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Import Organisation and Position data from HR System (SAP)

 
??
Import Organisation and Position data from HR System (SAP)
由 ?? 发表于 2012年03月14日 Wednesday 16:11
 

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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Austen Sinclair
Re: Import Organisation and Position data from HR System (SAP)
由 SinclairAusten 发表于 2012年03月14日 Wednesday 20:52
小组 Partners小组 TXP Site Administrator小组 V18 Program Complete
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

 
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??
Re: Import Organisation and Position data from HR System (SAP)
由 ?? 发表于 2012年03月15日 Thursday 21:57
 

Hi Austen,

Thanks for all that 'in the trenches' advice and experience with SAP & Totara v1. Sounds like the HR org and position feed isn't such a seamless sync/automated integration with Totara LMS yet sad Hopefully by the time we are able to implement it Totara v2+ has been released.

I'm curious how did you set up your org and positin frameworks initially using the mapped LDAP data?

Also how have assigned your positions to all staff members? Then how are these positions being updated?

Obviously an automated solution would be ideal as we have 20,000+ user records linked to our Totara site.

Cheers

-Ira

 
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Austen Sinclair
Re: Import Organisation and Position data from HR System (SAP)
由 SinclairAusten 发表于 2012年03月18日 Sunday 14:20
小组 Partners小组 TXP Site Administrator小组 V18 Program Complete

Hi Ira

Our Moodle/Totara LMS pre-dates our SAP installation, so we had already made a large investment in getting LDAP to work for us.

We have strong security around our systems access (I'm sure you have similar approaches) and we picked the one that is most actively maintained.

So, we started with an LDAP record that provides; user name, employee number, email address, Cost Center last paid from, and manager's employee number.

We have two scripts:

  • expand Manager's employee number into the user's profile fields of Manager Name and Manager email address (both required to populate the manager approval emails for the F2F module - in addition to reporting)
  • the second maps Cost Center to the 'Department' field

Over time we've also added two additional scripts based on Cost Center; "Invoicing instructions" (some groups of the business centrally record training spend), and Core Metrics reporting, which is essentially a higher org chart level (main business groups).

 

Initially, this many sound insufficient levels of differentiation in the organisation.  However, we've re-strcutured, re-grouped, re-aligned, 'business transformed' and generally changed our business structure at least annually in the eight years I've been here. The end result of which is for training & development reporting the sets of; Individual, Team, Dept, Business Group have been sufficient.

Cheers
Austen

 
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CogginsSimon
Re: Import Organisation and Position data from HR System (SAP)
由 CogginsSimon 发表于 2012年03月15日 Thursday 12:26
小组 Totara

Hi Ira,

We are working on an 'official' importer that will support importing positions, organisations, users manager relationships and support assigning and syncing users to positions and organisations. Unfortunately the port to moodle 2 has delayed progress on this though, but it will be in our 2.3 release (the one after the port to moodle 2) and we may be able to distribute a preview slightly earlier.

Simon

 
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??
Re: Import Organisation and Position data from HR System (SAP)
由 ?? 发表于 2012年03月15日 Thursday 14:48
 

Hi Simon,

So to confirm, in the current version of Totara LMS, do we need to set up all the orginisational and position frameworks manually?

Then manually set user's positions and managers as well?

What's a realistic estimate for v2.3 release?

Thanks,

-Ira

 

 
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CogginsSimon
Re: Import Organisation and Position data from HR System (SAP)
由 CogginsSimon 发表于 2012年03月15日 Thursday 15:04
小组 Totara

You'd either have to write a script to create the hierarchies, or manually add them. Since 1.1 there are some bulk actions that make it much quicker to manually create them, but usually getting the initial data in is something a Totara partner would do as part of your initial site setup.

In terms of assigning users to positions/organisations/managers there is an unsupported script for assigning users called dbpositions but I don't think it's been updated to 1.1.

Totara 2.3 is expected to be out in Sept 2012.

Simon

 
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??
Re: Import Organisation and Position data from HR System (SAP)
由 ?? 发表于 2012年03月18日 Sunday 16:06
 

Hi Dani,

We already have all our users imported into our Totara LMS v1.1 site via LDAP sync and mapping.

Does the script you mentioned support updating current user's details with their positions, organisations and managers?

We are hosting the Totara LMS ourselves internally behind our firewall due to our extensive security policies.

The hierarchy importer/user assigner features sounds like a great future addition to the Totara LMS, hopefully it will be available soon.

Thanks,

-Ira

 
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BüchnerAlex
Re: Import Organisation and Position data from HR System (SAP)
由 BüchnerAlex 发表于 2012年03月26日 Monday 05:39
 

Dani,

we'd be keen to get hold of a copy of the script, too. Can you post?

Thanks

Alex

 
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??
Re: Import Organisation and Position data from HR System (SAP)
由 ?? 发表于 2012年03月26日 Monday 17:30
 

Dani,

Our (public sector) organisation would be very grateful if you could share that script as well.

Sharing data between SAP HR and the LMS is the one thing that will make the selling of the Totara system a whole lot easier to the heirarchy in our organisation

Thank you,

Mark

 
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??
Re: Import Organisation and Position data from HR System (SAP)
由 ?? 发表于 2012年04月18日 Wednesday 17:34
 

Hi Sonia,

Do you have root access to the server that is hosting your Totara instance? If you do, then you need to drop the bulk_position_upload folder into the local folder. If not, you probably will have to get the people hosting your site for you to follow these instructions.

1) Unzip the folder

2) Copy the bulk_position_upload folder to /var/www/<your-site-here>/moodle/local/ (I'm assuming your server runs linux here)

3) Log into your Totara instance and click on "Notifications" under the Site Administration menu (you can probably skip this step)

4) You should be able to upload positions through Site Administration > Users > Accounts > Upload Totara Positions.

Hope that helps.

Marcus

 
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??
Re: Import Organisation and Position data from HR System (SAP)
由 ?? 发表于 2012年04月23日 Monday 23:38
 

Hi Niek,

I'm not entirely sure (I didn't write the script). But have you tried manually assigning that user that particular manager? It maybe a Totara thing because when I tried assigning organisations without a corresponding position it didn't spit out any errors but they weren't assigned. So yeah I'd say try manually assigning "textor" to "Johnson" via the position tab under

Site Administration > Accounts > Browse List of users

search for Johnson and click on his username > Positions tab (the url should look something like <your-site-here>/user/positions.php?user=1234&courseid=1)

If that does not work, then maybe you'll have to see what role the manager is assigned to. If it does work then I don't know.

 
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