The company and its structure
Stage one builds the skeleton: the company, the boxes a person can sit in, and the lists of places. All of it is short, all of it is picked from later, and none of it can be skipped.
This stage is mostly code-and-name lists. Resist the urge to be clever with it. The codes you choose here will appear on every payslip, every report and every screen for years, so choose short, obvious, permanent ones and write them down for the client.
Field detail is on each screen's own page. This page is about which screens, in what order, and what belongs in each.
The order
- Country, then State, then City. Geography first, because the legal entity's address and every employee's address are picked from it.
- Legal Entity. The company itself.
- Business Unit, Department.
- Business Area, Functional Area.
- Organizational Structure, last, once you know which fields this client wants to insist on.
The geography lists
Country comes first, because State is keyed against a country and City against a country and a state. Three levels, in that order, and the lower one will not offer you anything until the higher one exists.
Key only what the client actually uses. A Pakistani manufacturer needs Pakistan, the four provinces and Islamabad, and the fifteen or twenty cities its people live in. It does not need the world.
Region is a grouping above country, for a client that reports across more than one.
Two more place lists sit in the people module rather than here, because they are HR's own: Station for a work location a person is posted to, and Facility for a building or plant.
The legal entity
Legal Entity is the company as the law knows it: the entity that employs people, pays them and files for them. It carries the company's code and name, its time zone, its language and the logo that appears on reports and payslips.
One legal entity per company that employs people separately. A group with a manufacturing company and a trading company, each with its own registration and its own staff, is two legal entities, and almost everything in the system is held per legal entity: the calendars, the leave groups, the policy profiles, the wage types, the payroll settings. Two legal entities means two of each, and a client who asks for a second one halfway through an implementation is asking for most of the configuration again.
Many of the fields on this screen belong to the finance product and can be left alone on an HR-only implementation.
Business unit and department
Business Unit is the large division. For a five hundred person manufacturer, typically Factory and Head Office, or Manufacturing, Sales and Corporate.
Department is where people actually work: Production, Quality Assurance, Maintenance, Stores, Finance, Human Resources, Information Technology. Each department has a code, a name and a responsible person.
Both are flat lists of code and name. The hierarchy is not drawn here. A person's business unit and department are both named on his Employee Organization Assignment, and that is what puts the two together for him. The reporting line is also on that assignment, as the person he reports to, so the organisation chart is built out of the people rather than out of the department list.
Key the departments the client wants to see totals for. Departments are what payroll cost, headcount and attendance are summarised by, so a client who wants Production split into three lines needs three departments, not one.
Business area and functional area
These are the two extra ways of slicing the company, and both exist because a department is often the wrong answer for reporting.
Business Area cuts by what the company does: a product line, a plant, a project. Functional Area cuts by the kind of work: Operations, Support, Commercial, Administration.
A quality engineer sits in the Quality Assurance department, in the Factory business unit, and his business area might be the plant he is attached to while his functional area is Operations. Three different questions, three different answers, all three recorded on his assignment.
Both are optional in the sense that a client with no interest in either can leave them out of its reporting. They are not optional in the sense of being easy to add later: adding a business area after a year of payroll means every historic assignment is blank for it.
Business Area Dimension and Functional Area Dimension sit above these two and let a client define its own slicing rather than use the shipped one. Leave them alone unless the client has asked for something the plain lists cannot do.
Organizational Structure
Despite the name, this is not where the organisation chart is drawn. It is the screen where one company adjusts how the shared screens behave for it.
Three things are set here:
- Per screen and per field, whether that field is mandatory, disabled or hidden for this company. This is how a client that insists on a national identity number for every employee gets that, without the field being forced on every other client.
- Which address purposes a record must carry: a client can require every employee to have both a permanent and a present address.
- Which contact natures a record must carry: a mobile number and an emergency contact, for instance.
Fill it last, and fill it thinly. Every field you make mandatory here is a field that will stop HR saving a record on a Friday evening. Make mandatory only what the client genuinely cannot operate without, and remember that this is the screen to look at when somebody reports that a field is greyed out or will not let them save.
What the rest of the system takes from this stage
| Built here | Read by |
|---|---|
| Legal Entity | Everything. Nearly every record in the system is held per legal entity |
| Business Unit, Department | Employee Organization Assignment, and every headcount, payroll cost and attendance summary |
| Business Area, Functional Area | The assignment, recruitment requisitions, and reporting |
| Country, State, City | The legal entity's address, employee addresses, applicant records |
| Organizational Structure | Every screen it names a field on |
If something looks wrong
- "The State screen will not let me pick a country" - no countries have been keyed in, or they are keyed in and not released.
- "The department list is empty on the assignment screen" - the departments exist but have not been released. Only finished records are offered.
- "HR cannot save an employee and the message names a field they do not use" - that field has been made mandatory on Organizational Structure for this company.
- "The client wants a second company added" - that is a second legal entity and most of the configuration again. Price it as such.