Other's experience regarding process for factory workers (blue collar) in SuccessFactors

[inepre1]

Hi experts,

I really want to hear about how you in other companies handle blue collar workers, particularly in position management. For instance, do you use mass positions or create single positions? Are the employees firstly hired into a training position and then moved somewhere else in the company? etc

Hoping someone reaches out to elaborate on the general process, and I am happy to share more questions as well.

Thanks!

Ines

[nlgro023]

Sounds like you rather have a business need to decouple the manager from the position (which can also be done), for which the employee can then keep the position, but you can for instance do a mass change to update the manager (which will likely be a lot more efficient).

[inepre1]

Hi Jasper,

For this scenario, with decouple - do you mean to remove the higher level position field and just work with the supervisor field in job info. How does this work?

[nlgro023]

Well decouple is a bigger term here to describe that settings/business rules are to be changed to ensure manager is not overwritten all the time by the system default. There for instance commonly is a sync in provisioning that checks on a daily basis if the manager matches the one of the position and if not it sets that person as the manager, there are likely business rules that (onsave - on top of the more common onchange version of that) set a new manager and there may be some position management settings for instance enforcing the manager of the position to be the manager of the employee at all time (and some customers even go as far by making the manager field read only for users/admins.

In essence you just aim to change the setup in such a way that (on change of the position, maybe even for certain groups only such as blue collars) the default setting is the manager of the position, but that you can deviate from it as desired. The benefit is then that you can use mass changes (or easier one off changes) to change the manager if desired (combined with the mass position) as you could then for instance say everyone with position X should now get Manager Y via the mass change (which sounds a whole lot more efficient to me if the manager relation has to be correct all the time). If concessions can be made, I'd personally recommend just having someone generally be the manager in the system and the actual management being done towards the blue collars just to be an 'outside of the system' thing, as it would then just be whole lot of administration for nothing.

[inepre1]

Yeah, could be too complicated as well. I actually just discussed these options with my stakeholders. Good options, but we concluded that it might be to much admin work. Thank you for the valuable input!

One of them mentioned that in one of their previous SF systems, they used to drag and drop positions from the Company Structure Overview. I am not familiar with that and have not experienced that this is possible, but am wondering if you have ever seen and used this?