Other's experience regarding process for factory workers (blue collar) in SuccessFactors

[inepre1]

Hi experts,

I really want to hear about how you in other companies handle blue collar workers, particularly in position management. For instance, do you use mass positions or create single positions? Are the employees firstly hired into a training position and then moved somewhere else in the company? etc

Hoping someone reaches out to elaborate on the general process, and I am happy to share more questions as well.

Thanks!

Ines

[nlgro023]

Sounds like you rather have a business need to decouple the manager from the position (which can also be done), for which the employee can then keep the position, but you can for instance do a mass change to update the manager (which will likely be a lot more efficient).

[inepre1]

Hi Jasper,

For this scenario, with decouple - do you mean to remove the higher level position field and just work with the supervisor field in job info. How does this work?

[nlgro023]

Well decouple is a bigger term here to describe that settings/business rules are to be changed to ensure manager is not overwritten all the time by the system default. There for instance commonly is a sync in provisioning that checks on a daily basis if the manager matches the one of the position and if not it sets that person as the manager, there are likely business rules that (onsave - on top of the more common onchange version of that) set a new manager and there may be some position management settings for instance enforcing the manager of the position to be the manager of the employee at all time (and some customers even go as far by making the manager field read only for users/admins.

In essence you just aim to change the setup in such a way that (on change of the position, maybe even for certain groups only such as blue collars) the default setting is the manager of the position, but that you can deviate from it as desired. The benefit is then that you can use mass changes (or easier one off changes) to change the manager if desired (combined with the mass position) as you could then for instance say everyone with position X should now get Manager Y via the mass change (which sounds a whole lot more efficient to me if the manager relation has to be correct all the time). If concessions can be made, I'd personally recommend just having someone generally be the manager in the system and the actual management being done towards the blue collars just to be an 'outside of the system' thing, as it would then just be whole lot of administration for nothing.

[inepre1]

Yeah, could be too complicated as well. I actually just discussed these options with my stakeholders. Good options, but we concluded that it might be to much admin work. Thank you for the valuable input!

One of them mentioned that in one of their previous SF systems, they used to drag and drop positions from the Company Structure Overview. I am not familiar with that and have not experienced that this is possible, but am wondering if you have ever seen and used this?

[nlgro023]

Well managerial ones (as those exist too) ALWAYS 1 on 1 position, as otherwise it can become very confusing (especially if one moves) as it gives a distorted view as well about who really manages who.

If the roles are really standardised enough (and don't fulfill a managerial role), the volume is high enough and if you don't maintain too much on the position, then I'd ideally adopt a multiple employees strategy on a position for those respective roles to improve maintenance. Otherwise 1 to 1 is still preferable as HR often gets confused by 'sneaky / inexplicable' position updates and that is usually a contributor to a lack of confidence in the system, frowning of auditors and (not joking here) some customers that claim to have ghosts in the system.

[inepre1]

Thank you, Jasper!

We don't have mass positions yet, unfortunately, but hopefully in the future.

In our case, blue collar employees keep moving from one manager to another within the same department and cost center hence this becomes a time-consuming process for the HR admin to go through. The main requirement from business is that they need to know an employee’s time in position. There is a policy of the company that the employee has to be a position for at least one year before they can apply for or move into another position. This is the reason we started using one position for one employee. When the employee moves within the department, we move the whole position and create another position for a new hire.