Best practice forum (Archived)

Import Organisation and Position data from HR System (SAP)

Hi,

We are investigating setting up a data feed from our HR system (SAP) into our Totara LMS site. We would like to capture staff's position information and management reporting lines.

I'm wondering if it is possible to import the HR data into the organisation and position frameworks of Totara LMS instead of having to manually set it up? If so, what functions or methods are available within Totara LMS to do this?

All I can see for data import mapping is either:

course enrolment - external database (position assignment)
user authentication methods - external database

I don't see how these would apply to the hierarchies feature of Totara.

Appreciate any advice on this.

Thanks,

-Ira

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Hi Ira,

This is what we try and do now. The main issues for us (and to be fair this may be specific to how our business has configured SAP) are:

Damn positions...
SAP sees the organisation as positions reporting to positions, then it associates people to those position IDs. When there are absences (e.g. a new Team Leader is being recruited) the team members 'report' to an unoccupied position. Internally within SAP this means invoices/approvals are redirected to the manager the vacation position reports to. In the LMS this creates a gap where staff in that team don't report to anyone.

One to one reporting lines...
SAP sees a direct one to one relationship in a staff member reporting to one people manager. This is also our HR policy. In practice we have a sizable percentage of our staff on secondments, temporarily assigned to different parts of the business, staff with dual reporting lines, staff managing projects where they in effect as act as people managers (a different flavour of dual reporting lines), and staff managing individuals who are not on the payroll. This mucks up the Position = staff member model.

We've really really struggled with this for the last six years and it threatened to de-rail our deployment of Development Plans in Totara (which is heavely dependant on this relationship). We now have a option in the LMS to allow staff to manually add a Team Leader (only one, their choice is limited to staff who already have staff reporting to them, emails are sent to advise of this, and its time limited).

Individuals not on the payroll...
Then we have Contractors, temps and individuals seconded from other agencies. They are not employees nor are they represented as Positions in SAP. But, they do have network access and expected to complete our mandatory Code of Conduct, Health & Safety, and security courses in the LMS.

Where we're at:
Our Totara support vendor build us a sync with SAP data (that builds the necessary positional structure) in the Totara organisational hierarchy database. But, we don't use it.

Instead, we use LDAP data (of those allowed LAN access) which happens to have the Cost Centre data of where the staff member was last paid and their manager. From these two pieces of data we re-assemble our org chart. It's far from pretty but it works.

So, best of luck. Would be keen to hear if you make some progress!

Cheers
Austen