Hello everyone

I’d like to demonstrate the use case where an employee would like to create multiple time entries for the single service confirmation they would have created. To get an overview of the integration itself, please refer to my earlier blog post.

This would be useful for the scenario wherein an employee would have made multiple trips or spent a few days to complete a service order, but would have raised a single service confirmation to record the work done.

When multiple time entries should be created referring to the same service confirmation, the employee can use the action Split Service Confirmation.

New action for service confirmations on the time sheet

This action is available to Time Administrators as well.

On clicking the action, a pop-up appears using which the user can specify the date and duration of the time entries to be created for the service confirmation.

Split the service confirmation into multiple time entries

Each row in the picture above corresponds to a separate time recording entry. The employee can release the time entries, which are either submitted for approval by the line manager, or are Activated depending on the approval configuration. If additional data like the start time – end time or time type / premium pay needs to be modified, the user can do so by accessing the time entries individually.

To made adjustments to the splits, the user only has to select one of the time entries that were created above, and click on the Split Service Confirmation. All the time entries linked to the service confirmation would be displayed in the pop-up that comes up. The user can made the required adjustments to the required entities, and Release them.

Time recording validation rules:

All the rules (such as collision rules) for time recording apply while using this feature.

Using this feature, the user is in effect modifying the date and duration of the connected time entries.  Some additional rules that are worth mentioning :

1. The employee is allowed to record less time than the service confirmation. When the sum of the connected time entries is less than the Actual hours reported in the service confirmation, a warning message is displayed to the user.
2. The employee is NOT allowed to record MORE tune than the Actual hours reported in the service confirmation. An error message is displayed to the user in this case.
3. If the unit of measure is not Hours, but Days (or in the really rare case, Weeks), we don’t have a duration against which a suitable validation can be run. In this case, the user can record any number of hours on the corresponding time entries.

Variations in Service Confirmation

Having the capability of splitting a service confirmation into multiple time records allows a lot of flexibility in linking service confirmation and time recording. Here, I would cover some of the variations in the data that the user would record in the Time Reporting tab of the service confirmation, and explore the impact it has on the time entry created.

Standard service confirmation use case

if an employee has done 6 hours of plant maintenance and completed the work required in the service order, the employee simply creates a service confirmation specifying the 6 hours of work. This 6 hours of work is reflected in the employee’s time sheet against the service order item, referring to the service confirmation. As it fulfils all the “rules” of the time sheet, its state is “Active” and is visible in the Actual Utilization report of the employee.

Multi-day service confirmation

In some cases, the service performer might have made more than one trip to the customer to complete the job. This may be reflected Actual hours reported in the service confirmation as :

Duration : number of hours greater than what is present in a day

In the above example, the user has recorded 30 hours of work on 12th May. Since this exceeds the time that is permissible for recording during a day, this is represented in the time sheet as a single Inactive time entry, that is highlighted when the user opens the timesheet.

Inactive time entry is highlighted in the time sheet

The user is expected to use the Split Service Confirmation action to create multiple time entries for this service confirmation. Until this is done, the time entry stays inactive, and is not reflected Time Recording reports (or the Actual Utilization report) – it will be visible as an inactive time entry only on the data source HCMTLMB07 (Recorded Employee Times report)

Start Date – End Date : the user can create a service confirmation that has a start date different from the end date, to indicate that multiple trips were required to fulfil the service order item.

In the above example, the user has recorded 16 hours of work on the service confirmation, from 10th to  12th May. This results in an Inactive time entry created for each working day between the start and end date. The duration field for each of these time entries is blank by default.

These Inactive time entries are highlighted in the timesheet. The user can select any one of these time entries, and use the Split Service Confirmation action to view all of them and make adjustments. The dates of the time entries can be changed to reflect what they want to report from an HR perspective. As mentioned earlier, an employee will be allowed to record fewer than the 16 hours recorded in the service confirmation, but will not be allowed to exceed it.

Using Days or Weeks as a Unit of Measure in the service confirmation

Using Days or  Weeks in the service confirmation results in the start date and end date of the Actual Reporting tab to be different.

This then works exactly the same as a multi-day service confirmation documented earlier – a time entry is created for every working day between the start and end date. In this scenario, the system does not impose any validation on the total duration of hours than can be recorded against the service confirmation.

Performing a service confirmation on a Day off

The only scenario wherein a time entry is created automatically for a non-working day is if the service confirmation is created on a day off (as shown in the Time Reporting tab). In all other scenarios, time entries on days off are skipped – the user can create a time entry explicitly on a non-working day using the Split Service confirmation action.

Thank you for reading up. If you have any questions or suggestions, please leave a comment, I’d love to hear your opinion. Have a great day !