Data flow from Employee Central Payroll to Employee Central

[indrajitghosh]

Objective: Retrieve employee specific data from Employee Central Payroll (ECP) and flow back to Employ Central (EC).

Explanation: In a SuccessFactor HR solution environment with Employee Central (EC) and Employee Central payroll (ECP) in scope, employee data maintained in EC and gets replicated to ECP for payroll process via point to point data replication process.

Is the reverse flow possible? That is the flow of employee data from Employee Central Payroll to Employee central?

Few predefined data from ECP system can be accessed from EC either via ECP mash up screens or via API access (e.g. EmployeePayrollRunResults, EmployeePayrollRunResultsItems). But there is no straight forward way to move any additional information or custom information from ECP to EC.

The idea behind this blog post is to explain a simple process of additional data movement from ECP to EC.

Why is this required? There may be question on the requirement of this functionality. Why data flow is required from ECP to EC, when EC stores all master data and act as the source system?

An example of such requirement would help answering the query. The business requirement we implemented was to retrieve employee HESA ID from ECP and populate in the custom HESA ID field at the Personal Information portlet of EC for our UK client.

Little More about the requirement:

What is HESA? The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) is the official agency for the collection, analysis and dissemination of quantitative information about higher education in the United Kingdom.

What is HESA ID/Number?  It is a student identifier which is to be unique to each student. It is intended that the identifier is to be transferred with the student to each provider of higher education he or she may attend.

There are few predefined complex steps to be followed to generate unique HESA Identifier (https://www.hesa.ac.uk). Its difficult to generate with SuccessFactors , whereas, standard SAP has already delivered this functionality of HESA ID generation and related operations. Since ECP system functioned on standard SAP ECC platform, so, HESA functionality is easily achievable at ECP end. But, since EC considered to be the main source of employee information, it was requested by our client to made this HESA ID available at EC end (at Personal Information level) also.

So, the requirement pops up to generate the HESA ID at ECP end invoking standard SAP procedure and subsequently flow back the ID to custom field at EC personal information portlet.

High level implementation process: The above requirement can be catered via following four simple steps:

1. Create a Function Module at ECP to retrieve required information


2. Create an WebService at ECP end to be consumed by external system


3. Call the webService via middleware (HCI/CPI) to get HESA ID for an employee


4. Call ODATA PerPersonal to update HESA ID at custom field level

Detailed description:

HESA ID will be generated by Payroll Admin and will be stored at infotype 0614 HESA Master Data) at Employee Central Payroll system following standard SAP transaction.



Create a custom SAP RFC Function Module to the fetch HESA ID for employees from infotype 614 (HESA Master Data)



Create an WebService to be consume by HCI/CPI. This WebService will leverage above custom Function Module to get HESA ID for the employees



Create a middle-ware (CPI) step to call the web service and retrieve employee ID and related HESA ID



Create a custom field for HESA ID in personal information portlet of Employee Central and provide required permission on that field



Create another middleware step to call ODATA API PerPersonal to updated  the information (HESA ID)  in the Employee Personal information portlet



Conclusion: Example given above is for a typical country specific requirement, but the concept of using web services to retrieve information from ECP to push back to EC can be leveraged as and when required.

Prerequisite of the implementation: SAP ABAP knowledge, PCI knowledge and SF EC knowledge

Glossary:

EC - Employee Central

ECP - Employee Central Payroll

HCI/CPI - HANA Cloud Integration /  Cloud Platform Integration

Function Module - ABAP code snippet to carry out an intended activity

HESA - Higher Education Sustainability Act (UK)

Point to Point data replication - Is a SuccessFactors process to flow employee master data to employee central payroll for further processing

Infotype - Information types. SAP tables to store HR specific data. Each infotype uniquely identified by four digit ID