SAP HCM Organizational Structure

Welcome to the tutorial about SAP HCM Organizational Structure. After completing this tutorial you will get initial understanding about maintaining an organizational structure of an enterprise in the Organization Management submodule of SAP HCM.

There are 3 fundamental structures in SAP HCM:

• Enterprise structure
• Personnel structure
• Organizational structure

Enterprise and Personnel structures are part of the Personnel Management and Organization structure is part of Organizational Management (OM) submodule of SAP HCM.

The assignment to those 3 structures must allow to precisely locate any employee in the organization. Those structures are used to:

• Group together employees who share common rules and policies in terms of personnel administration, time management or payroll
• Generate default values
• Provide structures selection criteria
• Structure authorizations on master data

Overview of SAP HCM Organizational Structure

Now, let’s discuss SAP HCM organizational structure in more details. The organizational unit is a box in the pyramid of the organizational chart: a business unit, a department, a team, etc.

The position can be seen as a chair, on which will seat an employee, or a person.

Those objects are far from being the only ones existing in Organizational Management (OM) and will be detailed later on in this presentation.

Objects and Relationships

OM uses the concept of object and relationship. The following rules apply:

• An object has a type and is useless if not linked to at least one another object
• A relationship is always both ways (A and B relationships)
• A relationship has a type, which has a functional meaning (for example, 008, 012, etc.)
• All relationships are not allowed between two defined object types

Positions and Jobs

For various purposes, positions that share common characteristics may need to be grouped. This is done using the notion of job. It is used for instance to make easier maintenance of required qualifications, creation of requisitions for recruitment, or simply for reporting.

All these objects are linked in an organizational structure with so called ‘relationships’. These assignments between objects intend to cover the following business issues in the system:

Hierarchical structures

Define assignments between objects to describe their hierarchical relationship to each other. For example, you assign organizational units to each other hierarchically to represent the organizational structure of your enterprise or your organization and assign the individual organizational units to the positions that belong to them. You also use assignments to state which employee staffs which position.

Object characteristics

It is possible to use assignments to define object characteristics if own object types are planned to represent these characteristics in the system in the data model for the component Personnel & Organization. You can use the assignment of jobs to positions to describe the characteristics.

Relationships to objects of other components

It is possible to use assignments to represent relationships between objects of the component Personnel & Organization and objects of other components in the system. You can thus assign organizational units or positions to cost centers to represent the relationship between the organizational structure and the cost center structure.

Staffing

When assigning an employee to a position in the infotype 0001 (Organizational Assignment), a link is created between the employee and the position in OM.

The relationship between a position and a person holds a notion of staffing percentage. This percentage needs to be correctly set to reflect the real situation. Mostly this will be set to 100%, but it may be otherwise. This is typically the case of “double hats” (people that occupy two or more positions at the same time):

This represents employees splitting their time between two (or more) positions.

Transactions for SAP HCM Organizational Structure

Below is the list of common transactions to display, create or change the organizational structure in SAP:

PP01 – Maintain Plan Data

PPOME – Change Organization and Staffing

PP02 – Maintain Plan Data

PPOSE – Display organization and Staffing Basis – Organizational Management

PPOCE – Create Organization and Staffing Basis – Organizational Management

PO10 – Maintain organizational units

PO13 – Maintain positions

PPOSE/PPOME are very complete transactions which give many display possibilities:

• Many search tools are available
• Display of structure area is adaptable to add or remove columns
• Display is time-dependent and shows movements
• Various structure views are available: with or without staff, reversed, etc.
• Infotype data shown in bottom part of the screen have been adapted to best suit our needs.

With these transactions you can

• See planned moves

  

• Change the display dates to show the organizational structure on a desired date in the past or in the future

• Change the view to best suit your needs (here viewing from the employee upward)

  

• Search in various ways on various object types

 

Organizational units and positions should be modified only using transaction PP01, PO10 (organizational units only) or PO13 (positions only). They are more expert oriented and give you the full control over what you’re modifying and access to all the infotypes.

Whichever transaction is used, it is important to correctly manage dates. Indeed, the date on which data is starting in the SAP system must reflect the reality. For instance, if you decide to change an organizational unit title, then you would want to keep the historical name and date before changing to the new name before the real start date.

PP01 is an expert transaction which allows accessing all the infotypes available for a particular object. It handles the following situations:

1. A position changes its title on the 1st of March.
2. A cost center associated with the position you created has to be changed from a particular date.
3. The job associated with the position you created has to be changed from a particular date.
4. Move a position to another organizational unit.
5. Change your organizational unit manager.

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