Newsletter December 2005

How to create your own Evaluation Path

We often hear on projects or seminars that many customers are unsure about customizing a new evaluation path. Today we’d like to give you a step-by-step instruction how to create customer evaluation paths.

First of all: What is an Evaluation Path and what do we need it for?
The shortest Evaluation Path is the relationship between two object types. For instance a person is a holder of a position and a position is held by a person.
If there are to evaluate many persons out of an organizational structure, we surely need more of those relationships: e.g. from one organizational unit to another to positions and finally to persons. Evaluation Paths contain a sequence of object relationships.
With help of relationships you can create organizational structures (and structures in event management or personnel development). With Evaluation Paths you evaluate parts of the structures and get out a set of objects.
Standard R/3 contains a series of relationships and Evaluation Paths. For instance the relationship between a person and a position is called “Holder” relationship with code A or B 008. And all persons along an organizational structure will be evaluated with standard Evaluation Path PERS-O.
Among other occasions you will need a new Evaluation Path, if you have created an own object type which shall be reported or if your reporting or authorization concept needs a customer relationship because of your company specifics. Imagine a requirement where the leader of an organizational unit has to take the responsibility for other units for HR system purposes without being the disciplinal leader. In this case you have to create a new relationship which connects the position with the additional organizational units (see Figure 1).

Fig. 1: Example of a customer structure

To display this structure you first have to create a new relationship. Then you define the new Evaluation Path. With this path you can evaluate all subordinated persons of organizational unit A and additionally all persons of organizational unit B. We will now explain the procedure of definition step-by-step.

1. Create the new relationship as follows:

1. Choose the following path of the Implementation Guide: Personnel Management ► Organizational Management ► Basic Settings ► Data Model Enhancement ► Relationship Maintenance ► Maintain Relationships.

2. Create the new relationship using the customer name space. Start the evaluation path name with either „Y“ or „Z“. Choose descriptions for both directions (see Figure 2). Every relationship has two directions, one from the active to the passive object (bottom up) and reciprocal (top down). They are necessary to build up a structure. Also starting from an object you want to get to every other superordinate and subordinate object.

Fig. 2: Creating a new relationship

3. In the same customizing area now define the allowed Relationships between the object types. Be aware using the right relationship direction A or B (see Figure 3).

Fig. 3: Defining allowed relationships between object types

4. Create the new subtypes of Infotype 1001 “Relationships” using the path Personnel Management ► Organizational Management ►Basic Settings ► Data Model Enhancement ► Infotype Maintenance ► Maintain Subtypes.

5. At last define the time constraint for the new subtypes. Using time constraint 3 for relationship direction AY01 a position can have many organizational units to account for. An organizational unit on the other hand can only be accounted by a single position – time constraint 2 (see Figure 4).

Fig. 4: Maintenance of time constraint for subtype BY01

Result: In Expert Mode you now can maintain the new relationship between a position and an organizational unit. So you expand the structure of your organizational management (see Figure 5).

Fig. 5: Manager of HR Administration accounts for two other organizational units

2. For displaying or evaluating the new structure you have to create a new Evaluation Path:

1. Choose the following path of the Implementation Guide: Personnel Management ► Organizational Management ► Basic Settings ► Maintain Evaluation Paths.

2. Create a new Evaluation Path using customer name space „Y” or “Z” (see Figure 6).

Fig. 6:Creating an Evaluation Path

• Then choose Evaluation Path (individual maintenance). Have a clear image of your organizational structure! Selecting an organizational unit - which relationships are on the way to the subordinated and additionally assigned persons? Those are the relationships:

  • between two organizational units (No. 10),

  • between an organizational unit and the assigned positions (No. 20),

  • between the positions and the holders (No. 30) and

  • between the positions and the additional organizational units (No. 40). No. 10 to 30 again evaluate all subordinated organizational units, positions an persons (see Figure 7).

  The sequence of table entries is not decisive for the display of the results.
  In the Skip field, you specify that a particular relationship is to be included in the evaluation path, but that the second object type in this relationship is not to be displayed.

Fig. 7: Evaluation Path (individual maintenance)

Result: With help of report RHSTRU00 you can display the output of the new Evaluation Path (see Figure 8). Our sample organizational structure contains a root node (“Human Resources”) and four subordinate organizational units (“Personnel Administration”, “Personnel Development & Controlling”, “Social and legal”, “Personnel Training”). As you can see in Figure 5 the Manager of “Personnel Administration” additionally accounts for the units “Personnel Development & Controlling” and “Social and legal”.

Fig. 8: Structure display with selected organizational unit 50000147 and Evaluation Path Y01_PERS

Compared to this, the output without using the customer relationship Y01 (selecting standard Evaluation Path PERS-O “Persons along an organizational structure”) looks as shown in figure 9:

Fig. 9: The structure display only contains persons of organizational unit “Personnel Administration”

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