The Power of Rules: Crack Your Custom EC Business Requirements with Business Rules

[muge_das]

“I Love Rules” said my kids never! 

But I do!  I love rules – “Business Rules” that is!  They are very useful in extending the standard solution to your company’s custom needs and for finding creative solutions to complex problems.  They help reduce HR Technology costs. 

You can define business rules for a wide range of applications across the SAP SuccessFactors platform including Employee Central.  You can default values, kick off approval workflows, propagate data, do data validations, eligibility checks and calculations.  There are many pre-delivered functions that can help you with all of the above.

In these series of episodes, I would like to take you on a journey of useful features, tips and tricks, and handy examples for business rules for your Employee Central solution. 

Some helpful resources that will give you detailed information:

An Introduction to Business Rules | SAP Help Portal

IDP - EmployeeCentral - Optimizing Business Rules For Specific Scenarios

Blog - Business Rules in Recruiting

I would also encourage you to enter ideas and solutions you have created to solve your business challenges in the comments section.  Sharing is caring  🙂

Episode 1: Application-specific Rule Scenarios

Let’s begin at the beginning: We recommend using application-specific Rule Scenarios when creating rules.  Rule scenarios provide more guidance about the supported objects, parameters, and actions you can use to configure the rule.  For each application-specific scenario, there are guardrails to help you create Rules that work.  For existing rules using the Basic rule scenario, you can change the scenario to an application-specific rule scenario.

My colleague S_Strangfeld has a couple of wonderful blogs on adjusting rules to application-specific scenarios and mass changing rules to application-specific scenarios. She also has a short video on how to do it.

For an example of creating a rule using an Employee Central Scenario, see Episode 1 card.  It will walk through selecting the ‘Validation for HRIS Elements’ scenario to create a rule that will give a message when a field on Personal Info of Employee Profile is changed.

Episode 2: Rule Events or Rule Triggers in Employee Central

Rule Events refers to which user action in the system triggers rule execution.  For example, onChange event simply means when a field is changed and the user tabs out of that field, the rule attached to that field will be triggered.

Events supported in Employee Central are:

• onInit - page is loaded (for Hire/Rehire scenarios and foundation objects)
• onSave - when the page is saved
• onChange - when user changes a field value
• onView - page with transient field (calculated on the fly) is loaded
• saveAlert - when relevant employee record is saved to send reminder alerts of coming system events
• onPostSave - after changes to an object have been successfully saved (used in Intelligent Services)

Event Types for HRIS Elements and HRIS Fields | SAP Help Portal

These events give you tremendous capability to solve many simple and complex requirements for your business.  You may think this is the boring stuff, but boring and reliable is great when it comes to Rules.  Stay tuned for more exciting and exotic Rules in the upcoming episodes  😉

For several examples of cool rules using onInit, onChange and onSave, see Episode 2 card.  It will walk through how to hide fields during new hire for selected company codes, defaulting a new timezone when employee location field is changed and triggering an approval workflow when employee’s national id information is saved.

In addition, the Help document has many Employee Central related Business Rule examples:

Example Employee Central Business Rules | SAP Help Portal

Episode 3: Warnings, errors, and validations with data change

At home we have a sensor light in the corridor which goes on when something moves in the corridor. So imagine my heart rate when the light woke me up at 2:15 am! Nothing should have been moving at that time and we looked and checked and didn’t find anything. But the next morning, I found a spider as big as my palm hiding next to the picture frame in the corridor (I live in Australia, and we have THOSE SPIDERS!!). Needless to say, I will be paying more attention when the sensor light comes on unexpectedly…

Wouldn’t be nice to have an early alert/warning in the system that warns about unexpected things. Stops bad data when saving, gives helpful messages when unexpected data is entered. That is exactly what you can achieve with Business Rules and it is easy to set up. You first create the message text, and then create a rule that refers to the message text you've created. Then add it to the field or to save of record.

For some examples of rules with error and warning messages, please see Episode 3 card. It will give examples of an info message when Marital Status field is changed, a warning when Nationality of employee is saved and an error if the ‘child’ dependent is over 18 years old.

In addition, the Help document has great information:

Creation of a Rule That Raises a Message | SAP Help Portal