all the information related to the employees activity in the company will be tracked. The team of the employee must be selected. If the chosen department has no manager, an error message will be displayed. Also, the employees position must be selected and automatically, the available salary categories within the organization will be available in the salary category drop down list. The effective date will be today by default but can be changed.Also, the contract type of the employee can be selected. If the employee has a part time contract, the dedication fields will be displayed in the screen. If the salary entered is not in the salary categories range an information message will be displayed. The register will be initially in draft status. Once every information is filled out, complete button must be checked. The data will turn to read only and the register to status complete. If there was a previous register in complete status, it will be turned to historic status.
• Family member: If the contact has any relative whose information wants to be kept a register can be entered for each of this persons. It is compulsory to enter the name and surname and the birth date of this person.
• Operational Resource: In this tab there are two check boxes to set whether the employee is a sales representative and/or an operator. There is a child tab to select a cost salary category. This salary category will be used to calculate costs in project and service management.

Modification

Whenever there is any change in an employee data, Mary can access the system and change the information in the required field. This information update could have different effects in the system. There are some fields that may force some others to be changed.

On the one hand, there are some fields that will not affect anything else. These changes can be done just typing in the correspondent field and saving. The change will be saved and reflected in anywhere is used. For example, modifications in the employee header, such as First Name, Last Name, Nationality, Sex, Marital Status, etc.

On the other hand, some changes will make some other fields to be displayed. For instance, if the field status in the employee header is turned to former employee, the exit date field will be displayed.

However, there are some fields that require a more complex process.

• Manager modification: for example, if an employee is promoted to manager. This modification will be done in the teams window and not in the employee window. In the corresponding team, the add manager button will be clicked and the information entered. This will create a new record in the manager tab, where all the previous managers can be seen.

On the other hand, changes in employment information tab will require a new record to be inserted every time, so track of the changes can be kept. Whenever the new tab is inserted the previous records information will be displayed, so the insertion is easier. Once the information has being inserted, the record will be completed and not modificable anymore.

The following diagram illustrated this process:

This are examples of modifications that would need a new record to be opened in the employment information tab or in the team window:

• Organization modification: for example, if the employee is transferred to another country. This has to be done in the employment information tab but the modification will be accordingly done in the employee header. It could be necessary to change some other fields for the data to be consistent, such as the position, salary category, team, etc. That is, if the previous data is not valid in the new organization, it will need to be changed.
• Position modification: for example, if the employee is promoted to a new position. The salary categories available will change. If possible the previous salary category will be selected.
• Salary Category modification: for example, if the employee is promoted to a new salary category. The position remains unchanged.
• Team modification: for example, if the employee is changed from one team to another. The manager of the new team will be his/her new manager.
• Dedication modification: for example, the employee stops working full time and starts working half time. The dedication field will be changed from full-time to part time and the standard hours and work period fields will be displayed. If the employees dedication is set from full time to part time, the standard hours and work period will not be longer displayed.

Deletion

Whenever an employee leaves the company, Mary will set the status field to 'former employee'. The information related to this employee will be kept in the system for possible future usage. When an employee is the status will be turned to former employee and the exit date will be displayed. The exit date will be today as default.

Search

Whenever Mary wants to search for an employee, she can click on the search icon. This icon will allow her to search by:

List

Whenever Mary want to see the list of employees she can access the records in the grid view or export it into excel, CVS or PDF.

Functional requirements based on business processes

In the following tables the functional requirements are listed. For readability reasons, the requirements have been broken into different tables and some mockups have been added to help in the understanding. The code for the icons in the field lists:

• * read only field
• + mandatory field
• < shown in grid field

Menu

Setup Windows

It is very important to remark that a position can be related to different salary categories for different organizations. At the same time, a slary category can be related to more than one position in different organization. It is a three side relation. This idea is shown in the following image:

Employee Window and Tabs

Other Functional Requirements

In the following table a brief list of nice to have features is shown. At the end of this document there is a list of further feature request.

Image:Example.jpg

User Interface Mockups

The images below display some user interface mockups for the employee management system that haven't being displayed in the previous section.

Employee Search Filter

The employee search filter is shown in the following image:

Employee Selector

The employee selector is shown in the following image:

Nice to have windows

In the following images some of the nice to have features mockups are shown. The first one shows a view for the human resources managers and team managers. As it is only a window intended to show information, every field is set to read only. It will not be available for employees.

This one shows a very basic and simple view available for every employee in the company. It is intended to be a simple way to check the contact info of other employees.

Non-Functional Requirements

Open Discussion Items

Closed Discussion Items

• The term Team covers teams, departments and areas.
• The term Manager will be used instead of supervisor.
• The term Position will be used instead of job.
• The term Family Member will be used instead of Relative or Next of kin.

Nice to have Features for Future Extensions

This first approach will provide a basic, but solid, HCM module. There are plenty of good ideas that have being left out of this specifications but will be taken into account for future extensions.

• Historical information: Tracking of every single field. In this first approach only some fields are historically tracked.
• Medical Information of employees
• Window with delete option available for senior managers.
• User tab. In Openbravo ERP, in the business partner window, there is a tab named contact that is linked to AD_user table. The registers entered there created new application users. That is, a application user is created for the business partner. This tab could be added to the employee header as well.
• Resource planning: Central planning board of resources. Scheduling / planning / consumption of the available resource. This implies dealing with the actual resource planning functionality provided in Core.
• Reporting: Some interesting repords will be implemented once the basic structure is working.
• Printable employee card: Displayed in pdf directly. It should contain the following info: company Logo, picture, name, surname, main business address,main business cell number, business phone, business e-mail and current Position. Some layout ideas for this employee card can be taken from:
  • Layout 1
  • Layout 2
  • Layout 3
  • Layout 4
• Improve banking information. Branch identification field could be added to customize it to Spain.
• Improve usability in regarding the employee hierarchy. Possibility to navigate up and down and see details of each employee.