In this article by Pravin Ingawale, author of the book Oracle E-Business Suite R12.x HRMS – A Functionality Guide, will learn about entering a person’s information in Oracle HRMS. We will understand the hiring process in Oracle. This, actually, is part of the Oracle I-recruitment module in Oracle apps. Then we will see how to create an employee in Core HR. Then, we will learn the concept of person types and defining person types. We will also learn about entering information for an employee, including additional information.
Let’s see how to create an employee in core HR.
(For more resources related to this topic, see here.)
Creating an employee
An employee is the most important entity in an organization. Before creating an employee, the HR officer must know the date from which the employee will be active in the organization. In Oracle terminology, you can call it the employee’s hire date. Apart from this, the HR officer must know basic details of the employee such as first name, last name, date of birth, and so on.
Navigate to US HRMS Manager | People | Enter and Maintain.
This is the basic form, called People in Oracle HRMS, which is used to create an employee in the application. As you can see in the form, there is a field named Last, which is marked in yellow. This indicates that this is mandatory to create an employee record.
First, you need to set the effective date on the form. You can set this by clicking on the icon, as shown in the following screenshot:
You need to enter the mandatory field data along with additional data. The following screenshot shows the data entered:
Once you enter the required data, you need to specify the action for the entered record. The action we have selected is Create Employment. The Create Employment action will create an employee in the application. There are other actions such as Create Applicant, which is used to create an applicant for I-Recruitment. The Create Placement action is used to create a contingent worker in your enterprise. Once you select this action, it will prompt you to enter the person type of this employee as in the following screenshot. Select the Person Type as Employee and save the record. We will see the concept of person type in the next section.
Once you select the employee person type and then save the record, the system will automatically generate the employee number for the person. In our case, the system has generated an employee number 10160.
So now, we have created an employee in the application.
Concept of person types
In any organization, you need to identify different types of people. Here, you can say that you need to group different types of people. There are basically three types of people you capture in HRMS system. They are as follows:
- Employees: These include current employees and past employees. Past employees are those who were part of your enterprise earlier and are no longer active in the system. You can call them terminated or ex-employees.
- Applicants: If you are using I-recruitment, applicants can be created.
- External people: Contact is a special category of external type. Contacts are associated with an employee or an applicant. For example, there might be a need to record the name, address, and phone number of an emergency contact for each employee in your organization.
There might also be a need to keep information on dependents of an employee for medical insurance purposes or for some payments in payroll processing.
Using person types
There are predefined person types in Oracle HRMS. You can add more person types as per your requirements. You can also change the name of existing person types when you install the system.
Let’s take an example for your understanding. Your organization has employees. There might be employees of different types; you might have regular employees and employees who are contractors in your organization. Hence, you can categorize employees in your organization into two types:
- Regular employees
- Consultants
The reason for creating these categories is to easily identify the employee type and store different types of information for each category.
Similarly, if you are using I-recruitment, then you will have candidates. Hence, you can categorize candidates into two types. One will be internal candidate and the other will be external candidate.
Internal candidates will be employees within your organization who can apply for an opening within your organization. An external candidate is an applicant who does not work for your organization but is applying for a position that is open in your company.
Defining person types
In an earlier section, you learned the concept of person types, and now you will learn how to define person types in the system.
Navigate to US HRMS Manager | Other Definitions | Person Types.
In the preceding screenshot, you can see four fields, that is, User Name, System Name, Active, and Default flag.
There are eight person types recognized by the system and identified by a system name. For each system name, there are predefined usernames. A username can be changed as per your needs. There must be one username that should be the default. While creating an employee, the person types that are marked by the default flag will come by default.
To change a username for a person type, delete the contents of the User Name field and type the name you’d prefer to keep.
To add a new username to a person type system name:
- Select New Record from the Edit menu.
- Enter a unique username and select the system name you want to use.
