• Authors:

1. Neethu Raghavan (SAP SuccessFactors Consultant)
2. Nanda Kumar MohananNair (SAP SuccessFactors Consultant)
3. Nalin Sharma (SAP Technical Consultant)

Introduction:

This post is a part of the “SAPRPA2.0_TutorialChallenge2021”. When I heard about this challenge, one of the scenarios which came up was career path creation within the career development module in SuccessFactors system. Based on my interactions with customer admins during implementation, I realized that the current process for career path creation was data intensive, time consuming and prone to occasional errors. As an outcome of the brainstorming sessions with the SAP experts at Robert Bosch, I decided to take up this use case scenario for this automation challenge.

Use case: Creation of Career paths

Career paths are graphical representation of roles indicating which roles lead to which in an organization. It helps employee in choosing the right roles for their career progression in the organization.

The creation of career path can be a manual activity or through upload feature using ‘Import and Export Data’ transaction in SuccessFactors. However the association of roles to career path is a manual activity which the HR administrators have to do for each career path in the system. This is time consuming for the HR admin to select each individual role and then link it to another role in the career path and to repeat this activity for as many career paths and role associations they have in the organization.

With this in mind, I thought of automating the career path creation in the system.

Automation Flow Chart

Screen Capture steps:

Capture the first page which is the Career Path page in the Career Development Planning module of Success Factors.

Capture the first screen. In this screen, for the ‘Sales’ dropdown(highlighted in the screenshot) to remain while capturing the screen, use Alt+tab to go the automation screen while keeping the dropdown highlighted.  (Video link provided at the end)

Declare the elements in the screen – ‘Select a Role’, ‘Search’, ‘Role’, ‘Save’, ‘Career path’. ‘Role’ is declared as a collection.

Capture the second screen. Declare the elements in this screen – dropdown in the Role tile as ‘A’, and ‘Add a lead to role’.

Capture the page for Career path creation (the starting page) and declare the elements in                this page – ‘Create New Career Path’, ‘Input 1’, ‘Input 2’.

With the above steps we have captured the necessary screens and declared all the elements. Next steps would be to create the automation.

Automation Steps:

Create the automation. Enter the first activity as ‘Open Excel Instance’.

Add ‘Excel Cloud Link’ activity and double click to modify the properties.

Browse the excel file and the range of the file will be automatically detected. Enter the path of the excel file and click on ‘+’ icon to generate the data type automatically.

Add the ‘For each’ activity and set the looping list to ‘returnedValues’. ‘returnedValues’ refers to the outcome of the ‘Excel Cloud Link’ activity step.

Add the Career Path page to the loop and double click to define the page activities.

Add Click activity to the ‘Create New Career Path’ element. Add Keystroke activity to ‘Input 1’ element (External code).

Double click on the Keystroke activity and give command input as in the screenshot.

Repeat the previous steps for ‘Input 2’ field (Career path name).

Add a Click activity to the ‘Save’ button as mentioned in the previous step. Add Click activity to ‘Select a Role’ element. Add Keystroke activity to the search field.

Add Click activity to the ‘Role’ collection element, both the buttons – ‘A’, ‘Add a lead to Role’ element which were declared .Add Keystroke activity to the search field again.

Use the Scroll To (WEB) activity mentioning the parameters which is shown in the image below to make the BOT go to top of the page.

Add Click activity to Career Path button. With this step the Career Path is created. The BOT will repeat all the above steps to create subsequent Career Paths in the excel.

  Automation Chart:

Demo of the automation use case: 

Screen capture with Alt +tab:

Benefits to the Customer Admin:

Career path creation and assignment of roles is a manual activity which HR admins have to perform in the system in order to display the same in the career worksheets. Currently there is no upload option for this activity and the manual creation/verification of career path can take an average of 10 minutes for each career path in the system.

With this automation, the assignment of the roles to career paths can be done with less effort, reduce data errors and can add value to customer administrator. Assuming there are 20 career paths (the number varies depending on the size of the organization) in the system, the automation saves 3.5 hours of effort.

Conclusion:

The above use case covers one specific scenario of career path creation. For further addition/assignment of roles such as ‘Add a Peer Role’ and ‘Add a Lead from Role’, this automation can be extended to achieve the same, resulting in higher benefits to the customer.

References :

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