Introduction
This recording is a deep dive into the new Publish to MDF feature that will be live on Preview servers on October 15, 2021 and on Production servers on November 19, 2021.
Use cases
Getting data into Compensation worksheets from MDF objects has been available since the First Half 2020 release but this new publish to MDF enhancement opens up many possibilities for data management over the years as well as more flexibility for implementations of complex compensation programs.
Use cases include :
- Long Term Incentives vesting over several years.
- Complex compensation requirements specific to a customer (for example a process where the requirement is to use data from several effective dates to get to an output and there is no need to keep the data in EC because it is very specific to a few hundred employees).
- Removing complexity from Compensation templates to place it in MDF (calculations can be built in MDF custom fields), please see the example in the recording from the blog at 12'30).
Key takeaways of the Publish to MDF feature :
- The MDF must have a field called "cust_templateId" of data type "Number".
- The standard field "externalCode" of the MDF must be of type "User".
- The administrator running the publish to MDF must have read and edit permissions on the new MDF in Role Based Permissions (on top of Manage Compensation > "Store Compensation Data in MDF" permissions).
- Only the following field types are supported : Amount, Money, Date and Text.
- MDF fields tied to picklists are not supported for publish.
- In the Compensation template XML there can only be one MDF publish section per MDF.
- Additional custom fields that are not used in the publish back can be configured in the MDF and updated through an On Save business rule.
- In order to override a first publish to MDF, administrators must select the "Allow Override" checkbox in "Publish selected employees to the MDF".
- When we need the publish the MDF record with a different effective date for each employee it is advised to have the date column on the worksheet in a read-only mode and have it populated from a lookup table (in that sense it is different from the recording). An example of date column populated from a lookup table can be found here.
Known limitations :
- As of 2H 2024, publish to MDF is only available for Compensation templates and Total Compensation templates (in Total Compensation if the field being published is from Variable Pay summary level it must first be brought to a Compensation column by copy pasting the field ID in the formula of the Compensation column), it is not supported yet for Variable Pay templates.
- If some fields are marked as Required=Yes on the MDF object, they must be added to the design of the Compensation publish back section otherwise the publish to MDF will fail.
- If there is already an existing record in the MDF object and that record doesn't have the MDF field "templateId" populated with the ID of the template we are trying to publish a delta update from, the publish back job will fail (and as of testing on Dec 21, 2021 there will be no specific error message listed which is why we are documenting it here).
For more technical details and use cases regarding the Publish to MDF feature, please visit the official Product Management blog post here : https://blogs.sap.com/2021/10/25/extending-compensation-planning-publish-to-metadata-framework-a-ste...
https://youtu.be/Iv_Y-auhta8
How to mass delete published back MDF records :
https://youtu.be/hTSJbhdLkZE
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All the best,
Xavier
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