Hi folks -
yip at one of my favourite places a public sector client who no doubt uses absence across multiple assignments. Given that this functionality is person based - I was wondering of anyone has done something interesting or magical to get this working.

Happy to hear of any war stories or 'work arounds'

Colette, what sort of functionality are you looking to achieve, for someone with more than one assignment? I don't have any war stories as such, but it might help to know a little more detail about what you want to do.

Hi Colette,

If we are talking sickness absence, then this has always been a problem for payroll. As you rightly say, it is person based and the statutory sick pay elements will only be created on the primary assignment. The argument in the past has been where an employee may have two jobs, one manual and one clerical. They may sustain an injury that doesn't allow them to do the manual job but they may be well enough to continue the clerical job. If the manual job is the secondary assignment, you can't record the sickness against it. I suppose a possible workaround would be to switch the primary and secondary assignments for the period of the absence but that sounds a bit fiddly and something I've never tried.

Delboy

Hi there - thanks for getting back to me.
It's generally around handling absence across multiple assignments. There is fucntionality availaible based on work schedules that I hear can drive absence mangement across assignments? Not sure if that is true... my current understanding is that there is usually either business decision to drive absence off primary assignment or some addtional configuration in EIT etc to cater for second assignment.

Hello,

I'm not answering with all the facts here, but your observation about work schedules is essentially correct, and I think that this approach may help.

If you have an employee who works two jobs, which are represented against two assignments, then you can have the associated hours/days for each job configured in work schedules attached to each assignment.

Now let's assume the employee works clerical from 09:00 to 15:00 as their primary assignment, and cleaning from 18:00 to 21:00 as their secondary; and is injured, hence being unable to perform their cleaning job -- their secondary assignment. This means that when the sickness absence is registered, on the basis that you are recording the sickness absence in hours, you would register the person as sick from 18:00 to 21:00, in line with the work schedule pertinent with their second assignment. Obviously, and unfortunately, the sickness absence element, and the enrolment element if you are using the occupational sickness plan functionality, will be recorded against the primary assignment.

When processing the pay run for the primary assignment, you can drive a formula off the sickness element, or basic pay element depending on your requirements, to look at the sickness details, and check the work schedule for the assignment to ascertain whether there is any overlap. In the scenario above, there would be no overlap for the primary assignment, hence no impact on pay.

The last part of this problem is what do you do with the secondary assignment, as there is nothing recorded here to identify whether a sickness absence has occurred. My thoughts on this are on the slightly complex side... You have a standard information element permanently assigned to the employee which is processed through the pay run for the secondary assignment. When processed, the element runs a formula that checks for instances of sickness absence during the pay period. If any absences are found, the formula then checks, as above, whether there is any overlap between the absence and the work schedule for the secondary assignment. If there is, as we have in the scenario above, then the formula spawns an indirect element that performs the required pay calculation, or acts as a triggering input for the basic pay formula to work out the appropriate pay for the secondary assignment.

Please feel free to PM me if this explanation doesn't make enough sense.

Regards,

Peter.

I cannot add much to Peter's extensive observations, however having gigged at the nations healthcare provider for a while now i can say that there has been extensive lobbying, to Oracle, to "do something about this abboration" for some time.

Suffice to say that the solution in place here involves a heady mix of custom code (processes and formulae) and manual intervention (on the users part) to ensure things get calculated with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

Thanks for that, all very helpful and made me quite fearful - it confirms all doubt that I had.

I did hear a rumor that Oracle have a solution for absence across multiple assignments...but it seems that you need to purchase said soltion...mmm

hmmmmmm indeed. Sounds interesting!

At some point Oracle will have to provide a solution to this issue, as its one of the biggies that they get beaten up about at most HR-user groups globally.
If i were a betting man, i'd wager that there is a solution built for the new Fusion Apps...Wether it makes its way back into R12 is another matter.

When I went to the Pre GA Fusion sessions last year I took a note.... '• For Oracle eBusiness customers, it should be noted that Payroll is based on a person, NOT on an assignment, so multiple assignment issues should vanish.'

Hopefully this is going to be resolved.