Any MSS "plain vanilla" implementations?

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Keith Ruckstuhl

New Member

Posts: 1

5/11/2009 5:40 PM

My employer has been using Lawson for some years, paying for manager self service (MSS) but not successfully able to implement it. I'm new to the organization (working in HR), and have taken responsibility for getting MSS up and running. We keep running into system limitations for basic HR processes, and appear to be faced with the decision to abandon MSS, or use our talented IT folks to make lots of changes, to the extent that we have to expend significant resources to make the system work for us.

For example, some employee data is stored outside of the E1-E8 tables, so they aren't accessible to MSS. We also want some data to be read-only (like upper and lower limits of pay ranges) while allowing managers to enter personnel actions such as a merit increase- but the system seems to only have two conditions in 'plain vanilla'- either you can see it and change it, or you can't see it at all. You wouldn't want a manager to change the pay range, but you'd certainly want a manager to know the pay range when making any pay increase, so they don't go over the top of the range.

I'd really appreciate any opportunities to have a brief phone call (30 minutes or less) with anyone on this list who is in a 1000+ person organization and has managed a rollout out MSS, and is willing to have a brief chat. I'd like to know whether you rolled out MSS 'plain vanilla', and if so, what you see as the major system limitations for how your HR processes operate. For organizations that have implemented MSS but had to make significant changes to get it to work, I'd be interested in learning (at a high level) what types of changes you had to make. For example, if you pushed a lot of data from other tables into the UF table(s) just to be able to access it through MSS.

I'm new to this site/forum (one of our Lawson IT experts just pointed me here) but I'll monitor for responses- If you aren't interested in a brief call but want to post responses, that would be welcome too.

Thank you,

Keith

Currently using 8.1 Apps on 9.0 Foundation

stephanie

Veteran Member

Posts: 330

5/13/2009 10:36 AM

Although we haven't rolled out MSS yet (we're working on it) - I'm sorry that you're finding it so challenging to work with. I'm sure some of it is cultural, since we haven't found that there isn't enough information, we've found that we'd much prefer to keep some employee information more confidential than provided out of the box, and thus it sounds like we're more interested in suppressing information than your organization, so we haven't found it limiting at all.

And I personally disagree with your statement "you can see it and change it, or you can't see it at all". I've worked with Lawson for a long time, however, I've never heard of pushing data from other tables into UF just to be able to access it via MSS? I'm wondering if what you're looking at , at this point has already been modifiefd by your folks? It doesn't sound out of the box at all to me.

I wish you the best in whatever your organization's decision is regarding MSS.

One final thought - are you using ESS? Is that working for your employees?

Jay Riddle

Veteran Member

Posts: 191

5/13/2009 1:40 PM

We did quite a few customization to are ESS/MSS in order to make it workable. One of the things I did is setup iframes so that part of the page is actually a link to a document that HR has the ability to edit. This way some of the text changes on pages can actually be handled by HR without IT involvement. As an example of this type of modification, at Blue Cross, is on our Beneficiaries page in Employee Self Service. (Are bookmarks are setup so that we navigate to this page by going to \Employee Self Service\Benefits\Beneficiary)
On the Beneficiary page we have the right panel pop up with a several paragraph text "IMPORTANT NOTICE ON BENEFICIARY DESIGNATION....The State of Idaho is a Community Property State...."

We did the same thing on the Leave Balances page where there is an added panel below the employees PTO balance that shows a table with accrual rates. When HR changed the rates recently I just reminded HR what the name of the document was and they edited it.

If memory serves me there is actually an ESS or MSS page that actually says something like 'Put your text here'. From what I can tell a lot of companies do modify their ESS/MSS pages.

If you haven't upgraded to the newer security you will definetly need to think through some of the security issues. We are currently on the newer security but in the old system we ended up setting up two logins for the power users(well sort of two logins but that is another story).

JudeBac

Veteran Member

Posts: 129

5/13/2009 7:05 PM

I was pretty new in the company when we implemented ESS/MSS including the Benefit Open Enrollment, in "plain vanilla flavor". You will need a savvy programmer to do the changes and mostly in javascript, html, xml, ags and dme calls. I made changes to the drill around, personnel action screen, added lookup/list, change and hide verbiages... mostly cosmetics. Our changes is not to make it look professional but functional and acceptable. Hope this helps

Jay Riddle

Veteran Member

Posts: 191

5/13/2009 7:38 PM

"...some employee data is stored outside of the E1-E8 tables" You can create views in Lawson and let Lawson know about it through dbdef. As an example we did this when we wanted to display a PTO accrual date that in our system is located in a different database. Sometime however it would have been better to just do a custom web page say in vb.net. If a page has say 90% of what you want then you should probably just stick with the Lawson page. If however most of what you want is custom then probably just doing a brand new web page, in whatever your prefered web platform is, would probably be better. You can put your custom page into Lawson by just addomg a bookmark and with your URL. One negative of doing dbdef changes is that in our environment, which is Windows, we end up having to bring down Lawson in order to do dbdef changes.

JohnM

New Member

Posts: 1

6/1/2009 2:21 PM

Keith, We have been using EMSS for several years, we started out providing a minimum of information and inquiry only to the employee and manager population and then over time have released more functionality. If they have never had anything like this before, it will be a cultural change for the corporation. Our EMSS is somewhat highly modified however a good java html person can manage it quite well. From our experience with a phased release overtime, it provided us the luxury of learning about how the system worked and allowed the population to get use to the product.

jeremy.zerr

Advanced Member

Posts: 23

6/1/2009 2:32 PM

I think I understand what you mean about if you can see it you can change it, otherwise you can't see it at all. If you want to allow a change through MSS, you have to give a personnel action the Web Available property, then it shows up in the MSS personnel actions screen, and just like a personnel action, every field can be modified. And if you just want to show something read-only, there might not be a screen built that has it exactly.

To get around the personnel action thing, we just created a new action that is MSS/ESS friendly. In our case, our PERSONAL personnel action type had address, phone, sex, ethnicity, etc. When going online, we obviously don't want someone to change their sex or ethnicity, so I just created a WEBADDRESS personnel action type that only had address/phone. Then you just make the WEBADDRESS web accessible, while you don't allow the PERSONAL to be web accessible.

But also, if something is not a field available on one of the built-in read-only screens, I think people typically over-estimate how hard it is to add it in. There are plenty of examples throughout ESS code that Lawson already gives you of how to do a DME call, parse and display the data. Lawson has provided many screens, but they rarely fit any need we have. They almost always require some sort of modification. If you are looking for it to be used out of the box, Lawson MSS/ESS isn't the right product for you.

Good luck,
Jeremy
St Luke's, Boise, ID