Notifications of Employee Changes made through ESS

This has been a question for several of my clients.  It really has to come down to if you are going to open the information to the Employee that they need to "own" it. 

There is no "audit trail" out of the box, you would have to customize to accomplish this.   You could modify the code to make those type of changes a personnel action instead of a direct update of HR11, but that is customizing and that opens a can of worms whenever you do this to Self Services. Every time you patch ESS/MSS you have to reapply your changes.

Thank you Gary.

Hi gary.

I hope you see this post...Thanks for your last comment. However, I have a question regarding that suggestion. If you make these items require Personnel Actions, doesn't that prevent the ability to allow the changes through ESS? It was my understanding from the testing that we did with our HR department, that anything flagged for PA on HR10 could then not be made through ESS because of that PA52 requirement. Please let me know if this is a misinterpretation on our part. Thank you.

You do not have to set a field as PA Required on HR10 to use it in PA50 for an action.  In other words a data element can be defined as updatable in both HR11 and PA52 aand thus that statement above is not necessarily true.

If HR has a field locked down to PA52 only for functional reasons that can impact ESS, but as I said their is no need to do that.

I thought that there were a few self service notification emails built-in.... I can not remember where I saw that but I remember seeing a place where email addresses could be stored for changes to some of the information in self-service.....

If you are tracking history on the field you want to audit you could dump the history file into a report or processflow using the date stamps of the information. I have a processflow that looks for history of the marital status field on a daily basis and emails our benefits department.

We currently use HS06 for Dir Dep notifications and HS07 for address and tax changes (v8.1). Please tell me they're still there in v9!!

Those are the screens I was thinking of.... (Yes, both HS06 and HS07 are available in LSF9)

Stephanie,

Yes both of those screens are still in 9.0. The problem we have found is only because we are on Windows. Even though the email renders, it does not get sent automatically. it leaves it up to the user making the change to hit the send button in order for HR or Payroll to actually receive the email. If you are not on Windows, this should not be a problem though.

Shane,

Would you be willing to forward me some additional information on the process flow you use to accomplish this history tracking task? Thank you!

As Gary mentioned before, modifications come with a cost of having to reapply on each patch. With that said, we had the same issue as mentioned at the beginning. We choose to create a separate "Audit trail" by doing the following: Within the heart of the Portal code, there is the transaction.js (in makes XML of the transaction (AGS) calls and sends them through to the IOS for service. We captured the XML and sent our own XML to a custom table to store this call with the typical audit info (id, timestamp, etc.). We create a new web page which allows our Service Center Agents query the Audit table and display a lis tof all changes an employee had completed. This allows the agents to understand how the employee's information got to where it is. Besides changing the transaction.js with each patch, you will also have to modify the audit display webpage when the XML formats change.
Good Luck with your choices.
Lawson says they have addressed this with the Auditing functions within Lawson Security (in v9.0.x) - but we are still in the LAUA world, so haven't leveraged that yet.

Another method for adding email notifications is Process Flow. We use the application and function as the trigger. This results in additional processes and/or email notifications.

It is okay to have custom changes for few files. However, it is a pain to maintain if you have 40 plus html, js and xml changes and counting. If not for the happy employees, I would not have enough motivation to accept more changes. On the plus side, these changes saves the company both time (translate to good production and then money) and money.

And back to the email notification, the old issue is still the manual click to send the email notification to HR when you add say a new Bank Account in Direct Deposit. I am looking at creating a small email program (perl?) that will automatically send an email with no user intervention. Has anyone done this before? Lawson Guru is all about sharing :-)

Regards to all,

jude

OK, one of my more irritating, but nevertheless obscenely useful talents, is always asking, "Why?" Because I'm constantly finding automated processes that people think they need to implement, only to find out that they're still thinking in their paper-based paradigm.

So let me ask some serious questions here: 

Why does HR need to know when I change my withholding? That's a payroll function, not an HR function.

Why does anyone in Payroll need to know when I change my withholding? The people in the payroll department don't do anything with it -- the system does.

Why would an employee have to change their work phone? You, the employer, give it to them. You know it before they do. Why make your employee update it?

Our Audit department requires that we notify employees of changes made to their information regardless of who made the change. We have a batch job that runs each night reading HRHISTORY for employee demographic changes and triggers a process flow to send the employee a confirmation email. In other cases such as Direct Deposit changes, we wrote the code in a User Exit to trigger an email notification. Both approaches minimizes the impact of CTPs and Upgrades.

Chuck

We have PFI generating similiar reports for Payroll and HR Audit purposes.  Our employees were stopping the email notifications that can be automatically generated within the system.  We were also using Access to autogenerate an email to the appropriate individuals with name and address notifications.  

This brings up a concern that we have.  Since employees are permitted to change their name using ESS, we are having to manually track and follow up with them to obtain the updated Social Security Card.  How are other organizations handling this?  I dislike the fact that we are creating a manual process for the HR team when the goal was to stop some of them.

We have removed the ability for the employees to change 'vital' information from ESS. Name, Spouse Name, Birthdate, SSN, etc. If it requires a follow-up form, they have to fill out a form in the first place and attach info. Saves having undocumented data on the system.
john.