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Understanding the Employee Profile Feature

Many users of activity-based management applications are primarily interested in the costs of processes, activities, and tasks that are carried out within their organizations. An in-depth understanding of the costs of these processes and activities, and their associated costs, can provide insight, and can also help to answer the following types of questions:

Much of the information that is required to find answers to questions such as these involves collecting information about work activities from individual employees or groups of employees performing similar tasks. This can be a daunting task in large organizations, but the Activity-Based Management Employee Profile feature makes the collection of this information as efficient as possible.

Every employee or group of employees should be able to select activities that they are performing from the delivered activity dictionary. This functionality is either called Employee Survey when it is performed on a continuous basis, or Employee Profile when it is performed as a template over a certain period of time. The system uses these employee activity profiles to drive resources to activities for workforce-related costs in a more precise and documented manner.

To start the process, you must create activities either with the Activity component or with PeopleSoft Tree Manager. You must ensure that any personal employee information has been entered and is available to the system. Next, you associate work performed on activities, such as tasks, with a percentage of time or actual hours worked.

Employee Profiles

The Employee Profile feature enables you to create resources and resource drivers based on information related to employees and the activities those employees perform. The employee information can come from either PeopleSoft Time and Labor or from the Employee Profile module in Activity-Based Management.

Time and labor information is important, because it links people and activities, indirectly forming the basic setup for resource drivers. If you have installed PeopleSoft Time and Labor, the Employee Profile feature derives employee activity information directly from time and labor data. The system uses data migration tools to aggregate the information to the fiscal year and accounting period, providing the most accurate source of employee activity information. If you are using PeopleSoft Time and Labor, the Employee Profile process associates employees with the activities by creating system-generated, effective-dated resources, drivers, and driver quantities.

If you do not use PeopleSoft Time and Labor or do not use it for all of your employees, you can use the Employee Profile feature delivered with Activity-Based Management to capture activity information. The Employee Profile functionality enables you to define an activity profile for individual employees or to define an activity profile for a group of employees who perform similar activities and who constitute a work group or department. These profiles are defined with an effective date and capture information on the activities that are performed by employees, work groups, or departments. Profiles remain active until they are superseded by a profile with a different effective date. Models using the Employee Profile feature calculate the budgeted hours with the employee profile data. The Employee Profile feature requires that an activity profile exist for each employee of the company whether they are part of a workgroup or whether they are modeled separately. Running the Employee Profile process generates a resource object for each employee, department, and work group. It also generates the resource drivers for each resource to activity reported.

Note: Because employee profiles are effective-dated and are not aggregated into a fiscal year and accounting period, they cannot be used to capture day-to-day employee activity information. If you require this functionality, you must use PeopleSoft Time and Labor.

How the Employee Profile feature works:

  • The Employee Profile feature analyzes employee activity first by verifying that the information exists in the employee profile that you have defined.

  • Activity-Based Management uses the employee activity information if it is available; otherwise, it searches for the information in the operational warehouse - enriched (OWE) tables.

    Either way, the time and labor information is automatically transformed into resource and driver data.

  • The Employee Profile engine generates resources and drivers.

Populating Tables for the Employee Profile Feature

If you have installed PeopleSoft Time and Labor, to use the Employee Profile feature you must populate the following tables:

Required Table

ETL Job

JOB_F00

J_F00_PS_JOB

PERSONAL_D00

J_D00_PS_PERSONAL

TIME_LABOR_F00

J_FACT_PS_F_TIME_LABOR_E1

If you are using the Employee Profile module to obtain employee data, you must populate the following tables:

Required Table

ETL Job

JOB_F00

J_F00_PS_JOB

JOBCODE_D00

J_D00_PS_JOBCODE

PERSONAL_D00

J_D00_PS_PERSONAL

DEPARTMENT_TBL

J_BASE_PS_DEPARTMENT_TBL

EMPL_SURVEY_TBL

Data is entered online using ABM.

EMPL_SURVEY_SEQ

Data is entered online using ABM.

Note: If you choose to obtain employee survey data using ETL, rather than entering it on an Activity-Based Management Employee Survey page, you must create your own ETL job. If you do not use Activity-Based Management Employee Survey pages to enter data, then you do not need to populate the PERSONAL_D00 table.

If you are not using department activities, you do not need to populate the DEPARTMENT_TBL table.

Employee Profile and the Operational Warehouse

Personal employee information combined with the department and job information creates a maintainable employee profile. The Employee Profile process utilizes this information to create resources and resource drivers for each employee, department, and work group.

Image: Employee profile and operational warehouse tables

The following diagram illustrates the informational relationships.

 Employee profile and operational warehouse tables

Activity Fragmentation

An important feature of analyzing employee activity is the ability to determine activity fragmentation. Activity fragmentation provides information about the number of employees that are involved in completing a particular activity on either a full-time or part-time basis. It provides managers with a convenient measure that helps them focus their attention on areas within the business that might be made more efficient. The degree to which an activity is divided among the members of an organization can be represented by the activity fragmentation ratio.

With activity fragmentation, the number of full-time equivalents (FTEs) performing the activity is divided by the number of people performing the activity. In general, higher fragmentation ratios indicate efficiency while lower ratios indicate inefficiency.

Here's the formula that the system uses to calculate activity fragmentation:number of FTEs / headcount for activity = fragmentation.

This table lists how fragmentation can be used:

Activity

Full-time Equivalents Performing Activity

Number of People Performing Activity

Fragmentation Ratio

Selling products

4

15

0.2557

Performing credit checks

12

24

0.5000

Delivering goods

1

6

0.1667

According to this example, the activity delivering goods has the lowest fragmentation ratio. Upon closer examination, it appears that six people are delivering goods that could be performed by one full-time equivalent. While there may be justifiable business reasons for this particular structure, it is easy to see how Activity-Based Management can identify areas that need to be assessed for optimal efficiency.

Use the Employee Profile setup page to define the data elements that are necessary to capture information about activity fragmentation. After running the Activity-Based Management engine, you can view your activity fragmentation information from the inquiry pages.