Deactivating person types
You cannot delete person types, but you can deactivate them by unchecking the Active checkbox.
Entering personal and additional information
Until now, you learned how to create an employee by entering basic details such as title, gender, and date of birth. In addition to this, you can enter some other information for an employee. As you can see on the people form, there are various tabs such as Employment, Office details, Background, and so on. Each tab has some fields that can store information.
For example, in our case, we have stored the e-mail address of the employee in the Office Details tab.
Whenever you enter any data for an employee and then click on the Save button, it will give you two options as shown in the following screenshot:
You have to select one of the options to save the data. The differences between both the options are explained with an example. Let’s say you have hired a new employee as of 01-Jan-2014. Hence, a new record will be created in the application with the start date as 01-Jan-2014. This is called an effective start date of the record. There is no end date for this record, so Oracle gives it a default end date, which is 31-Dec-4712. This is called the effective end date of the record.
Now, in our case, Oracle has created a single record with the start date and end date as 01-Jan-2014 and 31-Dec-4712, respectively.
When we try to enter additional data for this record (in our case, it is phone number) then Oracle will prompt you to select the Correction or Update option. This is called the date-tracked option. If you select the correction mode, then Oracle will update an existing record in the application.
Now, if you date track to, say, 01-Aug-2014 and then enter the phone number and select the update mode, then it will end the historical data with the new date minus one and create a new record with the start date 01-Aug-2014 with the phone number that you have entered. Thus, the historical data will be preserved and a new record will be created with the start date 01-Aug-2014 and a phone number.
The following tabular representation will help you understand better in Correction mode:
|
Employee Number |
LastName |
Effective Start Date |
Effective End Date |
Phone Number |
|
10160 |
Test010114 |
01-Jan-2014 |
31-Dec-4712 |
+0099999999 |
Now, if you want to change the phone number from 01-Aug-2014 in Update mode (date 01-Aug-2014), then the record will be as follows:
|
Employee Number |
LastName |
Effective Start Date |
Effective End Date |
Phone Number |
|
10160 |
Test010114 |
01-Jan-2014 |
31-Jul-2014 |
+0099999999 |
|
10160 |
Test010114 |
01-Aug-2014 |
31-Jul-2014 |
+0088888888 |
Thus, in update mode, you can see that historical data is intact. If HR wants to view some historical data, then the HR employee can easily view this data.
Everything associated with Oracle HRMS is date-tracked. Every characteristic about the organization, person, position, salary, and benefits is tightly date-tracked.
This concept is very important in Oracle and is used in almost all the forms in which you store employee-related information.
Thus, you have learned about the date tracking concept in Oracle APPS.
There are some additional fields, which can be configured as per your requirements. Additional personal data can be stored in these fields. These are called as descriptive flexfields in Oracle. We created personal DFF to store data about Years of Industry Experience and whether an employee is Oracle Certified or not.
This data can be stored in the People form DFF as marked in the following screenshot:
When you click on the box, it will open the new form as shown in the following screenshot. Here, you can enter the additional data. This is called Additional Personal Details DFF. It is stored in personal data; this is normally referred to as the People form DFF.
We have created a Special Information Types (SIT) to store information on languages known by an employee. This data will have two attributes, namely, the language known and the fluency.
This can be entered by navigating to US HRMS Manager | People | Enter and Maintain | Special Info.
Click on the Details section. This will open a new form to enter the required details.
Each record in the SIT is date-tracked. You can enter the start date and the end date.
Thus, we have seen DFF in which you stored additional person data and we have seen KFF, where you enter the SIT data.
Summary
In this article, you have learned about creating a new employee, entering employee data, and additional data using DFF and KFF. You also learned the concept of person type.
Resources for Article:
Further resources on this subject:
- Knowing the prebuilt marketing, sales, and service organizations [article]
- Oracle E-Business Suite with Desktop Integration [article]
- Oracle Integration and Consolidation Products [article]
