Automate Payroll Processing - LawsonGuru.com

Name	Points
Greg Moeller	4184
David Williams	3349
JonA	3291
Kat V	2984
Woozy	1973
Jimmy Chiu	1883
Kwane McNeal	1437
Ragu Raghavan	1369
Roger French	1315
mark.cook	1244

Julia

Basic Member

Posts: 13

1/9/2019 3:04 PM

I have a request to automate Payroll Processing because we have 11 affiliates and it takes time to run all of the jobs. The kicker is they still want separate output for each affiliate and do not want it ran in bulk - plus the output in pdf form. I have some thoughts on how to do this but wanted to see if anyone had a template that they use or have some experience with this. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Julia

Ragu Raghavan

Veteran Member

Posts: 475

1/9/2019 5:55 PM

I suppose you could develop an IPA flow to do AGS calls to the PR programs, with different job names for each affiliate so the reports/files will be separate. You could kick off /servlet/Report?action=PDF from a webrun node to convert the reports to PDF. Don't the users want to run the critical reports (PR160 for instance) in report mode first, do a sanity check before running in update mode?

Julia

Basic Member

Posts: 13

1/9/2019 10:22 PM

Yes - they have groups of jobs they want to run in report mode and then groups of jobs they want review and then another group of jobs to run for update - so I was thinking about multiple jobs for each of those phases. This is good information. Thank you. Julia

Brian Allen

Veteran Member

Posts: 104

1/9/2019 10:28 PM

Intellias has a product for Lawson to automate payroll processing that they've had for at least 10 years.

http://www.intellias.net/erp-apps.html

tambrosi

Veteran Member

Posts: 55

1/10/2019 11:29 AM

Anybody have any comments about this product?

http://www.intellias.net/erp-apps.html

tambrosi

Veteran Member

Posts: 55

1/10/2019 11:38 AM

Hi Julia, we went thru this same process several years ago and needed to find a way to autoschedule jobs and IPA flows. As Ragu mentioned we developed an IPA flow

that submits the jobs and/or IPA process flows. It does get quite involved when you need to have job dependencies, check on cancellations etc.

Leonard Courchaine

Veteran Member

Posts: 55

1/10/2019 11:52 AM

Our Finance folks (Payroll, A/P, etc) swear by it, I'm quite sure. They've used it to automate a ton of processes.
Lenny (lc@choa.org)

Kwane McNeal

Veteran Member

Posts: 479

1/10/2019 12:22 PM

I have clients who consider any outage of the intellias products to be a complete production down situation.

The product has been around for right around 15-16 years, and I have yet to hear a client who has it choose to give it up.

Julia

Basic Member

Posts: 13

1/22/2019 8:22 PM

Would you be willing to share that flow? I am trying to get best practices.

Thanks, Julia

ryan.Julia@mhsil.com

Julia

Basic Member

Posts: 13

1/22/2019 8:25 PM

We have Intellias for Benefits but did not want to spend the money for Payroll automation. Thanks, Julia

Jason Beard

Veteran Member

Posts: 124

2/1/2019 12:41 PM

I've done it for clients both via shell scripting and IPA depending on their level of comfort for supporting the process.

Julia

Basic Member

Posts: 13

2/1/2019 2:05 PM

Which way did you find was the better maintain? I have gone back and forth on scripting and process flow. Did you kick off the process flow from a user action - did you create a form for the scripting for them to kick off? The feedback is great, it helps when there are so many ways to do this and others have had this experience. Thanks Julia

pbelsky

Veteran Member

Posts: 80

2/1/2019 2:18 PM

You can set up multistep jobs directly in the Lawson portal. PDFs can be created at runtime automatically, either globally - in rpt.cfg in the /system folder - or by program - by copying rpt.cfg to .cfg and placing that file into the source directory (e.g. prsrc). By default, if you run multiple instances of the same program in the multistep job, the reports will all have the same name, but not overwrite each other, as they are stored separately in the print folder under the jobstep number. If you wish to give the reports different paths and/or names, this can be set in each step by clicking on the Reports button. The information you set in the Reports button lives in the JOBSTEPRPT table. The JOBSTEP table contains information about multistep jobs by step, including parameters. You can do mass updates to the tables if you are comfortable with that. We use a flow to update jobstep parameters that change (like dates) in the multistep jobs. Lawson also has canned 4GL code to create new jobs, update jobstep parms, and automatically submit jobs, so you can write a 4GL program to accomplish this also.

Julia

Basic Member

Posts: 13

2/25/2019 8:53 PM

Thanks that is all very helpful. How did you get your job parameters updated? Did you use a straight update from sql command or did you do a lawson sql call - i tried this and GEN - at least in our environment is not setup to be a product line so have to do a sql update statement. Thanks again, appreciate the information.

Julia

Jason Beard

Veteran Member

Posts: 124

2/25/2019 8:58 PM

Created a custom program that updated job parameters via the delivered Lawson COBOL API's. There was a config file that kept track of various dates that we wanted to update and the program would read that file and update the job(s) as needed. There was a separate process that updated the config on a weekly basis.

Julia

Basic Member

Posts: 13

2/26/2019 5:32 PM

That is great information. I like the idea of using something we already have and making it as standard as possible,. We thought that we would need to put those dates in a file or somehow pull it from a Lawson table - calculate the date from a previous pay period -since that date follows a pattern with few variations. Thanks for the information. Julia