Basic of SAP HR

INFOTYPES Infotypes are also called information types and are pre-defined templates to enter sensible related information for an employee or applicant. for eg an address infotype would have fields like street & house no, city, pin code.This infotype is unique and is represented by an infotype number eg address has infotype no 0006. There other infotypes like 1. 0000 Actions (to capture employee movement info in the orgnization) 2. 0001 Organizational Assignment (to capture employee positioning in the organization) 3. 0002 Personal Data 4. 0006 Address 5. 0007 Planned Working Time (Store planned working hours for the employee.) 6. 0008 Basic Salary 7. 0009 Bank Details 8. 0014 Recurring Payment 9. 0015 Additional payment 10. 0016 Contract Elements 11. 2006 Absence Quotas ] Real Life Example: The above infotypes together in the same sequence form a part of the Hiring Action.To make you understand this better just try and recollect the contents of your offer letter which your organization might have given you. It would possibly read We are delighted to offer you the position (IT 0001) of ______. You will belong to ______ department (IT 0001). Your joining date will be ______(IT0000)and you will be paid a salary of ______ (IT 0008). You will be paid monthly allowances ______ (IT 0008 or IT 0014) and we are also offering you a joining bonus of ______ (IT 0015). You will be eligible for annual leave of ______ days (IT 2006) .You will be on a probation for six months from the date of joining (probation date & confirmation date in IT0016). Your working hours will be from ____ hrs to ____ hrs beginning Monday to Friday (IT 0007) and we look forward to your presence on date ______(IT 0016) This must have raised a question in many minds that Hey ! I got the offer during my recruitment so how come this is being referred to after hiring? Well thats simple This is because all your relevant data that was captured during recruitment was transferred to the the master (called HR master data) during the hiring process. So how was it captured in recruitment?

Well, this was captured using recruitment actions like shortlist candidate, for interview, make offer, offer accepted till you join the organization and sign the joining letter when your data actually gets transferred from the Recruitment module to the Personnel Administration module.Again this data was captured in recruitment infotypes. So we can now get an idea that in SAP HR ,all data is captured in infotypes. INFOTYPES CATEGORISED

Infotype 0000-0999 Personal Administration Infotype 1000-1999 PD objects (for OM) Infotype 2000-2999 Time Management Infotype 4000-4999 Recruitment Infotype 9000-9999 For Custom Development

If you closely observe that many of the recruitment infotypes are clones of personnel administration infotypes. I hope this gives you some idea of what an infotype is. Lets look at what we mean by subtypes. A subtype is sub-categorization of an infotype. Not all infotypes are sub-categorized and hence only some required infotypes would have subtypes. Lets take the case of Address Infotype (IT 0006). Now we would like to use the same screen template to store different types of addresses like Permanent,Temporary, Office etc.This is because we would be capturing the same type of information which would require the same fields like Street No, City, Country, Pin Code etc to capture different address types information. SAP handles this by using subtypes for the Address Infotype (IT 0006). So to store any Address Information we would need to specify both the infotype and subtype. Certain other infotypes with subtypes are Dependents (0021), ID Data (0185) etc. DATA AND AUTHORIZATIONS When it comes to data these are the things that we can do to it

create data ( in sap hr we do this by creating new records ) view data ( by viewing the records created) maintain data ( by changing/deleting records)

To be able to do one or three of the above , the sap hr user needs to be authorized to do so . This is a part of data security handled by sap using what is known as authorizations. Authorizations in SAP HR are handled through roles ( such as payroll administrator, training administrator , time administrator where these roles are given create/maintain/view authorizations for combination of hr objects/hr infotypes & subtypes /hr transactions/hr reports/hr clusters) called role based authorizations or a combination of role based

authorizations and the hr structures (like organization structure, training calendar etc) called structural authorizations. These roles and structural authorizations are assigned to the sap hr user based on his job profile. Data security is the key andits important to know that you would see,create and maintain data based purely on the tasks you perform in your organization as a sap user. So it may possible, your colleague can see more than you and does not divulge information as the authorizations would be based on his/her job profile and remember that company confidentiality & professional ethics are the most important qualification for any sap user. Authorizations using role based authorizations can be provided by using organizational key field and that the organization key does not replace the hr structures ORGANIZATONAL KEY IN AUTHORIZATIONS The organizational key is a 14 character code which is restricted to a combination of certain fields of the organizational assignment infotype -0001 like organization unit, personal area, personal subarea, etc. Organization unit is a part of IT0001 and it is often used as a part of the organization key. For most organizations, the organization key suffices. However, when complex authorization requirements arise than organizations with sap hr opt for structural authorizations. If you want an employee to have authorizations to certain employee data of 5 sub-ordinate organization units you would probably have to maintain all the five organizational keys in the role assigned to the employee which means more maintenance. This increases authorization role maintenance and authorization errors ( if there is data inconsistency),which is realized by organizations who are implementing or in a process of implementing structural authorizations. If you want to restrict the sap hr user access on the basis of training calendar or other hr structures then you would need to use structural authorizations and cannot use role based authorizations unless you do some custom development( which is not recommended, when you have standard sap meeting your requirements). LOGICAL DATABASES A layer above the physical database lies the hr logical databases called PNP, PCH and PAP. Logical databases contain data tables from sub-modules of sap hr.

PNP logical database contain data tables (HR Master Data & Time Data) infotypes 0000-0999 and 2000 to 2999) PAP logical database contains data tables of Recruitment (4000-4999) PCH logical database depends upon whether the object type is specified or not.

If the object type is specified , it would contain all infotypes for that object type and those infotypes of objects related to that object type., However, if not specified it would contain all infotypes.

Note : You should know when to choose between the PNP and the PCH logical databases when building your report or query and the key is whether you want the primary key for selection to be the personnel number or the object type. If the primary key is to be the PERNR ( personnel number) then you should select the PNP logical database and if you want it to be any object type like O org unit, S- position, C- job ,L- Business Event Group, D- Business Event Type EBusiness Event.etc) This means if you want to query by employee the business events attended, you choose PNP, and if you want to know for certain specific business events who are the attendees, you choose PCH logical database to build your query,program or reports.To conclude,we can say that to build an sap hr query ,user & standard sap programs or reports the preferred option and sap standard too, we use logical databases