Extension fields in employee time sheet in Business ByDesign

[SandeepJanardan]

In the last few years, we have had quite a few requests from customers to allow extension fields to be made available in the employee self service timesheet. The purpose varied from allowing the capture of the region that the time recording was performed (requested by many of our US customers) as well as capturing additional reportable attributes as part of work being done.

The challenge with the ESS timesheet was that the way it was designed, it was not possible to make use of the generic extensibility concepts that we have in ByD to make extension fields available.

To circumvent this technical roadblock, with the 2011 release, a few pre-delivered extension fields - are made available :

1. Country / Region


2. State


3. Extension Field 1


4. Extension Field 2

These fields are already part of the employee self service timesheet and time administration UIs such as the time file, and only need to be made visible (or renamed) by the key user (in adaptation mode) or by the employees (via personalization). These are also part of the employee data sources such as HCMTLMB07 and HCMTLMU01.

Extension fields in the employee self service time sheet

Extension fields in the employee time file in Time Administration work center

Extension fields made visible in report via Add Fields option

 

While the Time File and time administration timesheet continue to support the creation of extension fields via ByDesign's regular field extensibility concepts, these customer-created extensions cannot be made visible on the employee self service timesheet.

[Rene_Vijverberg]

Thanks and is it also possible to make these field available in the Mobile Application?

Best regards,

Rene Vijverberg

[CHAPON]

Hi Sandeep Dinesh,

I saw your video on integration between ByD & Employee Central in the virtual SAP Innovation Day for Partners event.

It was very interesting, thanks !

I was not able to download it (link did not work).

Could you please send it to me ? thanks.

Best regards,

Hervé Chapon

itelligence France

[CHAPON]

my e-mail adress : herve.chapon@itelligence.fr

 

Thanks !

[SandeepJanardan]

Hello Hervé

Thank you for your kind words !

Could you please try accessing the content in the jam page - https://jam2.sapjam.com/groups/xuXgMdJ4DYtHvWvesPK2nw/overview_page/EoutvPjt8TOkbJGLGHGMSk

I believe you should be able to access the content there as well.

I've also a link to a trouble shooting guide for the Learning Rooms - https://partneredge.sap.com/en/library/assets/partnership/training_education/lhub/tr_ug_lhub_ped.htm...

Regards,
Sandy

[CHAPON]

Hello Sandeep,

It worked out fine, thanks !

Have a good day.

Best regards,

Hervé

 

 

[SandeepJanardan]

Hello Rene

Currently these fields are not enabled in the mobile version of the time sheet. They will be added in an upcoming release.

Thanks,
Sandy

[Rene_Vijverberg]

Thanks

[Jacques-Antoine]

Thanks for the blog sandeepdinesh.janardan !

[Pedro_muller]

Hi sandeepdinesh.janardan,

I really appreciate your post and detail information on this new functionality, it is really helpful for us and many customers.

I am wondering if these fields are available for the forms such as the Itemized list of Expense? If not, could you please provide me with some advice on how to add them?

Thank you,

 

[maida1]

Hello Sandeep,

thanks for your blog.

Is it possible to change the type of the extension fields and that this fields are available in the activity report ?

It would be a huge benefit for customers.

The background to the question is the following business scenario:

In addition to the invoices, some service providers send an activity report to customers so that they can understand exactly what has been invoiced. If the customer-specific field is also visible in this report, detailed information can be passed on, which on the one hand can provide internal support for the creation of invoices, but also represent an additional information field for customers.

Thank you.
Kind regards, Maida

[SandeepJanardan]

Hello maida1

Thank you very much for pointing this out. We missed adding this to the Activity Report of the time sheet, this is something we would add to our product backlog.

Regards,
Sandy

[maida1]

Hello sandeepdinesh.janardan ,

I would be very glad about this implementation

Thank you.

Best regards,

Maida

[hayashik2017]

Hello Sandeep

 

Thank you for the posting

Is there any release plan to add those Extension Fields in the Employee Time Record report ?

If not able to see from the report then it is not really useful.

 

[Stefan_Stoegmue]

Now they have been added to the mobile applications!

Enjoy,

Stefan

[PhilMarsh]

@SandeepJanardan ,

Thank you for this blog post and for attempting to extend some functionality for customers.

Unfortunately, none of the fields can give us the functionality we need to achieve:
- could standard extensibility please be extended to the ESS time sheet?

We need to capture an additional status alongside timesheets - loose text fields are not good practice for achieving any such function.

If it is not possible to extend proper extension functionality to ESS, instead, could you provide some more field types as options - indicators and a selection of other field types.

An Indicator (off/on/tickbox) Extension Field (or two) would allow wider use-cases than the current loose text - and at least would allow our teams to indicate a status by ticking a box.

Many thanks,

Phil

[SandeepJanardan]

Hello @PhilMarsh 

Standard extensibility would not be introduced to the timesheet due to the technical design limitations mentioned in the blog post. 

About adding extension fields of other data types - this is the first time we've received such a request. It would be great if you could post it as an improvement request in the customer influence portal https://influence.sap.com/sap/ino/#/campaign/886. It can be taken up if we see multiple partners have a similar need. 

Thank you for reaching out !

Regards,
Sandy

[PhilMarsh]

@SandeepJanardan thank you for your reply, I have added it to customer influence - as below:

🔗 Customer Influence - ESS Extension Fields 

...but we all know this is a very slow route to any improvements - whereas customers need fixes/solutions here/now (and will likely workaround issues or migrate solutions before customer influence action).

I'm more surprised that 2 lots of loose text fields were chosen as the solution here - we all know that end-users are(n't) accurate in their loose text entries.

Would it take much to simply add 2x each of indicator, decimal and quantity - you then cover a wide range of extension scenarios, together with redundancy for more complex scenarios.

Loose text should rarely ever be used for any kind of analysis - whereas decimal, quantity, boolean (indicator) and lists (unachievable without full extension) can be compared and used for reporting purposes.

If you could consider this it would be greatly appreciated. I have little confidence in items from influence being picked up.