Don’t say you’ve never heard SAP HCM can do an organizational assignment or organizational chart planning. It definitely can with a bunch of tools. Let me show three effective ways how to plan organizational chart and one bonus!
First way without any settings
You can enter all changes with a future start date. It’s very easy! Open PPOME transaction, change the Key date and start entering new organizational chart, move organizational units, positions. The only thing you can’t do is to move people to avoid data inconsistency in the future. So, you change org structure to a planned one with the future date. Meantime all standard and custom reports work well, so you can print your orgchart and show to the boss or sign. If additional corrections needed you just make these and reprint org structure. In case it was not approved, you run standard programs to delete all future records and your current structure remains the same. Zero issue approach. One disadvantage – you can’t use Personnel Cost Planning module in SAP HCM to automate the budjet process.
Second way using infotype statuses
If you open PP01 transaction you’ll see tabs with different infotype status like this.
These are the statuses of approval workflow you can implement in your company. At First you start with copying data to planned status. You perform changes, run reports, analyze. Once done change status to submitted showing that they are under review. And then cycling through submitted – approved/rejected modes you easily track your progress with the whole change approval. Infotypes and objects in any state but Active doesn’t affect the current system or payroll, so you are free to use these. There is a transaction to change infotype status – RE_RHAKTI00. Ideally, you need to develop SAP Workflow and attach it to these changes, so the SAP system would track all changes and send reminders to all participants.
Third way or using alternative plans
Frankly speaking, it’s an extension of the second approach. You can have about one hundred different plans with its own orgchart data (objects, infotypes, relations). You can copy data from one plan to another with RE_RHCOPL00 transaction. It means when you start planning you copy actual plan from 01 to any other custom plan. Then in settings in PP01 or PPOME you switch to a new alternative plan and perform any changes. They won’t affect your live system and data.
You can utilize infotype statuses there, in an alternative plan, what would make your workflow more solid and manageable.
There is a trick. If you decide to copy alternative plan to the actual back, you need to make sure the data is consistent. There are options how to do that: use one number interval for all objects or freeze any changes to the current organizational chart in actual plan.
To compare different organizational graphs between plans use RE_RHCOPLPT transaction.
Bonus
If you have not heard about SAP Process and Forms module, I’d highly recommend you read this article https://saphcmsolutions.com/just-stop-using-sap-hcm-like-calculator-run-sap-hcm/ . There is a good explanation and example how you can organize your plan organizational chart process with a unique web-based technology absolutely at no cost.