When we embarked on a multi-city and multi-customer trip across India to meet senior executives in HR line of business, most of them were looking for smoothening of various processes in their organizations – some needed solution to implement processes like hiring, while others looked for solution for their complex processes like promotion and transfer, and some asked for a flexi car lease policy etc. – and such asks were common across private and public sector. While it was possible to go the usual way of delivering these one by one – the idea that struck us is whether such diverse requirements of various processes can be met by single, flexible and easy to use framework? Can such a framework be made adaptable enough for future needs, and for customer specific requirements?

This is the genesis of the new solution – SAP HR Policy Management – that enables organization to configure, draft, formalize, simulate, launch and monitor policies – enabling policy to execution.

Now let us see what such a solution should have to make it generic across organizations while ensuring simplicity of use and execution:

• Policy creation and maintenance via basic building blocks: You should be able to create a policy by basic building blocks like eligibility checks, approval path, condition based branching etc. It would be added advantage if solution can also generate a document describing policy in detail for easy communication to stake holders and employees.
• Predict budget impact of policy: Once you have the policy document detailing eligibility criteria of employees, solution should be able to tell you how much cost this policy will have, on today as well as on a future date.
• Implement the process that makes policy happen, and maintain it: And of course, just creating a policy document is not enough. Depending on the document that you created, solution should be able to put necessary code pieces and customizing together on its own to actually implement self-service scenario and workflow based process in the system.
• Make policy available to intended users only: You should be able to control who can see and use the policy based on various criteria.
• Versioning the policy: Solution should support tracking usage and adoption of the policy. In case you find less than expected adoption rate, solution should support easy modification to the policy creating a new version. Such modifications should be easy to make and roll-out.

Also, such a solution should be free of technical jargon. Policy creation is a business user’s activity, and it should remain so. Solution should be easy to use, without technical dependencies and complex configurations.

HR Policy Management solution does all these, and more. It is a web based application that supports policy creation by easy drag and drop of various choices. It can work directly in production environment, thus eliminating need of complex maintenance.

Following are some of the things that you can do by easy drag and drop choices, or button clicks, without any coding or even IMG customizing:

• Determine how many checks and approval steps your policy should have, and in which sequence.
• Specify eligibility criteria of employee for policy use, like employee should have completed 5 years in organization, or employee should be married. Or even something complex like employee should have average net salary of last 5 years above certain limit.
• Build approval path for policy request. So you can set up a process such that when employee attempts to avail, his/her request should be approved by immediate manager, HR contact person and local travel management team.
• Update employee master data like one-time payment Infotype or leave quota depending on whether policy was successfully availed or not.

Solution has many such built in checks and code pieces that you can use directly. If you need something beyond, you can create your own checks and code pieces easily.

This solution is available as part of EA-HR 607 which can be implemented on top of EhP6.