Employee Schedules

Begin setting up employee schedules by analyzing the calendars that exist in your organization. Within the context of employee scheduling, you need to consider three levels of planning information:

• Activities

• Calendars

• Schedules

Items that you enter into a calendar for Human Capital Management (HCM) are activities. Activities functionally parallel pay types. You need to set up activity types in a user-defined code (UDC) table.

Employee scheduling uses three types of calendars:

• Individual

• Template (work patterns)

• Holiday

Individual calendars might include such activities as individual work patterns that involve multiple pay types and planned leave time. To avoid duplicating terms, use a template rather than a work schedule to represent the repetitive blocks of time that an employee normally works. Examples of templates include:

• Part time.

• Casual (day labor, contract).

• Full time.

• Weekend days.

• Night shift.

Many organizations need to create multiple holiday calendars. Depending on company rules about employee holidays, some groups of employees might receive different holiday time off than others. For example, full-time employees might receive a set of nationally recognized holidays as paid time off, while part-time employees might receive the same holidays off but without pay. Another example is full-time employees receive a set of paid holidays, but a union contract specifies a slightly different set of paid holidays.

Because various holiday calendars can conflict, and conflicting holiday activity types can exist, this hierarchy of calendars applies:

1. Union

2. Business unit

3. State

4. Company

When a conflict exists between a union calendar and any other assigned calendar, the union calendar takes precedence. For example, if a company calendar specifies the same time off for a particular employee's holiday, the system uses the union calendar.

Schedules include one or more calendars. For example, an employee schedule might include individual, template and holiday calendars. In some instances, where overlapping holiday calendars exist, an employee schedule might include four or more calendars. Not only can different holiday calendars include conflicting days off, they can also include different activity types that track to different pay rates.

When you have analyzed the calendars that exist in your organization, you are ready to create activity types in a UDC table. You access the User Defined Codes Program (P0004A) from a menu in the Associate Pay Types with Activity Types program (P073111). When you have completed the activity types, you need to link them to existing pay types. When the linking activity is complete, you are ready to set up calendars. After defining calendars, you can create employee schedules by linking calendars to employee groups.