At some point, we all have rued the gaps which existed in the functionality of EC Alerts and Notifications. SAP SuccessFactors have tried to come up with some significant improvements in the current release which will make life a bit easier.
Here are the list of improvements which have come across in the current release:
1> Improvement of EC Alerts: Exclude alert for the terminated subject user
- Component : LOD-SF-EC-ALR
- ID : ECT-88914 / ECT-85239
- KBAs : 2676210
The rule is setup to send an alert in the future for subject user (for example, 5 days before end of contract). If subject user is terminated before alert date, the alert is still created. This was a major heartburn for EC Alerts and SAP have recognized this and have built in logic to not send the alerts for such cases.
With this enhancement, during scanning the record and evaluation with alert rule, the records for the terminated subject user (for current terminated user) are excluded and didn’t get an entry in the alert table. When alerts reach the trigger date and are triggered, exclude record for the subject user who was terminated after entry got to alert table. Alert is not created and email is not sent; status of alert is changed to compete.
What was happening before: The Alerts were sent for the users who got terminated after the Alerts is generated statically for a future date and user gets terminated in between.
What will be the Improvement: With this Enhancement, during scanning the record and evaluation with alert rule, the records for the terminated subject user (for current terminated user) are excluded and will not create an entry in the Alert table. When Alerts reach the trigger date and are triggered, the system will also exclude records for the subject user who was terminated after entry was made to the Alert table. The Alert is not created and email is not sent; status of Alert is changed to compete.
Caveat: If the user is Terminated in the future, after the contract end date, the alert will still be sent.
2> Performance Improvement of EC Alert Provisioning Job:
- Component : LOD-SF-EC-ALR
- ID : ECT-85239 / ECT-98999
The logic is changed to take advantage of the rule batch process: get a list of EC entities, iterate each Rule, pass a list of entities and single rule to the rule engine to evaluate the rule with a list of entities.
What was happening before: The system use to get a list of EC entities, iterate each entity and call the rule engine API to evaluate the rule with a single entity.
This way doesn't take advantage of the rule batch process. The rule API allows pass in a list of entity which belongs to a same base object.
What will be the Improvement: The system gets a list of EC entities, iterates each rule, passes a list of entities and will then trigger a single rule to the rule engine API to evaluate the rule with a list of entities. This makes the job perform more efficiently.
3> Performance Improvement of EC Alert Provisioning Job:
- Component : LOD-SF-EC-ALR
- ID : ECT-85239 / ECT-70257
Added multiple threads in the job to improve the performance when job scans a huge amount of data and creates/process Alerts.
What was happening before: Previously, the system did not process multiple records simultaneously and used to take lot of time to scan through the huge amount of data changes.
What will be the Improvement: The system is now using multi-threading and processing records in batches of n records to speed up processing time. It is applicable to scanning the records as well as creation of Alerts.
4> Improvement of EC Alerts: To-Do Tile
When Action was cancelled/removed, the associated alerts were not cancelled. However, those alerts were still included in the alert counts on To-Do Take Action. The redesign is done to have error message for the cancelled/removed alerts.
What was happening before: Take action tile count does not revert back even if an alert was cancelled.
What will be the Improvement: If there is an invalid ToDo item, which is missing the source data, (thus showing an incorrect count shown in the ToDo tile), the system now displays a Default Subject line:
"This Alert is no longer valid because the source data was deleted Please click "Done" to remove the alert."
5> Improvement of EC Alerts: Alert Rule ID given in Job Details
- Component : LOD-SF-EC-ALR
- ID : ECT-101243
- KBAs : 2677445
EC Alerts job Details will now provide the Rule ID in the Job Details from Provisioning, as well as the count of records that match that rule.
What was happening before: The current EC alerts job details text is not convenient to read, lacks clarity and was less user friendly.
What will be the Improvement: Text was updated to reflect "No Error Messages" if none are captured during run time of the EC Alerts Job.
Still there are few use cases where we wants to have access to the statically created alerts and put conditions in our business rules based on those but these enhancements are a welcome relief particularly the Termination users are excluded from Alerts.
Looking forward for more improvements in the coming releases!!!!!
