Order Processing

When you save an order, the system creates these items:

• Project.

• Status row for the project.

• Contract with a Pending status.

• Project owning organization (if you configure PeopleSoft Project Costing to use organizations).

When you save an assignment, the system creates these items:

• Activity.

• Activity status.

• Activity team.

• Project team.

• Contract line.

• Amendment.

  Note:

  The first assignment creates the first contract line and activates the contract. However, starting with the second assignment, the additional contract lines are added via contract amendments.

• Billing plan with a status of Ready.

• Revenue recognition plan with a status of Ready.

In addition, when you save an assignment, the system performs these actions:

• Creates a link between the project, activity, and contract line.

• Creates a contract level rate set for the contract line and project activity (for temporary assignments).

• Creates billing events with the billing dates and amounts (for career assignments).

• Sends an application message to PeopleSoft HR to either create a job record (for temporary assignments only, and only if an additional job record cannot be reused and a new one must be created), or to add an effective dated record to an existing job record (for temporary assignments only, and only if an additional job record can be reused but some job information changed for the assignment, such as the tax location code).

• For temporary assignments only, the system either creates the employee time reporter data in PeopleSoft Time and Labor (if an additional job record cannot be reused and a new one must be created) or changes the employee time reporter data in PeopleSoft Time and Labor (if an additional job record can be reused but the workgroup or taskgroup changed).

• Creates a cross-reference between the employee job record and the project and activity (for temporary assignments only) in HCM.

• Sends the assignment pay rates to PeopleSoft Time and Labor to populate the pay rate in payroll (for temporary assignments only).

This topic discusses these areas of order processing:

• Career assignments.

• Temporary assignments.

• Edits and amendments.

Processing Career Assignments

When you enter a career assignment, you specify the fee for the placement and how much to bill on specific days.

Because career assignments are direct hires, you do not bill the customer for the hours that an employee works. Instead, you bill a negotiated amount for finding the customer a permanent employee. Therefore the product associated with the contract line (assignment) is amount-based. The billing plan associated with the assignment uses milestone billing. By entering a billing schedule, you are creating events to trigger the billing for a specified amount or percent of the total negotiated amount on specified dates. If you previously set the product on the contract profile for this transaction to Billing Manages Revenue, the system does not create a revenue recognition plan. If the product is not set to Billing Manages Revenue on the contract profile, then the system creates a revenue recognition plan that is set to recognize revenue according to the billing schedule.

Processing Temporary Assignments

When you enter a temporary assignment, you bill on a time and materials basis for the hours that an employee works. Therefore, the product associated with the contract line (assignment) is rate-based. The system creates an as-incurred billing plan for the temporary assignments and creates an as-incurred revenue recognition plan.

For temporary assignments, depending on installation specifications, the system either generates a new job record in the HCM database for each new assignment or tries to reuse existing job records by comparing the fields specified in the assignment against the same fields in the employee's already existing job records.

As part of the installation options, you specify whether the system will try to reuse existing job records or whether it will always create an additional job record for each new assignment. Additionally, users with proper security access can override the option chosen in the installation options and force the creation of a particular job for a particular assignment.

Two check boxes on the Staffing Installation page enable you to define how the system handles additional job record creation: one controls the additional job records process for hourly employees, and the other does so for salaried employees.

If the system creates an additional job, it populates the job record with the department, company, tax location code, workgroup, taskgroup, and so forth from the values specified in the assignment.

PeopleSoft Pay/Bill Management captures Job and Time Reporter information in the assignment to facilitate the creation of additional jobs if an employee hired in one staffing branch is borrowed to work on an order created by another branch. The new job record created may have a different PeopleSoft HR business unit, company, department, pay group, or location code than the one in his or her original hire record.

Note:

Do not use this feature as a replacement for employee permanent transfers. Transfers should be done in the HCM job component; the system will use the new employee job information as a default for subsequent assignment. Even if the employee is temporarily borrowed from one branch to another, you should seriously consider not creating an additional job and paying the employee out of his or her home PeopleSoft HR business unit, company department, and paygroup and using the PeopleSoft Project Costing sharing rules to share some of the cost and the revenue between the department that owns the order and the department that originally hired the employee.

Paying the employee out his or her home job (and HR business unit) has the advantage of W-2 requirement at the end of the year (if the two branches belong to distinct companies or legal entities within your staffing organization), as well as making employee job data maintenance in HCM easier because the employee will have less job records.

Remember that even when the installation options are configured to reuse employee job records and when the assignment job-related fields match those of an existing employee job record, the system may still create an additional job if that existing job record is already in use by another concurrent assignment. This system behavior is intentional to enable the performing of data changes in the employee job record for one assignment (for example, a tax location code change) without affecting an unrelated concurrent assignment.

When an assignment is created in the FSCM database, two application messages are sent to the HCM database:

Term	Definition
FO_ASGN_CREATE	The subscription code of this message uses component interfaces CI_JOB_DATA_EMP (for employees) and CI_JOB_DATA_CWR (for non-employees) to create a new employee job record number for the assignment with an action or reason of ADL, (additional job). A row is inserted in the FO_EMPL_XREF table to maintain a reference between the employee job record number and the project or activity in the FSCM database. This information is used on the PeopleSoft Pay/Bill Management Time Entry pages.
FO_ASGN_RATES_SYNC	This message sends the assignment rates to the FO_ASGN_RT_DTL table in the HCM database. The rates are mapped to time reporting codes in PeopleSoft Time and Labor through the rate element configuration table (FO_RATE_ELEMENT).

Processing Edits and Amendments

Once orders and assignments are created, some of the fields become display-only and can only be changed in the appropriate pages in PeopleSoft Project Costing, PeopleSoft Contracts, and PeopleSoft Human Capital by using the appropriate links in the Order and Assignment components.

Note:

Changes performed directly in those applications are not reflected back on the PeopleSoft Pay/Bill Management Order and Assignment components.