Maintaining Your Organizational Structure

With the Manage Positions business process, you can create reporting relationships among positions, showing how they look in hierarchical form. Use this information, either through a report or online, for organizational planning.

Human Resources provides two ways to view positions in hierarchical form:

  • By entering supervisory position numbers in the Reports To Posn (position) field in the Position Data - Description page, you can generate reports that show position hierarchies.

  • If you want to see part of your organization chart online, use PeopleSoft Tree Manager to create a position tree, which illustrates position hierarchies.

These topics discuss how to:

  • Establish position hierarchies in Position Data.

  • Maintain position hierarchies in PeopleSoft Tree Manager.

You can establish hierarchical information for your entire organization in the Position Data pages by establishing reporting relationships among positions. Assign positions to one another directly, indirectly, or both, where applicable.

Here's how to set up position hierarchies:

  1. Open the Position Data - Description page (Organizational Development > Position Management > Maintain Positions/Budgets > Add/Update Position Info).

  2. Establish direct and or indirect (dotted-line) reporting relationships.

    1. To establish direct reporting relationships, enter the supervisor's position number in the Reports To field on the Position Data, Description page for each position that you create.

    2. To establish indirect reporting relationships, select a position number in the Dot-Line field on the Position Data - Description page.

  3. Save your changes.

Once you enter all the reporting relationships among positions, run the Build Position Structure SQR (POS006A), which links the positions in the system and creates an organizational hierarchy.

Establishing Direct Reporting Relationships

This data links positions to one another, and establishes reporting relationships among positions. Viewing position hierarchies are especially useful for budgeting and organizational planning.

Note: When Position Management is set to Partial in the Installation Table and the Reports to Position and the Supervisor ID fields contain values in Position Data, both fields appear in Job Data until you enter a value in one or the other.

Currently, if you save a position without selecting a position number in the Reports To Posn field, the system issues a warning message. You don't have to enter a position number after you acknowledge the message. But if you want to require this field for all positions, change the warning message to an error message. The system won't allow you to save the data without an entry in this field.

Establishing Indirect Reporting Relationships

You can enter this data for employees who officially report to one position, while on a functional basis they also work for another position.

For example, Joe Conrad, a computer technician, officially reports to the Plant Manager in Milwaukee, but functionally he works for the Computer Services Manager in the head office. Enter the Computer Services Manager position number in the Dot-Line field to reflect this situation.

Establishing Reporting Hierarchies by Creating a Top Position

To establish reporting hierarchies, you must create a top position that reports to itself.

To establish a top position:

  1. Add the top position.

  2. Save the top position.

  3. Reopen the top position and enter the top position number in the Reports To field on the Position Data - Description page.

  4. Save the top position again.

If you want to represent a portion of your organizational structure graphically, create position hierarchies in PeopleSoft Tree Manager. It enables you to view all the positions in hierarchical order at the levels that you designate, such as the top five levels of management. This is useful for what-if scenarios in organizational planning. For planning at the department level, create a position tree with only the positions in a particular department.

Note: Review the PeopleSoft Tree Manager documentation for a full, detailed discussion about PeopleSoft Tree Manager before you attempt to modify or create Position Trees.

This topic discusses using PeopleSoft Tree Manager to define and maintain Position Trees in Human Resources but is not an exhaustive discussion about the use of PeopleSoft Tree Manager.

Within PeopleSoft Tree Manager you can also view incumbent and position data in the context of the department or other part of the organization you're viewing. To do so, click a position number to display the Position Data pages.

Note: PeopleSoft recommends that you use the Tree Manager for position trees only if your company is small or, if your organization is large, you plan to only represent a few levels of management. You can also create separate position trees that incorporate small portions of your organization. Otherwise, generate the report, POS006, to manage and view your reporting hierarchies.

Building Position Trees

How to create a new position tree is described in the PeopleSoft Tree Manager documentation. Enter the following data in the Tree Definition and Properties page to create a position tree:

Field

Value

Tree Name

Enter a name to help you identify this tree.

Structure ID

Select Position. PeopleSoft delivers the system with this Structure ID set up.

Description

Enter a description of the tree.

Effective Date

Enter the date the tree becomes effective.

Status

Select the status of the tree.

Category

Select the category of the tree.

Use of Levels

Select Strictly Enforced if your levels consist of only one type of entity. For example, only Regions report to the Company level, and only Divisions report to Regions.

Select Loosely Enforced if the entities combine different types of entities. For example, both Regions and Divisions report to the Company level.

Select Not Used if your security structure is very flat and you don't need to set up groupings of units in levels.

All Detail Values in this Tree

Leave this blank.

Allow Duplicate Detail Values

Leave this blank.

Inserting Nodes

Once you've created the basic tree structure, add the nodes. In a position tree, each node represents a position, defined on the Position Data table. The first node is known as the root node, and is the highest level in the hierarchy or reporting structure.

See the product documentation for PeopleTools: Tree Manager