The topic "Duty of work time recording" is a hot discussed topic in the working world, also emphasized by a judgement of the European Court of Justice in 2019. Employers are now faced to the question how their employees should record their daily times and also, with which application. Must new applications be used or offer the already existing a possibility to do the time recording as well?
The SAP Field Service Management (FSM) offers the possibility to record the times of the involved technicians while processing the service activities. Besides the activity related times, also administrative times or absences must be documented. Does FSM also offer possibilities for these cases? The answer is fortunately: Yes!
The different recording types are presented in the following and also, how these types complement one another. We concentrate on the recording in the mobile FSM application which is available for Windows, iOS and Android.
Efforts
Efforts are the times incurred during the processing of an activity. They can be recorded automatically or manually.
The automatic effort recording is connected to the service workflow steps which are used in the activity processing. FSM saves the start and end time of a workflow step and calculates the duration. Based on the customizing settings, the employee has afterwards the possibility to modify these times in case the workflow step was started or finished too early or too late.
Beside the automatic recording, the possibility of the manual recording also exists. In this case, the workflow steps are not connected to an automatism, but the employee must record all efforts manually. This is for example very helpful if the usage of electronic devices is forbidden at the working place due to security reasons.
Moreover, it is also possible to combine the automatic and the manual effort recording.
These times are all displayed in the area "Efforts" of the mobile application.
Travel times could also be recorded automatically with the workflow step "Travel" or of course manually. They can be found in the "Expenses and Material" area.
Work Time
In contrast to efforts, work times could in general not be invoiced. This includes administrative times like internal meetings or training participations, furthermore absences like sickness or holidays. The recording of work times can be connected to service workflows as well what is suitable for breaking times for example. Moreover, the work times can be recorded manually, so this can also be done in advance (for holidays or trainings) or afterwards.
The overview over the recorded work times can be found in the related area of the mobile application.
Time Recordings
In the last sections, we have introduced different types of times which can be recorded within FSM. As already mentioned, the times can be found in different areas of the mobile applications. Due to this fact, the employee does not have a complete overview over all recorded times at one glance.
For this reason, the new area "Time Recordings"
(Link in SAP Help) was published in which efforts, travel times and work times can be displayed in one single list as wells as in a calendar view. This is a help for the employee when checking if all times for a day are recorded or if there are overlapping times due to record errors. When choosing the calendar view, the employee can find a summarized presentation of the recorded times for the selected day.
As you could see in the last chapters, FSM offers different types and areas for the time recording and therefore, it could be a helpful tool to fulfill the duty of recording the employee's working times.
You need more details regarding the times in FSM or other topics in FSM you would like to discuss? Please leave a comment or contact me directly!
More FSM topics are planned for the next weeks, so keep an eye on my profile!