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Information technology (IT) is one of the faster-growing and better-paying careers available today. Web developers, software developers, Java developers and others should pay attention to developing information technology skills for the human resources domain, which is experiencing a resurgence as SAP and other ERP vendors pay it increasing attention. Once you've gathered some ideas, move on to the next section of the SAP HR training tutorial to learn more about managing employees with SAP HR.
| Information technology skills for the SAP HR developer | |
SAP transactions and tables
Before you begin learning details about information technology skills for the SAP HR developer, you need to understand tables. If you're familiar with other aspects of programming and databases, you already understand the concept, but you still need to be able to consult this list of tables in SAP HR in order to make headway. If you want more targeted information on tables, this list of personnel administration tables gives you a handy view of employee-facing categories, such as Payroll Status and Garnishments. Learning about the table categories prepares you to speak SAP HR's vocabulary.
SAP infotypes
You won't get far in the SAP HR world without hearing about infotypes, a product-specific term that sounds
confusing but really isn't. Once you understand the infotype concept and the terminology, it's time to dive
right in by learning how to
create an HR infotype, which is the method for creating
new employees and other entities in the system (if you're a visual learner,
this graphics-heavy tutorial about on-boarding employees may help more). As with
everything else in SAP HR, there are times when you will need to delete what
you have created, or what comes built into the system. That's why it's crucial
to know how to delete infotypes right after you learn to make new infotypes. After creating infotypes, the next logical step is to be able to run queries, so you can pull up, alter
and manage classes of entered data. HR InfoSets for InfoSet Query is a good place to learn more about infotype queries.
As you acquire proficiency with information technology skills like infotypes, you can move on to more advanced commands, such as creating a query to display free text of infotype and creating two infotypes of time constraint 1 with the same subtype. You can also learn about CATT: tool to complete mass data loads to automate some aspects of moving the record you've created. Speaking of moving data around, it's also nice to know how to migrate payroll only. In terms of payroll-specific reporting and record-keeping, learn about outbound interfaces for payroll in order to see how SAP supports this kind of data migration on the front end.
Managing users and authorizations
At this stage, a helpful layer of functionality is the ability to create authorizations. Remember that all employees are not equal in their level of access to certain information. As such, the concept of authorization takes on special importance in SAP HR, as this is the feature that allows you to specify who gets to see, and access, what. SAP authorizations can get quite complicated, as you may want to exercise pinpoint control over rules of access.
Managing users and authorizations is a good overview of SAP HR authorization.
Another way in is to comprehend the SAP Authorization concept with code samples. When you're ready, you can take a deeper dive into authorizations by accessing this presentation on BW/HR authorizations. Main HR Authorization Object for Security explains how to achieve this control while closing access loopholes and maintaining internal security, so that even administrators are limited in what they see. Of course, because authorizations can fluctuate based on business conditions, it's helpful to know how to alter authorizations as well.
Once you understand the building blocks of information technology skills for SAP HR, it's time to learn how to put them together into transactions. In SAP, a transaction is simply a process -- such as maternity leave, disability information and the like -- initiated by the system. Start by examining a full list of the transaction codes in SAP HR. The more you know about transactions, the more you'll be able to handle SAP HR benefits configurations.
HR and Employee Self-Service (ESS)
How HR delivers service has major implications for employee morale and administrative costs. The employee self-service, or ESS, paradigm has gained mindshare in this domain. Obtain an introduction to ESS
here to discover how SAP allows employees to access key information about
themselves online, on demand. Of course, ESS allows SAP managers self-service access as well.
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